The above being a rhetorical question, I just wanted to take a temperature of the room.
I have lived without a phone pretty much all my adult life. The experiment for me would be to get a phone and see what changes. In that way, I have answered it for myself and the answer is a clear "you don't need a phone".
The goal, as ever, is to present to the public an accurate reflection of what the people as a whole think about candidates and issues.
Can this not simply be harvested from the endless volumes of online posts made to the public internet? Why do they act like they need to go on the hunt for something that is normally difficult even to avoid?
CPUs from around 2005 onward are all perfectly usable IMO for the purposes of x86 desktops. As long as it's got x86_64, SSE4 and at least two available threads. I would even wager that Pentium 4 hyperthreaded models (Wolfdale?) are still acceptable if we're really pushing it.
For example, some of these services would be... ?