I'm talking about the IBM Simon from 1994(!), which apparently ran Datalight ROM-DOS on a NEC V20 CPU.

We all want to hear more about this.

It's incredible. You think of the evolution of evolution of smartphones from dumb ones through to clunky things with keyboards and weird limited, tiny apps, and so on and so forth.

No, the first smartphone was a slab (with concessions to the tech of the day with worse speakers and microphones and the need for an antenna) with featured a large touchscreen, with a grid-of-icons home screen, and hardware volume up/down buttons on the side and a lock slider.

Look up the IBM Simon. Loads of excellent links, consider yourself nerd sniped. The iPhone ripped it off 13 years later with state of the art (actually novel in some ways) 2007 era manufacturing tech rather than 1994 era tech, except the first release of the iPhone couldn't really be considered a smartphone until Cydia introduced their app store, since it didn't really have loadable apps, unlike the Simon.

"From 2021 until 2024, the co-conspirators allegedly impersonated more than 80 U.S. individuals"

It's called identity theft. Are you new?

I've had my identity stolen, the problem is that courts don't punish corruption. In fact, they enable it.

Someone bought a car using my identity. Their proof of identity was my social written on a check cashing card. They had my same name, all three names. But the DOB didn't match so the person who sold them the car was in on the scam. Then a court (in Nevada City, CA) awarded a judgement against me based on my social being written in pen on a check cashing card. This does not meet any reasonable standard for SSN verification, but they got the judgement anyway.

That courthouse should be sold and the funds distributed between the court's victims.

The identities of people who mod posts should be public. That's the single most broken by design thing about the Slashdot moderation system.

That wouldn't make sense if everyone had modpoints and comment scores could be higher, but they don't and they can't.

This isn't a community, and this is a big part of why.

Who's "we", the USA? Or do you imagine that all nations which aren't China are on the same page when it comes to... anything?

The only thing they're good at is breaking the law.

Sending them "there" is just as good, Starship is already adequate to get the real job done.

The senate lunch system was designed as a jobs and wealth redistribution scheme first and a space craft development project second.

Most men still have a PC simply for gaming

[citation needed]

Women don't give a shit about gaming.

[citation needed]

My wife has a nice laptop that she barely touches.

Cool story bro. My wife has a nice laptop running Linux which she uses for almost everything, and our shared desktop for anything that needs real grunt.

The smartphone was the perfect product for females.

There's nothing wrong with referring to women as females it's just you sound like a Ferengi when you do it.

Um did you forget Microsoft Office exists?

Also Azure which is in number 2 position a bit behind AWS, but not that far.

Funny thing is Microsoft runs a lot of Linux these days.

The idiots tried to turn a workstation OS into a hybrid mobile/workstation OS instead.

As opposed to Apple who turned Unix(tm) into a mobile OS and er Android which turned Linux (basically a unix clone) into a mobile OS.

Still better than the first smartphone which ran an MS-DOS clone.

I see, but you're not very observant, are you?

If you have to explain to someone why their head is meant to be exploding then their head isn't exploding.

For that matter, you can already get WiFi 7 equipment... you can get m.2 modules for 20 or 30 bucks, even with master mode. I spent under $30 for a complete MT7925 kit, 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax/be 2T2R 2.4/5G/6GHz. It's only a 160 MHz chip but it was cheap and has pretty snazzy bluetooth as well. Anyway, oh well, at least it does all those other things. Anyway, can't vendors "solve" this (except for the customers being pissed off part) with firmware which prevents selecting 6 GHz? That seems like a pretty simple patch.

At the time I had no credit due to being a victim of identity theft.

Now my credit is fixed but I just like not having a contract, and it's $35/mo. I only get I think about a dozen GB of internet, but that is fine for my purposes since I don't stream video.

I realize I wrote that wrong, but what I meant to say, it's not slower than the old M chip. That is, it's not slower than all of the M chips. I realize that's a very different thing than what I wrote, my bad.

But it's also true that it's within the range of the M chips, and it's intended to be low cost and low power, and if you have low expectations then it should be plenty of machine. For your average web surfer, it'll be fine. I wouldn't buy one, even at their most Open, Apple was irritating at best to deal with. But to me the tradeoff is reminiscent of my AMD laptop, which has only a couple of cores and a few GPU cores (literally) and does all the things I expected it to do while using very little power. It was $300 in a retail box a couple of years ago. This is the Apple-priced version of that, which is another reason I wouldn't buy one.