The article author ignores how little those old phones could actually do, and how much of a pain in the ass it reliably was to get them to actually do most of it. I understand why; none of that would go to his point. But I was also there.
Boring is good in technology. It means you don't have to think about it much, and that usually means it is doing its job.
Tesla is perfectly boring and rational car, yet due saturation people are getting sick of same look and buying vastly inferior competition just to look different.
Even worse, having two identically looking houses next to each other is a nightmare for anyone on creative spectrum and pretty much illegal in most places.
This is anything but what I've heard from people who own them, over drinks at least, and certainly their latest model cannot reasonably be described with either adjective you used.
Maybe I should've been more specific about model - base Model Y (or as Bjorn Nyland called it - Poor man's Tesla) 0-60 does in 7 seconds which is only 1 second faster than my 14 yo Mazda SUV or parents 20yr old Opel. Yes it does that 0-60 confidently and consistently, but it's not a game changer.
As for rational - it drives itself for most of time, has an app, minimalistic design, great efficiency, spacious and reasonably priced. There is little to improve at this point.
Maybe what lacks is app ecosystem or open source for more ways of customisation/automation, but it's far fetch given rest of industry.
Edit: Now compare Tesla with competition - every feature is an option. Lucky if you get an app. Manual driving for most part. Some even came up with fake engine sound and manual gear shifting on a fucking EV. If they try to minimise button bonanza it's usually a trainwreck. And of course - overboard with external styling - something that means absolutely 0 for your daily driving comfort and experience. All of this mess to _differentiate_ into some niche while selling 100x less cars than 2 mass produced Tesla models.
> The article author ignores how little those old phones could actually do
I wish there was a phone on the market that did as little as those phones did. It appears, however, that if you want a cell phone at all, it has to be a smartphone ("feature phones" are just gimped smartphones).
Yes, the world has moved on. As I understand it, the primary market these days for what a decade back we'd call a "feature phone" is elders perhaps entering cognitive decline, or otherwise better served by a device not capable of the default levels of annoyance. (It makes sense! I've had a smartphone since 2012, and have spent every one of those dozen years getting more skillful at frustrating its software suppliers' desire to pester me. I'm quite good at that now, but God help me with whatever's novel twenty or thirty years hence...)
It would not surprise me to see this change over the next decade or so. On the one hand, 5G will probably remain the dominant radio scheme for at least that long, so that there'll be less pressure on device manufacturers for constant hardware changes to provide basic functionality. And on the other, the mounting backlash against the current iteration of the tech industry and specifically the harms it inflicts on children (1) may well develop into a movement toward ensuring connectivity while structurally limiting the sort of access required for algorithmic exploitation - which seems like very naturally opening a niche for the sort of device you prefer. Such a genre of phone may not partake of the sort of design language you might prefer, and it will of course be overpriced as any luxury good, but in functionality I suspect it'll come quite close to satisfaction.
(1) Haidt et al.; I disagree with almost his every prescription and don't at all trust the company he keeps, but I can't argue with his identification of the problem.
Boring is good in technology. It means you don't have to think about it much, and that usually means it is doing its job.