Techie Ramblings

Author: Ryan

  • The attention economy

    In my constant battle of trying to find balance in today’s world I’ve been going on a trip filled with nostalgia back in time a decade or two.

    I’m 31 now so some of my fondest memories are 15–20 years ago which takes us back to the time period of 2005–2010. Now I imagine everyone of different ages has a period of time in their heads they consider to be the “golden times” but I truly do believe these were great times, for technology and the internet at the very least which is something I enjoy focusing on.

    Myspace was in it’s final days, the most addictive part of Facebook was Farmville, Tumblr was where we pretended we were very deep and complex individuals and I never really got my head around what the point of Twitter was. We accessed these sites with intention, because it involved sitting down at a PC, more often than not the family PC in a shared space in the house. We still used MSN messenger, and Facebook chat was just getting started. Messages would only be replied to when we were on the PC.

    Our phones were what I consider to be the ideal scenario, they were complex enough that we could play basic offline games, they had rudimentary web browsers so we could obtain information in a pinch but the lack of memory and slow data meant that it was not an enjoyable experience. Other than that they made calls, sent texts and took very pixelated photos and videos.

    Most people gamed on an Xbox 360 or PS3 and most households had a Wii to play as a family. Online gaming was experiencing it’s first generation for most people who never owned a gaming PC. You bought the game and a year subscription to online services (or not in the case of the PS3, it was free!) and could play to your hearts content with your friends. Nobody was competing on who had the most expensive cosmetic items, and there was very little in the way of DLC.

    At some point in time, which I struggle to pinpoint, around 2012–2015 there was a major shift. Mobile devices became more advanced, mobile internet speeds improved and prices decreased, and WiFi became commonplace everywhere. The internet became a thing that followed us everywhere we went, rather than something we sit down to pay a visit to. Social media began to boom, and multiple different platforms began popping up. As time went on a cultural shift happened, most people no longer used or even owned a desktop PC or a laptop. Everything could be done on the ever expanding smartphone in our pockets.

    A war began across the internet, and the target was our attention.

    Very quickly marketers discovered that someone’s decision making process could be altered by what they saw on their social media feeds. Be that making a decision to buy a product based on advertisements that were displayed to the user, political opinions based on videos and material the user was fed, even lifestyle choices could all be altered.

    Social media platforms began monetising their platforms, but not to us the users. We were the product. Our attention was and is still sold to the highest bidder, they can pay money to target very specific demographics with their material. Think what you may but it’s very effective, these social media companies are now some of the wealthiest in the world, and their only product is a platform and its users.

    Any successful company will ensure it’s product is available and in plentiful supply, and this is where the addictive nature of these platforms come into play. Huge teams of people engineer their platform to be as addictive as possible, to keep you coming back and for as long as possible to ensure you are there and ready to view their customers advertisements. A notable example of this is when Facebook introduced notifications. At first the notification dot was blue, and users generally left it unread. When the colour was changed to red however it got much more attention, the colour red is well known to provoke a response in humans (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4413730/). These companies openly utilise our human nature and instinct to assure our attention.

    Humans have developed very rapidly over the last century. In evolution terms it’s been the blink of an eye since we were simple tribal or nomadic hunter gatherers. Our brains are not equipped to deal the cheap thrill that is social media. We are social creatures too, so when we receive a “like” it simulates social acceptance from our peers. Our brain rewards us for this good action with a little rush of dopamine. We crave this dopamine and repeat the behaviour. In more primitive times this would’ve been beneficial in that humans would act in ways that other members of their group liked, and this in turn would strengthen their bond which in survival terms is a good thing. In terms of social media a like costs nothing, and often means very little however the primitive circuitry in our brain cannot differentiate that from genuine interaction. Very easily people become addicted to this instant gratification, and in turn spend more time on social media which leads them to spend less time on genuine interaction.

    As you probably already know, or are finding out now social media isn’t beneficial for average people. There are genuine use cases for it, such as long distance relationships or friendships where face to face or a higher quality interaction is impossible but in general it is a lower quality social interaction. People are lonelier than ever but more connected than ever, why is this? I’d argue it’s because we’re replacing face to face interaction, or even a phone call with a like or a comment on a post, and somehow that feels like we’ve touched base with that person and removed the need to contact them in another manner.

    Social media then, is only really beneficial for the social media company itself, who make money from exploiting their users and keeping them active, and the companies that pay the social media company to advertise to it’s users.

    This is where we are today, and it only takes an altered perspective and you’ll find it impossible to avoid. AI generated sites litter search results. Social media can make you lose hours without realising just by choosing to open the app. We feel disconnected, dissatisfied and lonely through poor quality interaction online. Teenage boys are using steroids so they can look like their idols on Instagram, teenage girls are struggling with eating disorders for the same reason. Buying a genuine product online has become a minefield of ads and inferior products. There are so many bots online now it’s hard to tell if we’re talking to a real person, and in some cases bots end up talking to themselves.

    It feels like somewhere along the lines we went wrong with the internet, and I suppose where money is involved this was bound to happen. But I wish we could go back, and enjoy the internet for what it was again when it was fresh, exciting but not yet addictive and completely capitalised.

  • eBay – A downward spiral?

    Of the older ones among us that were the pioneers of the internet, most will have memories of eBay in its early days. My earliest memory of it would’ve been around 2003 as we didn’t get internet access at home until around 2005. I remember borrowing my Grandfathers laptop and browsing listings, there were no businesses on there it was just average people selling their unwanted belongings as it was originally intended.

    Fast forward today and you have to set up a search specifically just to find a private seller. The majority are “businesses” (in the loosest sense of the definition) reselling things can be purchased for a 5th of the price on Chinese market places such as Temu and Aliexpress.

    eBay seem hell bent on ruining their marketplace through poor decisions over the years. Pushing buyers and sellers away in their droves. I’ll list a few that come to mind:

    • Charging ever increasing selling fees.
    • Forcing all payments through their platform, and charging higher payment fees.
    • Siding with the buyer regardless of the situation, leaving honest sellers out of pocket.
    • Promoting alternative sellers items on a product listing, drawing attention away from the item that was clicked on toward a sponsored listing.
    • The entirety of the Global Shipping Programme. This abomination has left buyers and sellers all over the world frustrated and out of pocket through sheer incompetence.
    • Packlink shipping. They act as a broker for different couriers but when a shipment goes wrong neither of the parties will take responsibility.

    I could go on.

    The latest nail in the metaphorical coffin is the abolishing of the seller fees. This was in response to a loss of traffic due to Vinted. Vinted offer zero selling fees and put the onus on the buyer to pay for a “Buyer protection fee”, which in effect is just paying the platform tax.

    For a brief period of around a month eBay experienced a new golden era. Sellers sold their items with no fees, and buyers paid no fees. Sellers got paid immediately and could withdraw funds at any time. However this was not to last.

    Not satisfied with ad revenue and sponsored listing income eBay tried to follow Vinted’s footsteps and implement buyer fees, buy of course in a much worse way. As of Feb 2025 if you now go onto eBay and search for anything you will see all the prices look a little strange. Where an item was £9.99, you’ll now see an item at £10.76. This is because eBay have slid their fees into the selling price of the item. The seller still listed their item for £9.99 but now it looks like they’ve priced it higher.

    The honest way for eBay to implement this would have been to state the original price, and then clearly state their fees which make up the total. Interestingly this fee only applies to private sellers. Seemingly another effort to push out entire market they’re promoting themselves to. To stand any chance of competing with the droves of business sellers on eBay the private seller will realistically have to lower their asking price to incorporate eBay’s slice of the pie.

    To make matters worse eBay have made a change to how sellers get paid. Payments will now be held until a confirmed delivery is made, based on the tracking number. In the case of a collection or untracked delivery they will hold payment for 14 days. This leaves sellers out of pocket when they need to pay for postage, and they will not have the money for the item that is no longer in their possession.

    I think we are witnessing the end of eBay’s 30 year run, at least eBay as we know it. One of the first big websites, a household name and a hobby and a passion for many coming to an end. If the company does survive their truly dreadful decision makers latest blunder it will not be as we know it. We can expect more of the Amazon esque off brand products, a search that is fed by the highest bidder and algorithms and an ever worsening user interface.

    Truly a shame.

  • A case against Flagship Smartphones

    Flagships are overkill.

    Yes I said it. I mean really even midrange devices are overkill at this point. I get that the main feature which scales with the price is the camera but even on a flagship it’s subpar in comparison to even a entry level, old DSLR.

    So if we’ve ruled out the cameras what are the actual benefits of a flagship? Lets break them down and give the reasons why they’re not as important as we think, and how very clever marketing techniques have been used to convince us we need one.

    The processor, or chipset.
    I am currently using a Samsung A14 4g. Widely regarded as a slow and generally terrible phone, and yet here I am as a tech enthusiast and professional and I’m having zero problems with it’s performance. It’s responsive, can handle the tasks I need a phone to perform and has been playing casual games brilliantly. Granted if I want to play full titles I’ll play on PC or a console, but who really wants to play full blown games on a 6.5″ touchscreen when we have big TV’s and proper gamepads? A flagship phone has laptop or even desktop levels of performance, but ask yourself if you really need this level of performance? Most of us are communicating and consuming media on our phones, we don’t need all that power.

    Storage.
    This is a strange one. The budget phone technically wins here. Admittedly the flagships have faster read/write speeds on their storage but when it comes to sheer quantity the budget phone generally wins hands down. Why is that? In general flagship phones pricing structures start with a base storage of 128gb. Then there are versions with more storage that you can purchase for heavily increased costs. The budget phone however will generally have a fixed internal storage of 64gb or 128gb, the ace in the budget phones sleeve however, is that they still have micro SD card slots so can cheaply be expanded by however much you want.

    Display
    This one is a bit of a subjective point. But again coming back to the Samsung A14 the LCD panel on it is excellent. I really do not need anything better. I can’t see the individual pixels, it gets very bright and the viewing angles are great. This might not be the case for all budget phones but at least the ones I’ve experienced recently have all been great. In fact I’d go as far to say that in some cases an LCD panel is better for most users. There is no burn in with an LCD panel, and generally they’re a lot cheaper to replace. You may not get the latest gorilla glass, but when a replacement LCD and glass costs £20 it’s nearly the same price as a screen protector for some flagships.

    Construction
    The previous point leads nicely into this one. There are some differences here. Flagships will generally be made of metal around the sides, glass on the back and offer some sort of specially coated glass for the screen. The budget phone will be plastic all around with generic glass over the screen. 99% of people nowadays will throw a case and screen protector on their phone. The case will be made of a rubber or synthetic leather and the glass will be tempered glass with little to no oleophobic coating. Why do the materials of a phone matter when you will never see it or touch them? Arguably the budget phone wins here. If the housing is plastic, do you really need a case? Plastic won’t crack like glass and is more resistant to fall damage than metal as it absorbs impacts better. If the screen is cheap to replace on the budget phone, do you really need a protector? You can just use the phone as it is, and if worst comes to worst you completely break the phone it might cost you £100 to replace, whereas a battery replacement on a flagship alone will cost you that and a screen can be upwards of £300. You would be surprised at the added bulk and weight a screen protector and case adds to your device.

    Cameras
    As touched on earlier, there will be no contest between the cameras on a flagship versus the cameras on a budget phone. The flagship wins every time. Even a flagship from 5 years ago still beats today’s budget phones. But again, as I mentioned before the very best flagship today will still be beaten every time by the cheapest, 2nd hand DSLR that will set cost around £70. With that you have a near unlimited amount of lens and filter options. The flagship will undoubtedly be riddled with non optional AI enhancements that frankly ruin most of the pictures they touch, and anyone that knows their stuff will know they’re edited. It’s personal preference but to me they look like a poor Photoshop so I’d rather go without. Call me old fashioned but I prefer my photos to have shadows and look true to life. The budget phone will most likely be a similar story with the AI. However you won’t be trying to create a masterpiece with a budget phone. You use the camera when you have nothing better on you, or to capture information. To that purpose a smartphone camera excels. Photographers want to be able to control their focus, aperture, lighting and exposure time which smartphones can only emulate. Sensor size also comes into play here, with a smartphone there is a limit to how big this can be. A dedicated camera will always be able to capture more light and raw information, doing away with the need for AI completely.

    Update policy
    Currently the latest selling point of flagships is their newly extended update policies. Some brands are now offering 7 years of OS and security updates for their latest releases. This is great for sustainability but how many of the original owners are going to keep their devices this long? Flagship owners generally fall into two categories; tech enthusiasts who change their devices often or people that get them on contract and renew when that contract ends. At most that will be 3 years and most tech enthusiasts will upgrade every year. How many of those devices will go sat in a drawer for the remainder of their 4 years of updates? At best this benefits the 2nd or 3rd owner of the devices who will purchase them on the used market. However budget phones aren’t like they used to be. 2 to 3 years of OS updates is common nowadays and up to 6 years in the case of Samsung’s A16. Contrary to what their marketing departments would have you believe there is no hard cut off on your device when the updates stop. Android versions 3 to 4 years out of date can still get all the latest apps and google play security updates so this isn’t a device killer. Technically a win for the flagship here but I’d argue it’s not the selling point it’s advertised to be. It’s definitely a nice to have feature if longevity is a major factor in your purchase, but then again cost comes into play which I will delve into further down.

    Charging
    Flagships brag about their ultra fast charging. Some go up to 120w wired and 50w wireless. The budget phone might get 25w over wire and no wireless charging at all. Lets apply this to real life. The average phone user charges their phone once ever 24 hours, overnight. The average phone has a 5000mah battery (no difference between budget and flagship here, they all have around this capacity) and an average person would have their phone on charge overnight for at least 7 hours. The charger only needs to be a 1a charger for the battery to be full by the time the user wakes up with time to spare. That equates to 5w charging speeds. If for whatever reason somebody didn’t want to or wasn’t able to charge overnight, the average charging speed of a budget phone is 25w, at max speed that would take just over an hour to charge from empty to 100%. I’d argue that isn’t a major inconvenience.
    In my experience with the Oppo Find x8 Pro, even using the 80w charger the battery still takes just short of an hour to charge, because once the battery gets to a higher percentage the charging speed slows right down to protect the cells from damage. Arguably there’s not a lot of difference here. Wireless charging is a bit of a niche criteria for a phone. Some people swear by it, personally I have no need for it. If it was a must have for someone a midrange phone would probably be a better way to get this. Cost of repair also works in favour of the budget phone here too. A flagship phone will most likely be using split cell batteries or silicon carbon cells to achieve the higher charge speeds, or for a more compact form factor. The replacement cost of these batteries will be higher than normal. The average budget phone’s battery will cost around £10, and the repair will be much easier due to its plastic construction.

    The cost
     This is the big one and I’ve saved it till last. The range of budget phones is huge, and so is the variety in cost. There aren’t many differences between these phones, save a couple like the CMF phone 1 which has much higher specs than it’s similarly priced rivals, which it achieves through cutting out features such as NFC. Other than that it’s generally camera specs which I’ve already spoken about not placing too much value in. There are plenty of perfectly good budget phones from reputable brands that can be purchased outright for £100 or less. I’ll use £100 as the basis for comparison.
    On the flagship side it’s the same story, however purchasing habits are different here. The majority of buyers do not go for the lowest price variant of their chosen phone, due to the storage limitations the brands impose to push buyers further up their ladder. Some examples; the S25 Ultra 512gb is £1249. The iPhone 16 Pro Max 512gb is £1399. The Pixel 9 Pro XL is £1319. If I average this we get £1322. I’ll round this down to £1300 for comparison.
    Immediately noticeable is that the average flagship is 13 times more expensive than the average budget phone. Do you get 13 times the value from the product? Absolutely not. At the end of it all if you purchased both of them side by side you would have a smartphone in both hands running the latest version of the chosen operating system. They can run the same apps, and aside from a few gimmicks they can fulfill the same purpose.

    If we compare the cost of ownership it gets worse. Over two years the budget phone would’ve cost £50 a year where the flagship costs £600. It would take 13 years of keeping the flagship going to get the yearly cost down to the initial price of the budget phone. However even if that were possible (It’s not, it would have to go 6 years without updates on a 7 year promise) it would likely need a battery replacement every 3 years which on the average £100 battery charge would add another £400 to the total cost. The likelihood is the phone would also need a couple of screen replacements in that time too. OLED’s get burn in and bleed when damaged. This would add another £600 to the total cost. So over the imaginary 13 year ownership the flagship actually would cost £2300. Obviously this is dreaming because a phone will never last that period of time, but it’s a useful visualization. If we did the same calculation for the budget phone pretending it could last 13 years the cost would be £100 plus 4 batteries at £10 each and 2 screens at £20 the total cost of ownership comes to £200. The gap is increasing £180 vs £2300.
    A more realistic calculation would be that over a 10 year period you replace your phone every 2 years, selling the old one on the used market. The average flagship loses 77% of its initial value after 2 years, whereas the average budget phone loses 50% over the same time period. To get us to the end of the 10 year example we would need to purchase 5 phones and sell 4.

    Let’s calculate the flagship first.
    5x flagships equals £6500. 4x flagship sales equals £1196. That gives us a total cost of ownership of £5304.

    Secondly the budget phone.
    5x budget phones equals £500. 4x budget phone sales equals £250. Total cost of ownership is £250.
    That’s a staggering difference of £5054 saved over 10 years, just by not buying a fancy phone. You could quite easily buy a decent car with that money.
    Another hidden cost of owning a flagship is the risk of theft. A thief knows a cheap phone from an expensive one, and if you have an expensive phone to your ear you’re much more likely to be a target and potentially get hurt.
    The final cost is the mental toll. That resell value in the above examples depends heavily on the condition in the case of the flagship phone. If it’s damaged say goodbye to the hope of recouping any money. £1300 is no small amount of money to anyone except the richest among us. Can we really afford to risk this amount of money on a accidental drop on a daily basis, or even losing the device? With an average monthly take home wage of around £2000 in the UK this represents nearly a whole month of someone’s salary. Wouldn’t we all be better off with that kept in our bank accounts in today’s climate?

    To conclude; the marketing departments of phone companies must be some of the best in the world. They have somehow convinced the average person who won’t spend more than £50 on a pair of shoes that they absolutely need a £1300 phone that will only last them until the next model is released just a year later. When we look at this objectively it’s ludicrous. If someone buys a new camera it might cost them £300 but it will be dependable for at least a decade. With a flagship we’re getting cameras that will be worse than this, and a load of fad features that don’t add any true value over a much cheaper device. Can it even be argued at this point that it’s vanity with brand recognition? The Samsung A16 looks identical to the S25 unless you had the device in your hand, and all iPhones have looked the same since the iPhone 11. I really do think we’re being played here, and taken for fools.

    Hopefully this will be insightful for anyone reading this, and having all the information we technically already knew laid out in front of us is a useful tool for logical thought and rational decision making.