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Comment by pseudosavant | Hacker News Reader

I find it interesting that the Geekbench scores for the latest iPhone isn't mentioned. About the same performance as an iPhone 12. Yet, the Pixel 8 and iPhone 15 lines are price comparably.

Pixel 8 Pro: Single: 1760 Multi: 4442

iPhone 15 Pro: Single: 2894 Multi: 7192

iPhone 12: Single: 1995 Multi: 4401

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> Yet, the Pixel 8 and iPhone 15 lines are price comparably.

But this isn't how pricing works. Even if it did the CPU isn't the most expensive component in the bom, and it isn't the most important component for user experience.

The problem is that you can't easily and objectively factor the user experience. CPU are easy to benchmark — and do honestly factor a lot in the pricing. Android (the OS) development is payed for by other means, and the hardware line is kind of a vanity project.

People may, or may not prefer the Android experience. That's not relevant here.

At this point most of the reasons to buy a particular phone are inertial or emotional. A high end android phone and an iPhone both provide roughly the same functionality. I miss the times when new phones were more exciting.

I believe the parent comment was thinking about screen and camera quality, which can be benchmarked, contribute to the user experience and have significant costs.

Both of which are of high quality also on other phone in the same price range. That leave you with the CPU as a differentiator at the end, sad as it can be.

But it isn’t a differentiator if you can’t make people care about the difference.

With Apple and Google doing custom chips, I don't think that matters as much as people think anymore. Surely, a lot of functionality that used to be done in software is now done on chip. A generic benchmark isn't going to capture that.

Like what? What's the ML performance on this chip? Can it help with game? Or apps I'll use everyday? Does it improve the web experience? The last one depends largely on those CPU benchmark...

I want to be pragmatic here. Coprocessor were all the rage for the Amiga, then were out out of the loop, and were back for with the GPU. A bit like we're back to the mainframe experience with Kubernetes and all (don't throw tomatoes at me ;))

Yet an iphone 12 feels significantly slower.

Pixel 8 Pro: 12Gb ram

iPhone 15 Pro: 8Gb ram

iPhone 12: 4Gb ram

And now?

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