So in a world when so much is online to the benefit of customers, you want rail to not follow that in order to protect revenue. Who wants the customer unfriendly railway of the 1970s?
As far as whether I am exaggerating re: smartphones, I am struck by the number of Zoom calls I have been on over the past year in which friends in their 60s and 70s have participated, clearly on smartphones rather than laptops as you can tell by the image moving that they are holding it in their hand.
The 1960s & 1970s was much more user friendly than now. Stuff is often put on line more for the convenience of the rail company than for passengers, and used as an excuse to cut staff numbers. If, like me, you only use TVMs infrequently, the menus are over-complicated and take ages to navigate. It is much quicker to buy a ticket from a trained person in a ticket office.
When pay-trains were intoduced, there was always a guard who came through the train selling tickets. One snag was that sometimes you could not book through tickets to lines served only by paytrains. I recall that once, travelling to Cromer, I could only book to Norwich, and needed a separate paytrain ticket onwards to Cromer.
And how much money do they actually save by using TVMs, gates, etc. instead of staff ?? Much computerised machinery is expensive to buy, repair, and prone to unreliability, and has poor functionality, e.g. unable to cater for the full range of tickets.
And yes, whilst I do have a basic smartphone, with a relatively low battery capacity, I don't trust enough it to let it anywhere near my financial details; I don't use it for any purchases, and as it does everything I want, I see no need to replace it every year or two; also I was using computers back in the 1970s, so I am not opposed to new technology - where that is the
best option for doing tasks. Keep things simple for the customer / passenger is my preferred option -- we do not exist for the convenience of companies.