A narrative the manufacturers push, so not surprising that the thought pattern developed that way.

UI designers hate usability anymore. Is it text? A link? A button? Who knows? Tap and find out you just subscribed to Satan-of-the-month club.

Probably around 3GB. I have some cheaper Motorolas with that, usable, but a lot of app reload. Also, stick to older, slower phones to avoid the AI on-device. Otherwise rooting, GrapheneOS, etc.

Late-stage tech bros, devoid of innovation and flailing at their precious cup game.

I’m so over this garbage. RIP smartphones.

Google “SafetyCore” says hello.

The history of large phones, from a technical standpoint:

• LTE required a lot more power than 2G/3G until efficiencies were improved, this required a larger battery to have comparable battery life, doubly so on the phones that ran two modems (mostly Verizon) one for 3G, one for 4G
• LTE required larger antennas as their low band frequencies were lower than previous cellular tech. (750MHz and later 600MHz vs 850MHz being the old lowest)
• Handset manufacturers then stopped making smaller product lines even after efficiencies improved
• People (“consumers”) realized they’d rather not buy a phone, tablet, watch, computer, anal implant, and preferred to just buy one device, settling on an oversized phone was enough between phone/tablet that they only needed to waste money on one device
• The market then went, “people prefer larger phones,” even though smaller phones were waning/outliers
• Tablets outside of Apple’s ostensibly died, although there are a few more choices these days that aren’t Apple
• Now phones have so many antennae
  • WiFi/BT (which are often shared)
  • WiFi 6 new band
  • NFC
  • Wireless charging coil
  • Ultra Wideband
  • 20 or 30 various cellular bands with 4x antennae for MIMO
  • mmWave (in America)
• Phones also have gigantic camera systems (although since Samsung gave up on 10x optical, they shrunk slightly on that platform)
• The cycle repeated itself a bit with 5G, the channels are so wide and huge, they can suck a lot of power when doing large data transfers, and also the addition of needing a separate amp/chip for 5G above sub6 as well as additional cooling
• “AI” stuff that requires more ML compute, and thus cooling and battery capacity, even though again, nobody wanted it
• All the metrics and analytics handset manufacturers constantly run on users, disabling all this alone would probably make your average phone last 3+ days

Since then, more and more people are trying to get flip phones, dumbphones, imported small phones, or giving up on phones entirely and switching to devices like the Lilygo T-Deck LoRaWAN device that has…dun dun dunnnnn…a literal BlackBerry keyboard, as people are sick of that fabled market deciding for them.

Funny how handset manufacturers keep on designing borderless devices you can’t pick up without interacting with, with unusable and frustrating touch-keyboards, and users of them keep creating cases with grip points, chins, and keyboards.

Almost like the industry isn’t making what people want, and hasn’t in a long time.