Faster performance today means longer lasting tomorrow.
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.
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.
And more importantly to me, longer lasting tomorrow tends to mean longer official OS support. At least for Apple devices.
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.
They drastically increased RAM recently: https://9to5mac.com/2022/12/31/iphone-ram-list/
Unfortunately this can be hardly retrofitted to other OSs since it requires cooperation from the apps.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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-...
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.
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.