I'm really starting to hope the costs are unsustainable and semiconductors hit a brick wall. But I'm not optimistic.

Switched to this from Apple a year and a half ago. Works for most things. Unexpectedly, replacement apps lack polish. Also, RCS works very inconsistently (been without it for months), seems to be Google's fault. There may be workarounds, but I haven't had the energy to try the more complicated suggestions.

I am probably going to switch back to a used old iPhone for "phone appliance" tasks, but keep around the Pixel for other things.

My main takeaway from the experience is that iMessage is an even bigger weapon than I thought.

Are you in the US? I get the impression that iMessage and RCS are only big there. Almost nobody uses them here in Europe. (It's mostly WhatsApp where I live and Signal is slowly getting more popular.)

As an aside, from the latest release notes: Sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer: add toggle for granting Play services access to ICC auth in order to support RCS with carriers requiring it for RCS in Google Messages including T-Mobile (see RCS usage guide)

https://grapheneos.org/releases#2026021200

https://grapheneos.org/usage#rcs

The RCS issue is why I switched back to iPhone, reluctantly.

If anything, iOS seems buggier and less reliable, but I know (and am related to) a lot of people who insist on using iMessage/RCS, and I can't be missing messages.

> Also, RCS works very inconsistently (been without it for months), seems to be Google's fault.

The best thing would be to switch to Signal (Molly) for texting.

Old Macs in the background. Electronic soundtrack reminscent of Chariots of Fire, which played during the Mac intro.

went hard on retro futuristic for sure

Worse is better. Because better, it turns out, is often much, much worse.

It is possible for a devoted individual to do this, but it is not possible to solve deep societal problems one devoted individual at a time. We still need massive regulation of addiction-based business models.

Drove through SF this evening. Most people treated it as a four-way stop! I was generally impressed.

TikTok (along with the other platforms) is more like cigarettes, or sugar.

It's highly addictive. The negative effects are somewhat diffuse and may take a while to really impact your life, but they're very real.

And, rather importantly, it's legal and widely available, and the industry behind them is suppressing evidence of their harms and making tons of money off of addiction.

Other folks have given general answers, but I'm wondering, what ISP do you have, and where?

(I'm lucky to have Sonic, in the SF Bay Area. A local ISP that actively campaigned for net neutrality and has 1Gps symmetric as the standard basic fiber plan. Pretty sure they're not shutting down anybody's servers.)

Clever! But I think you might have forgotten to simulate moderation/dang. Sex and Nazis on there already.

In the US (edit: and elsewhere!), "beaming" worked great between Apple Newton devices, including the pretty cool eMate 300 (an early Jony Ive creation, I just found on Wikipedia).

In 1993.