Why does this permeate the HN all the time. You can 100% function without a fucking smartphone. My Dad doesn’t have one, he has zero-to-no trouble going to the bank and paying his bills and just about every other imaginable thing. If there was something he could not do and there were repercussions for it he’d be calling an attorney to rectify the situation. It is crazy to keep reading this over and over on HN, so weird

> "Why does this permeate the HN all the time."

It's a bias, an in-bubble illiteracy effect, concerning the perception and analysis of realities (e. g. experiences) outside that bubble, mirroring an in-group's projections about an out-group. It is, in my decades of experience, a very common phenomenon in the IT sector.

> "My Dad doesn’t have one, he has zero-to-no trouble going to the bank and paying his bills and just about every other imaginable thing."

So far, that holds true for me as well (Germany).

> "If there was something he could not do and there were repercussions for it he’d be calling an attorney to rectify the situation."

The crux: the increasing friction brought on by rising technological entry barriers. In Germany you have at least the non-exclusion principle of Teilhabe (lit.: participation) which gives certain guarantees. But such achievements of democracy are continually under fire.

Because the real complaint isn’t “it's impossible to live without a smartphone”, it is “I want all of the conveniences of a smartphone without having one, and I want every business to cater to the small minority who don’t want to use a smartphone”.

It’s like complaining that it’s difficult to travel to another continent if you don’t want to fly. I want to go from LA to Paris in 12 hours without getting on a plane!

Technically, sure you probably can spend a large amount of time, energy, and money to find alternative non-smartphone ways of navigating through modern life.

Practically, you need a smartphone. Engaging an attorney != practical

Yeah, and lot of people assume that something doesn't exist because they aren't personally aware of it. Quite often there are people who are willing to serve those who don't make mainstream choices. Other times, it means that you simply have a different lifestyle from the mainstream. There's nothing wrong with that.

In Portugal you have to do that at the bank terminals, otherwise going to the counter implies paying a services tax, depending on the kind of customer one happens to be.

Yep, many older people right now don’t have a smart phone and never will.

As long as some younger people stay that course we should be fine. Hopefully we’ll see an increase of dumb phone adoption in a growing cohort younger adults. But the FUD spread in threads like this actually spreads misinformation and makes that less likely to happen