This reminds me of the disdain with which some of those who used mainframes and minis looked upon the early microcomputers. That was clearly a step back in som

This reminds me of the disdain with which some of those who used mainframes and minis looked upon the early microcomputers. That was clearly a step back in some ways (you couldn't even run a LISP compiler on those), yet micros made computing ultimately more accessible to a much wider share of the populace and eventually displaced minis (and threatened mainframes and confined them to a niche market). The CPU in pricier smartphones outperforms the one in yesteryear's desktop for a while already. It's just that the UI and (usually missing) periphery isn't necessarily best suited for traditional computer applications like software development.