Why I don't like smartphones
I don&#x27;t really see how some of his points support his position.<p>e.g. I don&#x27;t own a smartphone, because it&#x27;s a consumption device rather than both consumption and production, is just silly. So is a photoalbum, so is a book, so is a TV, so is a music player. A smartphone is all in one and it&#x27;s incredibly useful. Beyond that, it is in ways a production device. It&#x27;s a messaging device, a photo and video taking device, it&#x27;s great for email, I record audio for my college classes on it etc. Sure you can hardly build software or write books on a smartphone in a practical way, but that&#x27;s throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Further, smartphones are increasingly becoming production devices, too. They&#x27;re becoming bigger, more powerful, and some can now be plugged in to monitors and bluetooth keyboards and create a reasonable windows production environment, others have interesting note-taking capabilities.<p>Web design is another one... Bad web designers have ruined web design, just like they were ruining web design before smartphones. Further it doesn&#x27;t seem like a reason not to use a smartphone, either.<p>I&#x27;m in total agreement with him on centralisation... it&#x27;s a slippery slope, I think. For example I&#x27;m still playing games from 15 years ago, because I actually own the software. But many of today&#x27;s games, even though they have no multiplayer component, would not run if in 15 years their servers shut down... because there&#x27;s calculation or storage being done in the cloud that is essential to the game running. We don&#x27;t physically own copies of our software anymore, but rather we own, in a way, a sort of thin client and some login details that we have to hope will last as long as we&#x27;d like to use them.<p>This was always a problem, back in the day, too... but at least the software was available. Take any popular MMO, if the servers shut down, people have copies and can run their own servers. In future, this may not be possible anymore. Anyway games are just an example, but it&#x27;s a trend that&#x27;s a bit worrying. Although, it&#x27;s not specific to or exclusively because of smartphones, it&#x27;s a larger trend.