Right. Because organizations like the AT&T monopoly when you paid $1/minute for phone calls and couldn't connect your own equipment didn't have shareholders. This kind of idealization of the past gets old.
An AT&T handset could be used to beat up a burglar and then still be used to call the police. They were, to say the least, indestructible.
Nokia phones were that way for a bit (I forget what model number) where you could have them fly off the roof of your car at speed, and find them run over twice and still working (assuming the battery stayed in).
The latest iPhone flying out of a plane "window" and then landing still running and unbroken was an impressive moment and harkened back to earlier times.
The break up of att lead to a race to the bottom on handsets, they were disposable in a bad way for a while.
As seen by their BSD lawsuit right after they were allowed to sell UNIX.