I don't miss landlines. Can't take the friggin landline with you wherever you go. (Affordable) Cell phones were the game changer.
this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
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One thing people forget is long distance fees. Cell phones basically did away with long distance fees, and we're better for that. However, landlines have some notable benefits:
- self-powered, you could call in a power outage
- high fidelity, yeah it was bandpass filtered, but everything in that filter made it through
- freedom of usage, it was hard-fought but you could plug anything into your phone line, from more phones to answering machines to computer modems. There was a whole market around "dumb shit you plugged into your phone line" products
We're still way better overall with cell phones, but something was lost to get them.
I feel like over the last 20 years landlines become this thing you still had from the past in which you only got spam calls. Like, you're home, and suddenly you hear a strange noise, you realize it's the landline ringing. You forgot about it. It's that thing sitting on some shelves with a cord. You pick it up, and you hear something about your car's extended warrenty.
A few years ago when I was working from home and on the phone all day, I much preferred my landline. My cell service was decent, but the landline was better. No dropped calls, no static or garbled audio (from my side anyways), and no latency causing me to talk over other callers. I always hated getting on calls when I was remote from my home office.
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My landline have been turned off completely.
I live in an apartment building that was constructed in '22 and a landline wasn't even an option anymore, it's all just gigabit ethernet.
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The optimal phone is both corded and wireless: it has a receiver corded to a base piece with a traditional dial, but the base piece is wireless.
Might last a day or few if it's even true. Just like how they were all ditching smartphones for Nokias recently.
I'm starting to view fads as a form of annealing. To knock ourselves out of local maxima, humans have an predisposition for finding a reason to go back and try old stuff again. If there was something useful to it, it'll be reflected in the tools they create. I guess rebellion in general is just as evolutionarily useful as conformity. The Exploration/Exploitation dichotomy.
There was a fashion about 30 years ago in the UK to convert old-style rotary phones so they worked with DTMF touch tones. I had a rather excellent original candle-stick style phone. Got lost in a move somewhere. Retro is always cool
You wanted to say that some gen Zers buy novelty Bluetooth headphones that look like a phone with a cord on it, right? Also: who still had a cord in the 2000's besides super important business ppl?
