I guess my question is - why do I care about geekbench? When was the last time someone who doesn't play games on their phone thought "man, I wish this was faster"? Because it's been years for me. The good news I hear is that Samsung is finally improving their battery life. That is a score that I actually care about.
You care about single-core performance when you use the web: things like JavaScript processing, layout, etc. will bottleneck on one core and since developers are shipping more code this is probably the most noticeable difference. It's also a little hard to tell in some cases since there are many “native apps” which use an embedded web view for some of their UI.
This is important for developers to know about because if you use a recent iPhone your experience is not just fundamentally better than any Android user's but it's especially significant compared to the kinds of cheaper phones many people buy. Look at the chart here: a Galaxy S22 is comparable to the iPhone XS which shipped 4 years earlier but even the S22 towers over the Moto E30 & other budget phones.
> You care about single-core performance when you use the web:
Theoretically, I would care. But in practice, I just took out an old budget android phone, gave it a go at browsing the web (news, images, and videos), and it seemed not to be noticeably slower than my much newer and pricier iPhone.
Benchmarks would probably show a great difference between the two, but my eyes can't tell.
People's tolerance varies and so do the sites they visit – and things like news sites are a lot better than they used to be before Google started more aggressively including performance in their search ranking factors.
My interest in this topic is mostly the same as the author of the post I linked, namely making sure that developers test and measure on lower-end devices to make sure they're not building sites which exclude key demographics. For example, a government site really needs to work well on the kinds of phones seniors get under the FCC Lifeline program.
I agree on the principle. Developers should care about low budget devices, and demographics—key or not—shouldn’t be excluded. The principle is sound.
But that is different from the observation of the beginning of this thread, which is that Geekbench scores don’t really reflect practical limitation of devices. A big difference in the score does not mean a noticeable difference in performance when doing everyday web browsing on the phone. An observation that my own experience echoes.
Even if I’m extra-tolerant (I don’t think I am), it would surprise me that a performance difference I can’t even notice is going to be so intolerable to another human being that they are excluded from using the website.
When it comes to governmental services on the internet, I think really the focus is on whether the site _works_ on all kinds of devices, which means whether the rendering and interactions are correct. Some can fail to render on a low budget phone, or if some button doesn’t work, etc. these are real problems but that is quite irrelevant to benchmarks.
I definitely agree that the focus should be broader - most websites, for example, probably bottleneck on the network first.
The broader point wasn’t that you should buy an iPhone but simply that the reason to care about single core benchmarks is that browsers fit that profile. It’s still perfectly reasonable to conclude that’s good enough for the sites you use.
I also feel like there’s an interesting angle about ad blocking here since that probably matters more than multiple processor generations.
Let’s check back a few years later, how will that phone stand up. More powerful hardware is also future-proofing the devices, which apple actually care about. Hopefully this will change as now even Samsung promises some 5 years of software updates, but previously you could almost throw out a perfectly fine android phone 2 years later..
But you don't have to anymore. My S20 is from March of 2020 and it's still as fast as the day I got it. It's hitting EoL for support, but as you said if I bought a new S23 Samsung promises supported for 5 years, and I think it might actually make it that whole way without slowing down.
That’s part of it: when you got a new phone, you probably noticed it being faster than the old one but over time your expectations adjust.
One factor which used to be under appreciated was battery degradation prior to that whole “Batterygate” flap back in 2016 where a lot of people learned that iOS throttled processor performance when the battery could no longer supply enough voltage for peak performance. That’s a lot more visible now so it’s less of a surprise than it used to be.
Most of the problem is that developers aren’t focused only on performance, so as the baseline hardware capacity increases the apps will slowly start to use more since very few people are going to spend time on something which seems fast enough.
That doesn’t happen all at once but it adds up over the half decade a phone will last. If you bought a phone and never updated anything, its performance would seem far more consistent … at least if you could avoid getting malware installed.
That third point is why I shared the link above: a lot of developers upgrade more frequently than average people and that means that our instincts for what seems fast enough might be missing things with our apps. That usually doesn’t mean things are unusable but it’s still polite to use your work on, say, the phone a senior citizen gets subsidized to make sure that you’re comfortable with that being the public face of your work.
(Bandwidth usage is at least as important here, too: use your website on 3G or ask how much it’d cost to use on a metered plan)
I find it is usually not so much about the JavaScript on a particular site for basic functions of that site but all of the other scripts and resources loaded by ads and promos. So many pop up videos stalking you as you try to browse the site.
That is something Alex Russell, the author of that blog post, is trying to raise awareness of in the industry but changing the culture of web development is a lot harder than buying a different phone (in many cases that won't even cost you more money).
Fix it at the rendering level. My device should default to not rendering a website the way the developer asks it to, but the way my defaults are set. Load a minimum viable site, ask my permission to execute more.
I think there is a general security and privacy argument for this type of setup as well.
As a web browser has become a general purpose VM, it has capabilities far surpassing what is needed at least 50% the time, I'd go as high as 90% of the time personally. Which is great that we have a magical run anything anywhere VM, but it's a double edge sword of the performance, security and privacy issues that come along with it.
If there was a well defined subset of functionality that browsers presented as the default "web enclave" and then opening up all the bells and whistles further was an opt in choice, a large chunk of those issues would go away. But that requires a bunch of people to agree on what that subset should include and the horror of trying to keep it updated over time. And that's _everyone_, including users putting up with "opting in" rather than everything just working.
I'm not sure I can see a subset of features becoming the default approach, at least until there is some horrible self propagating browser worm that impacts a large percentage of the world (or maybe by the 2nd or 3rd time, we will have had enough).
I just switched from a OnePlus 5 to a 9 Pro a few weeks back, and it is a noticable improvement. But you are right, while I was on the 5 I thought performance isn't a problem.
I have a One Plus which is slightly newer than that (~4 years old). It's very slow. I suspect people with a sentiment like yours just don't care about small amounts of latency. I wish the screen was immediately and instantaneously responsive to all my actions, and I wish all the apps I opened would immediately be interactive as soon as they are visible.
While I agree it's important for developers to know, I think that Ca.gov example would have been more compelling if we'd had side by sides between various systems - as it was it was incredibly slow, but that's an aberration, and it was a universal problem. Otherwise we have to once again resort to benchmarks. I've been happy with the experience on my last Android phone for 3 years now, another benchmark isn't swaying me, my phone is more than fast enough.
Hey, if it works for you, that's great. My point is really just that there are still pretty common situations where CPU performance matters and so you really need to measure on the types of devices your users actually use. If you look at that and say it's fine, you don't need to change anything but I suspect a lot of developers would not be happy with the performance of their sites on, say, 3G or public library WiFi on a phone which was $200 when it came out multiple years ago. A fair amount of that isn't CPU-related but network transfer, but real testing will catch both of those.
I was using a 12 year old desktop for my main system at home until I recently and impulsively decided to upgrade. I don't notice any difference because a lot of what I do is web browsing. The only thing that was transformational was things like using Photoshop, gaming and any high-intensity applications, which are few and far between. Even using Excel was hardly noticeable.
Yeah and the s23 has double the memory so it’s going to absolutely kick the crap out of the iPhone12 after it starts to swap your tabs into memory even accounting for the JVM.
It’s cool and all for Apple to have an edge in single core performance but it doesn’t matter all that much in the real world and the s23 is objectively the faster phone.
> the s23 has dramatically more memory so it’s going to absolutely kick the crap out of the iPhone12 after it starts to swap your tabs into memory.
Do you have any reproducible test results showing that or are you just asserting tribal loyalty? I jest, we all know the answer.
You might want to read up on how iOS and Android differ in key ways: native code versus JIT, garbage collection versus ARC, and all of the system level differences for how many things can run in the background as well as quickly apps can save and restore state - faster CPUs and SSDs allows iOS to be more aggressive there, too, and developers can tune more aggressively because they have fewer, more consistent configurations to support.
Also consider it from the perspective of the engineering trade offs that the manufacturers make. More RAM means lower battery life and a higher price, and consumers are also sensitive to both of those. Apple controls their stack so tightly that they designed a custom SoC and market-leading CPU, and they measure the user experience very closely since that’s a lot of what they’re selling — if there really was a gap, adding more RAM would be one of the easiest ways to close it. Similarly, Samsung wouldn’t make every phone they make have lower battery life and cost more if that only benefited a small percentage of users. They’re making different choices because they have different systems but both of them watch this stuff closely.
While I agree with your overall points, you are wrong on the details: Android runs native code and ARC is just another form of GC (with less memory overhead, but also less throughput for what it matters. It is probably the better choice for mobile devices).
Apple hardware is just that much better, it is not about the software stack.
Android does have native code support, but do non-games use it commonly? The Android reviews I've read tend to mention that being a game thing when talking about why it's important to have more RAM.
(And, yes, I should have said “Java's GC vs. ARC” since that tends to have higher peaks)
Android’s ART used to be a completely AOT approach (that compiled to native machine code on the machine at install time), nowadays there is also a JIT compiler that shares profiling information across devices even.
Yeah, to be clear my point is not that one is better than the other but simply that you can’t directly compare RAM without adjusting for the fact that they have different designs.
Android since version 5 AOT compiles the code, since version 7 it JITs first and then AOT compiles on idle, nowadays not only it JIT/AOT compiles it does so by using PGO metadata shared across devices via the PlayStore.
> Android since version 5 AOT compiles the code, since version 7 it JITs first and then AOT compiles on idle, nowadays not only it JIT/AOT compiles it does so by using PGO metadata shared across devices via the PlayStore.
Thanks, I knew that Android had native code support but I've always heard that described as something mostly used by games.
> Reference counting is a GC algorithm.
Yes, I should have been pedantic and written “Java's GC” since the point was that historically it's tended to trade RAM for performance. The classic complaint I've heard from our mobile developers was that Objective-C forced you to focus more on memory management.
I am using Xiaomi Mi 8, it is four and a half years old now. I don't have visible problems with websites performance. The battery is quite degraded though:(
I use an iPhone X (released 2017) and I wish it kept up with modern app performance requirements. The iPhone X doesn't support built-in OCR in images and apps take 1-2s longer to launch than my iPhone 13.
Faster performance today means longer lasting tomorrow.
Excellent to see a fellow SE user! I still happily run my iPhone SE (1st generation). I might take 5 minutes to boot Notion or run out memory and crash when I try to boot Amazon; but, my EarPods pair instantly—I just plug my 3.5 mm jack in my 3.5 mm port and then I can freely listen to music or do a phone call (works every time)! Also, I can easily swap connections from my laptop to my phone with the same workflow—simple (but sadly not futureproof).
I would rather have a gen1 SE than my current iPhone 12 mini. Had an iPhone 5 before, but AT&T stopped serving data to it. I thought maaybe it'd be ok not having a headphone jack, but nah, this sucks.
Please accept my sympathy. I do understand and soon enough I'll be in the same predicament. Every iOS 15 patch feels like a gift. I seriously don't know what I'm going do when iOS 15 becomes end of life; there aren't any modern phones that have my critical—and arguably reasonable—hardware requirements.
The other requirement being the home button instead of these awful swipe gestures and facial unlock? And compact size.
Man, Steve Jobs got it right before.
Precisely that and I couldn’t agree more. I even ditched my case about a year ago—live for today.
The hardest thing is the strain the whole experience puts on my relationships. I already used up all my fiancé’s patience with my chronic melancholy about my perfectly functional but ultimately doomed phone; and end of life hasn't even happened yet.
Seeing iOS 12.5.7 was bittersweet, a glimmer of hope, a reason to hold on.
Nah, swipe gestures are way better imo. Anecdotal, but there is a story that the design team (who were used to the previous button design) got so used to the swipes that they tried to do that constantly on their old phones as well.
I would have agreed with you on the fingerprints being superior, but I have to say that I really can’t say anything bad about the face scanner. It is fast and accurate and very rarely fails (which would be the same with fingerprints, you may have gloves on, or your hands are dirty, etc)
I've been using this phone for a year and haven't gotten used to it. There are too many scenarios where the swipe you want is difficult to pull off. It used to be common UI guidance to use gestures for extra convenience but not to rely on them.
Like if I'm using the map, it's swipe up from near the bottom to open nav options or swipe up from slightly below that to open app switcher; keep in mind I'm probably doing this hastily at a red light. Lock screen is swipe up to unlock but also to look at notifications. Home screen is swipe down for notifications or control center, depending on which side, I always forget.
Facial unlock has a hard time with my glasses. I have to input my pin half the time. If I'm driving, I can't look at my phone. Also idk why it has to auto-lock immediately like I'm paranoid; there used to be a setting to delay auto-locking for 30min unless I press the lock button myself.
Buy the $9 dongle from Apple and keep it permanently connected to your headphones. Then it's just a plug in scenario, the same as a headphone jack whenever you want to use them. Sure, you can't charge and use your headphones at the same time but I get 2 full days of battery life from my iPhone 12.
I did, and I got the typical outcome for dongles. Left it plugged into my car aux until my wife wanted to play music off her iPhone 6... turns out it can't use that dongle. She disconnected it, then it got lost beneath the seat eventually. Had another for my headphones, turns out it can't use the wired mic so it's kinda useless. Third one broke. Other car has Bluetooth, but it sucks, often doesn't auto pair or the phones fight over it.
This is a bad compromise that didn't need to happen; I should just be able to plug headphones into my phone. In the end, I took my old iPhone 5 and left it in the car for playing music. It's the better phone.
Same phone here. Only thing I really wish for is better battery capacity out of the box. Battery health is now 83% which is not the worse but definitely noticeable when I don’t charge during the day. But even brand new the phone would not make it through some days without charging or powersaving mode.
In the same light my S20, which by all benchmarks should be inexcusably slow compared to Apple, still feels like a brand new phone to me as well. I think we've lately hit a level of performance excess that means that phones don't age like they once did.
I still use an iPhone X (with new battery from last year). The Pixel 2 was released around the same time and is e-waste.
Almost all apps run well with the exception of Google's, which have consistently gotten worse. The camera still starts up quickly, and the fact that most apps are still performant compared to an iPhone 13 is impressive.
Google Docs is unusable - even small documents can't be opened, and the app hangs when opened more than half the time. Google Maps keeps adding misc features which adds significantly to startup time and responsiveness.
The Pixel 2 had a launch price of $649 vs the iPhoneX at $999, so ~35% more. That's not really a fair comparison, I imagine if you compare to a similarly priced android phone released at the same time, it'd be a closer result.
Where apple does do well is supporting devices for much longer with software and security updates. So running older android phones is prob not a good ideas from a security perspective.
> Faster performance today means longer lasting tomorrow.
I wish this was true for my old Android phone. I still have a OnePlus5 lying in my drawer, which still has stellar performance, but doesn't get any new software features.
I installed LineageOS on my OnePlus 6 also because of lack of software updates.
My experience was mixed: it works great, even my banking app. *Except* for the camera. The default camera app took blurry pictures; Google Cam from the app store cropped significantly from the preview; and the custom Google Cam made for OnePlus 6 couldn't use the front camera.
No amount of tweaking gave me anything close to what the original OS had.
In the end my phone's camera is one of the most important features, so I got a new one.
Unfortunately, there are no stable builds. I tried some nightlies from LOS 18, but experienced regular crashing during calls. And yea, as BoppreH suggested, the camera sucks.
Yah that comment should be amended to: faster performance today means there’s no technical reason the phone couldn’t stick around for longer.
Of course the manufacturer could just choose to screw you over by not updating/not letting you update your self. But I mean there’s no way to account for bad behavior on the part of manufacturers (other than not doing business with them anymore of course).
My old android phone (has a real radio), and also a tablet (now used as an extra screen for my pc)i have both work great, but apparently they're too old for youtube to be installed from the playstore. Can watch what i want on yt.com, but can't have the app (and several others).
Return for an Iphone 14 Pro or just Iphone 14. My partner did the same thing. If you don't want the big screen and fancy triple camera system, get the cheaper options. They will still be rocketship fast with long battery life and beautiful screens.
iOS has historically done a lot better with less RAM (as far as how snappy and responsive it feels) than Android. Dunno if that's still the case, but it very much was for years and years.
MacOS manages better than Windows as well. Apple seems to have really good memory management. I don’t know enough to know what they are doing, but in day to day tasks it always feels like a Mac/ iPhone needs half as much memory to feel responsive. Memory intensive work, such as video editing still require what they require though.
Apple's dev culture just seems to have more give-a-shit about performance (and, relatedly, battery life) than anyone else's. See also: Safari, their office suite programs, Preview which is the first program I've seen that handles PDFs very well and doesn't also feel super-heavy (on the contrary, it's very light), Terminal which is more-or-less competitive input-latency-wise with the best available anywhere else and is way better than average, and so on.
While I’m not an ios dev, from what I gathered ios is just way more aggressive at telling background apps to save their state and then stopping them. This can sometimes be very frustrating (ishell basically being blank if one didn’t touch it for like 10 seconds), but is great for responsiveness, battery life and longevity.
Unfortunately this can be hardly retrofitted to other OSs since it requires cooperation from the apps.
I believe it's still true. Apple's swift/obj c++ don't use garbage collection. Android default java/kitlin does, so android is inherently more memory intensive.
Tracing GCs get to amortize their deletion costs over time - in theory a tracing GC with two equal spaces (thus at least 2X overhead) can just copy used data to the currently unused partition and switch over, later overwriting the former region. This combined with thread local allocation buffers where an allocation is only a pointer bump is a really great combo. There are many smart modifications, but this auto-defragments as well.
Now if you want general ref counting you have to use atomic counters, and those will trash your performance on modern machines beyond fixing. And then we didn’t even mention that big object graphs will have to be recursively freed, an overhead that can’t be amortized in this case. Oh and you do need a tracing step one way or another to free cycles.
I was referring to the “ref counting is garbage collection”. You do however seem to know your ways around a GC, so it seems we’ll just have to disagree on the ref counting == GC part. (And yes, GC rocks, but seriously bloats the memory requirements)
If your most commonly used apps all fit into RAM, instead of initializing each app from scratch, the OS can just resume a suspended version from memory, which is much faster.
Yes and no. Yes, iPhones get throttled when the battery is on the verge of going ex, but no for this particular device. I run an iPhone X with a new battery from November 2021 (serviced by Apple), with maximum capacity at 90%, and it really is slower compared to the old days.
But!
I'm not complaining. It's an almost 6 year old device. That means, for every year of usage, I payed roughly 200€, or 16€ per month. That's not too shabby, tbh.
90% is pretty degraded for a battery (if the battery health metrics work the same way as Androids do). By 80% it's usually almost completely unusable, in my experience
Though I agree that battery health hasn't been super important to performance. But resetting the phone can do wonders
Interesting! i would have expected old battery to lead to keeping a charge for less time, but can you explain how it leads to worse perceived performance?
These mobile processors are very aggressive in lowering power demand when there is little computational load. Then, when you open an app or give it anything to do at all, power consumption jumps by orders of magnitude.
An aged battery will show big voltage drops under load. What was looking like a fine and dandy voltage (voltage is used to infer state of charge) can suddenly plummet. It can get so bad that your phone might even shut down because it starts to undervolt.
So, choosing between the lesser of two evils, iOS throttles down max. power draw, and thus max. processing speed, when the battery ages. The alternative would be random shutdowns, or your battery jumping from 80 to 8% suddenly.
In settings -> battery -> health & charging you can check in which regime you are.
As a battery ages it's capacity decreases. That's noticeable in that it will carry a load for less time, and the voltage it can sustain decreases.
On most phones you realize that when an old phone goes from 15%, you do something CPU intensive and the phone dies seconds later.
So it's reasonable to lower the peak power use on older batteries to lengthen battery life and make it more stable. Generally battery life increases when you are gentle. Charge slowly (which results in lower temps), avoid charging over 90% or discharging below 10%, and decrease the peak loads.
I don't know if it's still the case but on my old iPhone 6s, the geekbench score would differ depending on how full the battery is. Apparently Apple was pushing these processors on the limits of what the battery can deliver and once the battery degraded they need to lower the CPU/GPU speeds to prevent the device shutting off suddenly.
It even turned into a huge scandal of "Apple deliberately slowing down old iPhones" which was portrayed as if Apple is doing it to make you buy a new iPhone.
Once batteries get really old, I think they can start having trouble maintaining voltage and/or current, and Apple will start limiting performance to reduce fire risk. At least that's my understanding. Hopefully someone who knows more will also chime in.
iOS does have a feature that throttles the CPU on deeply worn-down batteries to save battery life, however, after it got some publicity a few years ago they made it user-toggleable from the settings menu (Battery > Battery Health & Charging)
My XS is currently at 74% of initial capacity (it tells you this too, which is really nice), and I don't even have the option to enable throttling yet, so it must not kick in until things get really dire
Apps' functionality is often simple, but the apps themselves aren't. Back in the ancient days, iOS used to refuse to download apps above a certain size via cellular connection. It was 10 or 25 MB. I don't think I have a single third party app on my phone that's less than half that size.
These well-crafted iOS apps still exist. E.g. Overcast is 7.3MiB. But yeah, most apps use a lot of frameworks and assets and they can be hundreds of megabytes.
> Faster performance today means longer lasting tomorrow.
Every flagship iPhone since 2011 has gotten at least five years of OS updates, with some of the more recent models getting six years. Security updates extend past that.
Having the latest iOS is not the same as having the latest iOS on the latest hardware. As years go by, you get less features or less snappier experience.
When my iPhone 6s received iOS 15, it didn't get the coolest stuff and the device performance was already less than decent. Even if the iOS itself wasn't slowing it down, the apps for iOS were made with expectation of higher performance.
As opposed to tossing an Android device into the landfill because it doesn't get any software support at all after a limited time?
> Six years is an awfully long life span for a mobile device, and certainly puts the 6S in the running for the longest supported phone to date. The iPhone 5S was five years old when it got its last OS update with iOS 12 but wasn’t eligible for iOS 13. On the Android side, Samsung has made recent moves to improve its device longevity by offering four years of security support for some of its phones. But six years of OS updates and security support puts the 6S in an entirely different league.
Apple is definitely doing great. It just would be cool of them if they provided option to unlock the device so maye go back to an older iOS or repurpose it for something else.
>Faster performance today means longer lasting tomorrow.
only if CPU performance plateaus in future generations. as long as new phones keep having drastically better performance, apps will keep updating to use it.
but if the phone is faster today, apps will start building features to use that CPU today. when the next phone comes out with a faster processor, you're still going to be behind the curve.
maybe less relevant in android, where phones generally have a wide spread of capabilities. but in iphone land, where most people are on the two most recent generations, you're always going to find developers assuming you have more processing power than you actually do if you're not on the latest generation.
But CPU performance strongly plummeted everywhere, there won’t be significantly faster CPUs in 4 years than what 4 years would have meant in the early days.
I am a bit surprised to hear the iPhone X doesn't do the OCR stuff. The iPhone Xs (2018) does, and I use it all the time. And I kinda thought those phones were identical in all notable respects.
I only use an iPhone X so I don’t have a point of comparison but I’ve never felt it was slow to launch any apps, that’s why I haven’t felt the need to upgrade.
It's the small 3rd party apps. Stuff like mcdonalds, taco bell, weatherbug, uber eats, etc. The web browser is kinda faster too, but I use firefox on both devices so it's not really a fair comparison on either end. The XS just shows its age in some stuff - I think due to the lack of ram. It'll just randomly hang for a second while it catches up lol. Rare, but it does happen.
The speed thing is balanced out by UI tweaks and things like the Apple Watch that I still use. Unfortunately it was a dumb silly situation where I bought a novelty phone that I actually REALLY enjoy using... and then I don't wanna get rid of my iphone haha.
Edit: Another unfair comparison - the Google Nest app is ludicrously slow on my iPhone.
It's worth caring about, but only as one data point amongst many.
For example I might consider:
1. Does it run Android?
2. Physically size- does it come in not obnoxiously large?
3. Does it support NFC payments? (surprisingly this still isn't a given)
4. Adequate performance
5. Camera quality
6. Screen quality
7. Battery life
8. Price
9. Community ROM support
10. Community Linux distro support
11. Can it run a desktop when connected to a usb-c screen
12. Geekbench
Only if everything else is equal would it make my decision
All modern touch screen phones are compatible with a stylus. I'm sure it would be harder to find one that isn't. The accuracy may not be the best on budget models.
Unless you mean _is a stylus / pen included with the phone_?
I have a Samsung Note. It has the best stylus on a phone.
(I also find it funny the Apple Fanbois decided to downvote my initial comment, when I was clearly showing that Apple is 'behind the curve' in this respect. Gosh, I used to work at Apple. I find this amusing.)
I didn’t downvote you, but surely your very niche requirement doesn’t add much to the discussion.
Even though, that is very cool line of work and I’m sure I would be similarly biased for the tech I helped form, but it is simply not a general requirement as shown by very very few phones having them.
You won't have much luck trying to combine an official Apple stylus with an iPhone. It's kind of a shame with how big phones have gotten over the years.
Samsung has some phones that have the necessary screen support for their styluses, sometimes even if the phone didn't come with one, but that's only in very few models.
There's the Apple Pencil, currently works on iPadOS but I don't see a reason why apple will not push the features to / it will at least be incorporated within the blend of macOS, iOS, and iPadOS.
I can currently use the Apple Pencil as a _dumb stylus / pen_ on my iPhone 2022 SE (not that it's necessary but just to see if it can be done).
Apple does not even advertise the Apple Pencil for use with iPhones. Because, as you say, it's a dumb pointer on your iPhone.
I have an iPPro + Pencil, and it is astonishingly good. It is no 'dumb stylus' on the iPPro. The exquisite detail one gets from a writing implement is not quite replicated with the Pencil -- but! The fact that Apple does advertise the Pencil and its features is a hopeful sign that we will continued to see more, and more sophisticated Pencils & apps that use them. I hope.
Yes I meant a stylus is not only included, but integrated into the device. I thought that would be obvious, but I was wrong. Thanks for letting me add that important detail.
The main factor that drives when I replace my phone is when I damage it enough that it seems like a better idea to replace the phone than have it repaired (I usually buy ~100-150 pound phones because I somehow have a near magical ability to totally seriously damage phones irrespective of how expensive they are)
I can't remember the last phone I had that survived long enough for me to feel I needed to upgrade it.
> When was the last time someone who doesn't play games on their phone thought "man, I wish this was faster"?
Whenever I have to use an older phone to do anything. App and web developers seem to be in an arms race with moore's law to see if they can waste the extra resources faster than hardware manufacturers can provide them.
Note: they can. Moore’s law didn’t end in its original form (we do get more transistors per unit still), but the usual interpretation of “faster CPUs” are long gone. So hopefully stronger focus on performance will happen soon.
It's not about CPU power, it's about software. Just putting a mutex in the wrong place or doing serious computation in UI thread will get you jitters, no matter how fast your CPU is. People do smooth screen updates on Commodore 64s and real time audio on things that are basically microcontrollers.
I think the simple answer is that you will get more years of use out of a highly performing chip. App bloat is inevitable and eventually the phone will slow down. You might get an extra year or two out of a flagship phone than a midrange phone. Android seems particularly vulnerable to this bloat due to a combination of cheaper components bottlenecking performance, most manufacturers loading up the OS with bloat, and apps having to target a much broader range of devices and having that take away from the performance tuning you can spend time on in iOS. Take it all together and the new Samsung you buy today will probably feel sluggish much sooner than a new iPhone.
People mostly care about app launch performance for productivity tasks. It was the norm for many years for budget Android devices that were a year old to wipe the floor on those tests with the latest, most powerful iPhone due to how poorly optimized iOS was. iPhone might have caught up since then.
I do. Recently did think exactly that when I was using Pixel 7 Pro. Opening a photo and pressing edit. Loading editor takes ages (relatively speaking). Pressing tools in that editor, takes ages to switch. It is really good editor with a horrible user experience due to all that loading time.
I care about it. I work on a video editing app for iOS (we also target Android). Raw CPU and GPU performance has a significant impact on our ability to ship features, not to mention user experience with things like number of simultaneous streams of video, rendering/export time, etc.
Funny, I often think I wish this or that app was faster, but the reality is that for architectural reasons developers are putting heavy computations on the main thread and leave all other cores unused.
So I welcome any and all single-thread performance improvements, if only because of lazy developers.
I don’t really want multi-core phone apps for the most part. Smartphones aren’t like full computers, they are small devices with little batteries. I want my phone to run single core programs with smooth scrolling and no jitter.
Multi core performance on a phone is like towing capacity on a sports car.
Last time I cared about Geekbench and such was highschool.
The metric is so generic it's irelevant in normal conversation.
It's same kind of topic EV cars are trying to introduce with instant torque and crazy acceleration - nobody in real life scenario cares about it.
You don't. It's widely discredited for comparing platforms. They also cherry picked JUST single core performance here (which has 0 bearing in any real life usage scenario).
Considering that 80% of App Store revenue came from games according to information that came out in the Epic Trial, there are a lot of people that play games.
The one, and only benchmark, I care about is battery longevity.
Not how long battery lasts before needing charge, but how many years it lasts before dropping to say 80% of original capacity that it needs to be replaced or the phone needs to be updated.
Most, if not all, modern phones are performant enough that I won’t need to update for a long time, if not for the battery issues. At least for my use case.
You take your phone to a shop and come back an hour later and boom you have a new battery. I once had a microphone fail on my phone and it was exact same scenario. It's really not a big deal.
The average selling price of an iPhone is over $1000. How many iPhone buyers are that price sensitive to a $40 difference in price for a battery that they might replace over four years.
The iPhones getting their battery replaced are older iPhones owned by people who do not want to spend $1000 on a new phone. It’s people breathing new life into an iPhone 8, not someone debating dropping. $1300 on the latest release.
I can't read the study (published in India?), but I would dispute the data.
> This hasn’t worked for lithium batteries, partly because so many formats exist. “These batteries are all over the place in different sizes,” he said. A related challenge is that the technology for lithium batteries changes rapidly — every one to two years, he said.
Show me any lithium battery-powered device that would last longer. They are all in the same ballpark and this is simply inherent in the way this tech works. Once another battery type surfaces in mobiles this might change, but still then you won’t get any meaningful differences as there is no order of magnitude difference between even the best and worst phones in power consumption and battery capacity.
My featurephone still gets 5 days of use without plugging in.
If you say that the comparison isn't relevant, I'll say yes: the whole point is that the industry has been innovating for computing power and computing power only. Cheaper versions exist to target low price. But no work is done to target long battery life because it's not considered profitable.
Feature phones are not running on general purpose OSs and are not capable of half the things smartphones can do. So there actually is an order of magnitude difference between energy consumption, resulting in longer battery life. But since their functionality is way different than a smartphone’s, it is akin to measuring the fuel efficiency of a horse and a car.
Wrong. KaiOS runs on featurephones and has a lot of the features people want from a handheld device: listening to music, messaging, social, even directions. KaiOS has a store where anyone can distribute their own apps.
I wish. We bought a Cat B35 because it looked cool. Phone speaker got quieter and quieter, I bought it to several phone places, nobody wanted to touch it. Maybe it wasn't popular enough?
All phone battery longevities are probably within a factor of 2x (for reputable brands). An iPhone official battery replacement is $100 installed. Is longevity really that material for a component that is 1/8 the price of the phone?
Apple wouldn't replace my ipad battery and is bullshitting me saying it is at 100% health. The device is 4 years old and I can tell it's only lasting half to 2/3 of the original battery life (even with only safari open). I'd be happy to pay $100.
One, do a wipe and re-install from backups. If the device doesn't really have much of importance on it, just wipe it and start fresh.
Two, discharge the iPad until it shuts off, then fully charge it and leave it plugged in for several hours after that. That will update the battery capacity gauge.
You can see the internal battery stats by plugging the iPad into a Mac and running any of a couple of different utilities - one free one is coconutbattery.
No what the guy told me is that they can't replace batteries because of lack of repairability. So their "battery replacement" is really a full device replacement (even though my device is otherwise in mint condition), and therefore they won't do it until their own diagnostics tell them the battery is dead. And of course I found lots of people sharing the same experience on forums, their diagnostic tool is set to never tell them the battery is dead.
I don't think I have a battery health in settings. The apple store guy ran some sort of remote diagnostic (and there is no way it is at 100% after 4 years of daily usage).
My point being that you can't really change those batteries on demand.
If you have a Mac probably the easiest way to see it is to connect the iPad to the Mac via USB and then use a third party app. I use this one, Coconut Battery [1].
The battery health is also included occasionally in the analytics the iPad sends to Apple if you have sending analytics. In Settings go to Privacy & Security/Analytics and Improvements/Analytics Data.
That takes you to a list of various recent analytics files that have been sent to Apple. If battery health was included it will be in one of the files "log-aggregated" files (iPadOS < 16) or "Analytics" files (iPadOS 16).
Battery health isn't always included in the analytics uploads so you might not have it in any of the files. Then you just have to keep checking as new files appear.
Here's a video I found talking about this [2]. The author of the video has written a shortcut [3] that shows up in the shar sheet. When viewing an analytics file you can share it with that shortcut and the shortcut will try to find battery information in that file and display it.
I just gave it a try but my logs don't currently have health information so I don't know how well it actually works for that. It did get cycle count from my logs and that matches what Coconut Battery shows.
FWIW my iPhone 7+ went 5 years and holds a charge for ~12 hours. It was just at 78% when I replaced it a few weeks ago but TBH that number is very... random (I used to do phone repair).
If you have a charger at your desk/car then honestly you could likely go even longer.
I've seen people struggling after 2 years though so it's rather random.
Absolutely 12 hours is not enough for a lot of people
That was with a few hours of screen time - I found that it didn't matter to me because I'd just plug it in at home/work. I'd call it "servicable" but certainly not great - but for 5 years I was personally surprised.
But, the battery chemistry is almost the same across the phones. There is no magic sauce for one phone company. However, bigger batteries generally last longer, because they go through less full cycle refreshes. Getting better battery chemistry is the same order of difficulty as curing a particular cancer! May be you care about cheaper battery swaps, and that is something we all can get behind.
And as an addendum to this, faster/more efficient processors mean the phone takes less time before it goes back into a low powered mode. There's a strong correlation here.
This is one of the main reasons I use two particular things on Android:
1) Firefox on mobile, with addons. Battery consumption is reduced a lot with less javascript, less ads downloaded, less domains contacted etc. From my quick tests, Firefox was perhaps efficient as a default installation compared to Chrome, or on a wifi with a pihole/nextdns type setup. But out and about in the world
2) Downloaded videos, podcasts, music or books. If I store my stuff on the device by downloading at home on wifi, it uses way less power than streaming over mobile data. My battery lasts for really long time playing videos from storage compared to for example Youtube.
I often wonder how much the battery life of a phone is a function of battery size and phone cpu & screen technology, vs web technologies and website design/performance. I can sort-of control for the latter.
Battery longevity is much less a concern for me these days with fast charging. My phone dropping from being 70% when I plug it in to 30% would only increase my time on the charger by a few minutes since it charges so much faster at low percentages.
To all the iphone diehards, I recently switched from Samsung to iphone 14PM and I whole heartedly hate following things:
1. The keyboard in ios: its unintuitive and ancient compared to the android counterparts. And No, Gboard, swiftkey keyboard in ios suck equally bad too.
2. Battery drain issues: Battery drains randomly, main culprit being "find my" process. This alone drains ~8% of battery overnight on my iphone and ~18% on my ipad overnight even with background app refresh turned off.
3. Lack of the back button is a huge pain in the ass. Some apps design their own navigation pattern and it sucks to operate the phone in 1 hand. For e.g, Youtube requires you to pull down on the video currently playing to go back to search results than allowing the native back swipe or back arrow on top left.
Meanwhile, I have agree that the apps in iOS are much nicer than the android apps, the same apps I used in android which sucked big time work flawlessly in iOS. FaceID is much reliable than the shitty in screen fingerprint readers in Samsung/Android phones.
So both Android and iOS have their pros and cons, and after using both, I can confidently say iphone is not the best phone in the world and user had to experience both to choose what suits them better.
On a random note I used to be an "I'll never go apple guy" but having to do some app dev had to get one so got a 13PM and recently upgraded to the 14PM and also copped a Pixel 7 Pro and man... going back to Android feels like regressing, sure swiftkey etc is nice but every app feels lesser than it's ios counterpart in terms of polish and feel, ios gestures are also way better. I haven't used my Pixel in weeks outside of work and a few calls despite having spent the last decade or so on Android. I once heard someone say even a baby can use an iphone and it shows, I don't think when I'm on it, it feels very natural and you quickly get used to the inconsistencies. I now have a M1 and a watch, heh.
I used to be that guy too :D First got and iPad, then Macbook M1 pro, then Airpods, then iPhone. So I got sucked in by the ecosystem, but I realize that such ecosystem comes with productivity benefits that otherwise isn't possible.
From what I understood the "back gesture" is not universal - sometimes you still have to use that Back link on the top?
Anyway, I'm returning to Android after 4 months for the same reasons. Lets see how this goes. I haven't found difference in the few apps that I use and since there is universal praise that iOS is smooth, every little hiccup called my attention. So, there are hiccups as well (lags, not responding to touches for half a second, etc)
> From what I understood the "back gesture" is not universal - sometimes you still have to use that Back link on the top?
It's actually universal when the App is built with the native UI components and it's part of Apple's App design guidelines. It doesn't work when the App is built with UI frameworks that don't adhere to this design convention. Sometimes even if the framework by default supports this, the devs can break it in an attempt to be creative but when it doesn't work, it means poor App design.
Ah I see, I don't have an airtag. must be my neighbour's. In any case, I don't want to pay the penalty for maintaining the network for someone else's airtag :(
I was mostly thinking about my neighbours having airbags in their own homes.
There's an iPhone that I only use for dev, and it surprises me at how bad it keeps charge when it's basically not in use, whereas my old S8 has far better standby time.
In the "Find my" setting there must be an option to turn off participation in the "Find my Network" which is the function of iPhone to act like a relay to other devices who want to advertise their position but don't have internet access.
Overall pros I've noticed is the stability and attention to detail in the small things we daily use.
1. Reliable performance from the OS: what I mean by this is, small features like auto brightness has worked right for me from day 1 on iphone vs me having to adjust it in android and gps lock on maps is always on point. Small things like this work in both Android and iphone, but in iphone it works right all the time.
2. Apple Wallet: I've used both Gpay and Wallet, my wife still uses Gpay on her android, But Apple wallet has worked without a hassle every single time.
3. Quality of apps in Appstore: When comparing same app released for both iOS and Android, the iOS app feels much stable to use without any crashes and better design. For example, the banking apps like Chase/ Capital one were absolute mess in my android(S20 FE), but in iOS I haven't seen them crash/hang ask for reload etc.
4. Software updates: You get software updates as soon as apple releases it vs Samsung taking months/years to add their bloatware and push it.
> However, single-core performance is generally considered more important when it comes to overall speed for everyday usage, as most tasks are unable to scale efficiently across multiple cores.
Thank you for acknowledging this. I think few people actually appreciate the need for better single-core performance. It's, in comparison, easy to just add more cores and use more power, but what is hard is making one core faster and faster and use less power.
Another tangential but related one is core architectural decisions made early on.
Apple wanted to build apps using web technology, but realized it was nowhere near fast enough. So they reused parts of the OSX toolkit, including the programming language which compiles down to optimized assembly. (and it wasn't even that great in performance due to obj-c's way of doing things, it had more runtime overhead due to the message passing system).
Meanwhile, Android always was on Java and the JVM, which, while pretty fast, isn't as fast or energy-efficient as a lower level language. If I recall correctly it took something like five years - and quadcore CPUs - before Android started to get close to iOS in terms of perceived performance and speed, and the iPhone still beat Android phones in terms of energy efficiency. It took even longer than that (again, if I recall correctly) for the iphone to even start having a dual-core CPU.
And Apple is doing it again with their own CPUs now, the energy efficiency of their new macbooks with no compromise on performance is really impressive.
Counterargument: Single core performance is more important for most applications, but it is rather unimportant overall. Most phones have already more than enough performance for usual applications. What matters for performance is heavy applications, games, for which GPU and multi-core performance are important, not so much single core performance.
Moreover, if someone really is interested in the speed of normal applications, then it is more useful to directly measure things like start-up times of popular apps. Apple isn't ahead here, as far as I know, despite higher single-core performance.
"Few people appreciate it" because it's no longer relevant with modern operating systems and programs for the vast majority of users and applications, which is why in almost every market imaginable, CPUs and SoCs have migrated toward higher core counts.
It takes a special sort of arrogance to look at literally the entire industry and go "psssst, savages don't know what they're doing. Single core performance is where it's at."
It’s just that not much improvement can be done in single thread performance anymore and it is much more easier to design and market “n times as many cores” then “we bumped single threaded performance by 0.2%”. Mind you, almost every single application you have will ultimately depend on single threaded performance, relatively few problems can even theoretically make use of multiple cores, let alone are programmed to do so. Sure, multiple single-threaded process will like more available cores, but it is more limited on mobile devices, where few very fast cores and more slower ones are the norm.
> because it's no longer relevant with modern operating systems and programs for the vast majority of users and applications
The article just proves you wrong
Apple's products are lightyears ahead from Android phones in perfomance. Apple CPU design always put single core perfomance upfront, because they know most application are still optimized to single core usage. how is not not relevant?
This doesn't really showcase how much Apple's chips are as much as how far Qualcom has fallen behind.
On the other hand, the results also show how much work Apple will need to put into their GPUs, as the clearly inferior chip is still beating the iPhone 14 hands down in terms of GPU horsepower.
The relevant review, though, is performance per watt. This video (https://youtu.be/s0ukXDnWlTY) from a few months ago explores the power efficiency graphs and that's probably what most phone users really want. Nobody is gaming on their phone until it hits the limits of passive cooling and very few people will need the raw CPU performance for more than a second per page load. I don't even know what intensive single core benchmarks are even good for in real life, maybe Javascript if you're somehow running the JS VM at 100% for minutes straight? That doesn't sound like something I'd want my phone to do!
Qualcom's advancements in speed and longevity have been incremental, sometimes even decremental, for years now. Mediatek, previously the chipset for every 100 dollar Chinese phone, keeps closing while Qualcom desperately tries to squeeze just a little more juice out of their cores.
Apple's progress is also slowing down, but not nearly as much as their most important competitor's. It's a shame, really. Hopefully Google and Microsoft will develop their own chips for real in the future because you can't just wait for Qualcom anymore. Microsoft REALLY wants a good M1/2 competitor but the other chips in the ARM space just aren't up for the task. I'm sure Google would also love for their Chromebooks to become more powerful, though their own mobile devices seem to focus on midrange performance with benefits in software and dedicated silicon instead of fast general purpose compute.
In the end, I have no horse in the game because I don't think I'll be upgrading any time soon. My current phone is more than fast enough for my needs. The battery is slowly fading but as long as I can still get through the day I'm satisfied. With the absolutely ridiculous prices of phones these days, I'm putting off an "upgrade" for as long as I can.
Performance per watt only matters until you hit 1+ day battery life in regular usage.
Beyond that, who cares?
It also wouldn't matter if the thing could recharge super fast.
The M1/M2 laptops have done this, I noticed that people who used to bring chargers with them at conferences/meetings don't even bother anymore, or don't bring it out of the bag.
> The M1/M2 laptops have done this, I noticed that people who used to bring chargers with them at conferences/meetings don't even bother anymore, or don't bring it out of the bag.
I haven't brought my charger to work since I received my M1. My bag just contains snacks. Not having to worry about charging is really a very different experience.
At this point I really don't care about what is the latest and greatest in phones
They are all the same at this point, we are way past when Specs actually mattered(outside of JS performance on mobile, thank you Snapdragon!), they are just too small for anything useful, at least for me personally.
I just buy a pixel and install GrapheneOS/CalyxOS on it, and call it a day.
Its a phone that works, and I can relatively trust it, certainly more than other spyware, even if sandboxed google services are installed.
Why buy a Pixel only to replace the OS? Pixels are basically minimum viable hardware to deliver Google software. Without the Google software, its just a mid-range phone at high-end prices.
That's just plain not true. It's at least $100 below market average and performance is great. Not mentioning camera which is easily one of the best on the market, if not the best one.
Pixels are one of the few Android phones that actually have some decent security features in hardware (that’s why they are the only supported grapheneOS targets).
Nonetheless, iPhones are also great from a security perspective out of the box, and the hardware is superior so I just couldn’t switch to a pixel, even though I wanted to at every version. They are unfortunately simply riddled with some stupid mistakes, like that emergency call one.
the a series are well priced/supported and do more than enough for me, you can pick one up for $300 and be good for years.. all while there are people making monthly payments for 1,200 iphones
I find it interesting that you’re comparing an old, low-end Pixel phone to the most expensive current generation iPhone. If your phone budget is $300 you’d be comparing it to the similarly priced iPhone 11 or SE; if you wanted a prestige flagship phone you’d be comparing it to a high-end Android device costing about the same.
