The average vape has more processing power than Voyager, and the iPhone is orders of magnitude more complex. With that said, it takes skilled engineers to squeeze perfectly crafted code into such a tiny platform from the 70s.
After reading some details about the Voyager, I have my doubts that a disposable vape has more computation power [1]. Maybe the higher end devices with programable displays and temperature settings?
[1] https://www.eejournal.com/article/voyagers-1-and-2-take-embe...
Crazy that we have disposable one use electronics now.
This silicon and lithium could be used for much much better things and recycled as well, than a few puffs of a substance only meant to make people addicted.
The Voyager had a custom-designed processor (well, several) that were basically computers made out of basic logic chips (74xx series); see details here https://www.eejournal.com/article/voyagers-1-and-2-take-embe...
Either way, it's clear that we (well, JPL) can build extremely powerful and sophisticated systems with relatively small computers, suggesting that resource constraints can sometimes be a source of stability and creativity.
This was not unusual at the time: many early arcade games were made exactly the same way. They've even been emulated by the MAME project.