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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • There’s some slight technical reason for it, but I think they swung a bit too far in the asshole direction with blocking too many.

    The LTE rollout was completely botched from the start. LTE voice is technically supported on all LTE chipsets, but early on the voice spec changed. Early phones used LTE for data and 2G or 3G for voice.

    Complicating matters further, AT&T and Verizon both have separate and slightly tweaked versions of the spec, as they didn’t want to wait for it to be finalized, and of course they’re both different in different ways. It’s also why T-Mobile allows so many devices. They just rode their very fast for the time HSPA+ network until LTE was finalized, got generic hardware on the network, and flipped the power switch.

    To top it off, AT&T was sued at one point for 911 not working due to a handset bug and they got very controlling at that point to avoid future lawsuits.

    VoLTE is ostensibly VoIP over cellular data at its core. All phones have to talk with the correct SIP signaling on VoLTE for voice calls to work. With 2G and 3G, the circuit-switched method of signaling was much more standardized (although not necessarily simpler, WCDMA at its end spanned literal volumes of books.) This made it so phones and networks were more easily compatible for basic things like voice, 911, etc.

    Now, on top of Verizon and AT&T thinking that rolling their own flavors of LTE was a good idea, every phone maker also had their own idea about how the VoLTE SIP signaling was supposed to work. Due to flaws in the LTE spec, carriers going rogue, and companies interpreting things wrong, it has turned quite literally into a clusterfuck.

    TL;DR: It took a long time for LTE to standardize enough across product lines, and there are a whole bunch of phone models that don’t talk the language quite right. So carriers chose to ban rather than make workarounds or work with the vendor to roll a software fix to the phone.






  • I think you give the idiots in charge of the corps that can’t see beyond a 3 month window of time too much credit. It is just the natural progression of unchecked and unregulated Capitalism that will always lead to this place, regardless of the industry or technology.

    Don’t get me wrong, I want to blame them too for their evil plot, but they’re too dumb to have contrived the whole narrative.

    Example with the cloud:

    • Look over past decades, storing your data in servers has been a thing for decades. Companies have tried time and again to get the concept to stick in various forms, and it always waxed and waned. (Reverse-example right now is AI, since people barely want it, and having it in the cloud is even creepier, manufacturers are trying to make people comfortable with cloud-executed AI queries, and otherwise releasing limited subsets of compute that run locally on the phone.)
    • Voice recognition tech like Voice Command (predecessor to Siri for those super young) started on phone-only. Then Siri used to run on the cloud until phones became powerful enough to run more commands locally and they moved more commands to the phone.
    • Apple used to synchronize SMS messages between iPhones and other Apple devices in a secure local method on your local WiFI network. Then, as they sold more types of devices, it made it evolutionarily (made up word) necessary to move that logic to the cloud. They probably didn’t pre-think that all this would be clouded, they just got there out of need to sell a new toy, and suddenly screw the alleged privacy they purport to worship.

    The reality is, a lot of these cloud techs have been held up by:

    • Lack of fast enough Internet bandwidth to make it doable, nobody is going to spend 4 hours a day uploading photos somewhere
    • Lack of fast local compute, hilariously, local compute can do most things now, but in the past, the local compute wasn’t fast enough to be able to parse/process the data to send to the cloud
    • Lack of local storage, again, prepping data for cloud transport and having local caching be performant requires enough throwaway space on the local machine that users don’t become frustrated with the latency of remote disks in a datacenter
    • Lack of metadata for trust verification like FaceID, fingerprint, GPS geolocation, and other security functions so the company could avoid fraud
    • Lack of quality mobile cameras and recording devices making the input content garbage

    Once these problems ended up being solved, it wasn’t some visionary with a big plan executing. It was just another Business Weenie being paid 9 figures having the same idea 300 other people had, and it just sticking this time because the technological environment is different.

    (Replace Apple examples with Google, Microsoft, Cisco whoever as necessary.)






  • Honestly, it wouldn’t have been a bad place to be if they hadn’t destroyed it from the inside. Windows on ARM is super stable. You can still build your own computer, or at least buy one with user-swappable parts. Linux has become much easier and wasn’t too bad to use even a decade ago, but it was nice being able to have a non-Apple computer running programs and getting work done that was just there to do the business. I’m speaking as one that attempted to use the kool-aid for a few years after Apple stopped using user-swappable batteries, memory, disk, their hardware upcharges are pure asshole insanity. I’m fully capable of using Linux, compiling my kernel, modifying driver source to work around problems, but, I don’t want to when I’m just trying to pay my bills. Streaming media services come and go with Linux support, hardware support is often lacking until the work is done to make the hardware work correctly. Windows, for all it’s … windowsness … worked. Until the last 8 months when they decided to put a molotov cocktail under the hood and see what happens.

    Apple is headed this way too, now that they don’t have SJ to errantly blow up the current tech to try something new and random (although, had he survived his cancer, he’d have just gone Musky with age like a lot of that generation has, mmmm leaded gas!) Apple will hold on just a bit longer because iOS gave them one new platform reboot (ish) to live off of, while Microsoft is still kicking around technical debt until the end of time.

    Oh, edit though, I’ve been migrating my machines to Linux one by one now. Not going to bother sticking around to see that Windows train wreck continue.