Mh, this sparked an interesting thought.
For my phone, I'm happy, because it replaced about 6 things without losing much quality. I could get myself a better camera (my parents in fact have one). I in fact have a more compact and repairable MP3 player that runs off SD cards and batteries and it still works wonderfully. With the death of the 3.5mm audio port that thing can actually drive the good headphones better than my phone, heh. But that's just more stuff to lug around.
On the other hand, for my hobby music, I by now prefer single-purpose things. My audio interface has the job of digitalizing audio. These three pedals each have their own unique job and function, and I own them for that purpose. There is a bunch of very dedicated stuff around, a good tuner, a good metronome with googly eyes.
I'm kinda observing the same at work: Sometimes, I just want to get rid of a problem. Just throw a magic zero-config box at it and have it be gone. And in other contexts you want or need to have control over many parameters, and then having small, little single purpose things is very, very useful.
Some monitoring box very likely would want to err on the zero-config magic box I guess?