Not saying this applies, but: The speed of the raspberry pi goes up dramatically when using a fast USB disk instead of micro SD. Most people start with a micro SD, and I had no idea how much faster a Pi could go.
my 2¢: if external storage is not an option for some reason, dropping ext4 in favor for F2FS will do a lot of good for sparing your sdcard from early death (due to superblock updates happening every so often), if not for performance due to ext4 not being flash-aware by design.
If that's not an option AND your setup has no power issues (e.g. it has good power supply, externally powered usb hub etc), disabling journalling might also improve performance: tune2fs -O ^has_journal /dev/sdaXXX (can't do it on mounted fs, so either do it from initram consolee, do pivot_root to minimal fs in ram, or do it from another machine)
The Pi's a bit limited due to its pretty terrible I/O performance, finicky power system and the insistance on sticking with old broadcom chips.
The broadcom thing made sense to begin with, they got a great deal on the pricing. But with the likes of the Rock Pro being pretty much on a price parallel now (and higher performing) it no longer makes sense.
It really doesn't. Cheap phones have browsed the web just fine for a long time, now. Raspberry Pi makes some weird hardware choices and have been suffering from it for a while. The insistence on SD cards (other manufacturers support eMMC or m.2 or both, and while RPi5 does now this has been the case elsewhere for A While) is the biggest problem with overall perf, including browsers.
I would expect the boards with the RK3588 to still be more pleasant to use than an RPi5, but the RPi5, used with an m.2 drive, should be significantly better.
I have a Moto G...something, at least five years old, sitting on my desk. It normally acts as a teleprompter. I opened up Chrome, turned on desktop site mode, and started browsing, and gotta be honest: it was fine. If nothing else, if absolutely nothing else, it could scroll a web page without stuttering, and a Raspberry Pi 4 has never been able to do that in any configuration I ever tested.
How is MicroSD weird? A microSD card 1) is available at Officeworks etc, and 2) doesn't require soldering so imaging the OS can be done before your RasPi even arrives on your Windows/Mac computer.
In contrast eMMC is soldered onto the board, while the m.2 didn't even exist back in 2012 when the first RasPi launched.
It's not that SD cards don't have advantages, it's that they also have noted disadvantages in terms of speed and reliability, particularly when you factor in that people don't always buy the high end models.
In a time when computer programs habitually assume fast storage, running your operating system and primary runtime on a microSD card is weird. Even "fast" microSD storage usually isn't unless you buy cards that cost as much as the SBC in the first place. If you want some perf in the SD form factor you go to the full-size card--that's one reason cameras still use them--but even there you encounter pretty hard limits, which is why higher-end cameras have also gone to SSD-over-USB-C and CFExpress Type B.
eMMC does not have to be soldered-on, either; the Orange Pi 5+ has a swappable eMMC module.
It's being reviewed on youtube positively in this regard. If you're reluctant, it wouldn't hurt to wait a few weeks and see what the reviewers who were not favored with prerelease hardware have to say about it.
You'd expect the experience to get better since people have been testing with prerelease software as well, but... we'll see.
