Facebook is the new crapware:The scandal-beset social media behemoth has inked an unknown number of agreements with Android smartphone makers, mobile carriers and OSes around the world to not only pre-load Facebook's eponymous app on hardware but render the software undeleteable; a permanent feature of your device, whether you like how the company's app can track your every move and digital action or not.
It's hard to get too worked up about this, though, since the entire Android concept is: "The world's largest advertising company has created a rootkit, and you are willingly carrying it around with you."
It's already only barely possible to use Android without being permanently logged into Google. It's only "possible" in the homebrew sense of, "it's possible to run AmigaDOS on a MacBook... I guess... If that's the hobby you choose to devote yourself to..."
So now the world's largest advertising company's rootkit also bundles a second rootkit from the world's second largest advertising company.
"Nice."
Apple is also a vile company, but they are not an advertising company per se, so advantage Apple, for now. However, "3.5mm headphone jack or GTFO" is a hill that I will die on, so about six months ago I purchased what I assume will be my last iPhone. (And I bought a spare.) The price has gone up a bit now, but when I bought it, you could still get a new, non-refurb 64GB unlocked iPhone SE for about $130 on eBay.
Now discontinued, this is the last good phone that Apple has made.
- It is iPhone 7 hardware crammed into an iPhone 5 case. The iPhone 5 form factor is, in my humble but correct opinion, the correct size for a phone. You can operate it with one hand. It is not an iPad Mini pretending to be a phone.
- It has a headphone jack.
- But, sadly, it has a 3-year-old camera. So that's not ideal.
Which brings me to my question about lenses. I'd like to have a small, removable optical zoom lens for this thing, since the digital zoom is pretty crappy. I think even 2× would be helpful, though 3× would be better. These things seem to come in 3 varieties:
- The kind with the two inch butterfly clip. It's fiddly to get them centered properly, and if you don't, you get weird vignettes. But the real problem is that none of these clip-on lenses work at all if your phone is in a case.
- The kind where you glue a steel ring to your phone, and the lens attaches with a magnet. I tried one of these, and carved a hole through my phone case to accommodate it. It's almost ok, except that the magnet isn't strong enough so the thing falls off if you breathe on it funny. It's certainly not strong enough to stay attached if I have put my phone in my pocket, which means that "pull out my phone and quickly snap a picture, mid-show" is now an involved process that requires two hands.
- The cases with the lenses permanently attached, which means you have 5 lenses you don't need, and your case is permanently twice as thick as it needs to be most of the time.
So what I would like is: a thin-ish iPhone 5 / SE case that is threaded to accept the kind of lenses that screw into those butterfly clips. Does that exist? (If you answer "I don't know but here's one for the iPhone X", please shoot yourself thx.)
And is there standardization on these lenses? Are they all threaded the same, or does every manufacturer do it differently?