I wish this article spent more time discussing how autolayout is implemented in the real-life example, and less time talking about absurd situations such as using autolayout with a thousand subviews.

We are given no info about what constraints were used and whether the view was created in code or IB. For all we know, maybe all they needed was an extra constraint or two they to speed things up. Diving into how changing individual constraints affects overall performance would be interesting. It would be nice if Instruments had a template for inspecting autolayout performance (or does it? I haven't looked and not by my desktop).

Also, the numbers without autolayout still aren't great (hopefully that was tested on low end hardware?). I wonder why the OP didn't just pre-render the next view in the background, since he has the luxury of knowing that users will page through views in a linear fashion.