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.
I’ve always loathed the “A jack of all trades is a master of none, but still better than a master of one”. Specialists exist for a reason. And I feel the same with my tech. I’d love to be able to go back to having an amazing digital camera, a phone that made sure it connected everywhere, and so on. I could do such things with a little elbow grease and research but I know I’m too lazy to do that.
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.
I sorta do the one thing for everything and that is my laptop but on the other hand I picked up a steamdeck and im really liking having a separate device just for gaming and I have a fire tv stick and that is handy to not have to run a hdmi from my laptop. So like I would want a one and done but realistically I have to use a few things.
In the past, I would have said “One device to rule them all” but then we got the modern smartphone which does all the things, but none of them exceptionally well (and definitely not ergonomically or frustration-free).
I’ve upgraded to a dumb-ish flip phone which is good for phone, texts, and music (has enough buttons i can key-map to have physical controls when it’s closed). Everything else, I’ve started preferring dedicated devices (e-reader, camera, my actual wallet/cards, etc). In a box somewhere, I think I still have my 1 GB MP3 player that will run for like 2 weeks from a single AAA battery. Would love to find that.
My old smartphones are also single-purpose devices, repurposed into HomeAssistant remotes, Emby controllers, VoIP handsets, etc).
