There should be a market for electronics that goes against planned obsolescence. Build a device that runs a good enough OS, with low specs, that doesn't require fast hardware, make it sturdy and last at least 3 years, and I would buy it.
I refuse to spit more than $200 for any of those devices. People say "but I used it everyday, it is my main computer", well with all due respect you are addicted to your phone.
The smartphone industry is bizarre. Of course you can accuse Apple and google ecosystems, but still.
Well, that's an entirely arbitrary line in the sand you've drawn there. It's an entertainment platform. Am I addicted because I pay extra for a high quality TV, stereo, or gaming computer? What if it was spending extra money on a jigsaw for my woodworking hobby?
“How about you make a cheaper product without software bloat” To me this was very clearly answered with we broke new ground building the right system from the ground up and that was expensive.
And we used our existing OS as the base and we’ve achieved true mobile <> PC converance.
Give the article a full read and please consider editing this comment.
The reason for the cost was literally what was covered in the article.
Non-smart phones in the old days had to use either WAP (a simplified version of XHTML) which you probably won't find much content available on today, or a thin client for a server-side browser (e.g. Opera Mini) which is not great for privacy/security.