Latest Is Not Greatest: The Case of "Foldable" Tech
More than 20 years ago I purchased a foldable keyboard for my PDA via an EBay auction. I still have that PDA. It's charging right now; it is right before me. The keyboard was sold by someone who worked for a radio station in the US and it took a lot of persistence to get him to send it (his name too was Roy). Less than a decade later some keys became unreliable (pressing them didn't always register a "click") and over time - perhaps around 2013 - they became completely dysfunctional. I typed a lot on that keyboard, typically while I was travelling. I wrote a lot of things (mostly unpublished) on a device that barely consumed battery power; the keyboard was the same size as the one I am using right now, but it folded into something that goes into a pouch and fits in a side pocket on any trousers.
The thing about foldable technology is, wear and tear are faster and more severe. A recent benchmark showed that foldable "smart" "phones" with lots of hype around them are falsely advertised as being able to endure many foldings. In practice, however, they break apart and became unusable rather quickly - more quickly than the skinnerbox becomes 'obsolete' or unworkable based on inside components and software updates. This past Sunday I saw one such foldable phone (skinnerbox) in the market.
Gimmicks come and go. Everything "foldable" may easily impress people, but semiconductors, wiring (cables) and other things are not too good as "moving parts". There are always limits; it boils down to chemistry and physics. This is why headphones don't last very long (too much movement, including stretching at endpoints), laptops that get opened and closed a lot may develop signal transmission problems (and "modern" laptops are harder to open and repair by replacing the cords/braids - I did that myself when I was 19, but nowadays a lot of things are soldered/glued in, screws aren't standardised because the goal is to discourage repair), and HDMI cables are like disposable junk (we have mountains of them; the DRM in them, especially the newer ones with computers inside the cables, means that anything short of perfection is dysfunctional, hopeless, dead).
Again: Gimmicks come and go. Those of us who stick with older solutions typically enjoy a longer lifecycle of products. The cost of migration isn't limited to purchases; time too is a factor.
Many headlines this week speak of Windows Update doing actual physical damage to storage devices. Somehow we're meant to believe (thank you, Currys PCWorld [1, 2]) that the real problem is people installing "Linux" on the hardware.
This past week I've copied terabytes of my data to an external new HDD (plates, not SSD). I still have with my drives like these that I bought as a student. Nowadays it feels like anything with "SD" in it (not the literal storage device) isn't so reliable, just abundant and ubiquitous. I already lost count of how many dead SD cards I have from my Raspberry Pi devices, maybe 5 or 6 in total.
The bottom line is, don't be shamed into abandoning old things just because the "fashion industry" of Apple and Samsung tells you to. They make more money from the newer things, partly because of patents (that will take longer to expire). You probably don't need a foldable "phone". What you need is patience. Wait till you get home, then use a real computer. █