As anyone who's used it knows, CB radio is very much unlike anything you can do with a smartphone[1][2], so I argue it should go in the second list at the end of the article, where the author talks about things that can't be replaced by a smartphone.
(the same can't be said of cassette recorders or answering machines or VHS camcorders)
[2] there were many attempts to make smartphone apps where you can communicate with people that are physically around you. These never picked up steam and the two examples I remember are now defunct (I can't remember the names, I will update this post if I find them)
EDIT: the apps in question were called Highlight app and Glancee app.
For those that are unfamiliar. In short it is a push-to-talk broadcast, public channel, communication. CB stands for Citizen Band.
In Europe, I remember the same frequency, 27 MHz being used for early RC cars. Not sure if EU truck drivers used this too, but it is available and caused runaway RC cars as it was unreliable to use that band. 40Mhz didn't have that issue, but perhaps it was not allowed for regular/unlicensed use...
> In Europe, I remember the same frequency, 27 MHz being used for early RC cars. Not sure if EU truck drivers used this too
I know they used to at least. 20 years ago I worked vacations as a courier. My boss installed a 27MHz radio in my truck, because the local truckers would warn about police raids etc. on it.
I'm in the same country. Another big reason to use a CB over a phone is that it's illegal to touch a phone while driving. No such restriction applies to CB radios.
In theory you could make a Bluetooth 5 app that works like those Cardo motorcycle intercoms (2 to 20 riders on the same conversation over BLE I think). I should look into it.
CB radio being closely related to ham radio arguably could be replaced with the Echolink app on your iPhone. Or one of the SDRs like WebSDR or KiwiSDR (listening only)
Author seems to have misread what the ”10-channel desktop scanner” is about. He seems to think it’s referring to an image scanner? I think it’s a device that monitors AM or FM radio for you.
I’m sure it’s been made obsolete, but I’m not sure it was by the iPhone.
It monitored various emergency and other radio channels used by police, fire department, ambulance service, taxis and so on. The '10 channels' is in reference to how many tuned channels the thing can scan.
Here is some more detail for that particular scanner:
Waiting for someone to explain that iPhone has replaced this too (via streaming), completely unaware that the origin of the stream is likely a 3.5mm jack on... an actual scanner.
While very true, so long as someone keeps that scanner online and the source remains unencrypted, only one person needs to own a scanner rather than hundreds.
Sadly, my city now encrypts all police channels. Fire and EMS can still be streamed though.
It depends on the region and specific needs, but a common reason for not encrypting is that it adds complexity in an emergency (where, e.g., people might need to communicate from other regions nearby, or ambulance needs to talk to fire, maybe civil defence or AREC needs to be involved.) The simplicity of plain unencrypted radio can outweigh the benefits of secrecy.
This said, different places weigh factors differently, there's no one-size-fits-all answer.
Likely replaced by group text for most. my grandpa drove snowplow for the state and often had the scanner listening for when he might be called in. he couldn't respond directly but he did call dispatch to give his ability to come in. Pagers probably replaced that for many.
It might be possible to use iPhone as scanner with RTL-SDR dongle. I don't know if there is any scanner software for the iPhone, most of it is PC software.
For the moment, yes. But in practice, this years dongles are next years built-ins. The same was the case with GPS, accelerometers, temp and humidity sensors, blood oxygen sensors, incident light detection, finger print reading, cameras and so on. Phones absorb sensors like toddlers consume cookies, they can't get enough of them.
I’d like to have a thermometer in my iPhone, for ambient temp, but most of all I am waiting for IR photography and the the inevitable calibrated fever thermometer app.
It will happen. The bigger obstacle is to make sensors cheaper. But MEMS has opened many doors already and I think microfluidics and various gas sensors (think chromatograph in your pocket) will be the next frontier.
Radio frequency scanners are far from obsolete overall but they typically have a lot more channels and scan much faster now. They have continued to evolve or devolve for those that like simplicity. Plenty of people, myself included still have scanners in their home and vehicle. I just had mine on to find out why a parade of ambulance, fire and troopers were going down the highway.
Semi-related because Radio Shack, a store manager taught me how to leverage my "Tandy Service Plan" to get free upgrades on my scanner for life. I was not ready for him to do this. He grabbed my handheld 20 channel scanner by the antenna and smashed it on the desk. Then he handed me a 200 channel scanner because Radio Shack no longer had an equivalent model. Once the 200 channel scanner was obsolete I got a free 1000 channel scanner. Each iteration scanned both channels and stepped frequencies faster. Most scanners lock out particular frequency ranges but this can be bypassed usually by cutting one diode or moving a jumper. Radio Shack preferred the diode method. Nowadays people call this "frequency expansion" or expanded on scanners, ham radio, etc... Some HAM radios can be used as scanners once frequency expanded.
Some now prefer software defined radios to double as scanners. I like both. SDR's are great at home but too much clutter for in the vehicle for me. SDR's combined with leaked keys can monitor P25 encrypted law enforcement tactical channels.
Right, but more specifically they are most often used for scanning stuff like air-band and VHF/UHF two-way radio traffic. Nowadays with a lot of public safety being digital P25 (requiring more expensive scanners) and online streams being so easily available, there's not a lot of reasons to buy a scanner unless you're really passionate about it.
I used a scanner this weekend to listen to the Blue Angels perform. It was also helpful to have their ground crew frequencies in their so we knew that they were a few minutes out from taking off (we watched from a few miles away at a friend’s house with a good view). Scanners are far from obsolete!
Here in 2025, I'm thinking of things my phone could do in 2014 that it can't do now: SD card, removable battery, headphone jack, ir blaster, less ads, less surveillance, easier to install third party apps
Besides the camera, almost nothing else has been an improvement.
While its rather cool that its available to everyone. Phones kinda killed the cool gadget market. Since your phone does everything, anything new or interesting is now some $5k+ minimum purchase.
I wonder if inflation adjusted gadgets are similar priced.
Phones especially killed the giftable gadget market.
Department stores and Radio Shacks used to be full of little golf computers and VHS rewinders and electronic Scrabble dictionaries and sports trivia games around Father’s Day and Christmas. It would be unusual in most families, I think, to give someone an app for Christmas.
They’ve also changed our relationship with industrial design. There are probably fewer people designing gadgets, and consumers are less used to acquiring a new device and learning how to use it. I didn’t grow up in a particularly gadgety household, but by the time I was 12 I had learned to work a pretty wide variety of electronics with different interfaces and physical media. Nowadays even your TV is basically a smartphone with a remote.
Some niche gadget-y things that are alive and well in the "a few hundred bucks or less" range:
* hardware tools / multi-tools
* bluetooth speakers
* portable projectors - outdoor big-screen movie night on the cheap
* the "sports/action" camera market - waterproof, magnetic/mountable, go-pro/insta360 etc
* pro/am mirrorless cameras are mostly too expensive to qualify but there's some really cool accesories now (handheld stabilizing gimbals, say)
* everything in the thread/zigbee/etc home automation space (sensors and buttons and automations...)
* car gadgets for enthusiast cars (things that plug into obd ports for diagnostics or real-time display of measurements), or "add android auto to your old car's built-in screen" multi-media retrofits (though in gaining things like this we've lost the ease of just things being single- or double-DIN in the first place), or dashcams
* vr headsets (feels very much like the sort of thing Radioshack of old would've been all over like the tiny handheld TVs)
* fitbits and such wearables
* portable monitors
* mechanical keyboards (as well as macro pads and such)
a lot of them qualify as "phone accesories" but I'm not sure that takes away from them
Half of those are basically just extensions of your phone. Just saying but I guess you are right gadgets have moved to be cell phone feature extenders.
Projectors and keyboards have both been around forever, I don't think most consider them gadgets but its a matter of opinion.
My Sony digital camera is still a lot of fun (so are my medium- format film cameras for that matter). Of course the phone is the camera I always have on me.
I have plenty of other dedicated devices but I'm kind of lazy to think about them, list them. (A digital 12-channel recorder/mixer just jumped to my mind though.)
In music, phones also killed metronomes and tuners which I'm thrilled about because by themselves those are $30+ instead of $1 (or free with ads) for an app
Except the stun gun, volt meter, and the cash. Even back then, they call out the value of non-digital paper money. A phone absolutely can't replace that.
Waze works great once there's a critical mass of other drivers—busy roads in populated areas. My radar detector fills in the gaps on back roads and small towns very well.
I’ve driven a lot in urban places with speed camera programs (which I fully support along with other car reduction and traffic calming designs) and lots of pedestrians and cyclists around, but I’ve never had a camera ticket in 20 years of driving.
Eight years ago I was driving on a genuinely empty back road in a rural part of America, speed limit 55mph. I failed to notice that, for one mile, the speed limit went down to 45mph. The character of the road didn’t change, we weren’t passing through a populated area. I don’t know why it changed. For miles in either direction it was 55. I kept going 55 and put absolutely zero people at risk of anything. That oversight cost me $400, and the cop was a huge asshole about it. So I bought a radar detector.
There are various layers of dysfunction at play in American road design and policing that I’d happily advocate we address. In the meantime I’m doing what I can to avoid any interactions with power drunk people who have the ability to decide my fate on a whim.
The assume-good-faith answer to a speed limit dip like that is usually that the road has one or more intersections with some risk factor. Like limited visibility around a bend or hill, or a short merging/acceleration area, or prone to flooding in rain, or intersection with a bike trail. Of course, any particular spot like yours could be a police cash grab, but there are many places where something like that seems arbitrary but there is a real reason. Best to follow the signs, for conditions you might not know about.
Speed limits are not the solution. Proper road design is the real solution. We shouldn't have straight four lane stroads that look like a racing strip going straight as an arrow for five miles if the intent is to limit speed to twenty five miles per hour. Slow the road down with curves and bends, not with a signage and paint.
For fixed radars, at least down here in Brazil, RadarBot is a lot better than Waze. For cops on the side of the road, maybe Waze can be better. RadarBot updates it's list of fixed spees cameras really fast.
I still have a pair of those Mach Two speakers in use in my garage. Can confirm that a cell phone can't sound like that and that driving them with a Phase Linear 400 playing Led Zeppelin II can really rock the block until an amp output shorts and blows out the woofer with frying egg sounds. That amp is also known as a "Flame Linear."
Phones in Japan used to receive actual TV. Well, slightly different, but still directly from the waves rather than the internet.
Phones used to receive AM and FM, too.
Some still can! Usually more low-mid teir devices.
Some of the higher end ones (such as my phone, which is how I know this) have the AM/FM signal processor built into their SoC, but the pins aren't wired to an antena.
Came here to say this. There's nothing like a CB radio or the mentioned scanner on a phone. (Scanner apps are streaming from actual scanners in the real world somewhere).
I’ve kept thinking about this, so I decided to run it in reverse.
An iPhone 16 would be would be about $340 in 1991 money. That’s only 70% more than the cell phone in the catalog, or only _42%_ of the camcorder!
The camcorder alone would be almost $1900 today. You could get a folding phone for that. Or three iPhones 16Es.
It's actually ridiculous that our phones support dozens of sophisticated radio protocols but can't act as two way radios without a cell tower from the right company nearby. A $10 walkie talkie can communicate over miles but your phone is a brick without service. This capability would save more lives than Apple's satellite SOS IMO.
They don’t really have the right frequencies available. In the GHz range they operate point to point comms at ground level with low powered radios wouldn’t be a great experience except for if you were so close to someone you could practically shout at them.
Amateur Radio and GMRS though are still very much things that will give good performance for those use cases. GMRS requires a “license” but no skill is required, just payment to the FCC.
Ham radio or GMRS are still great options for remote areas or at crowded venues where nobody can get cell service because everything is overloaded.
The frequencies that walkie-talkies use are available for walkie-talkie use. Sure, it might need another antenna, but so do features like mmWave, UWB, and Satellite SOS, and I guarantee a genuine walkie-talkie feature would see more usage than those. iPhones already contain antennas for dozens of bands including 600 MHz. I don't see it being infeasible to add ~465 MHz band support.
Ignoring the frequencies for a moment, because physics, the phone does 'wi-fi' calling just fine, a 40 'channel' (or 'room') push to talk (or VOX) voice app is pretty trivial. You get close just running the discord client on your phone. That _does_ require WiFi, but _doesn't_ require a cell tower. So modally, totally doable from a WiFi network, if your making your own WiFi network then yeah, you need a cell tower.
There are a lot of things our phones are capable of that we are not able to get them to do.
Even before the iPhone I had a phone with front and rear cameras and Bluetooth, it has long since been replaced and is probably sitting at the back of a drawer somewhere. If I had the ability to make it work as a Bluetooth webcam it might have had a productive second life. It was physically capable of doing this, just not software capable
Walkie talkies require a lot more power than smartphones have. FRS is 2W, ham radio handhelds are usually 5W, smartphone Wifi is 30mW. They also require a long antenna sticking out the top. Smartphones have UHF range antennas so possible to fit them but won't be as good.
What is disappointing is that LTE Direct and 5G Peer to Peer didn't go anywhere. They do LTE or 5G directly without towers. The range is 1km, not walkie talkie distance, but enough for a lot of things. There are some first responders phones with but it doesn't seem to be available for public.
> Walkie talkies require a lot more power than smartphones have.
Yes and no. "Real" handhelds could broadcast at 5W but the Walkie Talkies that Radio Shack sold[1] were in the unlicensed band and limited to 10000 uV/m which is well within capabilities of a current cell phone power wise, as you note this would not be efficient with their antenna arrangement :-)
That said, it would be fairly trivial to use websockets to create a "PTT Walkie Talkie app" (think 2 person zoom meeting with no video)
So all of those different technologies got swirled into the magic lamp (smart phone). And then what happened in the next 10 years until now? The phenomenon stagnated. The lamp got bigger and bigger screens, more hardware, but the core abilities didn't change as much they did back in those years.
That's hardly surprising no ? These 'revolutions' only happen once every few decades, and looking back everything looks insignificant (because their significance shrinks to nothing when you're at the wake of the exponential function).
If you look back there's basically "nothing" that happened till the 90s; and if widen the horizon a bit and look back 'nothing' appears to have happened till the 20th century and so on.
We grow in ability, not wisdom (which is why 'forgetting' is so much more catastrophic).
We're on the verge of another consolidation, where laptops and tablets become dumb shells for phones. (Exceptions: "hardcore" gaming, software development, content creation.) But yes, there's less to capture.
The author lists everything his phone has replaced, and the two items his phone cannot replace yet. One of those is a radar detector. To that I offer the Waze app. While it is not exactly a radar detector, it still serves the same purpose.
Funny story. I first heard of the Waze app while reading a Car & Driver magazine in my doctor's office nearly 15 years ago (possibly before 2010). There was an article on illegal cross-country car racing. One of the drivers said something like, "I use a combination of radar detector and Waze to avoid the police."
I had no idea what Waze was, and researched it as soon as I got home. It has always been crowd-sourced, and there were not many users back in those days (at least in my area), but I used it and spread the word anyway,
Those are two different use cases for me. A radar detector is much more specific. Waze replaces the usefulness of other drivers flashing their lights at me.
Anecdotally, people rarely seem to do that today for whatever reason. I expect at this point people think I'm either trying to cuss them out or complain about how bright their headlights are today, but if you see me flashing my lights there is a cop ahead looking for tickets.
Tangibly related, but I enjoy remembering my GCSE (an exam taken in the UK at 16 as you leave compulsory education) Maths teachers telling us “you won’t always have a calculator in your pocket”. I guess they were half right, in a way? It’s not a calculator, but it does have a calculator alongside access to the entirety of human knowledge.
On the other side of the coin, while I enjoy this memory I do think it’s a shame how lacking most people’s mental arithmetic skills are… and indeed their understanding of some basic mathematical constructs, like multiplication being commutative, but I suppose that’s not the calculators fault.
> Tandy 1000 TL/3, $1599. I actually owned a Tandy 1000, and I used it for games and word processing. I now do most of both of those things on my phone.
I think its a stretch to say the iphone does word processing well.
Interesting that one of the items that they iPhone can’t replace is the “fuzz buster”, a radar detector
Arguably that’s also covered by Waze or any other speed trap app
But the dystopian take is that the iPhone gave away far more to the surveillance state than we ever had with scanners and radar detectors of old. I don’t think we’ll ever go back.
Yeah, but then the cops had radar detector-detectors. And of course the war of escalation continued, with radar-detector, detector, detectors. and even radar detector-detector-detector-detectors.
Fun times.
As I recall, the goal was for the detector detectors to shut off once detecting that they were being detected, to avoid a ticket in places where detectors were illegal.
And in Ontario, Canada? One single company sold to the cops and people, in a war of escalation that left their pockets quite padded. Wikipedia says BEL-Tronics, Inc. of Ontario, Canada
I'm really surprised 286-based machines were still $1600 in 1991. But it was a brand name and not a frankenclone assembled from the back of computer shopper.
The problem is that without 3.5mm jack, there is no antenna for FM. Phones used the headphone cord as the antenna. I doubt it is possible to repurpose the USB-C wires as antenna. If it was, would require a custom USB-C chip.
I couldn't find FM/AM USB-C dongle. My guess is that nobody uses FM/AM or if they do, they get a standalone radio.
The phone wouldn’t be doing much in that case I guess… the dongle would have to bring along the headphone jack as well, so you could listen to it! I guess the phone would be the battery, and maybe a speaker I guess.
My biggest use for the FM radio on my old phone was sporting events which have the commentators broadcast locally with no delay.
Now I have to remember to bring a little pocket one or be sure the old phone is charged whenever I go to sporting events. Really kind of a pain. Luckily the kids also like to play games on the old phone so its a handy distraction machine on the train ride.
I find it distasteful whenever someone says iPhone instead of smartphone, where it is clear that iPhone is not the only solution. I don't like Apple, and I even less like cult followers.
This is probably because their BOM is still highly dependent on physical enclosures, cones, and magnets, which can't be Moore's Law'd-away.
I can find some basic setups in the $300 range, but they're usually bookshelf or slim-floorstanding speakers where you're expected to add a subwoofer to fill out the bottom end, not a true full-range.
Maybe I missed the rollout for the iPhone that performs all these functions, but no iPhone has ever:
• Picked up AM/FM radio (even though throwaway Nokia mobiles could do so)
• Allowed you to talk to truckers on the CB band.
• Played CDs you already own.
iPhones no longer come with earbuds (so they can sell you overpriced wireless ones), and a wayward update to the Calculator app kept it from functioning like a traditional 4-function calculator ever again. (Delete button? Really?)
Considering this article is nearly 12 years old and there have been no improvements on the above I declare this list dubious at best.
Well if you want to be completely literal, then you’re right. It also isn’t literally a Tandy 1000.
But if you actually comprehended the article, the author said that you use your phone to perform all those functions. The iPhone can replace all of those functions you listed. It is water resistant and has a speaker. It does not have an AM/FM station but most broadcast radio stations also have a live stream that you can get in your phone. The iPhone came with earbuds when this article was written. It had a calculator app on day one, and it’s just fine. You don’t have literal CB but you can use a variety of apps to communicate with voice in real time. You can’t play the literal CDs but you can’t play the literal .wav files on the CDs.
iPhones did replace tape decks. The mini hi-fi in my living room, my car stereo, my tape and CD walkman, all are now either bluetooth recievers for smartphones or play audio directly from the smartphone.
The function wasn't "playing tape" or "playing CD", it was playing music or audio books.
Wow, cool, but is it a good thing? It's a bummer that so much of computing has moved from content creation devices to content consumption devices. Desktop applications can be more advanced than mobile apps, there's just inherent limitations on the mobile input methods and OS. Though if you're playing games or browsing the web, touching and swiping works great.
Don't even get me started on the fact that only one tech giant allows you to run code on your mobile OS without their permission, and next year we're even losing that. Because the other tech giant normalized taking away the freedom.
The ecosystem had a lot of diversity. When there was a new need or opportunity, new hardware arrived from a fairly diverse set of manufacturers and distributors.
Some of those still exist in niches - music hardware, ham radio, specalised navigation hardware for boats and planes, and high-performance high-end professional cameras and such.
But consumer-grade products are now mostly software, and the software runs on a handful of platforms controlled by a handful of corporations who charge access tribute (taxes.)
The entire system is very locked-down and brittle, and gives those corporations the option to create individual and collective kill-switches for people and/or activities they don't like.
That would have sounded unlikely a couple of years ago, but it sounds a lot less unlikely now.
> It's a bummer that so much of computing has moved from content creation devices to content consumption devices.
I continue to find this assessment of phones and tablets impossible to relate to. The very-portable device with multiple cameras, microphones, various other sensors, maybe stylus support built-in, is in most cases in which I’m creating anything in my personal life vastly more useful than a laptop or desktop computer. This seems to also be what many people who create real things for work have decided. (I do computer-things with computers for pay, so it’s different for me there)
I could have been clearer, what I said wouldn't apply to cameras, I was only talking about things that could be done on a desktop. If a phone can capture audio/video in the field freeing people up from having to carry a separate camera, that is a good thing.
I was sort of on board until the Tandy 1000. It's disingenuous at best to assume that your phone can replace it because it 'does games and word processing'. A phone, no matter how much you like it or how much you can do with it, does not replace an actual personal computer. A phone is a locked down appliance running software written on personal computers. By design, you will never be able to truly explore the system or get it to do anything you can dream. You can do what the software designers / managers want you to do and that's it. (Obviously there are exceptions, but those exceptions are rapidly diminishing.)
These old PCs encouraged exploration, expansion, tinkering, and development. They were true personal devices that you could do whatever you wanted with. Phones are personal in that they know everything about you but they will never match the freedom and exploration of a personal computer.
I truly feel like we've lost something special with the move to smartphones and tablets. :(
> "These old PCs encouraged exploration, expansion, tinkering, and development."
Most users of that era did none of those things. They used apps or shareware they purchased, not much different from today. If anything, it was vastly harder at that time to get the tools to tinker. Compilers and assemblers were quite expensive products; users would be limited to Microsoft GW-BASIC and debug.com that came with MS-DOS or a copy of Borland Turbo Pascal if they were willing to pay extra to get it.
IIRC, even GW-BASIC allowed direct access to the hardware via peek/poke/inp/out. When you turned on the PC, it loaded the first 512 byte sector from floppy or hard disk into memory and transferred control to that. In theory, you could use the tools it came with to write a complete replacement for the operating system and install it so that after the BIOS loads that first sector, not a single machine instruction that you haven't written yourself runs.
I'm genuinely asking everyone here: How can I do this on a smartphone or tablet? Not just "root it", or install an "alternative OS" that is really just a tweaked Android, and "also you first have to buy this particular device it works on". Preferably without having to solder SMD components.
But from all I've read, I'm expecting the answer is "you can't". Which is too bad, since I have a couple of old devices from family laying around and would like to tinker with them. I'm not connecting them to any network as long as I don't have that level of control over what they do. Wouldn't do it with a new, "secure" device either -- the problem for me is what the built-in software does when working as intended by Goo666le + Shenzhen (I don't trust Apple either, and their devices seem even less hackable).
So if you evaluate it by hardware, it's true that the phone isn't giving the same I/O capability. But the application software is there, there are far more apps for a phone and you can access the old ones in some degree too.
If you need an actually hackable PC equivalent, we have all kinds of boards and configurations, from microcontrollers to rasPi style computers through FPGA boards. Any of them are a tiny fraction of the cost of the old desktops.
But the things I used to buy at Radio Shack before smartphones existed, like capacitors and solder, can no longer be found there, and phones don’t replace those.
> Mobile CB, $49.95. Ad says “You’ll never drive ‘alone’ again!” iPhone.
I mean sort of. CBs are still a thing that the phone doesn't quite replicate.
I would make the argument that the modern version of this is LORA/Meshtastic... Im sure at some point they will jam a few more radios into the phone just to have more features.
I like the comparison of Meshtastic being the replacement for CB, it fits pretty well since they are both decentralized and made to run without a lot of underlying infrastructure and both work well to communicate in emergency’s.
So my broad comment is, yes, your iPhone will replace all of these things, with some compromises. Its just like the things I see with with UI/UX design in my day job - I can make an app that does three unrelated things, but you lose something for each functionality you're adding in.
* All weather personal stereo, $11.88. I now use my iPhone with an Otter Box
Sort of, but not exactly, yes it does all of the things my portable radio does, but not as well - mostly audio fidelity.
* AM/FM clock radio, $13.88. iPhone.
Again, sort of, but not exactly, yes it does all of the things my clock radio does, but not as well - mostly audio fidelity.
* In-Ear Stereo Phones, $7.88. Came with iPhone.
This is a place with notable improvements from then.
* Microthin calculator, $4.88. Swipe up on iPhone.
This is a place with notable improvements from then.
* Tandy 1000 TL/3, $1599. I actually owned a Tandy 1000, and I used it for games and word processing. I now do most of both of those things on my phone.
If this was an iPad I would agree, but it's the same thing as the others - sort of but not exactly. It can do those things, but not as well.
* VHS Camcorder, $799. iPhone.
Again, yes if I squint at it - but it's the same thing as the others - sort of but not exactly. It can do those things, but not always as well without additional accessories.
* Mobile Cellular Telephone, $199. Obvs.
This is a place of clear improvement, todays cell phones are a world better in both audio quality and coverage.
* Mobile CB, $49.95. Ad says “You’ll never drive ‘alone’ again!” iPhone.
Yes, iPhone can do these things, but not as well as a dedicated device (no PTT button for a start)
* 20-Memory Speed-Dial phone, $29.95.
Yes, a clear win for replacement.
* Deluxe Portable CD Player, $159.95. 80 minutes of music, or 80 hours of music? iPhone.
Yes, a clear win for replacement.
* 10-Channel Desktop Scanner, $99.55. I still have a scanner, but I have a scanner app, too. iPhone.
Not much of an improvement over a dedicated device.
Voicemail (which you could get in 1991), is a clear winner over an answering machine.
* Handheld Cassette Tape Recorder, $29.95. I use the Voice Memo app almost daily.
Also a clear improvement.
* BONUS REPLACEMENT: It’s not an item for sale, but at the bottom of the ad, you’re instructed to ‘check your phone book for the Radio Shack Store nearest you.’ Do you even know how to use a phone book?
The internet replaced the phonebook before ubiquitous mobile data, I do miss phonebooks however.
A phone playing music from its speaker doesn't sound amazing but neither did handheld AM/FM radios or clock radios. Especially since the station you wanted to listen to always seemed to be just slightly too far away and you'd get a little bit of static.
I have 4 clock radios at home, and 2 tabletop radios that are clearly derived from a clock radio - they sound decent, and have reasonably good audio quality.
I've been an avid FM radio listener most of my adult life (NPR mostly), while I can really no longer stand most of NPR programming, when I wanted to do whole house music, I did so with an small sound mixer fed into FM Modulator which in turn fed into coax and an small antenna.
Not that clear unless augmented with wireless earbuds: I would much rather spend an hour talking on a traditionally-shaped phone handset (not quite the one in the picture) than on a mobile phone (even a pre-iPhone candybar one, though holding a glass slab to your cheek for prolonged periods of time is particularly unpleasant). Of course, hour-long personal telephone calls are not really a thing anymore for most people, but I don’t know in which direction the causation points there.
About the personal stereo, Tidal gives me FLAC quality, and my wired Steelseries headphones provide much better audio quality than any stereo I had own last century.
However, I don't own an iPhone, I have a Xiaomi with an audio socket.
The lack of earbuds is a welcome change because the included ones were almost always shit. Either sound quality wise, build quality wise, or simply just the lack of different silicon moulds for different ear shapes.
I do miss the power bricks though.
As an aside, you’d almost always want more than 5w to charge modern handsets in any reasonable time.
Definitely, I agree. My comment was a bit tongue-in-cheek, I don't need new earbuds or chargers these days. 1 Amp x 5 Volts = 5 Watts isn't enough for modern phones these days, we need USB-C adapters with various outputs like 22.5W, etc.
Personally I'm OK with Apple dropping the extras. They were nice but now I have a box of old Apple chargers and stuff that I don't need, and I think that is what they were trying to limit.
So we pay roughly 3 times more for the same functionality... Is the convince worth that much?? By this logic in 2090 people would have to pay most of their salaries for that "one device".... Dystopian....
> So we pay roughly 3 times more for the same functionality
How do you figure that it's 3 times more? The article says those things add up to $5100 updated for inflation (written in 2014, so more today). A smart phone then was a lot less than $5100.
You’d have spent $3054.82 in 1991 to buy all the stuff in this ad that you can now do with your phone. That amount is roughly equivalent to about $5100 in 2012 dollars.
For a fancy but not top-end device, we pay one third, or one fifth inflation adjusted, not three times as much.
For a budget device, we pay, what, 2%? Not 2% less, just 2%.
As anyone who's used it knows, CB radio is very much unlike anything you can do with a smartphone[1][2], so I argue it should go in the second list at the end of the article, where the author talks about things that can't be replaced by a smartphone.
[1] notice how CB radios can still be bought at major retailers such as this one, one of the largest in my country https://www.supercheapauto.com.au/4wd-recovery/uhf-cb-vhf-ra...
(the same can't be said of cassette recorders or answering machines or VHS camcorders)
[2] there were many attempts to make smartphone apps where you can communicate with people that are physically around you. These never picked up steam and the two examples I remember are now defunct (I can't remember the names, I will update this post if I find them)
EDIT: the apps in question were called Highlight app and Glancee app.
Highlight:
https://parislemon.com/post/18994363772/meeting-people-is-ea...
https://techcrunch.com/2012/03/08/highlight2x/
Glancee still has a website, but it no longer exists as a standalone app as they were acquired by Facebook many years ago:
https://glancee.com/
> there were many attempts to make smartphone apps where you can communicate with people that are physically around you
As someone who has worked in the area: safety was a nightmare, in the sense of "be a woman visible on a distance-based chat".
For those that are unfamiliar. In short it is a push-to-talk broadcast, public channel, communication. CB stands for Citizen Band.
In Europe, I remember the same frequency, 27 MHz being used for early RC cars. Not sure if EU truck drivers used this too, but it is available and caused runaway RC cars as it was unreliable to use that band. 40Mhz didn't have that issue, but perhaps it was not allowed for regular/unlicensed use...
> In Europe, I remember the same frequency, 27 MHz being used for early RC cars. Not sure if EU truck drivers used this too
I know they used to at least. 20 years ago I worked vacations as a courier. My boss installed a 27MHz radio in my truck, because the local truckers would warn about police raids etc. on it.
Related:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Radio_Service
And PMR446 [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PMR446
I'm in the same country. Another big reason to use a CB over a phone is that it's illegal to touch a phone while driving. No such restriction applies to CB radios.
The tech is very much alive and well.
Not quite CB but similar; as a Ham radio operator, I can do Ham radio on my phone. (EchoLink)
In theory you could make a Bluetooth 5 app that works like those Cardo motorcycle intercoms (2 to 20 riders on the same conversation over BLE I think). I should look into it.
CB radio being closely related to ham radio arguably could be replaced with the Echolink app on your iPhone. Or one of the SDRs like WebSDR or KiwiSDR (listening only)
Author seems to have misread what the ”10-channel desktop scanner” is about. He seems to think it’s referring to an image scanner? I think it’s a device that monitors AM or FM radio for you.
I’m sure it’s been made obsolete, but I’m not sure it was by the iPhone.
It monitored various emergency and other radio channels used by police, fire department, ambulance service, taxis and so on. The '10 channels' is in reference to how many tuned channels the thing can scan.
Here is some more detail for that particular scanner:
https://www.rigpix.com/rs-realistic/realistic_pro57.htm
Waiting for someone to explain that iPhone has replaced this too (via streaming), completely unaware that the origin of the stream is likely a 3.5mm jack on... an actual scanner.
While very true, so long as someone keeps that scanner online and the source remains unencrypted, only one person needs to own a scanner rather than hundreds.
Sadly, my city now encrypts all police channels. Fire and EMS can still be streamed though.
I am surprised they such sensitive channels are not encrypted. Both for confidentiality and integrity.
It depends on the region and specific needs, but a common reason for not encrypting is that it adds complexity in an emergency (where, e.g., people might need to communicate from other regions nearby, or ambulance needs to talk to fire, maybe civil defence or AREC needs to be involved.) The simplicity of plain unencrypted radio can outweigh the benefits of secrecy.
This said, different places weigh factors differently, there's no one-size-fits-all answer.
But then you lose accountability.
In what sense?
Likely replaced by group text for most. my grandpa drove snowplow for the state and often had the scanner listening for when he might be called in. he couldn't respond directly but he did call dispatch to give his ability to come in. Pagers probably replaced that for many.
It might be possible to use iPhone as scanner with RTL-SDR dongle. I don't know if there is any scanner software for the iPhone, most of it is PC software.
Anything is possible with accesories but that breaks the thesis.
For the moment, yes. But in practice, this years dongles are next years built-ins. The same was the case with GPS, accelerometers, temp and humidity sensors, blood oxygen sensors, incident light detection, finger print reading, cameras and so on. Phones absorb sensors like toddlers consume cookies, they can't get enough of them.
I’d like to have a thermometer in my iPhone, for ambient temp, but most of all I am waiting for IR photography and the the inevitable calibrated fever thermometer app.
The promo image for the next Apple event looks kinda like IR false colour to me, so maybe you’ll get your wish?
I'll bet $20 you can find a combination thermometer cellphone on aliexpress.
Oh, I found one already!
I don’t want an Aliexpress phone, though.
I have this absurd vision of someone sticking their smartphone edge-on into a slab of beef as a meat thermometer.
I wish that Apple would match all these sensor features on their laptops as well.
I want to those things. Tricorder please.
It will happen. The bigger obstacle is to make sensors cheaper. But MEMS has opened many doors already and I think microfluidics and various gas sensors (think chromatograph in your pocket) will be the next frontier.
SDR++ app enables this on Android
Ah, I remember those now! I forgot they were called scanners. Thanks!
I used to sell that particular model (I worked for Tandy on Saturdays in Amsterdam when I was a kid).
Radio frequency scanners are far from obsolete overall but they typically have a lot more channels and scan much faster now. They have continued to evolve or devolve for those that like simplicity. Plenty of people, myself included still have scanners in their home and vehicle. I just had mine on to find out why a parade of ambulance, fire and troopers were going down the highway.
Semi-related because Radio Shack, a store manager taught me how to leverage my "Tandy Service Plan" to get free upgrades on my scanner for life. I was not ready for him to do this. He grabbed my handheld 20 channel scanner by the antenna and smashed it on the desk. Then he handed me a 200 channel scanner because Radio Shack no longer had an equivalent model. Once the 200 channel scanner was obsolete I got a free 1000 channel scanner. Each iteration scanned both channels and stepped frequencies faster. Most scanners lock out particular frequency ranges but this can be bypassed usually by cutting one diode or moving a jumper. Radio Shack preferred the diode method. Nowadays people call this "frequency expansion" or expanded on scanners, ham radio, etc... Some HAM radios can be used as scanners once frequency expanded.
Some now prefer software defined radios to double as scanners. I like both. SDR's are great at home but too much clutter for in the vehicle for me. SDR's combined with leaked keys can monitor P25 encrypted law enforcement tactical channels.
Right, but more specifically they are most often used for scanning stuff like air-band and VHF/UHF two-way radio traffic. Nowadays with a lot of public safety being digital P25 (requiring more expensive scanners) and online streams being so easily available, there's not a lot of reasons to buy a scanner unless you're really passionate about it.
I used a scanner this weekend to listen to the Blue Angels perform. It was also helpful to have their ground crew frequencies in their so we knew that they were a few minutes out from taking off (we watched from a few miles away at a friend’s house with a good view). Scanners are far from obsolete!
>(2014)
Here in 2025, I'm thinking of things my phone could do in 2014 that it can't do now: SD card, removable battery, headphone jack, ir blaster, less ads, less surveillance, easier to install third party apps
Besides the camera, almost nothing else has been an improvement.
While its rather cool that its available to everyone. Phones kinda killed the cool gadget market. Since your phone does everything, anything new or interesting is now some $5k+ minimum purchase.
I wonder if inflation adjusted gadgets are similar priced.
Phones especially killed the giftable gadget market.
Department stores and Radio Shacks used to be full of little golf computers and VHS rewinders and electronic Scrabble dictionaries and sports trivia games around Father’s Day and Christmas. It would be unusual in most families, I think, to give someone an app for Christmas.
They’ve also changed our relationship with industrial design. There are probably fewer people designing gadgets, and consumers are less used to acquiring a new device and learning how to use it. I didn’t grow up in a particularly gadgety household, but by the time I was 12 I had learned to work a pretty wide variety of electronics with different interfaces and physical media. Nowadays even your TV is basically a smartphone with a remote.
Some niche gadget-y things that are alive and well in the "a few hundred bucks or less" range:
* hardware tools / multi-tools
* bluetooth speakers
* portable projectors - outdoor big-screen movie night on the cheap
* the "sports/action" camera market - waterproof, magnetic/mountable, go-pro/insta360 etc
* pro/am mirrorless cameras are mostly too expensive to qualify but there's some really cool accesories now (handheld stabilizing gimbals, say)
* everything in the thread/zigbee/etc home automation space (sensors and buttons and automations...)
* car gadgets for enthusiast cars (things that plug into obd ports for diagnostics or real-time display of measurements), or "add android auto to your old car's built-in screen" multi-media retrofits (though in gaining things like this we've lost the ease of just things being single- or double-DIN in the first place), or dashcams
* vr headsets (feels very much like the sort of thing Radioshack of old would've been all over like the tiny handheld TVs)
* fitbits and such wearables
* portable monitors
* mechanical keyboards (as well as macro pads and such)
a lot of them qualify as "phone accesories" but I'm not sure that takes away from them
Half of those are basically just extensions of your phone. Just saying but I guess you are right gadgets have moved to be cell phone feature extenders.
Projectors and keyboards have both been around forever, I don't think most consider them gadgets but its a matter of opinion.
Or have gadgets become incredibly cheap? 99 cent iPhone apps etc?
There's an aspect of fun and tinkering that is gone. You can't usually change those apps or use them in ways not intended by the maker.
I'm still falling in love with dedicated devices.
My Sony digital camera is still a lot of fun (so are my medium- format film cameras for that matter). Of course the phone is the camera I always have on me.
I have plenty of other dedicated devices but I'm kind of lazy to think about them, list them. (A digital 12-channel recorder/mixer just jumped to my mind though.)
In music, phones also killed metronomes and tuners which I'm thrilled about because by themselves those are $30+ instead of $1 (or free with ads) for an app
I feel the same about the 1993 issue of Mondo 2000's "R U A Cyberpunk?"
https://aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Mondo_2000_ma...
Except the stun gun, volt meter, and the cash. Even back then, they call out the value of non-digital paper money. A phone absolutely can't replace that.
Crypto coin is the next best thing to cash, I would say that it's in the bag if you use a wallet on your phone, although it could be argued.
Practically speaking, you can also replace a radar detector with the Waze app.
Waze works great once there's a critical mass of other drivers—busy roads in populated areas. My radar detector fills in the gaps on back roads and small towns very well.
Why not just obey the speed limits and stop putting innocent people at risk so that you can edge lord your way through late adolescence?
I’ve driven a lot in urban places with speed camera programs (which I fully support along with other car reduction and traffic calming designs) and lots of pedestrians and cyclists around, but I’ve never had a camera ticket in 20 years of driving.
Eight years ago I was driving on a genuinely empty back road in a rural part of America, speed limit 55mph. I failed to notice that, for one mile, the speed limit went down to 45mph. The character of the road didn’t change, we weren’t passing through a populated area. I don’t know why it changed. For miles in either direction it was 55. I kept going 55 and put absolutely zero people at risk of anything. That oversight cost me $400, and the cop was a huge asshole about it. So I bought a radar detector.
There are various layers of dysfunction at play in American road design and policing that I’d happily advocate we address. In the meantime I’m doing what I can to avoid any interactions with power drunk people who have the ability to decide my fate on a whim.
The assume-good-faith answer to a speed limit dip like that is usually that the road has one or more intersections with some risk factor. Like limited visibility around a bend or hill, or a short merging/acceleration area, or prone to flooding in rain, or intersection with a bike trail. Of course, any particular spot like yours could be a police cash grab, but there are many places where something like that seems arbitrary but there is a real reason. Best to follow the signs, for conditions you might not know about.
Speed limits are not the solution. Proper road design is the real solution. We shouldn't have straight four lane stroads that look like a racing strip going straight as an arrow for five miles if the intent is to limit speed to twenty five miles per hour. Slow the road down with curves and bends, not with a signage and paint.
I thought the same but then I realized the post is from 2014, so maybe not at the time
For fixed radars, at least down here in Brazil, RadarBot is a lot better than Waze. For cops on the side of the road, maybe Waze can be better. RadarBot updates it's list of fixed spees cameras really fast.
I still have a pair of those Mach Two speakers in use in my garage. Can confirm that a cell phone can't sound like that and that driving them with a Phase Linear 400 playing Led Zeppelin II can really rock the block until an amp output shorts and blows out the woofer with frying egg sounds. That amp is also known as a "Flame Linear."
Can't mention a Bob Carver designed amp without also mentioning the amplifier challenge: https://www.stereophile.com/content/carver-challenge-0
Additional 1991 gadgets you now have in your phone:
- Color TV (screen's a bit tight though)
- VCR
- Pager
- GPS (very recent and expensive in 1991)
- In-car navigation (just barely available in 1991)
- Portable cassette player
- Portable video game console (GameBoy launched in 1989)
- Modem and sound card for the Tandy
- SGI workstation for rendering 3D graphics
Phones in Japan used to receive actual TV. Well, slightly different, but still directly from the waves rather than the internet. Phones used to receive AM and FM, too.
Some still can! Usually more low-mid teir devices.
Some of the higher end ones (such as my phone, which is how I know this) have the AM/FM signal processor built into their SoC, but the pins aren't wired to an antena.
In the US we also briefly got this really cursed thing: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaFLO
Not forgetting the humble home phone, and car phone.
In some ways one could also include a Game Boy in that list!
I did :) I think you caught me between edits.
More than just some: an iPhone is my preferred device for playing games for Nintento portables. Literally gameboy games.
Let’s have some fun with this:
Newspaper
Classifieds
Phone book
Rolodex
Photo album
ATM?
Health tracker?
Translator
Dictionary
Thesaurus
Notebook
Scanner
Compass
Flashlight
Sears catalog?
Stills camera! Somehow that wasn't yet mentioned.
Calendar
Egg timer
Stopwatch
Wrist watch
Calendar
Encyclopedia
Star map and ephemeris
TV/stereo etc remote control
Heating/AC etc remote control
Credit+debit card
Language learning cassettes
Books
Paper maps (in general, not just for car navi)
Keys and key cards
Bird, plant, insect, mushroom etc guide
Level and tape measure (kind of)
You're racing ahead. I'm still trying to find the slot where we are supposed to be putting those cassettes in to play them. (-:
Meh, I'd rather had been born to same parents but as a USA boomer baby.
CB? Maybe you can get a walkie talkie app but there is nothing like CB on phone. (If there was it would be banned!)
Came here to say this. There's nothing like a CB radio or the mentioned scanner on a phone. (Scanner apps are streaming from actual scanners in the real world somewhere).
How/why would it be banned, if all it did was provide emulated 'channels' for shared voice comms among users in a local geographic area?
Banned because The Man don't want you to find out local voice doesn't require a subscription-based carrier.
TPC is not The Man. (-:
Sidney Schaefer, is that you?
From 2012. 13 years ago. It's interesting to note if we are talking just the desktop almost nothing has changed from 2012.
Which means it’s time to update the current value!
In 2025 it would be $7,245.62.
I’ve kept thinking about this, so I decided to run it in reverse. An iPhone 16 would be would be about $340 in 1991 money. That’s only 70% more than the cell phone in the catalog, or only _42%_ of the camcorder! The camcorder alone would be almost $1900 today. You could get a folding phone for that. Or three iPhones 16Es.
> Mobile CB
It's actually ridiculous that our phones support dozens of sophisticated radio protocols but can't act as two way radios without a cell tower from the right company nearby. A $10 walkie talkie can communicate over miles but your phone is a brick without service. This capability would save more lives than Apple's satellite SOS IMO.
They don’t really have the right frequencies available. In the GHz range they operate point to point comms at ground level with low powered radios wouldn’t be a great experience except for if you were so close to someone you could practically shout at them.
Amateur Radio and GMRS though are still very much things that will give good performance for those use cases. GMRS requires a “license” but no skill is required, just payment to the FCC.
Ham radio or GMRS are still great options for remote areas or at crowded venues where nobody can get cell service because everything is overloaded.
The frequencies that walkie-talkies use are available for walkie-talkie use. Sure, it might need another antenna, but so do features like mmWave, UWB, and Satellite SOS, and I guarantee a genuine walkie-talkie feature would see more usage than those. iPhones already contain antennas for dozens of bands including 600 MHz. I don't see it being infeasible to add ~465 MHz band support.
Unihertz even makes an Android phone with a DMR UHF transceiver, the Atom XL.
https://www.unihertz.com/products/atom-xl
Ignoring the frequencies for a moment, because physics, the phone does 'wi-fi' calling just fine, a 40 'channel' (or 'room') push to talk (or VOX) voice app is pretty trivial. You get close just running the discord client on your phone. That _does_ require WiFi, but _doesn't_ require a cell tower. So modally, totally doable from a WiFi network, if your making your own WiFi network then yeah, you need a cell tower.
There are a lot of things our phones are capable of that we are not able to get them to do.
Even before the iPhone I had a phone with front and rear cameras and Bluetooth, it has long since been replaced and is probably sitting at the back of a drawer somewhere. If I had the ability to make it work as a Bluetooth webcam it might have had a productive second life. It was physically capable of doing this, just not software capable
The latency and bandwidth on BT does not suffice for today's expected webcam level quality.
FWIW you can use an Android phone as a web cam. Not sure what the latency is though...
Yes but this was pre iPhone days. It was not going to be doing today's expected webcam level quality no matter which way you sliced it.
Walkie talkies require a lot more power than smartphones have. FRS is 2W, ham radio handhelds are usually 5W, smartphone Wifi is 30mW. They also require a long antenna sticking out the top. Smartphones have UHF range antennas so possible to fit them but won't be as good.
What is disappointing is that LTE Direct and 5G Peer to Peer didn't go anywhere. They do LTE or 5G directly without towers. The range is 1km, not walkie talkie distance, but enough for a lot of things. There are some first responders phones with but it doesn't seem to be available for public.
> Walkie talkies require a lot more power than smartphones have.
Yes and no. "Real" handhelds could broadcast at 5W but the Walkie Talkies that Radio Shack sold[1] were in the unlicensed band and limited to 10000 uV/m which is well within capabilities of a current cell phone power wise, as you note this would not be efficient with their antenna arrangement :-)
That said, it would be fairly trivial to use websockets to create a "PTT Walkie Talkie app" (think 2 person zoom meeting with no video)
[1] Exemplar Realistic TC-500 page 56 of this 1991 catalog: https://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/flipbook/1991_radioshack_...
Bitchat might interest you. It just uses Bluetooth for a local mesh.
So all of those different technologies got swirled into the magic lamp (smart phone). And then what happened in the next 10 years until now? The phenomenon stagnated. The lamp got bigger and bigger screens, more hardware, but the core abilities didn't change as much they did back in those years.
That's hardly surprising no ? These 'revolutions' only happen once every few decades, and looking back everything looks insignificant (because their significance shrinks to nothing when you're at the wake of the exponential function).
If you look back there's basically "nothing" that happened till the 90s; and if widen the horizon a bit and look back 'nothing' appears to have happened till the 20th century and so on.
We grow in ability, not wisdom (which is why 'forgetting' is so much more catastrophic).
We're on the verge of another consolidation, where laptops and tablets become dumb shells for phones. (Exceptions: "hardcore" gaming, software development, content creation.) But yes, there's less to capture.
I think the only explanation is that Steve Jobs was some kind of god, or extraterrestrial visitor.
You write 10 but isn’t it a lot closer to 20 years by now?
The author lists everything his phone has replaced, and the two items his phone cannot replace yet. One of those is a radar detector. To that I offer the Waze app. While it is not exactly a radar detector, it still serves the same purpose.
Funny story. I first heard of the Waze app while reading a Car & Driver magazine in my doctor's office nearly 15 years ago (possibly before 2010). There was an article on illegal cross-country car racing. One of the drivers said something like, "I use a combination of radar detector and Waze to avoid the police."
I had no idea what Waze was, and researched it as soon as I got home. It has always been crowd-sourced, and there were not many users back in those days (at least in my area), but I used it and spread the word anyway,
Those are two different use cases for me. A radar detector is much more specific. Waze replaces the usefulness of other drivers flashing their lights at me.
Anecdotally, people rarely seem to do that today for whatever reason. I expect at this point people think I'm either trying to cuss them out or complain about how bright their headlights are today, but if you see me flashing my lights there is a cop ahead looking for tickets.
Tangibly related, but I enjoy remembering my GCSE (an exam taken in the UK at 16 as you leave compulsory education) Maths teachers telling us “you won’t always have a calculator in your pocket”. I guess they were half right, in a way? It’s not a calculator, but it does have a calculator alongside access to the entirety of human knowledge.
On the other side of the coin, while I enjoy this memory I do think it’s a shame how lacking most people’s mental arithmetic skills are… and indeed their understanding of some basic mathematical constructs, like multiplication being commutative, but I suppose that’s not the calculators fault.
It's not really the entirety of human knowledge, either.
Very original reflection, never seen it before https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
1991 me would prefer the phone do-it-all.
2025 me would prefer the separate devices.
Both of those think that’s what they’d prefer
Relatable.
> Tandy 1000 TL/3, $1599. I actually owned a Tandy 1000, and I used it for games and word processing. I now do most of both of those things on my phone.
I think its a stretch to say the iphone does word processing well.
Interesting that one of the items that they iPhone can’t replace is the “fuzz buster”, a radar detector
Arguably that’s also covered by Waze or any other speed trap app
But the dystopian take is that the iPhone gave away far more to the surveillance state than we ever had with scanners and radar detectors of old. I don’t think we’ll ever go back.
Yeah, but then the cops had radar detector-detectors. And of course the war of escalation continued, with radar-detector, detector, detectors. and even radar detector-detector-detector-detectors.
Fun times.
As I recall, the goal was for the detector detectors to shut off once detecting that they were being detected, to avoid a ticket in places where detectors were illegal.
And in Ontario, Canada? One single company sold to the cops and people, in a war of escalation that left their pockets quite padded. Wikipedia says BEL-Tronics, Inc. of Ontario, Canada
Kind of the same game-plan (suspected) of antivirus companies.
Is that because the wireless hardware on the phone can't pick it up, or because nobody has attempted to program it?
Then again, it needs to be a laser detector today.
I'm really surprised 286-based machines were still $1600 in 1991. But it was a brand name and not a frankenclone assembled from the back of computer shopper.
But Radio Shack had a tube tester and gave me a free battery on my visit
What was better in 1991 than on my phone today: Caller ID
My Valentine One radar detector has an app. You still need the external hardware, but you can use it via the phone if you like. Partial credit?
Also, maps apps have speedtrap warnings.
Iphones don't have fm radios so add 13.88 to the bill
Most radio stations are simulcast online, so strictly speaking you can get the same content without an fm tuner
https://radio.garden
Except when camping in the woods, where AM radio still does reach.
But I guess with Starlink, eventually it will be everywhere.
Phones should include an AM/FM tuner. Then you can hear local stations, and if you're out of cell range or things go badly, receive broadcasts.
The problem is that without 3.5mm jack, there is no antenna for FM. Phones used the headphone cord as the antenna. I doubt it is possible to repurpose the USB-C wires as antenna. If it was, would require a custom USB-C chip.
I couldn't find FM/AM USB-C dongle. My guess is that nobody uses FM/AM or if they do, they get a standalone radio.
The phone wouldn’t be doing much in that case I guess… the dongle would have to bring along the headphone jack as well, so you could listen to it! I guess the phone would be the battery, and maybe a speaker I guess.
My biggest use for the FM radio on my old phone was sporting events which have the commentators broadcast locally with no delay.
Now I have to remember to bring a little pocket one or be sure the old phone is charged whenever I go to sporting events. Really kind of a pain. Luckily the kids also like to play games on the old phone so its a handy distraction machine on the train ride.
I find it distasteful whenever someone says iPhone instead of smartphone, where it is clear that iPhone is not the only solution. I don't like Apple, and I even less like cult followers.
* $1,599 for a computer
* $799 for a camera
* $149 for a speaker/woofer
Over 30 years ago and yet these are roughly the prices I’d expect today
It feels like speakers have gone up in price.
This is probably because their BOM is still highly dependent on physical enclosures, cones, and magnets, which can't be Moore's Law'd-away.
I can find some basic setups in the $300 range, but they're usually bookshelf or slim-floorstanding speakers where you're expected to add a subwoofer to fill out the bottom end, not a true full-range.
> All weather personal stereo
> AM/FM clock radio
> In-Ear Stereo Phones
> Microthin calculator
> Mobile CB
> Deluxe Portable CD Player
Maybe I missed the rollout for the iPhone that performs all these functions, but no iPhone has ever:
• Picked up AM/FM radio (even though throwaway Nokia mobiles could do so)
• Allowed you to talk to truckers on the CB band.
• Played CDs you already own.
iPhones no longer come with earbuds (so they can sell you overpriced wireless ones), and a wayward update to the Calculator app kept it from functioning like a traditional 4-function calculator ever again. (Delete button? Really?)
Considering this article is nearly 12 years old and there have been no improvements on the above I declare this list dubious at best.
Well if you want to be completely literal, then you’re right. It also isn’t literally a Tandy 1000.
But if you actually comprehended the article, the author said that you use your phone to perform all those functions. The iPhone can replace all of those functions you listed. It is water resistant and has a speaker. It does not have an AM/FM station but most broadcast radio stations also have a live stream that you can get in your phone. The iPhone came with earbuds when this article was written. It had a calculator app on day one, and it’s just fine. You don’t have literal CB but you can use a variety of apps to communicate with voice in real time. You can’t play the literal CDs but you can’t play the literal .wav files on the CDs.
> The iPhone can replace all of those functions you listed
> It does not have an AM/FM station
> You don’t have literal CB
> You can’t play the literal CDs
So not the same function, got it.
As for your last example, you might as well replace "iPhone" with "tape deck".
iPhones did replace tape decks. The mini hi-fi in my living room, my car stereo, my tape and CD walkman, all are now either bluetooth recievers for smartphones or play audio directly from the smartphone.
The function wasn't "playing tape" or "playing CD", it was playing music or audio books.
Wow, cool, but is it a good thing? It's a bummer that so much of computing has moved from content creation devices to content consumption devices. Desktop applications can be more advanced than mobile apps, there's just inherent limitations on the mobile input methods and OS. Though if you're playing games or browsing the web, touching and swiping works great.
Don't even get me started on the fact that only one tech giant allows you to run code on your mobile OS without their permission, and next year we're even losing that. Because the other tech giant normalized taking away the freedom.
The ecosystem had a lot of diversity. When there was a new need or opportunity, new hardware arrived from a fairly diverse set of manufacturers and distributors.
Some of those still exist in niches - music hardware, ham radio, specalised navigation hardware for boats and planes, and high-performance high-end professional cameras and such.
But consumer-grade products are now mostly software, and the software runs on a handful of platforms controlled by a handful of corporations who charge access tribute (taxes.)
The entire system is very locked-down and brittle, and gives those corporations the option to create individual and collective kill-switches for people and/or activities they don't like.
That would have sounded unlikely a couple of years ago, but it sounds a lot less unlikely now.
> It's a bummer that so much of computing has moved from content creation devices to content consumption devices.
I continue to find this assessment of phones and tablets impossible to relate to. The very-portable device with multiple cameras, microphones, various other sensors, maybe stylus support built-in, is in most cases in which I’m creating anything in my personal life vastly more useful than a laptop or desktop computer. This seems to also be what many people who create real things for work have decided. (I do computer-things with computers for pay, so it’s different for me there)
I could have been clearer, what I said wouldn't apply to cameras, I was only talking about things that could be done on a desktop. If a phone can capture audio/video in the field freeing people up from having to carry a separate camera, that is a good thing.
I was sort of on board until the Tandy 1000. It's disingenuous at best to assume that your phone can replace it because it 'does games and word processing'. A phone, no matter how much you like it or how much you can do with it, does not replace an actual personal computer. A phone is a locked down appliance running software written on personal computers. By design, you will never be able to truly explore the system or get it to do anything you can dream. You can do what the software designers / managers want you to do and that's it. (Obviously there are exceptions, but those exceptions are rapidly diminishing.)
These old PCs encouraged exploration, expansion, tinkering, and development. They were true personal devices that you could do whatever you wanted with. Phones are personal in that they know everything about you but they will never match the freedom and exploration of a personal computer.
I truly feel like we've lost something special with the move to smartphones and tablets. :(
> "These old PCs encouraged exploration, expansion, tinkering, and development."
Most users of that era did none of those things. They used apps or shareware they purchased, not much different from today. If anything, it was vastly harder at that time to get the tools to tinker. Compilers and assemblers were quite expensive products; users would be limited to Microsoft GW-BASIC and debug.com that came with MS-DOS or a copy of Borland Turbo Pascal if they were willing to pay extra to get it.
IIRC, even GW-BASIC allowed direct access to the hardware via peek/poke/inp/out. When you turned on the PC, it loaded the first 512 byte sector from floppy or hard disk into memory and transferred control to that. In theory, you could use the tools it came with to write a complete replacement for the operating system and install it so that after the BIOS loads that first sector, not a single machine instruction that you haven't written yourself runs.
I'm genuinely asking everyone here: How can I do this on a smartphone or tablet? Not just "root it", or install an "alternative OS" that is really just a tweaked Android, and "also you first have to buy this particular device it works on". Preferably without having to solder SMD components.
But from all I've read, I'm expecting the answer is "you can't". Which is too bad, since I have a couple of old devices from family laying around and would like to tinker with them. I'm not connecting them to any network as long as I don't have that level of control over what they do. Wouldn't do it with a new, "secure" device either -- the problem for me is what the built-in software does when working as intended by Goo666le + Shenzhen (I don't trust Apple either, and their devices seem even less hackable).
You can emulate the Tandy in a web browser, e.g. https://dosee.link/#emulator
So if you evaluate it by hardware, it's true that the phone isn't giving the same I/O capability. But the application software is there, there are far more apps for a phone and you can access the old ones in some degree too.
If you need an actually hackable PC equivalent, we have all kinds of boards and configurations, from microcontrollers to rasPi style computers through FPGA boards. Any of them are a tiny fraction of the cost of the old desktops.
This is how I talk myself into spending a lot on a phone.
The good old days when iPhones came with earphones and a charging block
To a lesser extent, the good old days when swiping up brought up the control panel
Which bit of kit was the government wiretap and tracking device? I guess the phone and the computer (like is still the case).
But the things I used to buy at Radio Shack before smartphones existed, like capacitors and solder, can no longer be found there, and phones don’t replace those.
> Mobile CB, $49.95. Ad says “You’ll never drive ‘alone’ again!” iPhone.
I mean sort of. CBs are still a thing that the phone doesn't quite replicate.
I would make the argument that the modern version of this is LORA/Meshtastic... Im sure at some point they will jam a few more radios into the phone just to have more features.
I like the comparison of Meshtastic being the replacement for CB, it fits pretty well since they are both decentralized and made to run without a lot of underlying infrastructure and both work well to communicate in emergency’s.
So my broad comment is, yes, your iPhone will replace all of these things, with some compromises. Its just like the things I see with with UI/UX design in my day job - I can make an app that does three unrelated things, but you lose something for each functionality you're adding in.
* All weather personal stereo, $11.88. I now use my iPhone with an Otter Box
Sort of, but not exactly, yes it does all of the things my portable radio does, but not as well - mostly audio fidelity.
* AM/FM clock radio, $13.88. iPhone.
Again, sort of, but not exactly, yes it does all of the things my clock radio does, but not as well - mostly audio fidelity.
* In-Ear Stereo Phones, $7.88. Came with iPhone.
This is a place with notable improvements from then.
* Microthin calculator, $4.88. Swipe up on iPhone.
This is a place with notable improvements from then.
* Tandy 1000 TL/3, $1599. I actually owned a Tandy 1000, and I used it for games and word processing. I now do most of both of those things on my phone.
If this was an iPad I would agree, but it's the same thing as the others - sort of but not exactly. It can do those things, but not as well.
* VHS Camcorder, $799. iPhone.
Again, yes if I squint at it - but it's the same thing as the others - sort of but not exactly. It can do those things, but not always as well without additional accessories.
* Mobile Cellular Telephone, $199. Obvs.
This is a place of clear improvement, todays cell phones are a world better in both audio quality and coverage.
* Mobile CB, $49.95. Ad says “You’ll never drive ‘alone’ again!” iPhone.
Yes, iPhone can do these things, but not as well as a dedicated device (no PTT button for a start)
* 20-Memory Speed-Dial phone, $29.95.
Yes, a clear win for replacement.
* Deluxe Portable CD Player, $159.95. 80 minutes of music, or 80 hours of music? iPhone.
Yes, a clear win for replacement.
* 10-Channel Desktop Scanner, $99.55. I still have a scanner, but I have a scanner app, too. iPhone.
Not much of an improvement over a dedicated device.
* Easiest-to-Use Phone Answerer, $49.95. iPhone voicemail.
Voicemail (which you could get in 1991), is a clear winner over an answering machine.
* Handheld Cassette Tape Recorder, $29.95. I use the Voice Memo app almost daily.
Also a clear improvement.
* BONUS REPLACEMENT: It’s not an item for sale, but at the bottom of the ad, you’re instructed to ‘check your phone book for the Radio Shack Store nearest you.’ Do you even know how to use a phone book?
The internet replaced the phonebook before ubiquitous mobile data, I do miss phonebooks however.
A phone playing music from its speaker doesn't sound amazing but neither did handheld AM/FM radios or clock radios. Especially since the station you wanted to listen to always seemed to be just slightly too far away and you'd get a little bit of static.
I have 4 clock radios at home, and 2 tabletop radios that are clearly derived from a clock radio - they sound decent, and have reasonably good audio quality.
I've been an avid FM radio listener most of my adult life (NPR mostly), while I can really no longer stand most of NPR programming, when I wanted to do whole house music, I did so with an small sound mixer fed into FM Modulator which in turn fed into coax and an small antenna.
> * 20-Memory Speed-Dial phone, $29.95.
> Yes, a clear win for replacement.
Not that clear unless augmented with wireless earbuds: I would much rather spend an hour talking on a traditionally-shaped phone handset (not quite the one in the picture) than on a mobile phone (even a pre-iPhone candybar one, though holding a glass slab to your cheek for prolonged periods of time is particularly unpleasant). Of course, hour-long personal telephone calls are not really a thing anymore for most people, but I don’t know in which direction the causation points there.
I presumed both included a speakerphone tbh.
1 hour phone calls for me are about as common as they always have been
About the personal stereo, Tidal gives me FLAC quality, and my wired Steelseries headphones provide much better audio quality than any stereo I had own last century.
However, I don't own an iPhone, I have a Xiaomi with an audio socket.
Everythings computer
(2014)
I'd argue this is important to add since iPhones no longer ship with earbuds (or so I'm told; I'm an Android guy myself).
No earbuds or 5W USB-A chargers in years. :(
The lack of earbuds is a welcome change because the included ones were almost always shit. Either sound quality wise, build quality wise, or simply just the lack of different silicon moulds for different ear shapes.
I do miss the power bricks though.
As an aside, you’d almost always want more than 5w to charge modern handsets in any reasonable time.
Definitely, I agree. My comment was a bit tongue-in-cheek, I don't need new earbuds or chargers these days. 1 Amp x 5 Volts = 5 Watts isn't enough for modern phones these days, we need USB-C adapters with various outputs like 22.5W, etc.
Personally I'm OK with Apple dropping the extras. They were nice but now I have a box of old Apple chargers and stuff that I don't need, and I think that is what they were trying to limit.
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So we pay roughly 3 times more for the same functionality... Is the convince worth that much?? By this logic in 2090 people would have to pay most of their salaries for that "one device".... Dystopian....
> So we pay roughly 3 times more for the same functionality
How do you figure that it's 3 times more? The article says those things add up to $5100 updated for inflation (written in 2014, so more today). A smart phone then was a lot less than $5100.
For a budget device, we pay, what, 2%? Not 2% less, just 2%.