[phonon]

> most low- and mid-range phones sold in 2021 have slower hardware with fewer features than my 2014-era flagship phone.

Unlikely. Top of the line then was a Note 4; 3 GB RAM, 32 GB storage, Snapdragon 805 quad-core (Geekbench 5 score--around 154/449).

Mid-range now--

Motorola One 5G Ace, $349 https://www.amazon.com/Motorola-battery-Unlocked-Camera-Silv...

6 GB RAM, 128 GB storage, Geekbench 5 score 660/1888

PLUS 5 G

So-2x RAM, 4x storage, 4x CPU + 5G.

At about half of the price of the Note 4 when it came out.

[csnover]

I think you’re probably right about the performance (though I did typo ‘2021’ instead of ‘2020’, so the specific model you mention wasn’t available at the time). I do remember feeling very surprised that contemporary mid-range phones seemed to have worse benchmarks on PassMark, but my old phone model (Galaxy S5) seems to be conspicuously absent as I look again, so I wonder if there was a data issue. It’s also possible that I misread something, or that the devices I was looking at weren’t representative of the best of the mid-range market at the time due to carrier restrictions and essential-to-me features (e.g. headphone jack) that have been getting cut from newer phones.

In any case, I regret bringing this specific point up, both because I try not to say things which are inaccurate, but also because I feel like it has distracted from the main point: my old phone did everything that most people do on their phones (phone calls, chats, video streaming, music streaming, web browsing, light gaming) with no performance/memory/storage problems, had a (subjectively) better feature set than many more recent models, and the only reason I had to buy a new one anyway was because the manufacturer made it impossible to keep the software up-to-date.