alt Hacker NewsLet’s take apart your phone
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> Petrol stores 50 times more energy by weight, but it needs to be exploded. A doughnut stores around 15 times, but it needs to be digested.
You left out a very important fact: Combustion requires external oxygen, which is not counted in the denominator when energy-by-mass is typically considered.
The most intricate machine I've ever held was an inertial guidance system, back when they were hugely complex. My phone isn't even close.
I came here hoping to hear stories of the more intricate machines people have held.
I held a baby. Does that beat a phone?
Author here, thanks for sharing.
The idea is that the smartphone is an incredible entry point to the history of technology for a general audience. A huge range of human needs were met by increasingly sophisticated tools over millennia, then collapsed into a single device over the last 30 years.
I'm sure there are plenty of mistakes, I'd be grateful if you'd let me know any you spot.
What an odd website. It explains everything in incredibly childish terms ("The display you’re reading this on is an absurd grid of exactly [wrong number] tiny, multicoloured light bulbs, known as pixels."), has lots of needless word-salad LLMisms ("Electricity made light effortless. The torch in your phone made darkness optional."), and all in all, feels like a wasted concept because it doesn't really say anything that isn't patently obvious: a phone has a screen and a camera and a CPU... okay? Not exactly mind-blowing.
It doesn't really even do anything to support its thesis that it's the "most intricate machine you've ever held". I don't know, I'm holding a Thinkpad laptop right now and I'm pretty sure it's a superset of what's inside a phone.