NASA Comp vs. iPhone

How Do NASA's Apollo Computers Stack Up to an iPhone?

Better than you might think.

By David Grossman

Yes, the modern smartphone is more powerful than the computer used by NASA during the Apollo mission, but that overlooks how impressive the Apollo computers actually were. For starters, there wasn't just one computer, there were four.

NASA's computers, specifically the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC), were at least ten years ahead of their time from a commercial tech perspective—their strength unmatched until a decade later with the advent of computers like the Apple II. Youtuber Curious Droid works through the misconceptions and gets to how impressive these computers really were.

While an iPhone does have more computing power than all of NASA had during the Apollo days, the AGC, designed at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, had one crucial advantage: it was crash-proof. Operating systems that we're familiar with today, like Apple iOS and Android, control the computer and dole out energy and attention to various programs. In the AGC, the programs controlled the computer in a hierarchical structure, and a program's specific importance would dictate how much attention it got. In the case of an emergency, this would allow for a quicker focus on crucial systems.

So while the iPhone beats the AGC in sheer power several thousand times over, there's still that chance of a freeze. If you had to go back to the Moon with an Apollo craft, you probably could transfer the necessary programs onto an app. After all, the AGC's code is now up on GitHub. But given the chance of a freeze, be it from an unexpected update or random chance, it might be safer to dust off the gold suitcase that got NASA there in the first place.