Hold the Phone: A Big-Data Conundrum
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Samsung is just a generic hardware vendor for Android PCs, like Dell. They don't create operating systems or apps.
It probably also has a psychological component. Just seeing a new generation gaming PC makes mine feel slow.
A better comparison is that Windows 8 runs faster than Windows 7, which in turn ran faster than Vista. Linux kernels continues to improve in performance too.
There was a talk at WWDC this year (session 419, if you want to watch it) that goes into some detail about how the blur effects on e.g. the lock screen, notification center, control center, toolbars, etc. work.
You can watch the talk for the details, but as a practical matter several of these effects involve seven (!) full GPU passes, just for these effects alone, let alone whatever UI is under or over them. And not even the very latest-gen devices can do it consistently full-screen at 60fps. iOS displays motion underneath blur effects in very small areas (e.g. a toolbar) on new devices but if you think about it, you never see motion underneath, say, the lock screen. The reason is that not even the latest iPad Air has the GPU to apply some fullscreen blurs in enough time to meet the draw deadline.
This actually surprises a lot of people--I can't count the number of designs I've gotten where some designer has made a large blurred UI element and expects something to move underneath it. Which, depending on the size of the element and the target hardware you can sometimes get away with, but you are in for quite the lengthy performance test, and a complicated spectrum of fallbacks for all the devices that just aren't fast enough.
And that's just one blur effect. You take a look at all the other "new" iOS things that are less visible, like the endless stream of new background technologies (background fetch, silent push, NSURLSession, multi-app audio routing, various iCloud syncing stuff) the new bluetooth stuff (iBeacon, HomeKit, Multipeer), turning WebKit into an LLVM compiler, and all the other things that are going on in iOS it really is "doing more of everything". I remember a time when iOS was basically just a few OS processes plus 1 active app, and as we speak ps on my phone lists 87 processes.
At some point in the "near" future it'll be energetically a net positive to snap a pix on the cam, analyze the eye pupils and accelerometers and recent eyeball movements, and if you're not looking at that part of the screen, its not going to waste energy displaying it. Could even see this happening with backlighting. Watching other people use their phones is likely to get very distracting for 3rd parties.
The term OS, as it is used by media and most people today, is the software that is installed on the device before you install any additional apps to it. E.g the "App Store" is considered a part of iOS, the Internet Explorer as part of Windows, and the Homescreen and Dock of Max OSX is considered a part of OS X.
Since a Galaxy and a HTC One ship with different Applications, a different user interface and other key software components (you mentioned the filesystem on the Galaxy S), Android is less an operating system but but the cross platform foundation that most operating systems are based on today.
Presumably youre implying here that people who complain about their iphone being slow are the people who upgraded their OS while keeping their old hardware?
I think the google trends graph for "iphone slow" search phrase says all that there's to say about this phenomenon.
Also, with each iphone generally comes a new ios version, which is more or less written for the specs of the newest phone. That being said, this post is being typed from an iphone 4s I've owned for two years. I've never had any complaints about performance. Never noticed a slowdown.
Second, we do studies like this so that one data point (yours) is not used to make general understanding.
There are often better explanations. GMail is fast. All the time. No matter how much mail you have. That's because it runs from a local database and all server interaction is abstracted behind sync and local accesses to data. Google Play is slow because it is a REST app with a native app veneer. It's harder to make an app like Google Play use sync'ed databases. So sometimes it does puzzling things like taking tens of seconds to go to the next track even when you are shuffling only your downloaded music.
Fast apps can "do more" and remain fast. Slow apps are slow for architectural and algorithmic reasons rather than because they "do more."
I don't know about Android, but on iOS, the Gmail app is much slower to launch and navigate than the stock mail app. I think that, on launch, the Gmail app makes some requests before showing you any of even your locally cached data, which always struck me as poor design.
The spikes for iOS 4 and iOS 7, which are relatively larger than for the other releases, may be justified. iOS 4 brought limited multitasking and more significant OS-level changes than iOS 3, and iOS 7 brought the visual refresh which is more CPU- and GPU-intensive.
[1] Or due to the upgrade process itself, rather than changes in newer OSes, slowing down phones
That wouldn't matter if Apple were simply adding code that tested the hardware and manually added slowdowns on the older model. Your observation could be seen as lending credence to the conspiracy theory.
There's some "optimisation" happening too, as bits are shuffled around so the most commonly used parts are fastest to access.
This applies for OSX as well as iOS. After upgrading, just wait an hour or two and everything will settle down. The impatient will simply have to cope with slower speed since the device is still sorting itself out.
I wonder if Apple will ever add some sort of indication when the indexing, etc. is happening, so users don't become frustrated and/or wonder why their phone is hot all of a sudden.
I know that my 2011 iPad 2 started feeling much slower after installing iOS 7. (Though luckily I finally tried the "Reset all settings" trick and it made a big difference, which points to a bug.)
All-in-all, still not a very straightforward 'improvement' path performance-wise -- at least not from the end consumer's point of view.
So you wonder if it's the same theory posited in the article itself..?
The theory you are responding to is that Apple is intentionally adding new features to iOS, which incidentally makes older devices slower because they're trying to do more work.
Is it a "conspiracy to make your device slower" when Apple adds new features to later versions of iOS? They're not intentionally adding in "slow down a bit here and encourage the user to upgrade to a new phone" code. So there's no conspiracy.
This has more to do with Apple's marketing strategy (hush-hush until a big media launch day) vs Samsung's (slow drip releases across various phone service providers). And also Apple's brand equity -- that it has more loyal followers eagerly anticipating new releases, vs Android users who tend to be commodity/pragmatic buyers who basically only research phones when their contracts are expiring.
I dug into this a little more on my blog:
The big problem, though, is that the average consumer doesn't decouple processing speed and network speed.
Release-day consumers congesting the network with updates, app/music (re-)downloads, testing of new functionality, etc. seems to be the most likely reason; why would the number of people searching for 'iphone slow' sharply drop after a day or two? Are we to believe that 95% of iPhone users upgrade on the first day?
The hokey conspiracy theories are needless when there are multiple sites that specifically benchmark the iPhone when new releases of iOS come out - 10 seconds with Google [1].
[1] http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/03/ios-7-1-on-the-iphone-4...
So the author ( & professor! no less) should have gone with his first instinct that Apple is the largest company in the world and would be foolish to deliberately wreck an older product...this is an embarrassment of an article needlessly tagged with "Big-Data" and expounding a bunch of non-sensical conspiracy theories.
>This data has an even more benign explanation. Every major iPhone release coincides with a major new operating system release. Though Apple would not comment on the matter, one could speculate — and many have — that a new operating system, optimized for new phones, would slow down older phones.
The benchmark data shows an older phone performing much slower with an updated OS.
Whether this supports the conspiracy theory implied in the first part of the article depends on Apple's intent, as the article says.
"Apple does not force iOS updates on its users. However, it does notify you as soon as an update is available"
Alas, that's something of a lie! OK, something of a falsehood for polite society. In fact, Apple downloads its iOS installer update to your device--and that can take up over 3gb of space! You have no choice in that.
And, if you are not careful, you can inadvertently click a button in iTunes that updates the OS.
No, the reality is that Apple is forcing through its updates; making it all too easy for people to reflexively click yes on the update; and eating up precious space on 16gb devices (well, 14 gb).
Apple can continue to behave this way specifically because only Apple makes hardware that runs Apple software. If they opened up to third parties and someone created a computationally weaker but aesthetically preferable device that ran their software they'd be in trouble.
At the end of the day the latest phones need to keep up with competitors and added features and resimplified experiences that are more costly to implement cannot be avoided. The only way to really avoid it is disallowing older phones to upgrade - which is far less desirable IMO.
No, Apple doesn't want their devices to feel slow. For example, my iPad 3 doesn't gaussian blur UI backgrounds. If Apple was nefarious as you're suggesting, they would force my iPad to render the expensive blurs.
Also, you can disable animation "gimmicks" (whose purpose is to orient and mask loading): http://www.iclarified.com/35637/how-to-disable-the-animation...
Computerphile did a piece on this (intalling Linux on a very old PC)
XP to Ubuntu with an 8yr old Hacktop - Computerphile
This could be tested. Developers could collect data on the actual speed of their apps, and if there is anything shady, we will have hard evidence on our side.
I am sure there are enough un-updated phones in our drawers to test out what the speed used to be back then.