iPhone 16's A18 Pro chip outperforms the M1 chip
9to5mac.com
9to5mac.com
I fully expect remote solutions to smoke local options and an ultimate transition to remote solutions.
Once you include the all the network overhead of sending images/video files to a server and back over a not very fast connection, I suspect it will be closer than you think for most real world use cases. And even if a cloud solution can improved the overall performance from say 4 seconds to 2 seconds, I don't see that as a huge win overall.
All that being said Apple does also offer an AI cloud compute solutions for operation too heavy to run on the phone.
Herein privacy and utility are clearly in tension. The only sane thing to do is do it on the server but if you ARE going to do it locally doing it on a computer on the clients premises is the only way to actually do it because mobile devices power/compute/cooling/power budgets are so anemic whatever a synthetic benchmark says a device can do in the space of a moment or two.
I'm presuming that the ultimate strategy that a lot of players are going to actually follow is all server all the time wherein companies who are terribly concerned about privacy will rather than doing it locally do it on a server that they own.
> The whole selling point of Apples AI stuff is that the processing for most things can be done on the phone and thus your private data won't have to leave you device
A desktop computer or server has substantially more power than an iphone even a nice one like the one which is the topic of the linked article because it has substantially more memory, power, cooling, and so forth.
I fully expect us to continue to rapidly expand what we can do with AI and such usages to require substantial resources to run wherein mobile devices will continue to be too grossly insufficient to run.
AR, CAD, Video Editing, games, etc..
Even just sending a video on WhatsApp requires transcoding
It's not my fault that you are underutilizing the incredible marvel of engineering that is your smartphone.
Reading and watching old sci-fi taught me to appreciate the technology I'm lucky to be in possession of and to take full advantage of it.
Video calls, gaming, AR... are very compute intensive and need every last transistor to perform well.
For anything truly groundbreaking... Apple has too locked down of a system. And I say it as a long time fanboy
Anyone that can afford a new iphone and games should just get a console or PC... jesus.
I was completely fine using a well-taken-care-of iPhone 8 until Instagram's input boxes became unusably slow on it, now I have an iPhone 13. I'm guessing that there'll be a race to make more powerful AI assistants, but makers of far more mundane apps will gobble up the computing power readily.
It's obscene for a basic messaging and photo gallery site.
Anyone know?
That's an insult to basic messaging, I've seen better UX in tutorials on writing a chat application/website than the sorry excuse Instagram has. Same goes for their comments.
The UI feels janky and laggy, the Messenger itself has noticeable delays, loading new sections is palpably slow.
I cannot understand how, it's not an absurdly complex SPA doing a lot of computation on client-side, it just loads different modals and views.
On the other hand, a complex app doing loads on the client like Onshape, a CAD modeling webapp is very snappy, and satisfying to use.
I don't get how Meta's webapps can be this intensely heavy, even if heavily unoptimised.
World is fucked. And those who create these invisible rules must be carpet nuclear bombed out of this world.
Literally none of my non-techie circle own a personal desktop. Only a few own a personal laptop - and even then, it only gets turned on occasionally. Most of them do all their personal computing on an iPad or smartphone.
Comparing them as if both were equally capable of going flat out is deceptive.
Other things being equal working faster means spinning down quicker and using less juice.
I expect someone will really wake up soon, but as long as companies like Microsoft continue to be cash cows, I don't think it'll happen anytime soon. Even if Qualcomm makes the chips, Microsoft Windows won’t handle the energy efficiently.
https://mobilegamer.biz/under-2000-people-have-paid-to-play-...
"AAA" is kinda a vague term, but there are definitely some big budget games on mobile that do massive numbers (hundreds of millions of dollars).
To play them you need to pair a controller, making the experience subpar.
Now, this is the case for software graphics, but it might not be the case for LLMs.
Not gonna happen from Apple but I’m eagerly awaiting the day.
I would tend to agree that today’s apps are… dogshit. Without a doubt, the vast majority of today workloads (99.9%) should be able to run on 2008ish era processing power if they were well programmed.
4K video editing — you need a pretty powerful desktop PC to smoothly edit/preview 4k video. CPU, GPU, and memory.
In other words, thanks to the “overkill” that Apple is willing to sell now, their user five years down the line will still feel that their old phone is a premium product. And they’ll be happy to buy a replacing iPhone for it when it does die.
Even if Apple did this (they won't) having to use Stage Manager for multitasking would make it intolerable anyway.
Yet I think the computing power of the A18 is great, and plan to upgrade to iPhone 16 now. Not for what I need today, but for what I need years down the line. Phones last a long time these days. The processor in my iPhone SE (2nd gen) is ancient, yet it’s still OK. My kid will probably use it for a couple of years more.
I’d say that there is a decent chance of phones becoming actually good smart assistants now. Much of that will be driver by specialised hardware, but the general processing power will be useful for some of that processing.
To dissipate heat you need volume/mass to soak it and surface area to dissipate it. Phones will never have the volume/mass or surface area to compete with normal size computers.
Sure it might not be able to run at 100% load for long periods due to cooling restrictions, its still going to be more than fast enough for a lot of the activities most people do.
One of the nice things CPU improvements bring us - the amount of thermal "volume/mass" needed for a given task is going down all the time, and right now an iPhone would comfortably drive a monitor and keyboard, just like the iPad with similar cooling constraints and physical architecture already does.
The screen on the latest iPhone runs at up to 2,868 x 1,320 at 120hz on the Pro Max - some desktop monitors would actually be easier to drive (1080/60 etc) than its own internal display.
More than a concept demo, it's been a production feature in all S, Note and Fold series Samsungs since 2017.
The latest and best iphone is about $1200. To use it you are going to want an acceptable battery, a screen, a case, keyboard. I should think This will run at least $300–500. You have not for the same amount the average person paid acquired a good phone and a mediocre laptop.
You also have no redundancy if one device is stolen, lost, or broken.
For value minded folks stepping up to a phone nice enough to serve as a mediocre laptop is a non-starter not to mention they probably already have an acceptable version of one when they are shopping for the other.
For the folks more concerned about quality than value they are apt to be very disinterested in stepping down. There is basically no market for this. This is a nerd trap its one of the ideas that seems like it ought to be able to made sense of which has no practical application.
Put a Frore AirJet MEMs fan (or conventional fan) on a holding pad, and that phone could sustain vastly better performance.
Ideally I'd love to see gaming handhelds so the same. I would love a Deck with for example the upcoming Strix Halo APU, that has to throttle way down when portable, that can't effectively cool itself and doesn't have the batteries to run at it's real capabilities. But then you dock the Deck onto a big power supply with active cooling and boom: gaming monster.
We ought to be building portable systems that need external cooling assistance to be fully utilized. Scaling down is enormously effective & advantageous today.
The other point I'd make is that while, yes, maybe even an unaided phone isn't going to win a sustained benchmark, most users on desktops are probably near idle 90%+ of the time. the phones inability to sustain high power isn't really a key factor at all for most computing usages. That there happens to be a big display and keyboard and mouse doesn't really mandate more than what a phone already offers, for the vast vast vast majority of desktop use. So why not?!
It'll be exciting to see Android 15 finally bring forward this promise and potential. I doubt it'll cause a big shift fast. But these capabilities are going mainstream, and phones should be up to it!!
Can't wait till we start getting USB4 phones!
Apple still ships non-pro models with USB 2 (mostly to pretend that the 4 models they produce every year have any meaningful difference besides size)
I just pair my phone with a lightweight butterfly-foldable BT keyboard ($40) and I can type on the train, plane, etc. It works really well, no laptop needed.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0C1VSRZ59/?th=1
It's a great way to take notes in a lecture hall too, or to do some writing in a cafe while I'm traveling. I've done lots of long-form writing this way and it's perfectly fine. Also great for writing HN comments with.
Lugging a laptop around always seemed overkill to me. Even an iPad is too much weight to carry around.
A phone and a foldable keyboard is all I need.
I am sorry but do you have some kind of a physical disability?
Instead I have a small messenger bag which I lug, and you'd be surprised how much a 1 lb iPad Pro 10.5" bears down on you when you are carrying it all day.
Scaling has slowed down in some aspects, it's definitely not the late 90s anymore where your PC is just obsolete 4 years later, but things like this are a good reminder execution by chip designers is still by far the bigger factor in how large the generational growth will be.
Qualcomm perform close to M3, Intel’s latest chips also perform close and compare to the M3.
But the iPad M4 benchmark already showed very interesting results and I guess all those are based on same design and fabrication process.
This hardware is too good to be wasted.
It's also a business killer feature which would kill their MacBook sales. So, won't happen anytime soon imo.
Maybe the dock has a little bit of extra ram to facilitate.