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Comment by Shank | Hacker News Reader

> I don't really use my phone for gaming or anything intensive

Let me be the first to tell you that for many, many people, smartphones are their primary computing platforms, and they do everything on them. I've had to help people file taxes on smart phones, sign documents, and more. Processor speed isn't important now so much as it is later. A good portion of the budget market is going to grab a phone because of the price and hold on to it for years. Will a 20% slower processor stand up as well as its bigger cousin in the future? Probably less so.

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Sure but then primary computer for most people don't need that much computing power. It's mostly about documents and communication. People who really need more processing power are either tech/gaming enthusiasts or professionals, and for sure this device isn't aimed for them.

It's been fun watching this line be repeated for 30 years without getting more correct.

Normal users need good performance too, but the bottom end of the market is always saturated with completely unsuitable crap. A safe way to look at it is that most users need roughly the power of a 2 year old flagship device. That has been true for many years as well.

There aren't many benchmarks yet, but the Snapdragon 670's performance is roughly between the Snapdragon 821 and 835, which were the flagships just 3 and 2 years ago.

> It's been fun watching this line be repeated for 30 years without getting more correct.

It absolutely is getting more correct. I used to update my desktop every year or two. I'm now still on a Core i5 2500 from 2011 and have zero reason to upgrade again, even despite some gaming use.

For phones, it's a bit different because they're back on the part of the performance curve where desktops were years ago and power efficiency is still improving rapidly but I think they're getting close to that crossover point.

It seems like for every desktop user who's still on a Sandy Bridge or whatever, there's a user asking for N*2 RAM where N is the maximum currently amount of memory available in a laptop.

I find that both statements are correct. 10-year old processors are still fast enough (I'm using one) but we need more RAM in 2019 than we needed in 2010.

> It's been fun watching this line be repeated for 30 years without getting more correct.

The average user can comfortably use a 5 year old pc even today, ofcourse with an SSD upgrade.

Even a 10 year old PC (assuming it wasn't low-end at time of purchase), with a SSD, is still good enough for most people.

For me, I'm planning on getting a Pixel 3a. The talk of it being like a "2 year old flagship" sounds great to me, not a detriment at all. I'm upgrading from a Honor 8, which is an almost 3 year old mid-range phone, so the Pixel 3a will be a decent upgrade, even though the performance of my Honor 8 is still perfectly good. I'm mainly upgrading for the camera, 3 years of software updates and because my Honor 8's Bluetooth is becoming less reliable over time.

Loads of chromebooks ship with Rockchip processors sporting A17 chips at 1.7GHz. They can do all those web things just fine. The A73 at 2.0GHz will blow that performance away.

The limiting factor of a cellphone as a primary computer platform is actually lack of keyboard and screen space. Computing power for most people has been fine for years now.

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