Species that are actually ready to evolve progress by reverse engineering the monolith and either fixing it, if warranted, or applying its design insights to a broad spectrum of problems across their environment.
Fully functional monoliths are only required if you need your technology indistinguishable from divine intervention.
Oh my goodness, thank you for posting that. I knew I had read something a long time ago about some sort of āThings are against meā disorder, and then couldnāt track it down. Probably because the servers were hiding it from me.
Hehe. Iāve only done that once, with my first mobile, a Trium Mars which was so terrible it constantly let me down.
I was Lost In Hereford (cue film) and just got off the train at night, couldnāt phone the hotel number or find any info on the extremely limited WAP browser if it worked. So in the park (actually not very far from the hotel I later found) I just propelled it into the ground at high speed. It exploded into a surprising amount of bitsā¦which I kept and put back togetherā¦unlike modern phones with expensive glass, this just boinged. Never worked properly though. Very satisfyingā¦
http://www.otterbox.com/en-us/defender-series
Saved my bacon many a time over the past 5 years.
Coryās phone appears to be bent rather than dropped, so this isnāt addressed at him specifically, but:
Put a damn case on your cellphone. No excuses! You can pay $50 for a good one, or (sometimes) less than $10 for a good-enough one. Iāve dropped my phone several feet onto concrete at least a dozen times, and it is pristine because of the case.
I bought my first smartphone when the flip-phone I had at the time was slowly dying. Among other things, it would periodically emit a loud beep whenever it decided its battery was low, which it did frequently.
The next day I was showing off the new phone to a couple of visiting friends when the old phone bleeped stridently. I promptly winged it into a wall as hard as I could. They were somewhat alarmed, especially the one who was just walking into the room and got grazed by shrapnel. 
Hereās what I donāt get.
Why would you pay twice the price for beauty and then put it in an ugly case? If youāre going for ugly, just buy a $200 phone that does everything the $700 phone does except being beautiful. And then you donāt need the $50 case because if you break it you donāt really care,
If the phone is expensive enough, you can call the dents and scratches āpatinaā.
Iād say itās lower, as youāre going to be a lot more careful with something that costs $700 to replace.
If having an allegedly sexier phone is worth $500 to you, then I get to laugh at you when it breaks. So everything works out!
On the other hand you have correspondingly higher stress and worries. Cheaper thing generates less of it with correspondingly higher quality of life.
I would be all sorts of interested to see some proper data; but the question of whether or not the cheap seats are a false economy(purely financially for the end user or overall/ecologically, etc.) immediately obvious.
Some goods are subject to the āVimes theory of economic unfairnessā: the lousy ones are worse and break faster, leading to higher costs and worse experience. However, it isnāt clear that smartphones are one of them. Not impossible; but not obvious: in particular, they tend to have few/no moving parts, which are a common place where the cheap and the good get brutally separated, they employ components from a fairly aggressively competitive and homogenized set of OEMs, and the fashion has moved far enough in the direction of optimizing for thin-and-solid-feeling that sometimes āworse is betterā in terms of durability(aluminum and toughened glass on extremely tight tolerances feel like a machined chunk of futureonium; but have nowhere to flex when stressed. Polycarbonate or polycarbonate/ABS on relatively sloppy tolerances feel kind of janky; but are good at the old Nokia trick of āsplit into three parts, each undamaged and ready to pop back together.ā
On the software side, the situation is similarly non-obvious: some cheap shit devices are utterly doomed by their apathetic and GPL scorning 3rd tier OEM to a future without first or third party updates. At the same time, many āflagshipā level devices with ROMs ready to go donāt get them because Verizonās boot loader cops say so.
Again, Iād love to have some harder data to work with; but it seems to me that cellphones are not a good where buying cheaper is penny-wise-pound-foolish. Some cheap gear is definitely disposable; practically broken from the factory; but some cheapie are quite durable and some respectable-brand-flagships are doomed by design.
Alas, ARM SoCs are still a bit of mess, so there is not enough interoperability/modularity to declare the advent of the āKalashnikov of cellphonesā; but hopefully that time is not too far off.
Most of the cheap Chinese phones are going for the āthin and solid feelingā vibe as well. For example, the sub-$200 (or less) Ulefone Be Touch 2ā¦ Featuring Gorilla Glass and a mostly-stock version of Android (lots of ROM ports from other devices running the same processor, as well):
My phone is quad core, 1GB ram, has a graphics co processor and cost about Ā£170. Itās also waterproof and you can bounce it off a wall. Fuck expensive phones.
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