My understanding was that after American retailers were burned so hard by the Atari crash, Nintendo wanted to position the NES as far from a 2600 as possible.
I've been reading Dashiell Hammett detective stories from the early 1920s and it seems like cars were almost exclusively referred to colloquially as 'machines' back then.
I read books on my phone while lying flat on my back in bed. I have a stand that holds the phone directly over my face, and a bluetooth page turner so I don't have to tap the screen. It looks ridiculous but I can read for hours like that.