[baroomba]

They're much, much better, and extremely useful, for just about any work that involves building or fixing things in the real world, to pick one large category of work. I'd personally find a laptop maybe 1/10 as useful as an iPhone (or smartphone more generally), at best, when, say, working on my house or car. Watching construction contractors work, they seem to love their phones and use them constantly, too, and for a lot more than making calls and sending messages.

It's like carrying around a whole office's worth of office equipment in your pocket. It's a document scanner, you can use it to measure stuff, to get paperwork signed, to take pictures and look at them later, it's a level or flashlight in a pinch, you can load reference materials on it, and on and on, and that's without getting into really specialized software or peripherals that let you do all kinds of cools stuff.