Art of doubt

2025-11-25

Alex Russell published his annual The Performance Inequality Gap, 2026. Must read for everyone in the webdev industry. It would be interesting to see data for regional markets, but I'm not aware of publicly available work like that.

His recommendations for hardware to test web apps are brutal:

Regarding devices, my updated recommendations are the Samsung Galaxy A24 4G (or equivalent) and the HP 14. The goal of these recommendations is to emulate a 75th percentile user experience, meaning a full quarter of devices and networks will perform worse than this baseline.

That HP 14 laptop?

Intel Celeron N4500 (1.1GHz) Processor
4GB DDR4-2933 RAM
Intel UHD Graphics Integrated Graphics
64GB eMMC Storage