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We're both rubbish at drawing unfortunately

I put a lot of thought into that problem:

So a baby, a seed, any living thing (or even a chunk of something that was once living I suppose) is more complex, which I why I went with 'machine' to exclude those.

I also toyed with saying 'own' rather than 'held', but a modern electric car is basically a beefed up phone with a bunch of driving stuff too, so they wouldn't pass that test.

There are some edge cases: someone upthread held a classic inertial guidance system, and a modern GPU is arguably more intricate, though much more single-function, and good luck getting your hands on one of those anyway!

E-Machineon Let’s take apart your phone

Ah that's a really good point, so it reduces the x times for both petrol and doughnuts. I'll recalculate thank you!

E-Machineon Let’s take apart your phone

Fair dos on the LLMisms. I'm still working on keeping my human voice despite being able to plug any words in to get a smooth AI version.

I'd push back on the childish terms. It is firmly pitched to a general audience, but I think it stands up in both depth and breadth. If you have better examples I'd love to see them.

I'd also square up on the thinkpad. It has larger and more powerful versions of some of the components, but it's also missing a lot of phones ones: the accelerometer, gyroscope, linear resonant actuator, magnetometer, barometer, multiple cameras, probably one with OIS; all in a much smaller device. Very keen to debate, tell me about your laptop!

E-Machineon Let’s take apart your phone

Author here, thanks for sharing.

The idea is that the smartphone is an incredible entry point to the history of technology for a general audience. A huge range of human needs were met by increasingly sophisticated tools over millennia, then collapsed into a single device over the last 30 years.

I'm sure there are plenty of mistakes, I'd be grateful if you'd let me know any you spot.

E-Machineon A detailed, layer-by-layer teardown of the mobile phone and its history

Full disclosure, I wrote this. It's a detailed teardown of the smartphone and the history of its components, written to be read on the device it describes. Some layers demonstrate themselves as you scroll: the screen counts its own pixels, the touch sensor tracks your finger.

It fills a little-explored niche: I haven’t come across anything else that brings together this level of detail and (hopefully!) accessibility. I think it’s neat, I hope you do too.

E-Machineon Show HN: Neil the Seal Game

Great work! I had some rendering issues with some part of the houses' roofs not showing