> Call, text, scroll social media, take photos, or make Google searches. That kind of stuff. None of those activities require powerful hardware, so I will never understand why some smartphones need processors more powerful than the damn PC I'm typing this on.
They don't "require" it per se, but the power does help. Apps will load and start faster, scrolling social media will stutter less, more processing can be applied on photos to make them look better, more processing can be done locally to avoid latency, and everything will be generally more responsive. More powerful hardware doesn't only serve compute-intensive tasks, it helps for everything. If you have money to spare, it's worth it.
So what happens is that phone A has a latency of 0.2s to perform a task and people are like, that's fine. Then phone B comes out with a latency of 0.05s and people are like, oh, that's so snappy, I love it, so they buy that. Then developers are like, we know 0.2s was fine, so we've got 0.15s of budget to add some features. It's kind of a vicious circle, because every step is logical: it's logical for people to buy faster devices to get snappier operation, and it's logical for developers to use the margin between snappy and slow to add new features.
TBH, if we could freeze all hardware development at all levels for a few years, it would do wonders for software and I think we'd ultimately come out ahead, but we all know that's never going to happen.
