- Photography and video (capture and editing—is a desktop nice for that? Sure, but the desktop can't also be your camera)

- Art (sketching/"painting"/et c)

- Music (tuner, recording, accompaniment, sheet-music display, composition, synth, metronome)

- A vast array of essentially secretarial functions (especially for phones) that aid all kinds of activities (reminders, lists, taking dictation, voice-recording, calendar stuff, organizing information)

- Construction, home projects, crafting of various sorts, and car repair (my phone is a: level, tape measure, notebook, calculator, flashlight, and reference manual)

- Tablets are pretty good for writing, with a wireless keyboard. Arguably better than a laptop per se (because you can position the screen separately from the keyboard for better ergonomics), but worse than a desktop or docked laptop with a large screen.

— Hiking, walking, outings in the city—navigation, wildlife & plant identification, ride hailing.

I'm far from a phone/tablet power-user and I use them for all kinds of stuff. If I had to live with only one personal computing device—well, it'd have to be a phone, because they're indispensable for all kinds of interactions with third parties that assume you have a cell phone, but if I had two the other would be an iPad Pro, no question whatsoever. I'd feel crippled with only a laptop or desktop, for almost every task except tinkering with computers, which I care about doing outside of work less with each passing year.

Most of the actual benefits of computing, in my personal life, as in, what makes my life easier, or helps me accomplish things, are better-available or only available on phones and tablets, and much of the rest is good-enough on those that I'd have trouble justifying a desktop or laptop just for those tasks. The main exception is fiddling with computers. Laptops and desktops are good for fiddling with computers (and not only that, to be clear—3D modeling and such remain much better there, too, for example—but that's really all I use them for, as far as productive use).

I think I also have a fundamental problem with classification of things into "consumption" or "creation", because it seems like successful and good and actually useable by and useful to normal people applications of computing tend to end up in the former, even if it's in service of tasks that aren't "consumption", like, "oh, navigation is just consumption" or "payment reminders are just consumption" or "AR sensors automatically measuring things for you is just consumption". Isn't the point that computers do what we need without our having to write a program from scratch every time? Shit, I thought computers doing stuff for us with, ideally, no commands or effort required, was the whole point of what we all do (I mean, that and selling ads, obviously).

For that matter, many of the benefits that a computer gives me over pencil and paper, for writing software, is "consumption"—that is, the output from tools I didn't write and often didn't even deliberately invoke, like code navigation, documentation look-up, hints, autocompletion, warnings, auto-formatting, et c. But those things are still tools aiding in creation. I don't like dismissing phones and tablets as "consumption devices" because they're not great for programming, when they are outstanding tools, far superior to a laptop or a desktop, for all kinds of other activities.