I like Chrome Remote Desktop for ease of use and for the ability to get to all of my machines no matter where I am. Great when using Chromebooks, too.

ESP32 or Raspberry Pico, if you want something easy to use, reasonably feature full, easy to interface, inexpensive, and medium form factor.

ATTiny, if you are strapped for physical space and don't have anything super complicated to interface with. Also, really inexpensive. I like it for basic electronics projects where even a Pico would be overkill.

On the other extreme, if you need more complex software, then a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 is a great option. Fortunately, the supply situation for Raspberry Pi has been improving a bit, at last. Sometimes, it's nice to be able to use all sorts of high-level software libraries, and then you hit a limit with the ESP32s and Picos of this world.

You can also mix and match. A PiZero talking to a Pico is a great combo. A ESP32 and an ATTiny can also sometimes turn out to be the more pragmatic choice.

Oh, and if you need even more oomph, then I really like the Raspberry CM4. Lots of nice carrier boards to choose from. But that's really not a microcontroller, so might not fit OP's question.

There are plenty of other boards out there. But they frequently have poor support, or are released only for the vendor to immediately abandon them. Maybe fine for one-off projects, but I generally prefer to stick with designs that last for a couple of years. Much easier to support, if I need to revisit my project down the line.

I have previously had to wait three or four days for the OTA to show up on T-Mobile, when it was already available for download from the site.

Since the image has been released, you can just sideload it. It's not very difficult.

Otherwise, you'll have to wait. It's not unusual for it to take a couple of days between images showing up and the OTA getting pushed.

It's not just shareholders that have to be concerned, it's end-users too.

I have lived both in the US and in the EU and move back and forth every so often. It's surreal to see how far the EU lags behind in technology and userfriendly services. The internet feels completely different from the US -- and not in a good way.

Lot's of things that can be done very easily from my computer while in the US are completely impossible or at least extremely limited when living in Europe. Companies are very afraid of regulatory restrictions (rightly or mistakenly) and simply don't offer the same online products. It feels very backwards. In fact, even Google search is very different and a lot less useful while in Europe. Subjectively, European web services feel like what the internet was like in the US in the early 2000's. That's 20 years behind.

I fully understand why the EU wants to regulate online behavior, but the politicians making these decisions don't have a good understanding of how technology works; and in the interest of making populist policy choices, they regularly throw out the baby with the bath water.

Just to give an example: I lived in Europe during the lockdowns, and my kids weren't allowed to send their teachers e-mail, because the school was afraid that doing so would violate my kids' rights. They couldn't articulate exactly what their worry was, but there was a lot of fear mongering about EU regulations and punative penalties that they'd expose themselves to. The upshot was that once a week, written letters on paper (!) would be exchanged with the teachers. This completely brought all learning to a standstill.

On the other hand, our US school made sure that all teachers were availably by Zoom conference at any time that the kids needed to talk to them. When we told the European school, they said that this was horrible and would certainly never be allowed in any civilized country...

it was weird to take photos on a smartphone once upon a time.

Really?! I don't recall that. If you wanted good photos, you had a (D)SLR and a couple of lenses. It was perfectly socially acceptable to do that; it just took considerable dedication thanks to the bulkiness of the equipment.

If you wanted basic photos and mobility was more important, you used a point-and-shoot. Everybody owned at least one, and many people carried them around with them at (most) times. And if you were an early-adopter but didn't mind the lower quality, you used your phone to take photos.

Nobody really cared much when you did that, as the form factor of the phone looked very similar to a point-and-shoot. If anything, they rolled their eyes thinking that you couldn't afford a second device and settled for the cheap-looking blurry pictures. Early cameras in phones were honestly pretty pathetic.