Technology

I live in an apartment building that was constructed in '22 and a landline wasn't even an option anymore, it's all just gigabit ethernet.

But the fact is modern smartphones are designed to do many things OK-ish in compromise, but nothing so well as the other devices they replace (phones, TVs, calculators - remember those?, flashlights, keyboards, etc etc.)

Weird! Am I the only one who hasn't completely replaced old equipment? I have all of those with me, including landline, radios, flashlights, TV, scientific calculators, keyboards, etc.

And as you mentioned, I prefer those individual equipment over smartphones unless the convenience really matters (like when traveling).

Awesome grounded explanation!

And phones don't indeed replace many other devices. Like camaras too, for example. If you want to do really good photography, you actually need different kinds of lenses. Although lenses exist for smartphones, they are not that widespread, and using a camara is therefore still important.

Also a big point is the ergonomics of it. Handling a camara is much easier for long and complex photography sessions. Same with having a calculator at hand. It's easier to punch numbers in a physical keyboard. Or to handle a flashlight, or using a real keyboard to write a document. The list goes on and on and on.

If it matters, the mocking is not a commonly held attitude. When I read nostalgia, my response was 'that doesn't sound so bad'. Besides, wired handsets have their own charm. We still have a few around.

Considering that every single generation has nostalgia its baffling to me this is even news

It's especially weird when you see these videos where they put very young people with some tech from the 90s, and the young person won't know what such a tech is.

Like, the classic is a floppy disk. They fell out of use in the mid 2000s. So someone born in the mid 2000s likely never saw one in use. And why should they? The ironic part is that people being impressed that a 18 year old doesn't know what a floppy disk is, also doesn't realize that floppys only become commercially available since the 70s. So a technology that had a lifespan of 30 to 40 years isn't widely recognize... yeah.... super impressive.

Elder Millennial here, I hate the whole mocking of generations and hoped ours wouldn't do it as much, but I'm still seeing people of my generation doing so. We did stuff others might call dumb too, or just stuff for the hell of it.

'GenZ is emotionally attached to things from their childhood'. You can replace GenZ with any other generation and it will still work. The stupid article is about mocking one generation to create outrage among others.

One thing people forget is long distance fees. Cell phones basically did away with long distance fees, and we're better for that. However, landlines have some notable benefits:

• self-powered, you could call in a power outage
• high fidelity, yeah it was bandpass filtered, but everything in that filter made it through
• freedom of usage, it was hard-fought but you could plug anything into your phone line, from more phones to answering machines to computer modems. There was a whole market around "dumb shit you plugged into your phone line" products

We're still way better overall with cell phones, but something was lost to get them.

I feel like over the last 20 years landlines become this thing you still had from the past in which you only got spam calls. Like, you're home, and suddenly you hear a strange noise, you realize it's the landline ringing. You forgot about it. It's that thing sitting on some shelves with a cord. You pick it up, and you hear something about your car's extended warrenty.

A few years ago when I was working from home and on the phone all day, I much preferred my landline. My cell service was decent, but the landline was better. No dropped calls, no static or garbled audio (from my side anyways), and no latency causing me to talk over other callers. I always hated getting on calls when I was remote from my home office.