Comment by seydor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seydor | Hacker News Reader

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And yet it is possible that in the alternate history where apple had not done those things, tech might be better. Note that they all came out during the booming times of the 2010s with cheap money for consumption.

For example, the Samsung S10 had a headphone jack, an SpO2 meter (who knew we wwould need this in the pandemic!), an FM radio, great screen, lightweight. Their newer models have no jack (to sell more wireless earphnes), no spo2 (to sell more watches), no fm radio (unknown reason), and its heavier. The perceptible difference in performance is miniscule despite all these years. So , some changes do need to be ridiculed

That said, i dont see this headset in a similar league, this seems an experimental prototype because none of the use cases mentioned have been proved.

Nitpick: the lack of the FM radio stems directly from the lack of headphone jack - the radio relied on wired earphones to work as they were used as an antenna.

So losing the FM radio is more a consequence of the decision to remove the headphone jack, rather than an active decision to remove it.

Still sucks, though. The FM radio was one of the most useful features of my previous phone. By the time I upgraded to a newer phone, its battery lasted for an hour at most during normal tasks, but I could get 12+ hours from the FM radio.

There are now very few phones that have my personal "wishlist" of removable battery + headphone jack + FM radio. And these are all budget phones so if you value a decent camera, you may be out of luck. Add 5G and I'm not sure there are any options.

> Add 5G and I'm not sure there are any options.

Yep. And I literally couldn't care less about the camera.

All of that (plus my #1 issue of security concerns) are why my current smartphone will be my last smartphone.

> it is possible that in the alternate history where apple had not done those things, tech might be better

This. I think Apple has actively made the cellphone space worse in a number of ways, from removing the headphone jack through eliminating user-replaceable batteries. When Apple does a thing, everyone else takes it as permission to do the same thing.

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