You're correct. Ultimately 99% of the stuff you do on a phone is identical to 10 years ago. I know exactly 0 zero phone gamers. I do know some who play, like, the pokemon trading card game.
Cameras have improved, but less than you think. Most of the improvement is in low-light, but in well lit scenes we actually sort of peaked 10 years ago. It's gotten slightly worse now, believe it nor not.
But you can't legitimately run a phone from 10 years ago, because while everything is the same, the software uses 100x as many resources. That sort of tricks people into thinking "oh it must be doing so much more!"
But... is it? Think back. Instagram 10 years ago, YouTube 10 years ago. Yeah... it's basically the same. Some argue they've regressed. I'm sure we've more than 10x the code size, but nobody sees that.
Web browsers have also gotten much more complex, but again, you won't notice it. We have a lot more fringe web APIs like webusb but like... the regular web browsing experience for 99% of tasks is identical.
I think there have been some niceities in web apis like webgpu, websocket, webrtc, PWAs. But they are limited in weird ways, and the fingerprinting has never been worse
Cameras have improved, but less than you think. Most of the improvement is in low-light, but in well lit scenes we actually sort of peaked 10 years ago. It's gotten slightly worse now, believe it nor not.
But you can't legitimately run a phone from 10 years ago, because while everything is the same, the software uses 100x as many resources. That sort of tricks people into thinking "oh it must be doing so much more!"
But... is it? Think back. Instagram 10 years ago, YouTube 10 years ago. Yeah... it's basically the same. Some argue they've regressed. I'm sure we've more than 10x the code size, but nobody sees that.
Web browsers have also gotten much more complex, but again, you won't notice it. We have a lot more fringe web APIs like webusb but like... the regular web browsing experience for 99% of tasks is identical.