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A graph showing phone single-core performance on GeekBench 5 over the past decade. In 2013, the fastest iPhone (iPhone 5s) was just over 4.7x faster than a "budget" range Android device of the same vintage on single-core tasks, and 4.4x faster on multi-core. In 2023, the fastest iPhone continued to be ~5x faster for both single-core and multi-core workloads. The difference? The absolute gap has now grown from a mere 215 points (single core) to more than 1522 points, and it continues to grow. The experience of iOS devices now has nothing in common with Androids, and the wealthy users and developers who carry them make up only ~15% of the world-wide market, and never more than half of users in most wealthy geos. Building to the limits of what your iPhone can handle is _de facto_ exclusionary.

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A graph showing phone single-core performance on GeekBench 5 over the past decade. In 2013, the fastest iPhone (iPhone 5s) was just over 4.7x faster than a "budget" range Android device of the same vintage on single-core tasks, and 4.4x faster on multi-core. In 2023, the fastest iPhone continued to be ~5x faster for both single-core and multi-core workloads. The difference? The absolute gap has now grown from a mere 215 points (single core) to more than 1522 points, and it continues to grow. The experience of iOS devices now has nothing in common with Androids, and the wealthy users and developers who carry them make up only ~15% of the world-wide market, and never more than half of users in most wealthy geos. Building to the limits of what your iPhone can handle is _de facto_ exclusionary.
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Alex Russell (slightlyoff@toot.cafe)'s status on Tuesday, 05-Dec-2023 01:37:14 JST Alex Russell

A decade ago, a tribe of JS partisans took the web by the reins, forked HTML and JS syntax, and yeeted userland abstractions into the critical path because "a better user experience".
This was premised on the idea that everyone's CPUs/networks would get faster the way their top-end phones did.
They could not have been more wrong.
JS-first web development has been a planetary-scale exercise in the rich making life harder for the less well-off.
https://httparchive.org/reports/state-of-javascript#bytesJs
https://infrequently.org/2022/12/performance-baseline-2023/

In conversation about a year ago from toot.cafe permalink