He was around 40 years old when he said it and he wasn't talking about smartphones - at least what we call smartphones today.
> "I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone".
> I said that after a frustrating attempt to use a "feature-rich" telephone sometime around 1990. I'm sure the sentiment wasn't original, and probably not even the overall phrasing; someone must have thought of that before me.
Since we're talking about the actual astronaut, not the movie, I feel I should point out Swigert and Lovell both say "Houston, we've had a problem", not have.
Is this something you come across often? I always give the canonical spelling of my email, dots included, and can't remember a time when it wasn't accepted.
I'm in the same boat. I can't see things as though they're physical objects but I can sense them in some other way.
I can also draw outlines with my eyes closed - e.g. I can point my finger out and trace the positions of my desk, table, windows, etc.
But when explaining the concept of aphantasia, my go to explanation is to look directly at a person, close my eyes, and say "I have no idea what you look like." I can still sense where they are - height, weight, - and I can state facts about their beard or hair colour, but I'm not seeing it in any way I'd normally use the word 'see'.
But with all that, I feel like it could be close enough that that might be how others sense things and we just lack the terminology to express it, so I tend not to say I'm aphantasic as a definite term.
And you would get some number arguing how "several" is a distinct category in the same way this post has people talking about cyan.