The iPhone or your equivalent Android device truly is one of the most useful inventions humanity has ever created, especially for the era that we currently exist in.
and you keep a phone 1-8 years but a car 3-20 years or 4x as long? seems like a bad ratio
Well, a Rolex has extremely high utility too. It's just that it has much less utility than a digital watch you can buy for $23 from Casio. The purpose of spending the other $59,477 [ https://www.rolex.com/en-us/watches/sky-dweller/m336935-0008 ] is just that you can say you did.
Apple products are similar. They have high utility that is nevertheless not as high as competing products that are much cheaper. All of the value is coming from the luxury branding.
Products competing directly with Apple products offer, at best, equivalent utility and performance for no more than 1 magnitude cost difference. Flagship android phones have cost about the same as iPhones for the better part of a decade and macbooks are often price competitive with a similarly specced ultra books. It’s understood that cheaper phones and laptops have similar utility for the average user, but some aspect of performance or quality is often a tradeoff.
Of course, like the SUV, often it's actual use case is a far cry from what it is actually capable of doing.
Rolex has a long history of being a tool watch, and mechanical watches can be used in a lot of neat ways, but I would never want to depend on one in a life or death situation without fully understanding a backup plan.
All of the cheaper options make pretty significant trade offs. Ones that you might not care about, but that others do.
The same can’t be said for a Rolex where the much cheaper options are better in every way other than flexing.
The Rolex (or luxury watches in general) are pieces of jewellery that also tell the time. The more expensive ones have some combination of -more expensive materials -better finishing -superior craftsmanship (including more intricate complications)
The goal is not just to tell the time, it's to wear a piece of artistic craftsmanship. (Though I would agree that other brands are a better example than Rolex, and some people do indeed just buy expensive watches in general and Rolex in particular just to flex. As some do with art.)
It's like how Google is pointlessly overengineered even though literally nothing they do affects revenue since they're a monopoly.
I have an Android phone with a physical keyboard and it is a totally different mindset when you can "check in" and communicate with the device/through the device without constantly checking/fixing the touchscreen/dictation errors.
If you do, you'll find that you'll stop feeling the need to project your scorn for the things you voluntarily surround yourself with!
You're 100% correct to talk about your criticisms still, but you read as if it was still a problem in your everyday life, so I gave a suggestion more apt to that scenario. It didn't translate well, I apologize!
The illusion is that you're getting a computer and not a collection of knickknacks and appliances.
Someone is deluded, and it's either all of the people using these apps despite being worse off due to doing so... or it's you. (And we're talking about actual utility apps, not something that you could dismiss as a dopamine trap.)
Secondly I think the only thing I really miss that's particular to smartphones is the map. Everything else is either a dumb gimmick or actually bad and all of it is to just get you're attention so they can sell it.