> If iPads were sold in every store for $1 a piece, we'd be doing that too. This is indeed a technology problem (or at least half-technology, half-economics), we just can't make working tablets cheap enough (and sustainably enough) to support such workflow.

The price of a lowend Android tablet can be shockingly low, to the point that physical multitasking is totally practical for an environment as expensive as space travel. The issue is bloat. The UI for a Trek level starship could easily run on 1999 era PC hardware much less powerful than a 2025 postage stamp of an SOC, if we were still coding like it was 1999. But not if it has to run Android Infinity with subpixel AI super resolution, a voice interface, and no less than 70MB of various JavaScript frameworks crammed into a locked Chromium frontend.

I run a Motorola mobile device at work (retail) that would be competitive with 10-15 year old flagship phones. The browser interface is designed for tracking and ease of development and to show off new AI tools. It employs landing pages, phased loading, a bunch of dynamic things. Looking up a SKU number takes 2-5 minutes (MINUTES) to load things I could get in ten milliseconds on a console interface or hundreds of milliseconds in a 1999 World Wide Web e-commerce site.