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Comment by froh42 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why such devices have such a "meh" processor. This thing has a worse one than my several year old OnePlus 5.

Don't know if it can do HDMI or DisplayPort output, but assuming that (and using a bluetooth keyboard and mouse) it might be a ultra-portable work machine for me, so I don't need to schlep my laptop around. But not with a meh processor, then it is only a phone with a keyboard.

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But a non-meh processor means less battery time. I'd prefer meh processor to meh battery life. Meh.

That's not necessarily true, if it remains clocked down most of the time and is using the low power 'little' cores the difference isn't going to be that significant.

Can someone expand on this? My anecdotal experience contradicts this and I don't know much about CPUs.

ARM chips are heterogenous, so while they may claim to have 8 cores, not all of those cores are the same. Some are low-power cores meant to save battery power, and the high power cores are only activated when necessary.

Plus regardless of that, just because a CPU is old doesn't mean it's more power efficient than a new one. If anything, it's usually the other way around.

edit: more info at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_big.LITTLE

For Linux device I would expect a system slider setting like "speed/battery".

I would prefer a better CPU and a power bank in my bag.

It depends on whether or not a person has a use case for a better cpu.

Part of the problem is they have been selling this phone for years. After constantly having his shipping date pushed back my friend was able to get his money back for his preorder back in 2017

Most SoC manufacturers are very user/developer hostile or just sloppy. It takes a long time to clean up the mess to the degree that you can run a decent OS.

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