As said before Tech companies don't buy real companys, they'll waste billions on a web site / app that so no real value at all, but they never go into anything with real value, cars that people drive are big and real and actually required, phones people just think they need. Ford wouldnt sell anyway, they know full well apple would just run them into the ground and use them as a tax write off.
We did just fine without cars for thousands of years, they're just something you think you need. You're funny in an Amish kind of way, you stopped progressing with the rest of the world sometime just before the internet and think everything developed after you froze yourself in time is worthless but everything before is somehow morally superior. Unlike most Amish, however, you have the hypocrisy to use the "worthless" technology to tell everyone how worthless it is while entirely missing the irony.
I didnt say worthless, but a few phones being sold shouldnt make a company bigger than a major car maker. Snapchat shouldnt have half the value of Ford. Tech companys just dont seem to venture into the real world hope it stays that way. Google great search engine, maps are getting there, rest of what they do barely useable crap and when it does start to work well they pull it bundle it into something new there trying to push which is also aweful and it just vanishes. Imagine that mentality making cars just scarey. Getting around is more important than having facebook with you 24/7!
This has got to be one of the more backwards comments I've read from you. The whole point of instant communication, whether it be through Facebook, phone, text or something else, is that it makes "getting around" much less important.
But I can communicate with a £20 feature phone just fine, which makes the £700 phones the app's they enable which the current tech bubble is based upon, well a bubble. Not saying i don't like my S7 but contract, doesn't cost much more than min's and data on it's own.
Not everybody has a life as simple as yours. 8 years ago, I didn't have a cell phone at all. Now, however, my whole life depends on what I have on my phone. My business runs from an app that I designed myself on my iPhone. In other words, my $1000 phone supports my wife and two children.
Your £20 was a £2000 phone before we started moving down the phone cost curve by building what were then expensive phones, and you paid £20/minute to call. And just as SimpleTrades pointed out, just because you don't use all the features of an iPhone doesn't mean that lots of us don't use them to great effect to eliminate a large number of what you would call "real" things in a way that is much cheaper, more efficient, and more environmentally friendly. For example, back when I was running aircraft maintenance programs, we were able to replace literally tons (in weight) of maintenance publications and thousands of labor hours updating those manuals and sending them out to remote locations around the world by putting them all on tablets. Not only did this save money and resources, we significantly cut down on errors caused by people using out of date maintenance pubs. This is just one of thousands of practical concrete applications that a guy like you could grab on to. Add to that the tens of thousands of things you can do now that you couldn't do before, a la Uber and organizing meetings of (pick your obscure interest) people, or running a company without an office where you get to pick the best people in your field regardless of where they live in the world without requiring them to move....the list is limited only by your imagination, or in this case I guess by all the rest of our imaginations because yours seems to be frozen somewhere around 1990.
I'm in IT I write and use phone Apps aswell, but I also understand there is more to life / the universe than tech and phones.
I actually don't really believe you. I find it hard to believe that a successful tech guy would avoid anything more than a 20 Euro phone. Its more likely that you have crappy credit and can't afford an up to date one. I look at my own bill for a $0 iPhone ( cost of phone built into monthly fee), 8GB data, unlimited minutes in Canada, $85. This is equivalent to $61 Euro. So, I pay 40 ( 480/year) more than you and have access to many more tools. An extra 480 so that I can run a business, earn a decent income, and support my family.
Only a special kind of Luddite makes his living off technology and claims none of it is real or as worthwhile as a truck! I tend to agree with the BS call, although I've noticed that people who code call themselves developers or programmers while everyone from the annoying password nazi to anyone who uses a computer in their job tends to call themselves "in IT", so that term is really pretty meaningless.