iPhone: More Powerful than the iMac

Posted by: Arik Hesseldahl on May 08

I never thought of it this way, but Dan Frommer over at Silicon Alley Insider has done an interesting comparison between the decade-old iMac and the iPhone. The short version? The iPhone wins on most metrics. It has a faster processor, more memory, and even more storage capacity, and far outdistances the specs of the original 1984 Mac. Send it back in time and an iPhone, would have more than enough power to guide the moon landing, provided NASA had a copy of the SDK.

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Reader Comments

Steve Wozniak

May 8, 2008 05:02 PM

Why would this be such a revelation? When comparing the iPhone, a device using 2008 technology, and the original 1984 Mac, of course iPhone has far better specs. The two devices are 24 years apart in terms of technology. Guess what, comparing the iPhone to an Apple IIe during the same era will result in "far [more] outdistances [in] the specs" (Hesseldahl) Back in the 1960s, probably all the computing power in the whole world just barely matches a 2008 Hallmark card that contains an ASIC to play some predefined tune.

Steven

May 14, 2008 01:57 AM

It's a revelation because, even though for those of us who are tech-savvy it only makes sense, for most folks it is completely counterintuitive that something you can place in your shirt pocket today would be so much more powerful than a desktop computer, even a 24-year-old one. And sometimes even the geeks (who never seem to be satisfied with anything) need a reminder of how far we've come.

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A blog on the daily doings of Apple and the many companies in its orbit, with insight and analysis by two longtime Apple-watchers BusinessWeek Senior Writer Peter Burrows and BusinessWeek.com Senior Technology Writer Arik Hesseldahl.

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