Unless my phone can be a PC too, I don’t want to keep paying for extra perf

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Credit: Rita El Khoury / Android Authority



Opinion post by
Robert Triggs




When was the last time you felt your smartphone really couldn’t cope? I’m running last year’s Pixel 8 Pro — hardly a benchmark topper — as my daily driver, and just as silky smooth as the more powerful ASUS ROG Phone 9 Pro I’ve been using on the side. But even before that, I struggle to recall the last time an app jerked and juddered into life. Outside of a few niche use cases, smartphone power has been bountiful for a few years now, but to jump up another level, modern manufacturing is making it more and more expensive but with few real-world benefits. We might have already passed the point of diminishing returns, but we’re also paying more and more for the privilege.

This year’s Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite is a prime example; it offers significant leaps in benchmark performance but is said to be considerably more expensive than its predecessor. Likewise, MediaTek’s Dimensity 9400 commands a higher price tag too, yet you’ll struggle to tell a phone packing these chips apart from last year’s model when it’s in hand. Money thrown at higher benchmark scores could be spent on better cameras, newer battery tech, or anything else on your wishlist. Returning to the ROG, the baseline model has dropped the telephoto camera, no doubt to keep up with the spiraling costs of top-tier performance.

With reports that the next-gen Snapdragon 8 Elite 2 will be “significantly” more expensive once again, something has to give; be it higher price tags or sacrificing other key specs. But is that a trade-off any of us are really willing to make?

I’m all for extra performance, of course, but there has to be an opportunity to use it. There’s no point in splashing out on a sports car to plod around the inner-city, after all. For smartphones, you don’t need the latest and greatest chip to sail through your daily apps or even hit 60fps in demanding Android games. A further 20% or greater boost to peak smartphone performance feels academic at this point; it’s just not going to make one bit of difference to virtually every use case you could name. There’s more to high-end chips, of course, but you’d struggle to make the case that mainstream flagships are hinging their sales in niches like Wi-Fi 7 or barely finalized 5G technical releases, either.

A further 20% boost to peak performance feels academic at this point.

What these future high-end smartphones need is a compelling use case to leverage all this extra performance headroom. And no, I don’t think AI is the answer there. Consumers are lukewarm on it so far and today’s features run pretty well on modern and even slightly older hardware already.

Handheld gaming feels like an underutilized option — today’s flagships far outpace the beloved Nintendo Switch. But unless you’re willing to work around with Winlator or similar, you’re not playing modern AAA titles on your phone, while most classic emulators will run on a potato. Barring a major change in the fundamentals of Android/Linux and Arm gaming, future mobile GPUs are destined to remain underutilized.

That leaves the oft-promised but never truly realized pocket PC. I could certainly see myself using my handset for work if I could run a proper Linux desktop from my phone. Blowing up my docs and messaging apps on the big screen is already possible to an extent, but letting my phone’s processor rip at full tilt for image editing or managing my vast media library falls far short of a PC-like experience. With limitations like five concurrent apps and meager software options, Samsung Dex — the clear market leader here — has never quite lived up to that potential. I’m keen to see if Samsung can level up Dex with the more powerful Galaxy S25 series, but we’ve not heard anything about it in the new One UI 7 beta, and Linux on Dex is long buried.



Credit: Robert Triggs / Android Authority


Perhaps there’s hope that the meshing of Android and ChromeOS or the potential of running Debian apps on your phone as soon as Android 16 could open the door to a broader range of software and use cases that could stretch tomorrow’s high-end chips. Certainly, the Snapdragon 8 Elite is more than powerful enough to serve as a high-end tablet or even a mid-tier work laptop, where photo editing or compiling code could really make use of those beefy CPU cores. Strangely enough, though, we haven’t seen flagship mobile silicon making its way over to Chromebooks, which remains a predominantly AMD and Intel affair. And that points to another hurdle: Linux software support for Arm processors is passable, but even proper desktop support wouldn’t mean we can finally run our Steam library on our smartphones. But it would be a significant step towards catching that all-important developer’s attention.

Extra performance comes at higher and higher costs.

Still, big performance really needs a big display to make use of it, so even more smartphones would also need to embrace DisplayPort over USB-C to make the pocketable PC a real thing. There are a lot of moving parts, then, which makes it seem unlikely we’ll be making the most of these powerhouse chipsets anytime soon. With that in mind, there’s little point in buying a phone for future-proof performance.

Instead, perhaps Qualcomm’s rumored Snapdragon 8s Elite and other upper-mid-range chips will be more than sufficient for everyday smartphone performance and better suit our readers’ preferences for longer battery life and more affordable smartphones. Better battery life and a lid on prices constantly poll as your two most desirable features of a modern smartphone, and the features over power idea certainly seems to work well enough for Google’s Pixel. Whether other flagship OEMs will see things the same way is probably much less likely, but Redmi/Xiaomi’s general manager was surveying fans earlier this year as to whether they wanted to keep following “upstream” costs or make phones more affordable. So, consumers aren’t the only ones pondering the cost/benefit ratio of modern hardware.

The ChromeOS merger and running Debian apps on Android hints at future powerhouse use cases, but we'll have to see.

The days of a new phone feeling notably snappier than your previous model have been long gone anyway, yet it seems odd to be turning my nose up at overkill performance that we could barely imagine a decade ago. But it’s the compromises, particularly in terms of squeezing product costs, that are presenting the industry with a tough choice. If there are compromises to be made, I’d much rather take the more expensive cameras, cutting-edge battery cells, a no-compromise approach to build quality, or just a freeze on prices over the extra performance I cannot realize.

Until a compelling new use case comes along that makes my current smartphone splutter, I’m increasingly convinced manufacturers should take their foot off the throttle a little and settle for more modest yearly gains. They could even start really focusing on other hugely important and popular aspects of a great smartphone, like better battery life.






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