
Hold the Phone: A Big-Data Conundrum - walterbell
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/upshot/hold-the-phone-a-big-data-conundrum.html?_r=0
======
staunch
It's incredible the answers non-technical people come up with to explain
technical things. The reason RAGE takes more CPU/GPU power than Quake III is
because it does more. Not _because_ John Carmack wants your gaming PC to feel
slow. The same is true of Apple when they ship a new app that does more.

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.

~~~
kibibu
RAGE is doing substantially more of _everything_ than Quake III, so I think
the difference between Quake III from 1999 and RAGE from 2011 is a poor
parallel to draw with iOS6 to iOS7.

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.

~~~
drewcrawford
I think people substantially underestimate how hard the iOS GUI pushes the
performance wall, from one release to the next.

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.

~~~
JonnieCache
Does that graphical stuff not destroy battery life?

~~~
VLM
Yes. The UI equivalent of automotive tail fins is expensive. That's the sole
point of it.

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.

~~~
kibibu
I hadn't really considered foveated rendering on mobile, but that's a very
interesting idea.

------
bjustin
The spike for the iPhone 3G suggests that the effect is as much or more in
people's heads [1] than due to new software. The 3G had all the same parts
that affect how fast a phone works: the CPU, GPU, RAM etc, were all the same
models as in the first iPhone. Even if iOS 2 were designed more for the 3G
than the original iPhone, it couldn't have required significantly more
resources because no more became available!

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

~~~
eurleif
>Even if iOS 2 were designed more for the 3G than the original iPhone, it
couldn't have required significantly more resources because no more became
available!

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.

~~~
vitd
Isn't that the problem with conspiracy theories? There is no disconfirming
evidence ever. All evidence is either neutral or somehow confirms the
conspiracy theory.

------
mumrah
New releases of iOS usually go hand-in-hand with a new device. They design the
OS to be optimal for the latest and greatest hardware, not so much the
previous generations. As much as I like a good tinfoil hat theory, I'd say
this is just a case of Apple adding new features (eye candy, mostly) and not
worrying so much about the performance on older devices.

~~~
manicdee
It's also to do with Spotlight re-indexing the contents of the phone. Every
email, every contact, every web page still in history, etc.

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.

~~~
chucknelson
Agreed - after a restore usually an iPhone will get unusually warm, I assume
because it's doing this indexing and such. I don't recall if it happens after
an in-place upgrade, though.

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.

------
philfreo
I wonder if this is also due to new major iOS versions being released at the
same time as new iPhones, and these updates add more intensive features (e.g.
apps open in the background) and are designed more with the most modern
devices in mind.

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.)

~~~
cookiecaper
One of the interesting contradictions in software is that, logically, things
are actually supposed to get _faster_ as new versions come out, since there
should have been both more time and more data to use for optimization.
However, in practice, new versions of software are usually slower than their
predecessors, presumably because of the addition of new features. It'd be
interesting to see a product developed with a "no slowdowns allowed" policy.

~~~
roskilli
Pretty sure Snow Leopard was a release aimed at doing just that, rewriting a
lot of the core system libraries for x86_64 and also clearing house on a lot
of old cruft. No new real features were delivered with the release.

~~~
oblique63
Then Lion came along and slowed things down to a crawl. Definitely the slowest
OSX release I've had on my old macbook (circa '08). I eventually downgraded
back to snow leopard until mountain lion came out, which was noticeably faster
than Lion, but still not quite as smooth as snow leopard. But now Mavericks is
back to being pretty good.

All-in-all, still not a very straightforward 'improvement' path performance-
wise -- at least not from the end consumer's point of view.

------
pixelmonkey
I have a much simpler explanation for this data. More people search about all
aspects of their iPhone ahead of Apple releases -- whether it is slow, where
to buy a new one, how to sell their old one, etc. This hypothesis is supported
by the same data source (Google Trends data).

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:

[http://www.pixelmonkey.org/2014/07/27/nytimes-
bigdata](http://www.pixelmonkey.org/2014/07/27/nytimes-bigdata)

------
rmrfrmrf
This might be one of the best examples of the quote 'statistics don't lie, but
liars use statistics." First, paint a picture of some insane scenario where
Apple would be purposely nerfing phone speeds (pay special attention to how
much of a weasel word 'speed' is in this context), then, (gasp!) it turns out
that a completely unscientific data aggregation found the author's scenario to
be true!

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?

------
suprgeek
It bothers me that the term "Big-Data" is thrown around casually for basically
using Google Trends canned.

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...](http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/03/ios-7-1-on-the-iphone-4-as-
good-as-its-going-to-get/)

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.

~~~
FatalLogic
It is very unfortunate that the author did not get benchmark data, because the
benchmark you have linked to supports this alternative explanation, which is
in the later part of the article:

> _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.

------
sgustard
Hmm, a google trends search for "iPhone covers" shows similar spikes. Clearly
people are embarassed about their slow phones and want to hide them. And not
that searches for iPhone-related terms spike when, you know, people have just
bought new phones.

------
Frank_T
One of the comments on the NY Times was this:

"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).

------
Houshalter
Does it actually matter what the motive is? If Apple is making older devices
slower as a side effect of something else, (and not informing the users who
choose to update) is that really any better? And how can you ever prove they
aren't aware of the effect and choose to do it anyways to sell more new
devices?

------
zwegner
Seems like a lot of this speculation could be replaced by a few benchmarks to
see whether the phone actually got slower... but I guess that would take more
time than looking at a Google trends graph.

------
htk
Very interesting to see some data on this. I also have this feeling that at
every iOS release the older devices get terribly slower. And Apple seems to
make no efforts to change this, on the contrary, iOS7+ is filled with
transparencies, bouncing effects and other gimmicks that add no utility but
demand hardware, and now swift generates code so slow that new devices will
have to be bought to be able to use the apps made with it. Just perfect for
Apple.

~~~
bluthru
>on the contrary, iOS7+ is filled with transparencies, bouncing effects and
other gimmicks that add no utility but demand hardware

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...](http://www.iclarified.com/35637/how-to-disable-the-animation-
and-parallax-effects-in-ios-7-video)

------
jgalt212
I think this is one of the primary reasons I like Linux. Current versions of
Linux run acceptably well on old hardware whereas current versions of Windows
just chug along on old hardware.

Computerphile did a piece on this (intalling Linux on a very old PC)

XP to Ubuntu with an 8yr old Hacktop - Computerphile

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAI368bZC1g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAI368bZC1g)

------
visarga
> People suddenly feel that their phone is slowing down. It doesn’t show that
> our iPhones actually became slower.

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.

------
csandreasen
I'll propose a different conspiracy theory: perhaps it's the other way around
- new versions of iOS are specifically timed to coincide with the release of
new hardware in other to make people feel like their phone is now slower and
get them to upgrade...

------
hyperliner
I don't think it is the old phone which is slow and which causes people to
search. It's the new phone which is slow. People get disappointed, and search.
This explains why spike does not appear during announcements.

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hyperion2010
The thing that is the most striking about the graph of those searches is that
it is time locked to releases and NOT to announcements. Seems strange. If
people are upgrading the OS then there is a very simple explanation.

------
MarkMc
My old iPhone slowed down noticeably when I upgraded to 7, so I dumped it and
bought a Nexus 5. Couldn't be happier - thanks, Apple!

