The problem isn't just plastic, it's the long supply chains. Let's take juice bottles, you stop using plastic, what do you use? Single use glass isn't good either, it takes a lot of energy to recycle it, way more than plastic (not that we are actually able to recycle plastic), metal cans are probably a bit better but they also have their energy costs. Reusable glass is the best, but it still has to be moved by heavy truck back and forth from the bottling plant.
Oh, was this because of limited processing power / slow secondary storage read speeds?
All of that and more. They didn't have mass memory, so you had a maximum number of contacts, a maximum number of SMS, a maximum number of ringtones.. but you couldn't delete ringtones to make room for SMSses or such. They were a completely different tech.
NO WAY.... Oof that must've been so annoying, no? Ur phone being a waking advertisement to everyone around you?
They loved it. Also it couldn't share media (messaging apps didn't exist yet and it didn't support MMS) and was GSM only, so to actually do anything smart it had to be connected to WiFi.
Old dumb phones could not play arbitrary audio... Well, aside from phone calls of course. Ringtones were a series of... Tones! Kinda like a midi file, ever heard of that?
Extra fun fact, the original iPhone only had THE iphone ringtone, and you could not change it.
The problem isn't just plastic, it's the long supply chains. Let's take juice bottles, you stop using plastic, what do you use? Single use glass isn't good either, it takes a lot of energy to recycle it, way more than plastic (not that we are actually able to recycle plastic), metal cans are probably a bit better but they also have their energy costs. Reusable glass is the best, but it still has to be moved by heavy truck back and forth from the bottling plant.
We need to start rethinking distribution.