Technology

Samsung owner, checking in, so I absolutely get the appeal of having one device that serves as a traveling workstation and mobile comms platform.

I do miss headphone jacks, but I've got a grip of 99 cent USB to stereo adapters if I really care about it, and I've got almost exclusively Bluetooth headsets anyways.

Thunderbolt is glorious, but you also can accomplish all the things you mentioned with USB 3.x and I've accomplished most of them with Samsung Dex and a USB Dock.

Thunderbolt was developed in Partnership between Intel and Apple, and Intel largely holds the keys for it, and opened the spec for TB 3/4 to be available rolled into USB 4 devices and beyond, many years ago, so Thunderbolt licensing is rarely needed.

I have literally one dock and one Apple computer which even support Thunderbolt 5, and I can't really do anything that needs to saturate its bandwidth in production. Generally speaking, 40gbps is enough today for anything I would need to do on my phone docked as a workstation except for larger LLM's, or maybe video production or CAD design, which are likely want the full fat horsepower of any of the computers available to me instead.

But I really freaking want though out of my phone, is for it to not be locked down to one of two spyware ecosystems, and for it to be small enough that I can comfortably use it with one hand. I have bought the smallest Samsung Galaxy S phone available to me every year since around 2015 and I'm quietly resentful about it that I'm forced to carry around a phablet. Every time I picked up my old iPhone 4S from a drawer and dusted It Off I would charge it up and turn it on and be dismayed at the state of the software and SOC, but it's form factor and elegance is what I want, just in something more open.

One key point you need to understand regardless of where all of the jumble of Technology goes next, affordability is out the window, and it's not the upstart phone vendors fault that they can't command millions and millions of orders to get manufacturing discounts. Any phone that is better for you and me to carry is going to cost a pretty premium and we're basically funding the R&D with the first Generations we buy. That is pretty much unavoidable in this era.

So we slavishly keep buying pixels and galaxies and iPhones.