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Comment by bserge | Hacker News Reader

It's doable, but I believe a bunch of old phones will come out cheaper (including on electricity cost) and more reliable (being proper devices in the eyes of ad networks, and having fewer crashes).

A 4 core i7 CPU + 32GB of RAM will run 4-8 Android machines, maybe a couple more. You can get 10 Android phones for ~$700.

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True. I think the economics of how cheap smartphones have gotten is shocking.

Especially since you can acquire "barely working" phones. Broken camera? Not a problem. Broken audio jack? No worries. Cracked screen? Meh. No battery life? Doesn't matter one bit.

I imagine it's pretty easy to acquire hundreds of barely working phone for cheap if you don't care about using them as a traditional mobile device.

Or buy working devices and harvest the unneeded parts for resale.

Can buy a used MacBook Air, sell the lcd assembly and keyboard/trackpad and already recover a big chunk of the cost. (If you needed an Apple device).

And once you start looking to acquire hundreds of phones, you can buy a lot of old phones on ebay or the like for something like $1 a phone or less. Most probably won't work, but at scale, you'll end up with enough that are good enough for something like a click farm.

Why would an emulated phone need 4-8GB of RAM? A $70 phone probably only has 1 or 2 GB.

Worst case scenario overhead. Aka my normal situation, because I'm too lazy to use solutions better than Bluestacks on Windows :D

>A 4 core i7 CPU

What year do you live in? These days even i3s come with 4 cores.

2014, the last year Intel made any good improvements to their ancient architecture.

Just ignore the "i7" part if it confuses you. I've not had a desktop in over a decade, so I'm talking about mobile chips 90% of the time.

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