Before the iPhone, we thought we already had everything we needed.
Audio player, cell phone and camera were already implemented by “dumbphone” Nokias. I think adding mobile internet was a mistake. I use it all the time but it doesn’t add much to my life. It doesn’t make me more productive but it adds another consumption device.
Then one day I was at the airport waiting in a long check-in line. I got out my Motorola Droid, dug though my email, checked in to the flight, and got out of the line.
After that I was convinced of the value of it, and I’m reminded every time I’m standing on the street, waiting for an Uber rather than looking around for a cab.
Mobile internet was not a mistake, we just started to use it wrongly. It's your choice to not use it to browse internet aimlessly. It's your choice to make yourself available all the time. You can definitely use it how I did for more than a decade before everybody realized what being always online means. It definitely improved my productivity before that, but it's true that the added benefit is about flat in the past decade.
I 100% agree that if I was doing those things, they would be wrong for me so I avoid doing them.
I don't like people who say "I don't like when I do this thing, so, this thing should not be available for people to do!"
I equally don't like people who say "I don't like when other people do this thing, so, this thing should not be available for people to do!"
I know that social media is designed to be addictive. This is why I'm mostly absent from it for most of my life.
If you use and enjoy social media and it brings joy to your life, great, have fun. It wasn't doing that for me (or more directly, I realized very early on it was going down a bad path) so I cut it out.
If you're lamenting social media and bothered by how much time you spend on it, or how it negatively impacts your life, or whatever: I am definitely going to advocate to you that you do simply have the option to turn it off. Life will move on!
You can also have a smart phone and not feel the need to immediately respond to every text message, nor, click every notification. You can even choose to not pick up phone calls if you want.
In the past decade while the reality of mobile connectivity hasn't changed much, the quality and ubiquity of it has improved dramatically.
10 years ago I would have agreed that in most places it was possible to get some form of internet connectivity, today, it's deeply unusual to travel anywhere in the USA and not get >100Mbit on LTE with "good enough" latency.
Of course, most people goes to places with coverage, but for example if you travel between population centers (cities, towns, etc), then it's quite frequent that you don't have internet, or just terrible one. Especially if you're on a train which insulates somewhat, and of course speed is also a degrading factor.
There's a huge difference between an audio player and having spotify (or apple music, or whatever you prefer) where you can play effectively any song you want at effectively any time.
There's a huge difference between having a camera and something which can record 4k video or take photos which surpass any digital camera we had in the early 2000s and even today surpasses virtually any camera in the price range of the whole phone. You would need something like a Leica fixed lens camera or a mirrorless DSLR with multiple lenses at several times the cost of a smartphone to equal the photo and video capabilities. This also ignores the fact that I can snap these amazing pics or videos and send them to a friend instantly.