Sorry, as there is so much easy access to worry these days, but then also don’t read this: https://csl.noaa.gov/news/2025/427_0428.html But actually, do at some point, but just store it in the same file as “things that suck that I can’t control, so I have knowledge and can learn, grow, respond, while realizing it just goes in the same pile of bad decisions people of power are doing to destroy our planet.” The knowledge is annoyingly necessary to build onto the next puzzle piece, despite the frustration. Although we kinda do have control if we just stop playing their game.

Incorrect, they don’t have natural de-orbit. They have to be controlled. They haven’t solved natural de-orbit, and every de-orbit puts more aluminum oxide in the upper atmosphere that will decimate the ozone layer in 15-30 years.

Xcel literally does nothing right. What a garbage company anymore.

The Motorola phone brand has been owned by Lenovo for some years now, not the Motorola that brought the Nexus 6 and Moto X. The behavior is of no surprise. It isn’t a brand borne of pride anymore, it is just a thing that makes money, maybe.

That paying extra to get faster service thing is a complete scam too, at least with DoorDash. But they probably didn’t bother researching anything about how these junk services work either.

Bear in mind that as they age, you have increasingly unstable lithium bombs on your wall.

Nest smoke alarms were inspired and truly the best I have ever used. So pissed Google destroyed them.

If you do a Takeout request of Nest data, you will find a hundreds of megs JSON file with every change you made to your thermostat, every time you walked by it, any data it could harvest. A breadcrumb trail of your entire home life. I switched back to old fashioned offline battery thermostats.

However Fitbit accounts had different privacy policies and terms of service, IIRC. Bringing them under the Google umbrella likely allows Google easier data harvesting/combining from a legal perspective. They did similar with Nest years back before they completely butchered it.

IIRC, Apple’s “open” browser implementation was so fundamentally broken and difficult that it made the actual implementation of a third-party browser exceedingly difficult. Kinda like how their call-blocking API is nothing more than a database loader with no feedback, so call blocking apps can’t share data back to improve through crowd-sourcing. The products all have to learn from Android phones on the same product to be able to share with iPhones.

They just copy GrapheneOS and take away features each release. Like soft-buttons instead of the silly swipe gestures? Gone (but they eventually brought back the option to enable.) Want to remove apps? They let you remove almost every one, then only disable some, then you can’t even disable but you can use ADB to mask the app for your user account so it appears removed but is still present. Quick settings for Bluetooth, WiFi get harder to disable with each release because they love metadata too much. Want to do GPS only and turn off their WiFi/BT stalker? Apps that use their modern GPS API will bring an OS dialog up to re-enable Google Stalking EVERY TIME, and still not fall back to GPS. (Watch Duty is a good example of this.) Disk access, you used to be able to at least SEE most of the filesystem on-phone including app container storage. Then you could only see the root folders but not files. Then not even the folders. You can still via ADB, for now, and even that slowly becomes more limited. Bootloader unlock? Not on many phones shipping today at all.

Then with Android 16, Google isn’t even shipping the binary blobs (hardware drivers) for the chips in Pixel anymore, Graphene has had to use kluges to get Pixel 10 support.

Google doesn’t release good OS features every major release, they just keep taking away everything they can until they find the cross-over of forcibly extracting the most data users will tolerate while supporting the least freedom and features as possible.

With their new closer Apple alliance, I wouldn’t be surprised if they cease phone/OS development in a few years. They seem to have no interest in making products worth buying anymore.

Cheapest guarantees you will be missing some 5G bands, might as well just focus on LTE. It will be around for years to come.

That being said, Galaxy Xcover Pro series is probably the way to go, just find an older model for “cheapest.”

The entire universe could collapse and these tabs will live on. Forged by Satan himself.

Oh, yeah, you’d think, but no. Instead you have to try and bend the clips, and while doing so, they catch the two layers of the spindle-hole and either crack the disc, tear the disc, or tear the layers apart. Sometimes the disc even comes out.

I’ve seen a dozen DVDs cracked in the spindle-hole across multiple box sets from this travesty of a design. Bought replacements and exchanged them. Seems they went back to a more sane storage format and these disc-eaters were just unloaded over the holidays or something.

Those still work? Time to dig in the wire bin.

Additionally, automating rapid iteration and investigation isn’t necessarily “smart” - it just let’s one try permutations more quickly with the parameters adjusting automatically. Handy, useful, but not this “magic” that tech bro billionaires keep fawning over.

The tl;dr is: Control. Vendors want it, making it easy to run open software would make that control harder to keep.

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Their deluded vision is that they think the traditional user interface is going away. Rather than interact with a machine, you’ll just be walking around, sipping coffee, having thoughtful conversations with a bot laughing along with your jokes as it writes your letter and does your taxes.

Bigger would be leveraging Android System SafetyCore or iOS mediaanalysisd to stalk-spy on the contents of everyone’s phones on-demand for the State. The software is already there, and on both platforms have deep entitlements…