&quot;Smartphones are unapologetically devices for consumption.&quot;<p>The vast majority of social media posts being written, photos and videos being taken and edited, and music being recorded and performed with these devices show this is wrong. Anyway, how did most people use their desktop and laptop computers 10-15 years ago at the peak of popularity of those devices?<p>&quot;They are not real network clients.&quot;<p>This isn&#x27;t even actually his complaint. His complaint is that smartphones have too-limited battery life. The smartphone battery life we have today would have been considered a miracle 10 years ago.<p>&quot;They have led to massive centralization.&quot;<p>True enough. Unfortunately, that&#x27;s how the money which funds the Internet gets made. That said, there&#x27;s nothing stopping the author from using his smartphone in a distributed manner and helping to build the infrastructure to support the same.<p>&quot;There are no secure smartphones.&quot;<p>There are no secure networked computers, period.<p>&quot;They have ruined web design.&quot;<p>I&#x27;m not sure web design in general has ever been all that great. The people who practice the art are severely restricted between the demands of their employers and the limitations of the platform. Smartphones have driven the latest changes in fashion, sure. Fashion will change, and the older you get, the less you&#x27;ll care for it.<p>&quot;capabilities are all too often restricted by device manufacturers or carriers.&quot;<p>It&#x27;s true. But I don&#x27;t think the smartphone is the problem. Microsoft and Intel started talking up the locked-down hardware that only runs trusted code approach 15 years ago or more. Smartphones came along soon thereafter, and are designed along the same lines. It&#x27;s frustrating, but for a certain class of device, one that you want to Just Work for handling the basics of human communication, I think it&#x27;s a reasonable tradeoff.<p>There&#x27;s still plenty of hardware that lets you do anything you want with it. It&#x27;s critical that such devices remain available, but with the rise of DIY style hardware--Raspberry Pi and Arduino et alia--I&#x27;m very hopeful. The gap between these solutions and high-priced high-performance components will only narrow over the next decade.<p>Ultimately, though, unless you&#x27;re manufacturing the hardware entirely by yourself, you have to trust someone. You don&#x27;t want to trust Apple. But we have to trust the companies who make our wifi chips, our graphics chips, our CPUs, our USB chips. Even our cables soon may be sophisticated enough that they might include the hardware necessary to stream what we&#x27;re displaying on our monitors directly to the NSA <i>and</i> the MPAA.<p>Good luck!