Phones especially killed the giftable gadget market.

Department stores and Radio Shacks used to be full of little golf computers and VHS rewinders and electronic Scrabble dictionaries and sports trivia games around Father’s Day and Christmas. It would be unusual in most families, I think, to give someone an app for Christmas.

They’ve also changed our relationship with industrial design. There are probably fewer people designing gadgets, and consumers are less used to acquiring a new device and learning how to use it. I didn’t grow up in a particularly gadgety household, but by the time I was 12 I had learned to work a pretty wide variety of electronics with different interfaces and physical media. Nowadays even your TV is basically a smartphone with a remote.