Theoretically, I would care. But in practice, I just took out an old budget android phone, gave it a go at browsing the web (news, images, and videos), and it seemed not to be noticeably slower than my much newer and pricier iPhone.
Benchmarks would probably show a great difference between the two, but my eyes can't tell.
My interest in this topic is mostly the same as the author of the post I linked, namely making sure that developers test and measure on lower-end devices to make sure they're not building sites which exclude key demographics. For example, a government site really needs to work well on the kinds of phones seniors get under the FCC Lifeline program.
But that is different from the observation of the beginning of this thread, which is that Geekbench scores don’t really reflect practical limitation of devices. A big difference in the score does not mean a noticeable difference in performance when doing everyday web browsing on the phone. An observation that my own experience echoes.
Even if I’m extra-tolerant (I don’t think I am), it would surprise me that a performance difference I can’t even notice is going to be so intolerable to another human being that they are excluded from using the website.
When it comes to governmental services on the internet, I think really the focus is on whether the site _works_ on all kinds of devices, which means whether the rendering and interactions are correct. Some can fail to render on a low budget phone, or if some button doesn’t work, etc. these are real problems but that is quite irrelevant to benchmarks.
The broader point wasn’t that you should buy an iPhone but simply that the reason to care about single core benchmarks is that browsers fit that profile. It’s still perfectly reasonable to conclude that’s good enough for the sites you use.
I also feel like there’s an interesting angle about ad blocking here since that probably matters more than multiple processor generations.
One factor which used to be under appreciated was battery degradation prior to that whole “Batterygate” flap back in 2016 where a lot of people learned that iOS throttled processor performance when the battery could no longer supply enough voltage for peak performance. That’s a lot more visible now so it’s less of a surprise than it used to be.
Most of the problem is that developers aren’t focused only on performance, so as the baseline hardware capacity increases the apps will slowly start to use more since very few people are going to spend time on something which seems fast enough.
That doesn’t happen all at once but it adds up over the half decade a phone will last. If you bought a phone and never updated anything, its performance would seem far more consistent … at least if you could avoid getting malware installed.
That third point is why I shared the link above: a lot of developers upgrade more frequently than average people and that means that our instincts for what seems fast enough might be missing things with our apps. That usually doesn’t mean things are unusable but it’s still polite to use your work on, say, the phone a senior citizen gets subsidized to make sure that you’re comfortable with that being the public face of your work.
(Bandwidth usage is at least as important here, too: use your website on 3G or ask how much it’d cost to use on a metered plan)
