The Unacknowledged Compromise - Matt Gemmell

The Unacknowledged Compromise – Matt Gemmell:

By all means make a choice, and by all means obtain the maximum utility from it. Just don’t deceive yourself about the reasons for your decision. If you can only afford one machine, then that’s all you’ll buy, and that’s fine – but don’t frame it as a choice. If you only want to carry one, then only carry one – and acknowledge that you imposed that limitation yourself.

But if those limitations don’t really apply, allow yourself to see the age-old wisdom of using the right tools for the job. Choosing only one device is so enormous a compromise as to make other factors irrelevant.

No device fits all situations, and no device ever will. If you do more than one thing, in more than one place or in more than one way, maybe you ought to have more than one tool.

Feels like this article is slightly rushed. For example, why not include TV? Why ignore watches, since they’re starting to become part of the game?

I think the more interesting thing is why we bother to think of these devices as such discrete categories. It doesn’t mean you’ll start only buying one, it just acknowledges that as the services are increasingly whirring away in the cloud, what you decide to call these various pieces of glass is irrelevant.

In that sense, he’s right. If you need a small piece of glass on your person for notifications (watch/phone) a bigger one for work (tablet/laptop) and a bigger one for viewing (TV), that’s fine. But I think less and less will it be that you’re buying what we think of as specifically one of those old fashioned items.