Think of a smartphone as "laptop lite," not "better flip-phone," and I think that might help answer your question. Since you don't have a smartphone, you know objectively "no apps" and "no wifi," but what that means is: - no online banking at my fingertips so I always know how much money I have - No personal e-mail directly at my fingertips so, for instance, when a recruiter hits me up, i can respond relatively quickly despite being at work (At my work I cannot in any way access personal email, only my work email address) - No MyFitnessPal which allows me to track my calorie consumption throughout the day and monitor my macros, if I care enough to try to meet them - No pedometer/Fitbit/Health app to help me know my step count for the day and if I need to "step it up" a notch to meet my daily goal - No music to listen to (it's all on my smartphone) - Not to mention the apps which are solely for entertainment, which again, especially at work, are pretty nice to have. In response to this, you might say, "Well, you can do all of these things without a smartphone!" and yes, that's true - but with a smartphone, you can do them easily, and you can do them all in one place, and you can access every single one of them almost immediately, without having to page through notes, find trackers you've saved on the computer, run iTunes/YouTube on your work computer, what-have-you. It's a huge difference in experience, where the smartphone allows you to do a ton of different things at once, all in one place, neatly; none of the things I've mentioned are really "entertainment" items, yet they are probably the most frequent ways I use my smartphone on a day-to-day basis. Well, that and texting.
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.