For me it’s the notification light you used to find on older phones, was particularly good to know if your phone was charged without picking it up
Physical buttons in cars
Repairable phones
Repairable laptops
Resoleable shoes
Hand-crank drills (for those quick and easy projects where dealing with batteries or cords isn’t worth it)
External frames on hiking packs
Actually tough jeans that need to be broken in and last a while
Headphone jack
I miss physical buttons on everything. We’re a tactile species living in a digital purgatory
Not sure if an automatic transmission qualifies as a modern gadget, but I remember push starting my car back in the day when the battery died.
You know the original automatic trannys had the pump on the output shaft side, so they could be push started in D.
Most features that smart phones had. Most prodomimantly the micro SD card slot, headphone jack and IR blaster.
I miss IR blaster on my phones, so handy.
There are lots of phones with micro SD and headphone jacks.
My Motorola G60s has either dual sim or sim with SD and a headohone jack. Also has a 120hz screen. Just missing the ol IR blaster
Yeah but they’re all the lower end phones, all the major flagships removed the features three or four versions ago, I don’t want to have to sacrifice camera or screen quality in order to have features that should be built into phones by default
I’m going to say that today, even on lower-end phones, the screen, processor and camera are all pretty decent.
I have a Motorola G31, which cost about 200€ one year ago, when I got it. It has a Micro SD Card Slot and a headphone jack. The screen is plenty good (1440p,60hz) (why would you need 120hz or 4k on a phone) And the camera is also quite nice. It has no fancy features, but it takes pictures and that’s all I need.
From my perspective, flagship phones are impractical and overpriced to say the least.
120hz is amazing for scrolling through feeds, it is absolutely night and day. It is like turning off the annoying motion blur in a video game.
By far replaceable batteries. You used to be able to purchase physically larger and higher capacity batteries to get insane battery life, but because they would include a larger rear plastic for the phone it would still look normal. Now we have to waste space and lose efficiency with external power banks.