We’ve come a long way, guys. The best possible laptop you could buy from Apple in 2005 scored around 1000 on Geekbench, a popular performance-testing program. The A6 chip in the newest iPhone 5 demolishes that number by a fair margin.
The 17-inch PowerBook — the last of the line that preceded the current MacBook lineage — weighed 3kg and was an inch think, costing over $2500. The iPhone 5 is less than one-third of an inch thick and weighs 112 grams. Geekbench numbers now hitting the web show that the iPhone 5’s A6 chip delivers a score of 1600. It also costs less than one-tenth of what a flagship PowerBook would cost you back then. It’s a synthetic benchmark, sure, but there’s nothing artificial about the fact that we now walk with computers in our pockets that once filled desktops. That used to be the stuff of science fiction. [MacRumors via Daring Fireball]