This is important for developers to know about because if you use a recent iPhone your experience is not just fundamentally better than any Android user's but it's especially significant compared to the kinds of cheaper phones many people buy. Look at the chart here: a Galaxy S22 is comparable to the iPhone XS which shipped 4 years earlier but even the S22 towers over the Moto E30 & other budget phones.
https://infrequently.org/2022/12/performance-baseline-2023/#...
Only thing that would make extra performance matter are video games and I don't play those on phone.
Theoretically, I would care. But in practice, I just took out an old budget android phone, gave it a go at browsing the web (news, images, and videos), and it seemed not to be noticeably slower than my much newer and pricier iPhone.
Benchmarks would probably show a great difference between the two, but my eyes can't tell.
My interest in this topic is mostly the same as the author of the post I linked, namely making sure that developers test and measure on lower-end devices to make sure they're not building sites which exclude key demographics. For example, a government site really needs to work well on the kinds of phones seniors get under the FCC Lifeline program.
But that is different from the observation of the beginning of this thread, which is that Geekbench scores don’t really reflect practical limitation of devices. A big difference in the score does not mean a noticeable difference in performance when doing everyday web browsing on the phone. An observation that my own experience echoes.
Even if I’m extra-tolerant (I don’t think I am), it would surprise me that a performance difference I can’t even notice is going to be so intolerable to another human being that they are excluded from using the website.
When it comes to governmental services on the internet, I think really the focus is on whether the site _works_ on all kinds of devices, which means whether the rendering and interactions are correct. Some can fail to render on a low budget phone, or if some button doesn’t work, etc. these are real problems but that is quite irrelevant to benchmarks.
The broader point wasn’t that you should buy an iPhone but simply that the reason to care about single core benchmarks is that browsers fit that profile. It’s still perfectly reasonable to conclude that’s good enough for the sites you use.
I also feel like there’s an interesting angle about ad blocking here since that probably matters more than multiple processor generations.
One factor which used to be under appreciated was battery degradation prior to that whole “Batterygate” flap back in 2016 where a lot of people learned that iOS throttled processor performance when the battery could no longer supply enough voltage for peak performance. That’s a lot more visible now so it’s less of a surprise than it used to be.
Most of the problem is that developers aren’t focused only on performance, so as the baseline hardware capacity increases the apps will slowly start to use more since very few people are going to spend time on something which seems fast enough.
That doesn’t happen all at once but it adds up over the half decade a phone will last. If you bought a phone and never updated anything, its performance would seem far more consistent … at least if you could avoid getting malware installed.
That third point is why I shared the link above: a lot of developers upgrade more frequently than average people and that means that our instincts for what seems fast enough might be missing things with our apps. That usually doesn’t mean things are unusable but it’s still polite to use your work on, say, the phone a senior citizen gets subsidized to make sure that you’re comfortable with that being the public face of your work.
(Bandwidth usage is at least as important here, too: use your website on 3G or ask how much it’d cost to use on a metered plan)
As a web browser has become a general purpose VM, it has capabilities far surpassing what is needed at least 50% the time, I'd go as high as 90% of the time personally. Which is great that we have a magical run anything anywhere VM, but it's a double edge sword of the performance, security and privacy issues that come along with it.
If there was a well defined subset of functionality that browsers presented as the default "web enclave" and then opening up all the bells and whistles further was an opt in choice, a large chunk of those issues would go away. But that requires a bunch of people to agree on what that subset should include and the horror of trying to keep it updated over time. And that's _everyone_, including users putting up with "opting in" rather than everything just working.
I'm not sure I can see a subset of features becoming the default approach, at least until there is some horrible self propagating browser worm that impacts a large percentage of the world (or maybe by the 2nd or 3rd time, we will have had enough).
What about buying a ticket and it failing at the last step because your browser determined that js was unneeded?
Basically have to keep giant lists of what js actually enhances the people experience vs just being useful to the publisher.
It’s cool and all for Apple to have an edge in single core performance but it doesn’t matter all that much in the real world and the s23 is objectively the faster phone.
Do you have any reproducible test results showing that or are you just asserting tribal loyalty? I jest, we all know the answer.
You might want to read up on how iOS and Android differ in key ways: native code versus JIT, garbage collection versus ARC, and all of the system level differences for how many things can run in the background as well as quickly apps can save and restore state - faster CPUs and SSDs allows iOS to be more aggressive there, too, and developers can tune more aggressively because they have fewer, more consistent configurations to support.
Also consider it from the perspective of the engineering trade offs that the manufacturers make. More RAM means lower battery life and a higher price, and consumers are also sensitive to both of those. Apple controls their stack so tightly that they designed a custom SoC and market-leading CPU, and they measure the user experience very closely since that’s a lot of what they’re selling — if there really was a gap, adding more RAM would be one of the easiest ways to close it. Similarly, Samsung wouldn’t make every phone they make have lower battery life and cost more if that only benefited a small percentage of users. They’re making different choices because they have different systems but both of them watch this stuff closely.
Apple hardware is just that much better, it is not about the software stack.
(And, yes, I should have said “Java's GC vs. ARC” since that tends to have higher peaks)
Reference counting is a GC algorithm.
Thanks, I knew that Android had native code support but I've always heard that described as something mostly used by games.
> Reference counting is a GC algorithm.
Yes, I should have been pedantic and written “Java's GC” since the point was that historically it's tended to trade RAM for performance. The classic complaint I've heard from our mobile developers was that Objective-C forced you to focus more on memory management.
Faster performance today means longer lasting tomorrow.
I wish this was true for my old Android phone. I still have a OnePlus5 lying in my drawer, which still has stellar performance, but doesn't get any new software features.
My experience was mixed: it works great, even my banking app. *Except* for the camera. The default camera app took blurry pictures; Google Cam from the app store cropped significantly from the preview; and the custom Google Cam made for OnePlus 6 couldn't use the front camera.
No amount of tweaking gave me anything close to what the original OS had.
In the end my phone's camera is one of the most important features, so I got a new one.
Of course the manufacturer could just choose to screw you over by not updating/not letting you update your self. But I mean there’s no way to account for bad behavior on the part of manufacturers (other than not doing business with them anymore of course).
My wife upgraded from same to iphone 14 pro max and is seriously questioning what's so great that it's such a bulky device.
And more importantly to me, longer lasting tomorrow tends to mean longer official OS support. At least for Apple devices.
Exactly. I use a 2nd gen iPhone SE, and a big reason I bought it was that it had the then-beefy A13 chip despite being a “budget model”.
It’s now nearly 3 years old and still feels like a brand new phone.
The hardest thing is the strain the whole experience puts on my relationships. I already used up all my fiancé’s patience with my chronic melancholy about my perfectly functional but ultimately doomed phone; and end of life hasn't even happened yet.
Seeing iOS 12.5.7 was bittersweet, a glimmer of hope, a reason to hold on.
I would have agreed with you on the fingerprints being superior, but I have to say that I really can’t say anything bad about the face scanner. It is fast and accurate and very rarely fails (which would be the same with fingerprints, you may have gloves on, or your hands are dirty, etc)
Like if I'm using the map, it's swipe up from near the bottom to open nav options or swipe up from slightly below that to open app switcher; keep in mind I'm probably doing this hastily at a red light. Lock screen is swipe up to unlock but also to look at notifications. Home screen is swipe down for notifications or control center, depending on which side, I always forget.
Facial unlock has a hard time with my glasses. I have to input my pin half the time. If I'm driving, I can't look at my phone. Also idk why it has to auto-lock immediately like I'm paranoid; there used to be a setting to delay auto-locking for 30min unless I press the lock button myself.
This is a bad compromise that didn't need to happen; I should just be able to plug headphones into my phone. In the end, I took my old iPhone 5 and left it in the car for playing music. It's the better phone.
They drastically increased RAM recently: https://9to5mac.com/2022/12/31/iphone-ram-list/
Now if you want general ref counting you have to use atomic counters, and those will trash your performance on modern machines beyond fixing. And then we didn’t even mention that big object graphs will have to be recursively freed, an overhead that can’t be amortized in this case. Oh and you do need a tracing step one way or another to free cycles.
Unfortunately this can be hardly retrofitted to other OSs since it requires cooperation from the apps.
I am sure I would notice something if I were to play games or do something graphical.
The speed thing is balanced out by UI tweaks and things like the Apple Watch that I still use. Unfortunately it was a dumb silly situation where I bought a novelty phone that I actually REALLY enjoy using... and then I don't wanna get rid of my iphone haha.
Edit: Another unfair comparison - the Google Nest app is ludicrously slow on my iPhone.
Every flagship iPhone since 2011 has gotten at least five years of OS updates, with some of the more recent models getting six years. Security updates extend past that.
When my iPhone 6s received iOS 15, it didn't get the coolest stuff and the device performance was already less than decent. Even if the iOS itself wasn't slowing it down, the apps for iOS were made with expectation of higher performance.
> Six years is an awfully long life span for a mobile device, and certainly puts the 6S in the running for the longest supported phone to date. The iPhone 5S was five years old when it got its last OS update with iOS 12 but wasn’t eligible for iOS 13. On the Android side, Samsung has made recent moves to improve its device longevity by offering four years of security support for some of its phones. But six years of OS updates and security support puts the 6S in an entirely different league.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/8/22523351/ios-15-iphone-6s-...
It even turned into a huge scandal of "Apple deliberately slowing down old iPhones" which was portrayed as if Apple is doing it to make you buy a new iPhone.
An aged battery will show big voltage drops under load. What was looking like a fine and dandy voltage (voltage is used to infer state of charge) can suddenly plummet. It can get so bad that your phone might even shut down because it starts to undervolt.
So, choosing between the lesser of two evils, iOS throttles down max. power draw, and thus max. processing speed, when the battery ages. The alternative would be random shutdowns, or your battery jumping from 80 to 8% suddenly.
In settings -> battery -> health & charging you can check in which regime you are.
On most phones you realize that when an old phone goes from 15%, you do something CPU intensive and the phone dies seconds later.
So it's reasonable to lower the peak power use on older batteries to lengthen battery life and make it more stable. Generally battery life increases when you are gentle. Charge slowly (which results in lower temps), avoid charging over 90% or discharging below 10%, and decrease the peak loads.
My XS is currently at 74% of initial capacity (it tells you this too, which is really nice), and I don't even have the option to enable throttling yet, so it must not kick in until things get really dire
But!
I'm not complaining. It's an almost 6 year old device. That means, for every year of usage, I payed roughly 200€, or 16€ per month. That's not too shabby, tbh.
Though I agree that battery health hasn't been super important to performance. But resetting the phone can do wonders
Almost all apps run well with the exception of Google's, which have consistently gotten worse. The camera still starts up quickly, and the fact that most apps are still performant compared to an iPhone 13 is impressive.
Google Docs is unusable - even small documents can't be opened, and the app hangs when opened more than half the time. Google Maps keeps adding misc features which adds significantly to startup time and responsiveness.
Where apple does do well is supporting devices for much longer with software and security updates. So running older android phones is prob not a good ideas from a security perspective.
only if CPU performance plateaus in future generations. as long as new phones keep having drastically better performance, apps will keep updating to use it.
maybe less relevant in android, where phones generally have a wide spread of capabilities. but in iphone land, where most people are on the two most recent generations, you're always going to find developers assuming you have more processing power than you actually do if you're not on the latest generation.
For example I might consider: 1. Does it run Android? 2. Physically size- does it come in not obnoxiously large? 3. Does it support NFC payments? (surprisingly this still isn't a given) 4. Adequate performance 5. Camera quality 6. Screen quality 7. Battery life 8. Price 9. Community ROM support 10. Community Linux distro support 11. Can it run a desktop when connected to a usb-c screen 12. Geekbench
Only if everything else is equal would it make my decision
If not, unacceptable. Ergo, all iPhones are unacceptable. (Yes, I used to work at EO, running the GO PenPoint Operating System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PenPoint_OS?useskin=vector , and also worked at GRiD, putting wireless LAN into the GRiDPAD RC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRiDPad?useskin=vector. I like pens. I might be biased.)
All modern touch screen phones are compatible with a stylus. I'm sure it would be harder to find one that isn't. The accuracy may not be the best on budget models.
Unless you mean _is a stylus / pen included with the phone_?
Samsung has some phones that have the necessary screen support for their styluses, sometimes even if the phone didn't come with one, but that's only in very few models.
I can currently use the Apple Pencil as a _dumb stylus / pen_ on my iPhone 2022 SE (not that it's necessary but just to see if it can be done).
I have an iPPro + Pencil, and it is astonishingly good. It is no 'dumb stylus' on the iPPro. The exquisite detail one gets from a writing implement is not quite replicated with the Pencil -- but! The fact that Apple does advertise the Pencil and its features is a hopeful sign that we will continued to see more, and more sophisticated Pencils & apps that use them. I hope.
How can you do that? My apple pencil (the new gen) doesn’t even register as a dumb stylus on my iphone 12 pro max.
Opinion here, but capacitive styluses suck. I wouldn't bother with a stylus unless it was something like Wacom or Apple Pencil tech.
I have a Samsung Note. It has the best stylus on a phone.
(I also find it funny the Apple Fanbois decided to downvote my initial comment, when I was clearly showing that Apple is 'behind the curve' in this respect. Gosh, I used to work at Apple. I find this amusing.)
Even though, that is very cool line of work and I’m sure I would be similarly biased for the tech I helped form, but it is simply not a general requirement as shown by very very few phones having them.
AND, when you intentionally remove it, by clicking, it pops out and the Notes app is automatically fired up.
Apple just doesn't do this on iPhones. Why not?
I can't remember the last phone I had that survived long enough for me to feel I needed to upgrade it.
Whenever I have to use an older phone to do anything. App and web developers seem to be in an arms race with moore's law to see if they can waste the extra resources faster than hardware manufacturers can provide them.
Is product speed really a differentiator that affect’s people’s buying decision?
* does javascript execute fast
* which video codecs are hardware accelerated
No, Android phones browser performance is still a joke compared to I phones, which are faster than desktop PCs!(in speedometer)
for me it's literally every day. frames missed, jittery animations everywhere on top-of-the line phones, this drives me completely mad.
On devices with gigahertz multicore CPUs, gigabytes of RAM and fast flash memory, absolutely everything local should be 100% instant
So I welcome any and all single-thread performance improvements, if only because of lazy developers.
Multi core performance on a phone is like towing capacity on a sports car.
Don't take it from me, take it from Linus Torvalds (you know, the guy who created Linux) - https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=136526&curpost...