That’s amazing (thoiugh not in a good way)! I assume that alternatives are available.
There are two reasons I have a landline – for redundancy in case of emergency, and for convenience – I love my desktop speakerphone. I realize that there are ways to interface your entire house phone system with your cell phone. In fact I even have such a gadget that connects to my cell phone via Bluetooth. But it still leaves a single point of failure in case of emergency. I have a heart attack and drop my wonderful amazing smartphone into the toilet. Then what?
Most smartphones are waterproof these days, assuming you’re willing to reach in.
But point taken, a smartphone can break or run out of batteries. In my house, I have a phone, my wife has a phone, my Apple watch works as a phone (and will automatically call 911 in the event of a fall!) and either of our laptops or tablets can be used for wifi calling. I have more redundancy now than I technically had when I last had a landline, maybe 20 years ago or more.
I definitely still have a desktop. I even just bought a new one a few years ago after my old one finally died after a dozen years. If fact I am one of those, “Important purchases/online transactions must be done on the desktop” types even though that makes less and less rational sense with every passing day.
I share your disdain of complex work on a phone. But my tablet w keyboard is the complete equivalent of a desktop from 10 years ago.
How does a big box under a desk do anything for you just because it’s a big box?. And especially if the big box is 10 years old and slower than a modern wristwatch?
Could you explain what the difference is? Is it just that you have trouble reading the screen or hitting the keys on a phone? That’s totally understandable, but just in terms of making online purchases I don’t see why the size of computer you do it on makes any difference.
Back when I had a landline, I had a mix of wired & cordless phones in the house. While a cordless was usually in the appropriate base, I always knew where the wired devices were if I had an emergency where seconds count. While I rarely need to search more than one minute, I frequently don’t know exactly where my cell phone is in the house at any given point in time.
A large internal HDD for photo storage. As a photographer/videographer, I have many TB of storage, which means I need a commercial/business plan to store all of that in the cloud, which gets to be expensive. Backed up to multiple drives, including one off site in case of some disaster at the house. From the moment I take a photo on the camera, it’s a minimum of two places at all times because the memory cards are set to mirror.
So I’m going to rely on the alleged waterproofing of Chinese manufacturers to save my life? No thanks. Nor, in an emergency, do I want to rely exclusively on a cell phone that I may have misplaced somewhere, or forgotten in the car, or had been eaten by the dog.
The idea of telephones in every room was invented more than half a century ago and it’s not obsolete, IMHO.
Lacking the redundancy of wives and multiple cell phones and Apple watches, my point stands. In my current situation I would have limited means of communicating for emergency help. It’s very very good to have a cell phone. It’s not so good, in my situation, to have it as your only means of emergency communication.
I’m no longer working. But my home office has my desktop with a 43" monitor. I also have a laptop for when I’m just fooling around, like now. That stays upstairs. All on WIFI of course. No docking stations to fool around with or exta plugs.
I also have two tablets. I mostly use those for hand writen notes. My wife also has a laptop which is her go to device. But I like my desktop and 43" screen. It’s rare that I don’t have 10-12 connections. It can handle it.
And the quality of news editing continues to decline:
Segal, 81, has owned a flip phone for the last five decades
I highly doubt that, considering 50 year ago cell phones were the size of a brick and were brand new very expensive technology. I assume they meant that he has a flip phone, and has been a season ticket holder for the past five decades, but that’s not what they actually said.
I really can’t explain it. It just feels wrong to, say, buy plane tickets or upload my taxes from my phone. Things like that need to be done on my PC. I freely admit it makes no sense but here we are.
I’m much the same but it mostly comes down to being able to do more stuff quicker on the PC than my mobile devices. Like opening new tabs to check other information before purchase, saving information in a document, saving it to a folder and easily re-accessing it. It’s all things that you CAN do on a mobile device, I just find it faster, easier and more responsive on a PC due to both the hardware and UI. Plus stuff like saving a copy of my taxes I would rather do on my PC which I know probably isn’t going anywhere versus my phone which might be lost, stolen, damaged, etc.
Agree completely. That is the central shortcoming of phones as git-admin-shit-done machines. And it’s a significant shortcoming.
But once the keyboard is full size and the screen is, say, 1500x2000 pixels at a font size I can (still) read, I’m done. e.g. TurboTax works just as fine on my tablet’s ~8x11" screen as it does on a 43" diagonal screen.
Having the QR code does speed up processing through customs.
They have kiosks to scan your own passport and verify the information. They take your picture then after you get your luggage, you can go through an automated gate.
You don’t have to have a smartphone, you could print out the QR code if have access to a printer, but having a smartphone makes it easier.
Taxes for sure, those are done on my laptop. But buying plane tickets I’ve done on my phone for several years. The United app is way easier than the website IMO.
I’m the same way. And I’m not that old or a technophobe. It might actually be that my utter comfort with a desktop computer (been using them daily since I was, like, 10) makes it feel like the absolute best tool for the job. I see it joked about sometimes on the GenX subreddit, so I don’t think we’re alone in the sentiment.
I have a friend who’s 10 years younger, a Millennial, and he says he does everything on his phone. One night we were at dinner and he needed to buy some ads on Facebook and in the blink of an eye he spent $300 using his phone. We had a good laugh about how he thought that was so cool and convenient and I was horrified.
I would say that’s true if it’s a company you’ve dome business with in the past and they already have your contact and payment information. In that case, yeah, a well designed app can be just as good if not better than the desktop website. I’ve found ordering stuff from Amazon on my phone to be just as easy as their website, but that’s because I’m logged in and they already have my shipping address and credit card. Where buying stuff of a smartphone breaks down IMO is when you have to enter you address and payment information (Although I know sometimes they can autofill some of that for you).
I use Chrome on my laptop and my phone. All of my autofill and password information transfer between the two. I personally find most things just as easy on the phone and laptop but there are a few exceptions. None come to mind right now.
