Smart phones and their problems

As Noah Smith points out in his recent Substack, smart phones are conceptually distinct from social media.  To some (modest) extent, it might be smart phones making young (and old?) people unhappy.

Speaking on a purely subjective level, I hate smart phones.  Better yet, I hate phones.

I love my iPad, and now once again I have two of them.  Apart from disliking phone calls, the iPhone itself frustrates me.  It is simply too small to make me happy.  I don’t like looking at it, and I use it instead of the iPad only in very restricted situations, such as the iPad being on the other side of the room and the iPhone still being in my pocket.

Have you noticed that no one can call you on your iPad?  Well, actually they can, but not the way I have it set up.

It is also bulkier to take out the iPad and hold it and use it.  That limits the number of times you check it, relative to an iPhone.

So maybe an iPad-based world would be somewhat healthier, mentally and otherwise.  The more general point is that we might be able to improve the psychological architecture of iPhones.

As a side query, if social media on iPhones are a harmful addiction, why do we observe so few attempts to quit them?  Why do we observe relatively few self-constraint devices for social media use?