Alternatively, smartphones are the PC (personal computer) of choice.
SoC and mobile chips are themselves near desktop level performance. Heck, Apple's A18 can outcompete the M1 in certain benchmarks, and outcompetes a Kaby Lake Intel i5 (2017-19 period) in most aspects.
We are reaching a point where commodity mobile processors have mid-2010s desktop chip level performance but at a fraction of the cost, which opens up plenty of opportunities.
And there has been some progress getting some phones running real Linuxes, with upstream kernels & more regular userspaces. There's some cheating too, using hybrid Android drivers bent to be Linux-y.
But man it is so irritating to me that there's such tight controls on these chips in every way. So many seem to only be available for large devices makers. There seems to be very narrow segmentation. Ideally one would hope a small SBC with say a Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 (SM7675-A), with a single X4 core, would be so interesting as a low cost small board. But instead of the most popular chips on the planet - cellphone chips - being everywhere, there's a whole market of extra special extra old-core embedded chips - the Allwinner and Rockchips and Broadcoms - providing an alternate. One would hope removing display, touchscreen, battery, and case could lower costs, but it's just not done. https://www.anandtech.com/show/21316/qualcomm-intros-snapdra...
And phones, man, so many are locked locked locked down. Many of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptops are locked down - laptops - which can by design install no OS but windows. Highly restricted use seems normal in the ARM world, makes these so much less able to be enjoyed.
The other major downside to phones is they have enormously limited io. A single USB 3 port isn't the worst, but it's still a very narrow straw for something like a modern flash drive to squeeze it's data through. Hopefully, again, USB4 improves this, but ideally I'd love some PCIe connectivity and especially multi-port designs (Lenovo has a couple gaming phones with >1 port in some markets, way cool).
I agree with the excitement for mobile. But it's also a dark segment, a pinnacle of consumerdom & regression to the mean versus that brief great amazing age of Personal Computer compatible, which has spawned systems both small and massive and mighty, that we have been able to extend & use however we might imagine. Phones returned us to an age of control, where our species is impotent at using the tech we have all around us, phones are infernal devices trapping us, are the spiritual foe of human spirit.