They already are, though. They sure won’t run many games, but any mid tier smartphone should perform relatively well compared to a computer from five or ten years ago.

In fact, several Lumia devices run Windows 11. Not Windows Phone, just plain old Windows 11. When you run ARM applications in them, they just work. And those things haven’t been sold since Windows Phone died!

The challenge is the ARM <-> amd64 translation step. There are tricks that can at least perform the system API calls at native speeds, but application code itself still needs to be emulated.

An iPhone is easily as fast as a modern laptop and I bet if Apple wouldn’t be so stuck up their own ass you’d be able to run applications in Wine just fine on there, even without hardware acceleration like on macs. Unfortunately, Apple’s competitors in mobile CPU land don’t come close to what Apple manages to produce in terms of raw performance.