If you are just using apps, 15 seconds is more than enough to launch and setup an app, for anything more it will be down graded a little.
Still dang impressive but the form factor becomes the limiting factor.
I’m now at the iPhone 16. The performance of those chips with 8GB in non throttled environment (Neo..) can run as a fully performant macOS.
Yet, as a phone I don’t feel upgraded performance since my SE 1st gen days.
Sometimes I get stuttering, basic browsing can get the device pretty warm, sometime camera lags to launch.
My usage profile didn’t change much over the years.
So I can only assume codebases became more bloated, websites became more heavy on resources. Because, if my device now throttles to what I was happy with years ago assuming the software would behave the same, I’ve expected my usage to give me at least cooler non stuttering performance.
But that was never the case.
If we assume this is true, it at least meant if you didn't upgrade you'd get even worse performance.
The only computer that's the exception is my macbook m4. This thing was and still is ridiculously snappy.
A very big portion of this is just Wirth's Law in motion. Software is getting worse rapidly, and AI is accelerating the decline in software quality, where performance is an aspect of quality.
But the other part of this is the latency vs throughput tradeoff. More and more of our systems are optimized for throughput, or worse are optimized for throughput in ways which causes significant experience degradation if you are unable to meet the throughput demands. There is a natural tension between throughput and latency, and we are seeing this play out across every aspect of both hardware and software system design. As a simple example, nothing you do to USB4 will ever match the latency of PS/2 connection for an input device, but a PS/2 port delivers around 7-12 kiloBITS/second of throughput vs USB4 delivering up to 120Gbps and a /minimum/ of 20 gigabits/second of throughput. PS/2 uses blocking direct hardware interrupts for input devices, vs asynchronous polling on USB. This architectural difference will never allow for USB to match PS/2 latency, regardless how "fast" USB gets.
This tradeoff is leaning more and more towards throughput everywhere you look. Just today, the new M5 Ultra is announced w/ 1.2TBs/ of memory bandwidth. The M5 Max had 14ns of memory latency while high-performance DDR4/DDR5 typically achieves 8-9ns of latency. That's 36% more latency (conservatively), but nearly 10x the throughput. When you stack up small changes like this at every layer of the system, including in our overreliance on micro services and networked data I/O vs local data in applications, and it adds up. There are so many places in modern software where there is some network connection required for something that could have been achieved without that connection, and waiting on that connection consumes a huge amount of wait time relative to the total time for the operation, and we all feel it.
Im sure there are many more things that add up to focus more on throughout over latency as mentioned above.
The only use of a slow machine is it gives a point where you can say more optimization isn't worth it. Everything else I can do better on a fast machine than a slow machine.
I have been away from Android for a while, is it any better there?
Androids launched ≥2026 got a serious haircut in either memory or other features though. We'll see in 2028.
Maybe if you want to use all of the big mainstream apps the experience might be different, but I tend to have a fairly minimal setup on my phone. On android I would disable animations, use Nova launcher, Firefox with UBO, and a bunch of fdroid apps. This all added up to a very snappy and efficient system that I haven’t been able to replicate on iOS.
I understand why, mind you; would VS Code or Slack have as much velocity of improvement if they had to individually manage GUI toolkits for each platform? Would VS Code be as extensible if the UI were built in Swift or Qt?o But the results are still there.
There are projects to try to make this /better/, like Tauri - Electron but using your system's built-in browser engine rather than shipping a new one, so that you don't have to have eight separate copies of Chromium loaded into memory - but they still need to reach feature-completeness and projects need to do a non-trivial migration, and then they need to test across multiple browser engines, etc., so it's still not the same.
Regardless, this is the situation we have right now; everyone figured that RAM capacity would continue to increase at the same rate as RAM usage, "it works on my machine" but it's a 32 GB Macbook, Chromium optimized for performance and not memory usage by assuming that each 'page load' would be short lived (browser behavior) rather than having one 'page load' run for hours or days (Slack, VS Code, Spotify).
Or at least, that's how it went where I work.
I think this is a trait of all chips. As a general rule of thumb, both desktop chips and graphics cards come with a huge and noisy fan. Demand for aftermarket solutions is so great that it spawned quite a few specialized companies.
How many high-end laptops ship with at least one fan?
Desktops can have plenty of cooling so you actually get the real speed of whatever you are using.
I think most children prefer to play on phones these days. Mobile gaming is huge. To the point where game loops on high-end games are optimized around thermal throttling.
Try working in the shade. The max brightness isn’t helping either.
Outside was too bright for me to see my laptop screen even at full brightness, but by the time I had it outside and had discovered that my phone had overheated so much it refused to turn on until it cooled down.
At least my drink was still cold.