Remember what phones were like a decade ago?

Ten years back, Apple's lineup was the iPhone 7, while Android had the Huawei Mate 9, Samsung Galaxy S7 edge, Xiaomi MIX, and more.

Back then, the chip to beat was the A10, and Android flagships ran on the Snapdragon 820, Kirin 960, and the like. As for memory, flagships typically packed 4GB, while some lower-spec models made do with 2GB.

Compare that to today: pit the A20 Pro against the A10, or the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 against the Snapdragon 820, and raw performance has jumped roughly 40-fold. On the memory side, many phones now offer 16GB—versus 2–4GB back then—a 4-to-8-fold increase.

Suffice it to say, phone performance has undergone earth-shaking changes over the past decade, reaching an entirely different level.

Yet if you've used a phone from ten years ago and then pick up a current model, you'll notice something odd: despite the massive performance gains, the phone doesn't feel much smoother. It still lags when it should, and when stacked against new rivals, the smoothness gap isn't all that dramatic either.

So the question is: what's the point of this staggering performance growth, and why do phones still lag when they should? Is upgrading performance just a tax on the gullible?

The truth is, performance gains are real—and so is the lack of perceived smoothness. The reason boils down to one thing: our demands on phones have changed.

As phone performance grows stronger, our very definition of what a phone should be keeps shifting, and that in turn reshapes the entire phone ecosystem.

Take WeChat, for example. The old WeChat app had an installation package of just 400KB—simple chatting was all it needed. But today's WeChat? The iOS package is nearly 1,000MB, and the Android one close to 300MB—hundreds of times larger than before.

Its functions have transformed just as dramatically. WeChat has become a super app, with chatting now its smallest feature. Do all these added functions consume chip performance and memory? Absolutely.

Another example: for phones in the past, 8 megapixels was already impressive. One camera was all you needed, there wasn't much algorithmic enhancement, and photos were generated directly—so they barely taxed the phone's performance.

But now? Triple rear cameras, even quad cameras, 200-megapixel sensors. After you take a photo, it isn't simply saved as-is—it goes through AI noise reduction, HDR light-and-shadow reconstruction, edge sharpening, color calibration, and a whole chain of subsequent algorithms before finally landing in your album. The file is dozens of times larger than before, eating up more storage, and the chip has to crunch all of it along the way.

The examples are endless. Compare apps from ten years ago with today's—look at their size and functionality—and you'll understand. All that extra performance is being consumed by these functions and apps.

In tech circles, there's a commonly cited principle: Andy and Bill's Law—the performance hardware gains will always be slowly eaten away by software. It holds true for phones and for computers alike.

So it's not that performance improvements are useless. Rather, as performance rises, phone system features multiply, the phone's own capabilities improve, and the ecosystem upgrades—all of which slowly consume that performance again, leaving you feeling it's about the same as before.