Tech you miss/ new tech trends you hate - ok boomers

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Nick Wilde said:
I want them to bring back small tech. I want a phone which is physically compact enough that I can use it in one hand, and I want a laptop with the form factor of those old netbooks.

I found one of my old phones in a drawer the other day and I was reminded how we used to actually care about a phone being small, like that was a feature on its own. Because a phone being big is inconvenient. Yet somehow nowadays everyone walks around with practically a full ass fucking iPad in their back pocket. You see smashed screens all the time because you can't go a week without dropping your phone, because it's physically impossible to hold it securely while also using your thumb to swipe/type.

Obviously, as somebody who still sits at a desk on a desktop PC just to do shit like browse the farms, I am a minority in desiring portable devices for their portability, and not just as a surrogate desktop. I get that big screens are an appeal for the increasing proportion of people who use phones as their "main" computer. But I hate it.
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I just brought sony xperia 5 because of this. Learning that Sony went back to 16:9 ratio with their newer model is heartbreaking
Aero the Alcoholic Bat said:
Today was the first time I've ever heard of these things or what they're used for.
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If you need to use one you're living in a shithole
 
Critical Raxx Theory said:
I dunno man, I have an ssd in my ide era laptop (I also maxed out the ram and cpu for pocket change, within the last couple of years) so I think you screwed the pooch there.

It's not a think pad but the excessive ports are great
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Fair enough, but I could buy a working one on eBay for like $40, and I don’t really have a use for it since it can’t run most OS and the max RAM’s only 2 GB. It’d probably struggle just opening a browser, and running anything modern would be slow to the point of useless.
 
ToroidalBoat said:
Did you ever get your car back?
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Sort of. It was found a few days later abandoned where the kids who stole it (a guy and his girlfriend according to the camera footage) drove it into a fence damaging the front right quarter and then stole another car, but since it was private property it got towed to an impound lot where they were complete fuckheads about it and since it was an older and not very valuable as well as now damaged car (1994 Sunbird in 2009) with nothing I needed in it, it was now worth less then the cost of getting it out and it was more satisfying to tell the lot where to stick that car. Bought an absolute beater for $500 to hold me over until I could go shopping for a real car.
 
The Un-Clit said:
Sort of. It was found a few days later abandoned where the kids who stole it (a guy and his girlfriend according to the camera footage) drove it into a fence damaging the front right quarter and then stole another car, but since it was private property it got towed to an impound lot where they were complete fuckheads about it and since it was an older and not very valuable as well as now damaged car (1994 Sunbird in 2009) with nothing I needed in it, it was now worth less then the cost of getting it out and it was more satisfying to tell the lot where to stick that car. Bought an absolute beater for $500 to hold me over until I could go shopping for a real car.
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That's where laws need to be in place to have stolen property not be allowed to be impounded by private companies. Police should have an impound lot for shit like that.
 
Dear Google,
Go fuck yourself, I just want a fucking map.
2026-04-12_11-21.png
 
Harmless Harm said:
I recently got a free old Lenovo ThinkPad business laptop from someone. It had just been sitting around after their son left it, and since they didn’t need it anymore they gave it to me. I was surprised by how many features it has. I’m not used to seeing so many, and I didn’t even know they used to make laptops with all kinds of ports. The parts look really easy to replace, and it feels solid compared to the thin and fragile designs of modern laptops. It’s got removable batteries, full-size ports like Ethernet, VGA and Mini DisplayPort, easy way to upgrade RAM and other parts, and the keyboard is so nice to type on. Sadly the HDD was dying and the laptop's like 20 years old. Couldn't use my spare HDD/SSD since it doesn't support it, and the CPU & RAM are extremely outdated anyway. Fixing it would've cost way more than it's worth, so I just binned it in the end.
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Given that you said it had Mini-DisplayPort I take it the laptop was from around mid 2010s? I dunno about newer ThinkPads and whether the ones around T480 era had both or not but generally you can get cheap NVME and SATA (including M.2) drives. Also as for the CPU even mobile dual core CPUs from that era aren't completely useless (hello from an i5-4300u :)) so seems like a massive shame that you just binned it.
 
ToroidalBoat said:
Does it still work? How old is?
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It's an Xperia Compact from maybe 2015-2016, probably still works fine as a general device, but I imagine it'd be too slow to run the modern bloated jeet code versions of the same apps. But as I recall, the reason I had to replace it was the microphone/speakers being fucked making actual phone calls impossible.

It was probably one of the best smartphones I've ever had. It was just about the perfect size, it felt weighty and solid, not like it would just break if you looked at it funny, and it still had something of a visual aesthetic to it with a cool gunmetal/magnesium kinda frame, not just a black rectangle like all phones now.
Ruined by the Rain said:
I just brought sony xperia 5 because of this.
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Pretty sure that's what I currently have. I'm too much of a boomer with over 500gb of torrented music to let go of the headphone jack and SD card slot, so just having those features alone keeps me loyal to Sony.
 
I've now noticed that when I move a tab to the very left in librewolf, it sometimes turns into a small square, instead of remaining normal, despite me having the room for all tabs to stay full size. The behaviour is really inconsistent and annoying.
 
On a newer "smartphone", there is this "app" called "Pixel Studio", and I was thinking "a paint program?"... but nah, it's some AI thing that's subject to policy and TOS BS.
 
Nick Wilde said:
I found one of my old phones in a drawer the other day and I was reminded how we used to actually care about a phone being small, like that was a feature on its own.
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I have the iPhone SE, the last reasonably small phone Apple released. If I wanted to carry around a full-ass tablet I'd get a tablet.
 
Zeftax said:
I've now noticed that when I move a tab to the very left in librewolf, it sometimes turns into a small square, instead of remaining normal, despite me having the room for all tabs to stay full size. The behaviour is really inconsistent and annoying.
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That sounds like the "Tab Grouping" feature they recently added to Firefox. It happens when you drag one tab onto another. If you right-click on the little square you can "Ungroup Tabs" to get it back to normal.
 
pylosurf said:
That sounds like the "Tab Grouping" feature they recently added to Firefox. It happens when you drag one tab onto another. If you right-click on the little square you can "Ungroup Tabs" to get it back to normal.
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No, I've already turned that off, this is something new. It happens with a single tab.
 
Nokia E series ending with 72 and Symbian s60v3 were utmost cellular peak and everything that came after is just glorified garbage.

Actual smart, phone, that could do damn near everything sans MS paint since there was no shitty touchscreen. Lack of shitty touchscreen made backlight options nor did you need it in any lit setting and especially outdoors so battery life was literally a week with sensible use. Perfectly sized qwerty that was way, way better than Nigberry's. No USB charging was its only real flaw besides the camera also not being up to N95 and similar models' scratch, but it was a business first kind phone. Ran, at the very least from what I can recall, Opera and that was plenty for interwebbing on a damn phone. Nokia maps, at the time, saved all your shit to your Nokia account and you could transfer if you got a new phone. Nokia maps also and outright gave you option to download whatever region's map you wanted and then the phone didn't even need cell reception to act as a GPS. And the best part of that era - shit priced retards who shouldn't have had net access in something like a phone right out of it.

And then fucking Apple enabled and enticed retards with easy internet access. And Google followed right along with the touchscreen power drain bullshit.
 
Kiwi Lime Pie said:
I recently logged into my bank and got the usual We need to send you a one time code screen. I input the code and got another screen saying Call us to continue. TL; DR - I had to talk to an operator who gave me another automated one-time code so she could then verbally give me yet another one-time code over the phone to log me into my account. *sigh*
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What's worse is when I need to call my local branch for something. Even if you use the local number, you still get the automated menu that is frustrating as fuck and then you get a call center. If I wanted to talk to India or some Jeet in America, I would have dialed the 800 number.
 
Kiwi Lime Pie said:
I recently logged into my bank and got the usual We need to send you a one time code screen. I input the code and got another screen saying Call us to continue. TL; DR - I had to talk to an operator who gave me another automated one-time code so she could then verbally give me yet another one-time code over the phone to log me into my account.
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Oh man that brings back a last year's story - went to a local I've gone to for a couple of months, so bank's system knew damn well it was me pissing away my own money. One night decide to grab some 7-11 afterwards and the card gets locked. I check typical text messages asking if it was me using my damn card. Nothing. Login to the bank account to see if there are any pop up notices, and there was the utmost bullshit one I couldn't even imagine in the best dream - they wanted me to come into a fucking branch, during business hours, and bring 2 fucking gov IDs to manually 2FA that it was indeed I who used my damn card and they wouldn't unlock it otherwise...........Next morning I get to 1 branch - wait time to bullshit with an account rep......2 weeks. I politely cursed out the bus boy and asked if ANY other damn branches had "an appointment" available right the fuck then. There was one. In 2 fucking hours from that point.......if it wasn't my day off I would've set their building on fire.

I run errands aka waste 2 damn hours. Get to the other branch, walk in, show the account rep IDs and all that fucking nonsense and it gets even better........he has to CALL a special CS department who then ask me basic bullshit questions on the phone, there, and unlock my fucking card..... I jokingly told him I'd set his branch on fire for this level of bullshit if the situation didn't get resolved and he kinda agreed with me.

Needless to say I moved my banking to a different goddamn bank promptly after all of that raging bullshit.

and @Jean ValJean ^
 
To reverse the point of this thread somewhat, I was thinking about how the design of old, pre-smart phones was kinda garbage in a lot of ways.

I have one of those basic bitch 3310-but-modern type Nokias for work, and everything about the interface is awful. The only thing is gets right is that you unlock the screen and dial in a number if you need to call someone. But things like, if you go into your call history, you then have to hit the option button, and scroll down two places to the option for "call", to call that number. That should be the first thing that happens, it shouldn't be hidden in a sub-menu.

But then maybe this is just a general pattern. UI and interface design seems to have gone downhill in basically every type of technology.
 
Zeftax said:
I've now noticed that when I move a tab to the very left in librewolf, it sometimes turns into a small square, instead of remaining normal, despite me having the room for all tabs to stay full size. The behaviour is really inconsistent and annoying.
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It's the pinned tabs feature. It's not inconsistent, drag a tab to the left and hold it there a moment you'll get a faint blue outline that shows it will turn into a pinned tab. You can also pin tabs if you right click the tab, I assume there's a key shortcut too. You can undo it by right click menu > undo or dragging it back to the right. I do not know how to disable it.
 
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