When I was a teen, Symbian smartphones with a physical slide keyboards were all the rage, but too expensive for my budget. I was day dreaming of how cool that'd be to be able to ssh someplace from a phone via grps. I did it years later once (from an early android phone). Now I have an android phone that can do that easily (albeit without a physical keyboard), and yet I never do that day to day. Phones make poor computer and computer make poor phones - it appears easier to send data across then to bother trying to merge them into one.
The real question I have is why software keeps getting progressively slower requiring faster phones. I don't buy the "devs are lazy / management pushes for frequent releases, so devs use poor expensive platforms like electron" or "all manufactures conspire to make phones that age too fast" - both devs and companies have always been like that, I don't see any recent fundamental shift in that. And it is not like current dev experience is somehow fundamentally different and easier then 10y ago - we use similar kinds of abstraction to do similar things (maybe ~20% more productive and simple?). I am genuinely confused.
I can't tell my new Pixel 9 Pro being any faster and I think the effective screen resolution is LESS than my Pixel 6a is, out of the box. I liked the way it fit in my hand better, too. 3 years felt like long enough to "deserve" an upgrade but I kind of regret even bothering to upgrade. The camera is better but that's about it.
While I agree that phones make poor computers, smartphone + Bluetooth keyboard + "found" external display (e.g., hotel room TV) + remote connection to a desktop PC is an excellent alternative to vacationing with a laptop "just in case".
The real question I have is why software keeps getting progressively slower requiring faster phones. I don't buy the "devs are lazy / management pushes for frequent releases, so devs use poor expensive platforms like electron" or "all manufactures conspire to make phones that age too fast" - both devs and companies have always been like that, I don't see any recent fundamental shift in that. And it is not like current dev experience is somehow fundamentally different and easier then 10y ago - we use similar kinds of abstraction to do similar things (maybe ~20% more productive and simple?). I am genuinely confused.