Before I got my first smartphone my Dad warned me to make sure I could afford it long term because as soon as I got it it would be a bill for the rest of my life. Back then I thought he was being ridiculous of course but he was absolutely right. I don't need a smartphone, and if I didn't have one I would likely see more cons than pros while observing others. Sure it's cool that we can look stuff up easily but I'm becoming increasingly more annoyed by how often I see them. If I didn't have one I would see how the bad outweighed the good but since I have one the pros are right in front of my face (ha) so I see them easily. The pros will be different for each person at different points in their life. For myself having a smartphone was great when I couldn't afford to get a laptop because it enabled me to do almost everything I would normally need a laptop for. For a lot of people it's simply an appealing device. It's like carrying a multi tool instead of a bunch of inidivual tools. Except there are no cons to a multi tool whereas there are cons to smartphone which is why we would never have this conversation about multi tools. They're fucking great.

So it's perfectly normal that you don't see the appeal behind a smartphone. Just because there are pros to having a smartphone doesn't mean there aren't cons which wreck the appeal of the device. Number of pros alone don't dictate how appealing a device is. There are pros to a lot of things which don't seem appealing because of the cons.

The device is appealing to different people because to them the pros outweigh the cons. That's how appeal works in all situations. Those pros and cons change for each person though so trying to "understand the appeal" is a tad useless since each person is different. Sometimes there really are a lot of pros and other times people just ignore the cons like they do with meth so the pros look better.