Hacker News Reader

Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

> All the spectacular advances in computing power are lost on her as this makes zero difference for the Facebook cat video group and Pinterest.

Gonna disagree with this one. Tell me, does using an iPhone today feel significantly faster than the top model 2-3 years ago or even 10 years ago? Does the battery last a lot longer than it did back then? Apple certainly claims this is the case in their marketing every year. The answer however is no, because with every increase in computing power and battery size, the OS and all the apps on it get that much more resource hungry. The entire ecosystem is designed to get users to need to upgrade every ~2-3 years, otherwise they will start to feel the lag.

View on HN

> does using an iPhone today feel significantly faster than one from 2-3 years ago?

Yes. Absolutely. We just forget that opening an app--or restarting the device, or recovering from airplane mode--was an action that incurred a noticeable delay once and does not tend to anymore.

Sorry but you just contradicted yourself.

> you just contradicted yourself

Where?

I assume their logic is that if we have forgotten what that feels like then it doesn't in practice feel any different.

Ah, memories of RISC OS from school in the 90s. Instant boot, instead of the minute or so for Win95 and System 7.5.5…

As an iPhone 12 mini daily-driver who also owns a 15 Pro Max (which I use exclusively to shoot video), I have to disagree.

> an iPhone 12 mini daily-driver who also owns a 15 Pro Max (which I use exclusively to shoot video), I have to disagree

Out of curiosity, where? I went from the 12 something to the 15 Pro and the speed in connecting to networks and rendering pages was memorable. Now I don't notice it anymore; the old phone is just slow.

In fairness I'm not a heavy iPhone user. Hence still having a 12 mini. It's rare (~never) that I'm 'browsing the web' on it. If I'm in Safari it's for some functional reason and I'm in and out.

Still, I can't say I've ever thought, jeez, this thing is slow to render a page.

> the speed in connecting to networks

I'm not even sure what you mean. Connecting to 4G? a) mine's practically instant and b) how often are you doing this?!

(Not being snarky there. Genuinely don't understand how this is a thing someone would notice. But you may have a different use-case to me.)

I have come to the same conclusion, users like you just don't percive it.

I see a lot of "this 200€ phone is as good as the 1000€ one"

Sister, i would kill someone to not have to use Google maps on a phone 10% slower.

In 2020 i returned my samsung A7 (decent phone for the era) because i just couldn't support how laggy it was. Thst phone was better than most phones around me but i felt the slowness. (ended up with a Huawei mate 20 pro)

Is opening an app on an iPhone 13 actually noticeably slow? What you're saying is true if you go back to a distant enough horizon, of course, but... 2-3 years? I don't really see it.

I'm on the other side of the fence, and just replaced a Pixel 7 with a 9. And quite frankly I bought it because I was Supposed To. I'm sure there are benchmarks to say otherwise, but routine use is basically instant on both and absent a professional desire I quite frankly would have just waited until I broke it.

Mostly that's because RAM has increased enough to let the OS do things while multiple apps stay resident. Phones from 5 years ago were still handheld supercomputers, just hobbled by limited memory and code bloat.

Completely wrong. As an iPhone 12 User there is 0 perceived difference to iPhone 15 in day to day usage performance.

> Completely wrong. As an iPhone 12 User there is 0 perceived difference to iPhone 15 in day to day usage performance

This obviously revolves around what one perceives. Data speeds on mobile are objectively faster on their newer devices [1]. But we normalise those speeds without needing additional cruft; waiting for a page to load just ceases to be a thing one notices except when it doesn't work.

[1] https://www.opensignal.com/2023/09/07/users-should-upgrade-t...

Speed is both an objective metric and a user perception, which is a very subjective thing.

I’ve done performance tuning long enough to develop some rules of thumb:

Just about everyone will detect a 3x performance difference if told about it. (5x even if they’re not told.)

Only gamers and some IT pros will notice a 50% difference.

Nobody will notice 20% or less.

Anything under 10% is hard to even measure.

One career trick is that if you have three changes that provide a 20% boost each, release them at the same time instead of trickling them out one at a time. Sure, this is more risky for the company but is great at review time because otherwise your contributions would go unnoticed. Unethical? Maybe, but this is the incentive structure. Hate the game, not the player.

I would love to take a few people who claim to notice the speed differences and have them do the Pepsi Challenge to prove it. Get iPhones from the past 8 years, put them in big cases that only show the display and hide which vintage they are, and ask people to see if they can guess which phone is which, or rank them in order by year. I bet most people, including the self-professed experts, can't.

The 120 Hz displays are very noticeable when side-by-side. For example, my iPhone switches to 60 Hz on low power mode and it suddenly feels like it's a fast slideshow instead of "smooth".

There is also an adaptation factor: Good performance is only noticeable in contrast to poor performance. You get used to it very fast and stop noticing, unless you go back to the old system which suddenly feels "broken", even though you may have considered it perfectly acceptable before.

But the relevant part here is user delay /overall latency, not some intermediate measure like download speed, which is missing from the link

For example, if the first visible paragraphs takes the same time to show up, but the rest of the page is slower (but still not slow enough to be visible even if the user starts to scroll right away), then there is objectively 0 improvement on user interaction

As an iPhone 12 user, I'm getting sick of the limited memory in this device. It's difficult to leave an app for more than a few seconds without the memory manager purging it.

>Tell me, does using an iPhone today feel significantly faster than the top model 2-3 years ago or even 10 years ago?

You are on a platform where 99% of comments at one point were suggesting VSCode is fast enough or feels as fast as Sublime when it first launched, i.e before a lot of optimisation.

There are a lot of people just dont feel the difference or simply dont care about that tiny difference. And for someone like me who is latency sensitive, it bothers me a lot.

I've noticed overall improvements in responsiveness as well as the number of apps that can stay in memory without some getting evicted, though the latter is most noticeable when using smaller indie sorts of apps (think Ivory for Mastodon, Narwhal for Reddit, etc) which are on average built more efficiently and aren't dragging around a metric ton of tracking garbage.

This is what I notice as the only frustration with my 12 mini.

A lot of apps don't handle state changes to background well, especially social media apps where there's no reason to cache what content you were viewing.

The camera app is usually the culprit for things getting sent to the background for me.

Eh, iPhones are pretty fast. I think a lot of older model just need a battery replacement. I was using an iPhone 6S until last year and it was certainly slower than the latest models, but not dramatically so. The bigger difference was the camera quality which has improved dramatically in 7 years.

I agree that this effect exists but it's not as strong as it was in early generation models.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com