It's a deeply flawed comparison, because many of the things we do with a phone now wasn't something we'd do at all with the computers we grew up with. We didn't pay at the grocery store with a computer, we didn't buy metro tickets, we didn't use it to navigate (well, there was a short period of time where we might print out maps, but anyway..)

When I grew up, I feel like our use of home computers fell into two categories:

1. Some of us kids used them to play games. Though many more would have a Nintendo/Sega for that, and I feel like the iPhone/iPad is a continuation of that. The "it just works" experience where you have limited control over the device.

2. Some parents would use it for work/spreadsheets/documents ... and that's still where most people use a "real" computer today. So nothing has really changed there.

There is now a lot more work where you do the work on services running on a server or in the cloud. But that's back to the original point: that's in many cases just not something we could do with old home computers. Like, my doctor can now approve my request for a prescription from anywhere in the world. That just wasn't possible before, and arguably isn't possible without a server/cloud-based infrastructure.

Phones/tablets as an interface to these services is arguably a continuation of like those old dumb terminals to e.g. AS/400 machines and such.

> It's true even in tech; half a year ago I switched my phone to a Galaxy Z Fold7, and I haven't used my personal laptop since then, not once.

I do agree, I am in a similar situation.