Would you rather be able to do everything with one thing? Say, listen to music, take pictures, play, work and whatever with one device? Or would you rather have a specific device for listening to music, a specific device for taking pictures, a specific device for work and another one to play and such?
I personally prefer to keep things separate these days. On a practical level it means that I don’t depend entirely on a single object and that, if gets lost, damaged or runs out of battery, would let me with nothing at all. On a subjective level, I feel that having specialized objects for each need gives more weight to the routines I create with them, contrary to when I kept everything in one place and it felt superfluous and banal.
So far I have an old phone that I use as an MP3 player, an old tablet as an EBook, my old Ps2 to play games and so on.
Either extreme is a bad fit. Luckily those aren’t the only two choices.
So I choose a single generalist device that can do everything to at least and “okay” level, then specialized one-off devices that I need capabilities that go beyond the generalist device for that specific need. I read books on an ereader, but if I’m out and about and want to read and don’t have my ereader with me, I’ll read on my phone. So I get the best of both worlds.
This isn’t a new concept introduced with electronics. Forty years ago people were having this same conversation except it was the Swiss Army knife vs carrying dedicated individual tools. A Swiss Army knife is not a great screwdriver, but compared to having nothing, or having to carry around a full sized screwdriver everywhere, a Swiss Army knife becomes a wonderful screwdriver in that situation.
