Having to micromanage notifications is why I have two phones - one without a SIM card. It's nice to be able to do stuff on the phone and know it won't bug you. I simply put the one with the SIM card elsewhere (other room, leave in car, etc). No - I'm not going to spend too much time learning how to "effectively" manage notifications on a smartphone (and if I do, have it change on me with some future update).

I've been saying it since around 2004-2005 - even before smartphones - that consolidating everything into one device is a bad idea.

One thing I really miss from the 80's and 90's: When you buy a product (hardware or software), its features and capabilities were stable. You never had to worry about some update changing the behavior on you.

I really like some of the health features on Apple Watch. But I won't buy it because I don't want it to be my watch, and I don't want to pair my Apple account with it. I just want the health features and nothing else.

iMessage is still only available on Apple hardware. Apple’s malicious compliance has made developing apps for third party app stores a no-go. I have AltStore installed but there are no apps worth installing.

I don't really expect the prices to be this cheap for much longer, but my hope is that the seeds for the next generation of tech have already been sown.

It would be cool if software becomes so mundane and interchangeable that tech once again distinguishes itself with hardware.

The walled gardens are imo getting worse. And opting out (dumb phone) isn’t the same thing as that dissolving.

That said I’m also cautiously optimistic in some areas. Linux on desktop in particular is on a good streak. Riscv seems promising. More people are understanding lock in risk etc.

As far as I can tell he's among the techies that purchase a lot of e-junk each and every year, no matter the circumstances, not sure of how that's an improvement on anything.

Unlike "full" smartwatches (arbitrarily defined as: You can browse the web on them in some fashion) Garmin devices are intentionally limited but in return, what they do works very well and seems fully debugged. I spent several years recording outdoor activities with the Strava app on my phone, and always there was about a 1% failure rate where for one reason or another, the GPS trace was interrupted or corrupted. With the Garmin watch this simply doesn't happen. If it's recording, the recording is good, period.

It is that, that has somehow been lost. That devices that just do one thing and do it well have been replaced by apps on a device that, in the modern software fashion, are "mostly" debugged, get constant updates that may or may not remove bugs (or features!) and usually don't add anything useful. One app got an update which, on my lower-end phone, changed it from crisply responsive to incredibly slow (5+ second response time to an app). It worked fine before.

As an aside, can they bring back Symbian OS and Windows Phone?