I said it last month, but will say it again:
Size matters. Desktop PCs are easy to make modular (unless you want an iMac). Laptops are harder, and besides removable batteries, only a few had any modular components (like a DVD drive swappable for an extra battery). Phones are much more space-constrained. Every millimeter counts, and modularity takes up quite a bit of space at that scale, because each part needs to be enclosed, securely attach to the others, etc.
In short, a modular phone is possible, but the trade-offs will be severe, and you'll be able to pick one or two things (e.g. speed, battery life, extra features, small size, etc.) but not all at the same time. And the prices won't be good, because manufacturer(s) will lose economies of scale: it'll be hard to compete with Apple and Samsung making millions and tens of millions of identical units.
"I bought a cheap-ass phone and it sucks"
It's worse than that. It's more: "I bought a cheap-ass phone and it sucks and thus the free market has failed."
I'll admit micropayments don't remove the problem of click-bait, which already exists. And there could be fraud, e.g. claiming something is 1 cent to read, but charging $1. But I think a lot of that can be solved be reputation and common sense, i.e. you might not want to click on that
This is because most or all website revenue comes from advertising. CBS has ads, but Netflix doesn't. Books don't, and newspapers and magazines have a limited amount, because part of their revenue comes from selling their publications to consumers. (Without ads, a copy of something like National Geographic or Playboy would cost $20 or more.)
The problem is that we don't have a good way of buying small amounts of content online. You can subscribe to some sites by the month or year, or perhaps buy limited access via PayPal, but the cost tends to be $ or $$ or $$$, and nobody wants to subscribe to CNN or YouTube. They want to see that video now, with no registration and commitment. The answer is the great lost Internet opportunity of 15 years ago: micropayments. If there was an easy and universal system for paying (say) a few cents to watch a video, why not? It'd be trivial for viewers, but could add up to real money for sites.
If I were a huge content provider, I'd figure out a way to make it happen, perhaps through ISPs. Subsidize them to give every user maybe $10/month credit. Offer content providers a great deal to install a one-click "Read/Watch Now for 1 cent" buttons. Get people used to paying tiny amounts of money to view content. If something like this could get going, it'd benefit content providers of all sizes. E.g. a comedian who writes one joke a day could make a living with 10,000 readers paying 1 cent per day ($100/day = $36,500/year).
The question going through my mind, is what does this mean for Lenovo? Lenovo acquired IBM's Personal Computing Division in 2004, and announced at the beginning of 2014 that they had reached an agreement to acquire IBM's x86 server business. The fact that IBM chose not to partner with Lenovo for developing all these apps and services for Lenovo's Windows and Android tablets and smartphones is downright bizarre.
On the contrary. Selling things to someone is different from marrying them. And who would IBM rather have a relationship with? An unstable trio (a Chinese maker of undistinguished hardware plus two rival OSes), or the one most profitable and popular maker of phones and tablets and the OS that runs on them? How many of IBM's customers and even employees prefer Lenovo Windows and Android tablets and smartphones to iPhones and iPads?
So, to be clear, if Obama got on TV and announced that no taxes would need to be paid on corporate or personal income from renewable energy sales, you would NOT consider that a form of subsidy? And he would get no resistance from the right, because it would just be "taking less of someone's money"?
No, that would be a subsidy, if it wasn't applied to all businesses equally. My point was that some people claim a tax cut, usually in the form of a rate cut, is "the same thing as spending." E.g., if a tax cut is expected to reduce revenues by $100 million, they will say it's the same as the government spending $100 million. It's not, for various reasons too off-topic to go into.
Today on
You'd have a mod point if I had one right now. You could have added "spending," because I've seen people argue that tax cuts (i.e. taking less of someone's money) is the same thing as more government spending.
"Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love." -- Albert Einstein