> Not necessarily. Many people grew up with PCs and laptops but now mostly use their phones, because outside of specific jobs or hobbies, everyday computing needs are heavily optimized for mobile-first.

It's a deeply flawed comparison, because many of the things we do with a phone now wasn't something we'd do at all with the computers we grew up with. We didn't pay at the grocery store with a computer, we didn't buy metro tickets, we didn't use it to navigate (well, there was a short period of time where we might print out maps, but anyway..)

When I grew up, I feel like our use of home computers fell into two categories:

1. Some of us kids used them to play games. Though many more would have a Nintendo/Sega for that, and I feel like the iPhone/iPad is a continuation of that. The "it just works" experience where you have limited control over the device.

2. Some parents would use it for work/spreadsheets/documents ... and that's still where most people use a "real" computer today. So nothing has really changed there.

There is now a lot more work where you do the work on services running on a server or in the cloud. But that's back to the original point: that's in many cases just not something we could do with old home computers. Like, my doctor can now approve my request for a prescription from anywhere in the world. That just wasn't possible before, and arguably isn't possible without a server/cloud-based infrastructure.

Phones/tablets as an interface to these services is arguably a continuation of like those old dumb terminals to e.g. AS/400 machines and such.

> It's true even in tech; half a year ago I switched my phone to a Galaxy Z Fold7, and I haven't used my personal laptop since then, not once.

I do agree, I am in a similar situation.

(edit: I'm broadly in agreement with your comment & observations, so I don't at all mean to come off as argumentative for the sake of being argumentative. You just got me thinking about how that situation might have been handled thirty or a hundred years ago.)

> [...] my doctor can now approve my request for a prescription from anywhere in the world. That just wasn't possible before [...]

I'm picking nits, but wasn't this more or less instantaneous approval possible before with e.g., a fax and a telephone? Or (although this is a bit of a stretch) a telegram and telegraph?