Since my primary computer is a 2008 MacBook Pro with a Core 2 Duo and 6 gigs of memory, I wanted to see if a Pi 4 with 8 gigs would be an improvement. Of course

Since my primary computer is a 2008 MacBook Pro with a Core 2 Duo and 6 gigs of memory, I wanted to see if a Pi 4 with 8 gigs would be an improvement. Of course, I'm not using an SD card for primary storage - I'm using a USB attached SSD. For many things, it is definitely faster: compiling, ffmpeg, running lots of shells with lots of scrolling in the background, interactive use with high loads. For browsing, it was definitely slower. Firefox on ARM is significantly slower than Safari on a Core 2 Duo, even when Firefox has more and faster memory and has four real cores. I eventually decided to build my Pi in to a 1U case with two mirrored 8 TB disks and a serial console, and colocate it. It makes for an excellent, low power server.