Haha I feel this. I have to say I rather miss early smartphone days. Just looked up the Dream G1 and it was such a fun design. There's almost no innovation nowadays which makes sense, market segment has stabilised. At most we see those rubbish foldables with screens that break over a weekend.

I'm likely sticking to Apple too. I absolutely have my gripes with them, but when it works (which is most of the time) it works really well. I had an Android/Google smart TV box on my dumb TV, and it was okay. Super laggy, very unresponsive, crashed every so often, but once it worked it was mostly fine. Sometimes there were audio sync issues and whatnot. Got an Apple TV a while ago and it's dreamy by comparison. It also slots in with the rest of the Apple ecosystem, so I can watch films and whatnot late at night, with surround sound in my earbuds, while my roomie is sleeping soundly in the other room.

My gripes are mostly with the platforms being so locked down. I wish I could get xbox game stream on the Apple TV, but because of the vetting process it's not allowed on iOS at all.

Funny thing about upgrading phones, I was thinking about maybe swapping to the new phone this year, not because I strictly need it (though my camera has some sort of blemish) but the potential USB-C port is very tantalising. Now I'm thinking about holding off until the self-swappable batteries might come. Unsure if my XS would hold up until 2027 or beyond, but I wouldn't be too surprised. The battery has under 80% health, but still runs at peak performance so I've not bothered having it changed. Changing it would also only cost about $70 so it's not a huge deal either.

Sure, it's a walled garden. A very well protected one at that, almost like a prison. But it's a damned nice garden. I'm still entertaining the thought of buying one of the new ARM minis.

Nice. Forgot to say: if you get the amd gpu disabled you lose the displayport. It’s hardwired into the radeon. Never known anyone who cared but its worth saying.