The iPhone was the first smartphone that hot insanely popular. It launched the app store model that’s now used on every mobile platform including Android. Those apps have gotten hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in India and China who are doing e-commerce and opening small businesses from their phones. That’s food on the table for the working class. They can earn money while looking after their children because they’re not chained to a desktop computer for internet access. People in remote areas can know instantly about natural disasters and the news, educating them and making them active citizens in a democracy.

People across the world can chat with each other for nearly free using messaging and social media apps, and won’t have to send letters or pay extra fees for long-distance calls. The iPhone got more people onto what formerly only Blackberry-owning business executive had.

It’s such a first world thing to belittle the impact of smartphone (an industry which the iPhone shaped tremendously), when it has so much tangible impact, especially to working people.

How accepting is society and school for trans children in South Africa?

It’s just extra seasoning.

Why did the UK refuse?

It’s an example of one company coercing another to enshittify for revenue. Getty also gets the blame here.

• Google Image Search removing the ability to go directly to the raw image after Getty complained that web users are bypassing its website and therefore not generating traffic
• Facebook removing chronological feed
• Facebook showing you pages that you never followed on your home feed without the ability to turn this off
• Microsoft trying to introduce ads to Explorer and the start menu
• Microsoft making it difficult to create a local Windows account by making the process unintuitive, leading the user to believe that a Microsoft account is needed to use Windows
• Apple dropping support for iOS web apps because it doesn’t want to support browsers other than Safari
• Reddit and Twitter’s ban of third-party API use that killed nearly all third-party clients
• EA producing games that require users to be always online, despite the game being single-player, presumably as a DRM measure
• Ad companies making it easy for you to give consent to data sharing and selling but really difficult for you to opt-out

Edit: More examples

I don’t like the normalizing of using “woke” to describe progressives.

CNN++?

Why would China want to sell the lucrative secret TikTok algorithm to the US government?

Oh, how thoughtful.