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Comment by parkersweb | Hacker News Reader

True - exactly why my wife chose one earlier this year. Her main criteria was "it has to fit in my back pocket" - which meant 4.5" screen. There's so few of those devices in the modern smartphone market - and yet I wonder why? I'd happily keep my phone small if it didn't mean compromising on performance...

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Performance gets mentioned a lot, and I'm curious what people are doing with their phones that demands so much of it.

Is the iPhone suddenly everyone's preferred device for playing Fortnite or something?

considering how popular "webapps" (monstrosities with 5M+ of compressed javascript) are, you need a powerful CPU even if all you're doing is browsing.

The A9 seems to still be up to the task, despite being nowhere near as powerful as what's in these newer phones.

It may not always be that way, I admit. But I'm not sure that my Stockholm syndrome with respect to the ad industry has developed to the point that I'm willing to spend hundreds of extra dollars on additional hardware and data plan to solve a problem that I could solve for free with an ad blocker.

True, but Apple likes to keep products around for a long time, unlike other phone makers. Their latest and greatest high end monstrosity comes with premium performance and a premium price tag. Meanwhile Apple is plenty happy to sell you their flagship from two or three years ago a more budget-oriented option.

Do you not use the modern web?

I used a Moto G 2015 until earlier this year. With Firefox and uBlock Origin, browsing didn't seem slow to me at all. I browse a lot of sites but not a lot of webapps. I used native apps (Slide and Materialistic) for this site and for reddit.

I haven’t noticed lag in Safari or apps in general on my iPod Touch from 2015

I also wonder. I play Hearthstone on my phone, and I plan on playing other resource-intensive (or poorly programmed) Unity games (Magic Arena when it goes out).

I do know of people that play Fortnite, but they have to be in the minority... (actually 3 million reviews means it's not a small minority!)

While I haven't owned a statistically significant number of different smartphones, the lower-end Android devices I've owned have seemed poorly tested - especially for problems that skirt the dividing line between the phone developer's responsibility and the app developer's responsibility.

For example, I once had a device where Skype would only use the rear-facing camera. Another device received a software update which couldn't be installed as the internal storage had been consumed by updates to apps like Facebook that were _impossible to uninstall_.

Flagship products seem to receive marginally more testing; I speculate phone companies' employees mostly dogfood the flagship models.

I think the things people notice most are fast fingerprint recognition for unlock, app launch times particularly the camera, and visual effects and post-processing in photography. Face unlock on the X also takes a lot of horsepower.

It will be interesting to see how noticeable the performance improvements fit older models in OSX 12 will be. My 6s is very noticeably faster than my wife’s 6+ so I’m hoping hers gets a bit of a speed bump.

> There's so few of those devices in the modern smartphone market - and yet I wonder why

Battery life. Physically, phones are mostly battery. Smaller phone = smaller battery.

Smaller phone = smaller screen = doesn't need as large a battery. The SE has a smaller battery than the 6S, yet equal or better battery life in every category.

Same here.

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