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Comment by anon373839 | Hacker News Reader

I've got an old MacBook Pro from 2013 that I still keep around because the keyboard is the best Apple ever made. It's not fast by any means, but I haven't encountered any difficulty with websites whatsoever. They're not as snappy as I'd expect on new hardware, but perfectly usable. I do use uBlock Origin, however.

Are these Androids actually less powerful than an 11 year-old, base-spec MacBook?

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> Are these Androids actually less powerful than an 11 year-old, base-spec MacBook?

Yes. Definitely. a Macbook Pro from 2013 has between 4-16GB of memory for one thing. The lowest spec phone in the article (Itel P32) has 1GB. A 2013 Macbook Pro has a 4th gen i5 processor. This phone has a MediaTek MT6580. It's not even in the same ballpark.

This is a bit of an extreme example, but the fact is that a very large number of people in many areas of the world use phones like these.

Additionally, weak Android devices are not necessarily old Android devices. New underpowered Android stuff is sold every day. Cheap tablets are particularly bad about this — I have a Lenovo tablet that I bought maybe a year ago which uses a SoC that benches a bit above a 2015 Apple A9.

$50 android phones are still sold in developing countries and they usually have an MT6580 or UMS312 with 720p screen.

I was forced to use an old 2011 (IIRC) MacBook Air in 2020 (my replacement BTO MacBook Pro was stuck in China due to the pandemic), and the OS and local apps were fine and reasonably snappy, but oh boy, the web sucked so bad. Slow slow slow. Couldn't open more than 3 or 4 tabs of "modern" websites (HN was fine, yay). Virtually unusable. I was shocked.

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