Raw CPU performance, perhaps not. But people definitely do care about a specific set of user-facing, ML-driven functionality - think speech recognition, speech synthesis, realtime video filtering, and so on.
Many of these are only barely possible on "pre-neural" mobile ARM CPUs, and at a significant cost to power consumption. Developing for newer devices is like night and day.
Google's speech recognition is damn impressive, but I'm talking performance/power consumption, not "quality". Sticking a 2080 into an iPhone won't give you better speech recognition results, but it will give you bad results faster.
> > Many of these are only barely possible on "pre-neural" mobile ARM CPUs
> Speech recognition on my old Pixel 2
I don't think the Pixel 2 can be called "pre-neural". "[...] The PVC is a fully programmable image, vision and AI multi-core domain-specific architecture (DSA) for mobile devices and in future for IoT.[2] It first appeared in the Google Pixel 2 and 2 XL [...]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_Visual_Core
When speech recognition starts understanding European Portuguese without me playing stupid accent exercises, and mixed language sentences as well, then I will care about it.
Many of these are only barely possible on "pre-neural" mobile ARM CPUs, and at a significant cost to power consumption. Developing for newer devices is like night and day.