[buu700]

If we broaden "desktop" to include laptops, and assuming we're talking about common/mid-range consumer devices rather than e.g. spec'd out gaming machines, GP's point seems to hold up.

It's still wild to me that the 2013 MacBook Pro that was my daily driver until recently is neck-and-neck on Geekbench with both my Pixel 5 (whose CPU is considered mid-range) and the old iPhone 7 that I use as a test device. It's decisively slower than every iPhone since version 8.

If we move ahead to modern desktops: it looks like iPhones have typically been only 20 - 25% slower than iPad Pros released in the same years, and this year's iPad Pro literally has a desktop processor in it (not even just a laptop processor, now that the iMac uses M1 too).

Based on that, in order for your claim to be true, the majority of the world outside the US would have to be using outdated or very low-end mobile devices and/or modern souped-up desktops that blow the average American's machine out of the water.

Some googling shows that a popular phone in India is the Redmi 8, which is pretty low-end even compared to the Pixel 5, and scores about half the 2013 MBP at multi-core and slightly above 25% at single-core. If the average owner of a phone like this also happened to own a modern (not 8-year-old) mid-range consumer laptop, I could see 4x being overly optimistic.