I am unfortunate in that I am the owner of a pixel by choice, and given an iPhone by my employer. I hate Apple’s “exceptionalism” and inconsistencies, that they kept the lighting connector alive for so long, that they removed the audio jack even though I have good BY headphones, their constant bait for their ecosystem/cloud storage and whatnot, now this arbitrary cap on USB capabilities (the list is seemingly endless). iOS is also such a frustrating user experience. The perspective of typing long form on an iPhone is off-putting enough to often compel me to pick up the laptop or the pixel given how stupid the keyboard completion and text entry UX are. Don’t get me wrong, I also think Android is a terrible OS, but at least it’s not forcing its shortcomings down our throats. For instance, I use nova launcher and sesame shortcuts, so that I just type what I want (contacts, common actions, app-specific shortcuts, settings, directions, …) and barely do any menu/app navigation at all. And that’s what I want: to order my phone about my immediate needs and get immediate feedback/answers. Apple UX is about prettifying a workflow which I don’t want in the first place, stripping out elements of UX which I might need, and leveraging a hard to reach zoo of applications which never interact/complement each other. They really managed to turn an incredibly powerful device into a dumb phone. Did I mention already how frustrating the user experience is?

You can have a look at the communities there: https://programming.dev/communities

Perhaps, but in an energy-scarce world, who would be able to afford living in an old, inefficient house? I obviously hope to be wrong but increasing material price and labour might alone offset whatever price decrease the extra inventory of a decreasing population might bring. I hope to be wrong, ofc.

I admire how Microsoft keeps repeating the same mistakes over and over again. At some point a decade and a half ago everyone was laughing at them for having IE, then already understood as a buggy and insecure piece of crap, running in the windows kernel space, with them explaining (in some lengthy Ars Technica piece) that it was depended upon from everywhere, and that the windows kernel internals were practically a tangled hell.

I suppose they finally got out of their way to remove IE, just in time to establish blink in its place. The king is dead, long live the king, I guess.

Up to date firmware?

I heard they stopped allowing that recently.