How do you get information or deal with payments? It's the smartphone. Many people in developing countries benefit immensely from this change. Or refugees or travelers. And on software services side, we have similar improvements - the smartphone would be useless without the services it's used with. How many hours of queuing have we eliminated since now you can do those things online? In my country almost nothing requires physical presence anymore. And also, millions of people can spend their time on something more productive than sitting behind a counter, serving customers for trivial things.
Although, ironically, these hacker news discussions could have content wise been had in the usenet already in the eighties. No similar upvoting / downvoting crowd moderation though, which did kill it as a discussion platform once the masses got access.
What other technologies look completely different? People laughed at wind and solar power. They were completely unviable as power sources.
Cars used leaded gasoline. Diesels were rolling smoke stacks. Air quality in cities was terrible. Now we have electric buses.
On the other hand, there have been regressions. Nuclear power was being built at a fast pace in the late seventies and early eighties. It's way slower now.
