A modern smartphone is millions of times more powerful than the computer that guided Apollo 11 to the Moon.

The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) was developed in the early 1960s by the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory. It operated at a clock speed of approximately 1.024 MHz and featured only 2,048 words of RAM and 36,864 words of read-only memory. In contrast, a modern high-end smartphone chip like the Apple A17 Pro or Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 operates at speeds exceeding 3 GHz. This represents a processing speed increase of over 3,000 times based on clock cycles alone.The difference in memory is even more staggering. The AGC had about 4 kilobytes of RAM, while a typical smartphone today has 8 gigabytes or more. This means your phone has roughly 2 million times more memory than the computer that landed humans on the lunar surface. Furthermore, the AGC used 'core rope memory' which was literally woven by hand by workers at Raytheon. Modern chips use photolithography to etch billions of transistors onto a single silicon die.The AGC was designed for one specific purpose: calculating orbital trajectories and managing the lunar module's descent. It lacked a graphical interface and instead used a 'DSKY' unit where astronauts entered numerical verbs and nouns. Today, the graphics processing unit (GPU) in a phone can perform trillions of floating-point operations per second (FLOPS). This allows for real-time artificial intelligence and 4K video editing that would have been unimaginable to NASA engineers in 1969.