Can you provide a few examples please? I'm genuinely curious what you think phones suck at.
They're a mediocre phone and a horrid computer. They probably do ok as a GPS - at 10X the price. I have 3 dedicated GPSes, that I probably paid a total of $400 for. One of them is well over 10 years old, I've never had to replace them as yet - vs the "usual" 2-3 year lifespan of the smartphone. I wouldn't want to do anything on the 'net with one, including email. Too small, too crippled, brain dead OS, no keyboard, no precision pointing device, and no screen real estate. I don't understand why people use them in their cars so much - rather than putting their music on a "Geek Stick" and plugging it in - or using onboard storage, they stream music via a paid subscription service via an expensive data plan with an overpriced smartphone. I'll be the first to admit that they can take good pictures. Bad form factor, not as versatile as my DSLRs, but most of the time they get the job done - when the idiot using the thing remembers to turn it sideways rather than shooting in portrait mode whether or not it should be. Don't get me started on vertical videos...
I certainly could go on about the evils of the things, but that's not your question, and that aspect has only come to the fore (for me) fairly recently. When Jobs introduced the device in 2007, I examined the concept like I do all new tech. What it looked like to me was that the failed Newton PDA had been grafted onto a cell phone. Not necessarily a bad idea, if one wants/needs a PDA. However, I skipped the whole PDA craze as I didn't need one, although I thought they had their place. But at the price that the iPhone commanded, it was a complete non-starter with me. I didn't need it and I was certainly not paying the price demanded.
In short, I didn't see the point of the thing then, and I don't now. I expect to get at least 10 years out of a desktop computer. I upgraded a 13 year old Mac Mini last January at the cost of around $1K. I could have gotten more life from the Mac, but my computing requirements had changed, and I needed something with more horsepower. With the help of one of my dance instructor's husband, I pieced a very nice Linux box together - I was glad for his help as I retired from IT 8+ years ago, and wasn't up to date on the latest and greatest. Will it be the last one I ever buy? Probably not, but I'll probably only need one more after this one as I figure I have about 21 years left to me this time around. But for the computational tasks I do, its fabulous - and certainly beats a smartphone hands down.
Another aspect of smartphones is the fact that they are rightly called a consumption device. I do very little "consumption" - I'm on this forum, watch a few YouToob videos, am on several firearms forums, and do a lot of research on the open web about subjects (many!) that interest me. That's the extent of my "consumption". Otherwise I'm creating - videos, music cuts, a bit of electronic CAD, I like to keep my hand in programming - or "coding" as the youngsters seem to call it now. A bit of light graphic design, and a whole lot of photography. Why would I want to use a smartphone for ANY of that? Oh, and webpage creation/maintenance, and starting to get into mech-CAD a bit as I have a 3D printer. I had 3 large screens on the old Mac, with the new Linux box I added a 4th that is even larger, then I went the other way and got a tiny - more or less smartphone sized - screen that I keep system statuses running on.
Bottom line. I don't see much that a smartphone can do that something else can't do better - usually FAR better, and cheaper.
This just popped up:
We’ve been down this road before to no avail.
I’ll make it simple.
I’ll put my $299 iphone that costs $35/mo for unlimited everything on the table.
You put all your wonderful ‘dedicated devices’ on the table that, in aggregate, can perform
all the functions the iphone can perform in its sleep, list their purchase prices and their monthly usage charges, and if you, as repeatedly claimed over the years, can do so for less than what I’ve paid above, I’ll eat my iphone on a live Zoom call that everyone on the forum is invited to watch.
If you can't, well, I hope you have a big appetite, & dental insurance
I'll make it simple: I'm not paying $35/mo, and my dedicated devices reach past 10 years old. I'm not saddled with a crippled, brain dead device that spies on me. How much are you paying to stream music? Or are you one of the few that's actually smarter than that - I hope so. Most of the functions of the smartphone are pointless to me anyway. Read the above - the full extent of my dedicated devices is there. Yea, they cost more than you paid for your PHOOOOOONNE, but HOW MANY TIMES HAVE YOU HAD TO BUY YET ANOTHER? Never mind the sub-optimal experience of them. The amount you're paying just to feed that thing every month will replace a couple or three of my devices each year (not that I've needed to) - that have no subscriptions attached to them.
"Perform in its sleep?" Give me a break. Let's see YOU do half the stuff I do on my COMPUTER with that broken toy. Let's see you do a PWB layout on the thing - I'll even make it simple for you and keep it at only 4 layers, and won't even suggest blind or buried vias. Let's see - SolidWorks doesn't run on one either - I wonder why? Let's do some movie editing and re-encoding - or graphic design for that matter. You probably can do some clumsy audio editing with it, although why anyone would want to is beyond me. You haven't got the horsepower, you haven't got the software, you haven't got the operating system, and you certainly don't have the the screen or other UI - the UX sucks by the thing's very nature, its hard to get around physics.
I've been using, building (at the chip level), designing, and programming computers and computational hardware since long before most people had ever seen one or knew what one was. I've forgotten more about computers than most will ever know - but I do know that a PHOOOOOONNE "ain't it!".
