The Soviet smart phone weighs six pounds. You talk in to a handset attached by a cable. It has terrible call quality but gets reception anywhere on earth. If you open it up you’ll find a replaceable wet cell battery, a complete circuit diagram, spare fuses, and a worrying sealed box with a nuclear trefoil on it. All parts are replaceable by hand. It has 70% parts compatibility with your microwave, your radio, and your lada.
Communist smartphone - open source software, components built to last minimum 30 years, easy to repair
Needs a big enough of a production run that software devs are forced to optimize their software well enough to actually run on the things.
Also you can get a bunch of free CPU power on it and all other devices by ending advertising.
take everything you like about the iphone and remove everything you don’t. the public/government could just hire 300 engineers and pay them very good wages to develop and produce a smart phone, but tell them to make it without a profit motive in mind, make it as useful as possible, and that it should be as cheap and reliable as possible. (where as the engineers at google are told make it as profitable as possible, while maintaining enough usability to not hurt sales)
I’ve had to get new bloody chargers every phone (which admittedly isn’t too often) because the Chinese phones I buy have significant increases in charge speed.
The Xiaomi Mi Ultra 10 charges at like 100 watts.
Charging for five hours isn’t particularly attractive to save resources on a $20 charger. However if you had more expensive smarter chargers in the first instance that could have firmware updates and more repairability, then you’d avoid the need to update (e.g. the first 100W usb power delivery standard was agreed almost a decade ago).
I do wish phones were more repairable though - I’ve accidentally cracked a replacement screen and stabbed a battery in the past when replacing broken bits on my phone.
I haven’t had a phone for years so this would fuck me completely. Why don’t they do two models, one without the accessories and one with? Surely that’s the actual best way to do this? But then they’d have two prices and wouldn’t be able to charge the same I guess.
