skuzz

That paying extra to get faster service thing is a complete scam too, at least with DoorDash. But they probably didn't bother researching anything about how these junk services work either.

Muskrat is clearly an alien sent to Earth to ensure our doom.

Bear in mind that as they age, you have increasingly unstable lithium bombs on your wall.

Nest smoke alarms were inspired and truly the best I have ever used. So pissed Google destroyed them.

If you do a Takeout request of Nest data, you will find a hundreds of megs JSON file with every change you made to your thermostat, every time you walked by it, any data it could harvest. A breadcrumb trail of your entire home life. I switched back to old fashioned offline battery thermostats.

However Fitbit accounts had different privacy policies and terms of service, IIRC. Bringing them under the Google umbrella likely allows Google easier data harvesting/combining from a legal perspective. They did similar with Nest years back before they completely butchered it.

IIRC, Apple's "open" browser implementation was so fundamentally broken and difficult that it made the actual implementation of a third-party browser exceedingly difficult. Kinda like how their call-blocking API is nothing more than a database loader with no feedback, so call blocking apps can't share data back to improve through crowd-sourcing. The products all have to learn from Android phones on the same product to be able to share with iPhones.

They just copy GrapheneOS and take away features each release. Like soft-buttons instead of the silly swipe gestures? Gone (but they eventually brought back the option to enable.) Want to remove apps? They let you remove almost every one, then only disable some, then you can't even disable but you can use ADB to mask the app for your user account so it appears removed but is still present. Quick settings for Bluetooth, WiFi get harder to disable with each release because they love metadata too much. Want to do GPS only and turn off their WiFi/BT stalker? Apps that use their modern GPS API will bring an OS dialog up to re-enable Google Stalking EVERY TIME, and still not fall back to GPS. (Watch Duty is a good example of this.) Disk access, you used to be able to at least SEE most of the filesystem on-phone including app container storage. Then you could only see the root folders but not files. Then not even the folders. You can still via ADB, for now, and even that slowly becomes more limited. Bootloader unlock? Not on many phones shipping today at all.

Then with Android 16, Google isn't even shipping the binary blobs (hardware drivers) for the chips in Pixel anymore, Graphene has had to use kluges to get Pixel 10 support.

Google doesn't release good OS features every major release, they just keep taking away everything they can until they find the cross-over of forcibly extracting the most data users will tolerate while supporting the least freedom and features as possible.

With their new closer Apple alliance, I wouldn't be surprised if they cease phone/OS development in a few years. They seem to have no interest in making products worth buying anymore.

It is fun if you use fancy formatting with columns, and somehow the anchor character doesn't show up on the ghost page even with hidden characters on, and you give up and choose 11.8pt font to make the page go away.

I miss ClarisWorks 2 and 3. Best office suites ever made.

Cheapest guarantees you will be missing some 5G bands, might as well just focus on LTE. It will be around for years to come.

That being said, Galaxy Xcover Pro series is probably the way to go, just find an older model for "cheapest."

The entire universe could collapse and these tabs will live on. Forged by Satan himself.

Oh, yeah, you'd think, but no. Instead you have to try and bend the clips, and while doing so, they catch the two layers of the spindle-hole and either crack the disc, tear the disc, or tear the layers apart. Sometimes the disc even comes out.

I've seen a dozen DVDs cracked in the spindle-hole across multiple box sets from this travesty of a design. Bought replacements and exchanged them. Seems they went back to a more sane storage format and these disc-eaters were just unloaded over the holidays or something.