[dfinninger]

Calling out excel, photoshop, and text editors (I’m assuming coding)… those are all computationally expensive tasks.

My mom runs her entire business off of her iPhone and iPad. I’d say that she’s doing “real work”. She just doesn’t need a discrete GPU.

My sister is in a similar boat with her business.

There are definitely certain classes of work that lend themselves to larger screens and an actively-cooled chassis. But many people don’t need the extras and are quite happy with the “mobile experience“. It’s just a different market. They love the updates coming down the pipe.

[tomcam]

I would love to get a few more details describing how your mom uses the iPhone to run her business.

[wildzzz]

I can certainly see someone running a one-person Etsy or farmers market stand business all from their iPhone. You use Excel or Google sheets to track expenses and income or just track it in a real ledger book. All the banks have an app now. She can order supplies through a browser or just by calling vendors. She can take payment in cash or card using the phone itself or a Square reader. TurboTax has an app. She can file state sales tax online or through the mail by printing forms from the phone if her payment processer isn't already handling this for her. You can even build basic websites using templates.

I'm sure all of these tasks are a little easier with a bigger screen and real keyboard but they aren't impossible to do on a phone. Plus, record keeping on paper still exists and isn't difficult if your volume is small. You could even run something like a dropshipping business where you don't do any physical work and hire freelancers to do things that usually require a real computer like graphic design. Or maybe you just own a larger business with people under you that handle all the day-to-day work while you do big picture stuff in meetings or contact clients via email.