Magic in the Mundane

Do these things provide a valuable function beyond the cool factor? The cool factor is clearly enough for some people, but like the $50+ egg minder that told me how many eggs I had left and which ones were oldest, some things go too far.
I'm clearly not an early adopter of anything. If it doesn't provide an obvious and relatively dramatic improvement to my life I'm not paying extra for it. Of course, sometimes it's hard to know how much something will improve your life until you have it. Didn't think I'd use the iPad as much as I do. Still not entirely convinced that the convenience of the iPhone is worth the occasional panic of making sure I didn't lose/drop/damage it.
I guess I'm also parts of the oughts obsessed with convergence. I like how many functions I get out of the smartphone. (I was actually surprised the other day when it rang and I used it to talk to someone. I so rarely use it that way I genuinely forgot it had a phone function as well as text.) I also like convergence because it means I don't have to buy a hundred things that do one thing, one thing that does a hundred things is a better value in my mind.
The private/public data mining issue doesn't bother me much. I'm not doing anything super secret or objectionable in general. I ignore the adds, throw away the junk mail and delete the spam. I suspect my google search history is pretty confusing to the algorithms anyway since I'm most often searching for things that other people have asked me about (family, professors, clients). Amazon thinks I have kids and like baseball because I really only use it to buy presents for other people.