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).
For people with the means to afford it, iOS devices are superior in most ways: from performance to utility to lifetime. They lack features a rounding-error fraction of users care about, like side-loading for example.
Performance? Maybe. Lifetime? Maybe. Utility? No. The extra restrictions Apple packs on cuts utility. No emulators, no NFC pairing, no auto-sorting your app pages alphabetically, worse notifications, no grabbing that file off a USB C drive, etc. Certainly never got some of the weird but useful things Android phones have had like being a universal remote. Android phones can do everything iPhones can plus more. You can debate whether or not it's more rough around the edges but they just simply do more.
One could make the argument that Apple has to have something that Android doesn't... a faster cpu?
This doesn't mean that Android needs to have the fastest cpu, because they can do more with the resources they have better then Apple does.
Wireless charging android phone to android phone, done. Wireless charging your headphone case from your Android phone, done.
Want to plug in a hard drive, ssd, ide, cd-rom, 3.5inchers, printer, keyboard, mouse, monitor, done, done, done, it all gets done on android.
You see I care more about functionality/utility them cpu speed.
And as others have pointed out battery life is still the most critical priority....because who cares how fast your frame rates are if you can only play for 15min before running the battery dead...
Next 5yrs the battery technology for these handheld devices will be insane. Imagine not charging your phone for a week....
Yes, you fit in the “rounding error” group of users. Nobody (almost) cares about any of the features you noted. I’m not talking technology-ignorant people, either: the vast majority of phone users, including sophisticated users, use it for basic app functionality and texting. They aren’t hooking up hard drives or keyboards and don’t even want to.
>Android phones can do everything iPhones can plus more. You can debate whether or not it's more rough around the edges but they just simply do more.
More but worse. I don't want it to be a really bad space heater or a really bad flood light, I want it doing a few things really well.
>No emulators, no NFC pairing, no auto-sorting your app pages alphabetically, worse notifications, no grabbing that file off a USB C drive, etc.
The number of people that care about this stuff is a rounding error. I can't even remember the last time I saw a USB drive let alone needed to get something off of it on my phone.
Nobody cares about better app and notification management? Some of these are niche but those two things make Android better at being a smartphone than the iPhone. You might not care about these things but some people do. Rounding errors start to add up when there's lots of them.
Apple's notification management is better than what I remember from my last Android phone (years ago, a Pixel, latest version at the time, I think in 2017 or 2018). Apple's app management is definitely mixed, but I find it quite easy to use as-is, certainly not deficient enough to be a deal-breaker. And most people--by far--don't care much about either item.
Android lets you easily disable notifications for some features of apps in settings. Apple is all or nothing and you have to hope that the app dev was kind enough to put granular notification settings in the app. It's also just better at stuff like in-notfication replies.
"Nobody" wants to spend 20 minutes configuring at that granularity: apple's is more than sufficient for 99.9999% of all use cases. All the supposedly superior Android features in this entire thread are things only a minute fraction of tinkerers actually care about.
Yes, everything you don't care about is some minute fraction of tinkerers. I bet you thought only some minute fraction of tinkerers wanted copy and paste, a notification shade, widgets, always on display etc.
The only tech geeks I've known who gave a shit about on-paper specs and benchmarks for phones and were always buying anything faster than what they already had just because it's faster, have been Android fans.
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.
Does benchmark results really matter that much for phones? I don't see myself compiling code, playing graphics intensive video games, multitasking with many engineering software running simultaneously, on a phone.
Although Apple most definitely still leads on these factors, I think battery life, general latency/responsiveness of doing daily tasks, reliability, etc, are more important than some random coremark.
I do all of the above on my smartphone. I just use the USB-C connector to plug it into a hub and plug in a display, keyboard and mouse. I have OpenVSCode-Server running within Termux, along with Python installed there.
Unfortunately iPhone can't do that so who cares about the better Geekbench score...
I'm following some nReal topics and to me it still seems like a mixed bag, best suitable for video on a plane. I would jump on it the moment I have enough confidence it can replace my monitors.
Battery life (especially idle battery life) and feeling responsive are all I care about. iOS devices have usually done far better on those fronts while having smaller batteries and weaker hardware compared with Android devices, so, yeah, super don't care about it benchmarking as faster than an Android device.
Can I still put it on my nightstand at 10pm with 15% battery and have my alarm go off at 8AM with 8-9% charge remaining? Cool, don't care how fast it benchmarks.
I keep an iPhone 5 in my car for playing music only. It's on airplane mode. Even then was surprised to learn that it lasted 2 weeks on a single charge, and was still at like 20%.
Has Android gotten a lot better on that front? Last I developed for Android was after they had some big push to improve battery life and they were still a ton worse.
I had a lot of experience with tons of devices from both ecosystems (because I was at least part-time in mobile dev) from about 2011-2019 and a consistent hallmark of Android devices—regardless of manufacturer, Google's own devices weren't much better—was that their battery life, and especially idle battery life, was markedly worse than iOS devices. In fact, I came into that world as an Android user, and gaining extensive exposure to both ecosystems was what convinced me I'd be better off in almost every way by switching. Android devices only stopped being an absolute joke, by comparison, near the end of that span, but were still lagging on both performance (as far as actual in-practice UX, not benchmarks) and real-world battery life. But it's entirely possible they've closed the gap since.
It had to have been the apps that were running on Android. It's nothing to do with the hardware. I used to have my pixels, back from 2012, regularly at less than 10%, and would still last overnight as you describe. If a pixel not running any crap apps was worse, it was only be a negligible amount.
The gap was never that big, it was more the software that was running than any hardware issues.
No, it really was. I wasn't hallucinating stock Android tablets dying over long weekends while iOS tablets would still be usable for testing without needing to plug in, after three weeks in a drawer. Or the phones needing a daily charge if you barely used them, while Apple phones could go 3-4 days under light use. There were no exceptions to this in Android land.
[EDIT] Incidentally, yes, I agree it was largely a software issue—but at the OS level.
I don't know what to tell you, but your experience is very different from mine and most androids users (who knew what they were doing).
Disable all the software crap and there was no real difference. You think it was more internal to the OS, and maybe part of it was, but even with just ending all the crap that fixed things.
We agree there were no significant differences in hardware though, and that was my point.
Since when does ios devices have weaker hardware (besides lower RAM)? Even as per the article, years old, low-end iphones easily beat out flagship android devices CPU-wise, to the point it is not even funny. Apple is just generations ahead in CPU design.
> Does benchmark results really matter that much for phones?
I would say no, but they are a means to compare raw performance between phones.
Which isn't the best metric, but it's one of them. I mean at some point, Samsung was caught fudging the numbers, overclocking or disabling thermal / power saving options when it detected a benchmark app running.
So for their customers, or customers comparing phones, benchmark results do matter, to the point where it became a marketing tool. I don't think that's the case anymore though.
Late to reply (sorry) but this is an incorrect assumption. Benchmarks do not generalize to everything, especially loading apps from non volatile memory where users might notice latency the most. This is also usually a bottleneck by the memory related components instead of the core itself. Also, its not hard to just throw more brute clock speed at something, which will absolutely consume more energy overall than a slower but more efficient system.
I can't understand who are the people that care about smartphone performance.
I do every computation and gaming outside my phone.
My Xiaomi Redmi Note 8 from 3 years ago feels as good as when I bought it when reading the net, watching youtube, chatting, emailing or editing pictures.
And my Redmi scores 300 in the same Benchmark, where the S22 scores 900, the S23 1500 and the iPhone 14 Pro 1900.
Maybe JS performance could be slightly better? But I rarely navigate to such poorly optimized websites.
After having multiple google pixel phones break and never having an iPhone break (after much abuse) I realized that the hardware quality far trumps any software AI voodoo that I care about. Mind you I don’t do fancy stuff on my phone- YouTube, insta, texting, email, slack. The main culprits
I bought an iPhone 14 pro. Switched back to my s21 within two weeks.
On apple, the animations are slicker, the hardware much better, and arguably the software stack higher quality. The Bluetooth audio quality was noticeably better on every device I used, from old car to brand new stereo.
But the always on display isnt as good, focus modes didn't work quite like I wanted, widgets are less powerful, the notifications UI is inferior, and accessing system settings is more cumbersome.
Bonus: the lightning port is inferior.
So yes. I would love the android software architecture with apple hardware and privacy.
My main gripe was that each notification was a separate bar item that I had to clear out - five messages from the same person in the same app, is five notification bars in the menu. And the "smart" grouping I don't think fixes that.
I like MacOS okay, but re: notifications, they too have this abysmally small "X" to clear out notifications. They're just... annoying.
The goofy thing is that I remember when iOS used to be _better_ at notifications. Android didn't used to give you so much control over app notifications and iOS required apps to use them much more sparingly.
I still have issues with Android's notifications though. Some apps insist on using a single "General" category that includes both notifications I require as well as marketing and advertisements.
The core advantage for the average user of Apple's smartphone chips being so powerful is that they'll get updates for a super long time and remain high-quality phones for a long time.
It starts with one gadget. Then you buy the second Apple device, and find that they work fantastically together. Soon, you're in an all-Apple household!
Started with iPhones, then added iPads, then AppleTV since the screen mirroring was great and we use it for Plex. Then the next thing you know, the entire household is now MacBooks because shared clipboard is amazing, handoff is nice, being able to reply to text messages from the laptop is great.
Took a decade for the transition to complete, but now it is done and the stickiness of it will be hard to overcome.
Now the Windows machines are just gaming machines, nothing else.
To be clear, on an Android phone you can use a desktop to write texts regardless of operating system. The Apple lock-in around writing text messages is a bad thing, not a good one (especially if you've realized that macOS is actually quite bad and can't use it without wanting to throw the laptop at the nearest wall).
I legit wish they had any competitors doing the thing they do even almost as well. It's worrisome that there's nowhere to turn if Apple goes to shit (I'm very worried about their growing advertising income) that's not a significant downgrade in overall UX.
My experimentation with apple products started and ended with ipods. Their insistence to use itunes for putting music on the device eventually turned me away. I've used about a half dozen hardware music players. The ipod UX was easily the worst because of this, even compared to the Diamond Rio PMP300, which was powered with an AA battery. I don't doubt the apple has good UX for some things. But if you think they're much better at everything, you might have blinders on.
Eh, I came to them after about 15 years of thinking Apple users were kinda culty and must be wrong about how good Apple stuff is, and mostly running Linux (though I started on Windows/DOS). No, they're that good, overall. They do fuck up or do annoying things pretty often (requiring iTunes for iPods would be one of those things) but every other option (and there... aren't that many, really) is so much worse that they've yet to push me to switch. I'd love to see a real competitor.
Yeah, started with an Apple TV hooked up to my Sony TV (didn't want Sony / Android connecting to internet). Then got an Apple Watch because of running + vibrating alarm. Had to get the iPhone for the watch, so rented the iPhone 12 Mini on a Black Friday Deal from Grover. Then followed by iPad Air.
Though my Desktop is still a Tower with a 12 Core / 24 Thread 3900X. And the next laptop would probably be a frame.work.
Though for a family computer the low spec Mac Mini looks nifty.
Indeed. Got a macbook. Then wired headphones because no others fit my ears. Then an iPad. Then finally swapped to an iPhone. And eventually even an Apple TV.
Same for me. I was previously a huge fan of the original iPhone SE, but having a modern screen and camera is so nice. Battery life is lacking a bit though. If Apple won't release another iteration of the mini in the next two years, I'll consider getting a 13 mini with a new battery which would hopefully last me quite a while.
I do think that phones are in a sorry place - but this isn't exactly why. The industry is still based on the concept of a new model every year, but it has been years since there were obvious & universal reasons to get a new model. The striking thing about this fact isn't that Apple is "ahead" - it's that even though Apple has basically lapped the competition on a technical level it doesn't matter much.
I'm particularly frustrated with the market for phones. I'w not going to buy an iPhone, and I'd really like to avoid the Google ecosystem (eg, by using GrapheneOS). I just received new Pixel 6a phones for me and my family yesterday only to discover that there's no 3.5mm jack.
I really feel like old man yelling at cloud, but the more advanced phones and the software get, the more I miss the days of my cheapy Motorola flip phone.
I don't follow advances in phones - new models coming out are never on my radar. So if a manufacturer drops functionality like that, I don't notice. And literally every phone I've owned for my nearly 25 years of cell usage has had a 3.5mm jack, so it's never had to be a conscious choice.
Do you have the same apps installed? Years back I found uninstalling Facebook was like a 20% battery life improvement - I didn’t even open it much but it was so busy in the background.
Going through the battery usage report and pruning apps is like flossing: most people should do it more often than they do.
> The problem is the poor battery management on the phone. Not fair to blame the apps for Apple's failure.
You can't separate the two: if the apps are requesting the phone do more work, that's going to affect the battery life. That's why I suggested looking at the battery usage history since it often has surprises if you don't, and comparing two devices with different workloads doesn’t tell you much.
This made me chuckle. I'm "still rocking" an iPhone 12 because I'm still paying it off. If it were dated and obsolete I'd be angry I threw away my money buying Apple.
AT&T in the US offers "trade in rebates" on phones. You trade in a phone and they rebate your phone bill by $800 or $1000 over a 24 month period when you buy a new phone on an installment loan. It's a 0% loan so I'm not going to throw money away just to avoid paying less money over time.
My mother's iPhone 6 is running iOS 15, which will be supported by all the apps she uses for at least 2-3 more years, bringing the total lifetime of her smartphone close to 10 years.
Sure, Apple is pretty draconian when it comes to how much the developers have to keep their tooling up to date, but that's not the same on the consumer side anymore
If you read carefully, Apple's "Ceramic Shield" glass actually only is on the front of the iPhone. The back is just the glass they used before. Which, I find inexplicable after multiple years of Ceramic Shield being available.
This does look to just be geek bench CPU, and we need to be honest, people play games on phones now so GPU performance matters, so if you're going to make an extreme claim like the headline, you need more than a single category of a single benchmark.
Although an Iphone 15 or equivalent is going to be very incremental, Iphones with USB-C are going to fly off the shelves.
Lighting connector is 10 years old now, and is USB 2.0 speed. Still funny to see hotels with the pre-lightning connector and got screwed, but its been a long time now.
> Despite being over 6% faster for single-core performance, the iPhone 12 is 15.64% slower for multi-core performance compared to the Galaxy S23 Ultra, with scores of 3867 vs 4584.
I wonder how many people who are now saying “we don’t need faster phones” would have been beating Apple up back in the 68K and PowerPC days when Apple’s hardware was slower?
I just downloaded and run the geekbench 5 on my s22 ultra and it showed 1215, instead of 926 listed in the article. Probably other numbers are of similar quality.
What about me? I want a high-end Android, non Chinese OEM, non Exynos-based, non shutter-speed-problem-riddled phone that guarantess >3 years of Android OS updates and has shown in the past to deliver on those promises and has a respectable battery life.
Which phone should I get? Or am I too picky for something I want to pay >$1000 for?
Sony flagmans checks most of your boxes. Updates stop after 2 and a half years, true, but since it is android you can update to linageos. Battery life is pretty good, screen is excellent. As a bonus, it is less bulky than IPhone and bloatware... is manageable.
It's a single core benchmark, so not surprising. The single core performance has always been a lot better on the iPhones, and you can't fix this in software.
You can produce a multi-core benchmark that makes an Android look just as good as an iPhone, and some apps will be just as snappy. But when using the web browser the difference in performance was noticeable for me so I upgraded to a used iPhone.
whatever the cpu android is bloated. it forces me to prefer an iphone even I dont like apple. I need an ativ S with windows phone like in 2014. Galaxy S23 with W11 would be the best imho. Ativ S was a Galaxy S3 with windows 8 on it
I traded a galaxy S3 + 3 year agreement in for a free S22; can you do that with an iPhone? Seems like we are comparing a free phone to a many hundreds of dollars phone.
Everyone in this thread is arguing about operating systems and their mobile OS preference... why?
The interesting point here, which is corroborated by different sources than just TFA, is that Apple's silicon is 1-2 generations ahead of everyone else.
Whether you like iPhone or Android, I think we should all agree that's a bad situation for the world to be in. Apple's advantage in mobile CPUs is coming at a time when new types of devices are appearing, like AR glasses. If Samsung and Qualcomm don't catch up soon, Apple will win that space and have an even more unassailable monopoly.
Once upon a time, there were around a dozen fabs competing to make high-end semiconductors. Now it's just TSMC (who sell cutting-edge capacity exclusively to Apple) with Samsung's fabs playing catch-up. And Intel... are you okay back there, Intel?
There's isn't much hope on the horizon for more competition when it costs hundreds of billions to build a new next-gen fab, there's a significant chance of process shrinks failing economically, and the institutional knowledge required is concentrated in a few isolated groups, with most STEM students in most countries not finding the semiconductor industry attractive. There's a crunch on pretty much every axis.
"Is selling cutting edge capacity exclusively to Apple" I think undersells the situation, perhaps a little disingenuously.
Apple has a track record of bankrolling build-out of cutting edge manufacturing facilities in a weird business loan/prepurchase arrangement where essentially they get stuff 18 months before anyone else would have been able to get it without doing the same thing. Waiting around for businesses to see a market and then a long line of processes necessary to make that a reality slows things down.
When Apple made their first Intel laptop, they got a CPU bin that didn't actually exist for something like another 9 months. If Lenovo had shown up asking for it, they would have been told no, in no small part because Lenovo would have wanted 10x the capacity that Apple needed for those first macbooks. But Apple could handle waiting for what were essentially perfect chips to trickle out of a fab still working on yield.
As Apple has gotten bigger they've had to make their own weather more and more. I have no doubt that if Apple hadn't shown up to TSM with a bag of money that Intel would only be a year or so behind TSM instead of whatever they are right now (which is Really Really Bad)
That's when governments should step in and invest in alternatives. The TSMC quasi-monopoly is any country national security risk, and that it is irresponsible for most western nations to let the industry be run by a single foreign player. If I'm not wrong, TSMC captures by itself 60% of the world's semiconductor market?
Depends on your context. The US is more or less forcing (via political & economic pressure) TSMC to build inside the US. If anything were to happen in terms of national security (with regard primarily to China invading Taiwan), the US can stand up a US-TSMC entity in collaboration with TSMC Taiwan (or without them entirely), declare the Taiwan entity void as far as the US is concerned, claim all the assets globally as being owned by the US entity and go right on about its business. And it doesn't matter whether anyone else likes it or not, given the context that will be unfolding at that time. Ideally also shift all critical IP and talent out of Taiwan and into the US, to the extent possible, while the chaos is unfolding. It'd just be a new Operation Paperclip.
If TSMC actually goes forward with its plans to build inside the US to the extent it's supposed to, it's no longer fully a foreigner player. Realistically it's a hybridization of TSMC for what-if scenarios. Once they do it, the US will not let them return to the way things were before.
That’s true, except Apple silicon has been well ahead of competing CPUs in performance even back when it was on the same or similar nodes. Remember half of the first 64 bit Apple ARM cores were fabbed by Samsung. They only moved completely off Samsung fabs in 2014. So yes undoubtedly having exclusive early access to the latest TSMC nodes helps but we know that’s not the whole story. They were thrashing Samsung in their own fabs for years.
The main reason is Apple has the profit margins to be able to afford to use large chips with lots of cache and plenty of premium features. Look at the M1 architecture, those chips are monsters. Android OEMs don’t have the margins, so are trapped in a race to the bottom against each other.
Does Apple really have some secret sauce, or are they just consistently first in line for TSMC's latest process? Not saying that's better or worse, but it's a very different problem.
Apple’s secret sauce is their long-term focus, colored strongly by their many awful experiences being held hostage by CPU manufacturers. They’ve re-architected their entire software stack on multiple occasions to deal with manufacturing partners who could no longer keep up.
For example, it was a big deal when they moved from IBM/Motorola to Intel, and Macs started getting much faster right away. A decade later and Intel is struggling to keep up at the high end, woefully behind in low-power contexts, and Apple is again hamstrung in their plans.
So at some point they decided to make their own chips. Well, to design them, and to use their leverage with TMSC to get them made exclusively. It’s true that they have fewer dependencies than a more general-purpose manufacturer like Intel, but don’t discount the many years they’ve spent eating shit while waiting for their “partners” to catch up. In the CPU space, they’ll never do that again.
> Apple’s secret sauce is their long-term focus, colored strongly by their many awful experiences being held hostage by CPU manufacturers.
This is the key point. There used to be a lot of chip makers and phone vendors in the Android space (hell, even Sony had their own processors for their early phones), both ARM and the odd non-ARM effort. The way that the Android market has collapsed down to essentially "Qualcomm and Samsung" is what's hurting Android, and Qualcomm, in particular, are the reason that things like support lifecycles are such garbage. Google have been completely disinterested in solving this problem in any way, while Apple have.
Apple tried and failed to make a chipset to replace Qualcomm didn't they?
I'd love to see them try again. And I feel like that's an area where their particular culture (of looking at vendors that make them resentful and trying to do something about it) might even put them in a place where they're willing to sell those chips or designs to other carriers because fuck Qualcomm.
I think it’s “tried but it takes a while” — and I’m sure the supply mess of the last couple years broke a lot of schedules. The most recent story I’ve seen has it a year or so out, so it’ll be interesting to see if that pans out or, especially, if Qualcomm comes up with some new legal angle to prevent competition.
I wonder if they'll roll it out on the iphone first or start with ipads and possibly the apple watch if they can get the power draw lower. That might be a good way to increase the battery life of those devices, lowering the gap between regular and low power mode.
Yeah, I'd be really curious to know where the hangups are. My understanding of that field – in which I have no direct experience — is that there are a lot of hard edge cases to deal with and it would make a ton of sense to roll that out on a small scale first. I wonder what the tradeoffs are for something like the Apple Watch – the device is simpler in the sense that it does less than a phone but the battery constraints are quite tight.
One of Apple's goals with building their own chips is getting a lower TPD for devices. I can't imagine they'd field a cellular chip that drew more power than Qualcomm's. It's always possible though.
If that turns out to be the case, the iPad has the largest battery and can absorb more of a regression than any of their other devices. But there's enough of those sold to get some progress toward a tighter solution
I’m sure you’re right on the goals. What we can only speculate about are their thresholds for shipping v1: it wouldn’t surprise me if, for example, they would opt for a design which used less power but wasn’t as fast for the watch where bandwidth is less critical. As a buyer, I’d be more than willing to take a hit on peak performance if the design used less power or more gracefully handled poor coverage.
> Apple tried and failed to make a chipset to replace Qualcomm didn't they?
I can't remember whether it was sourcing Intel modems or rolling their own, but yeah, either way they fell foul of Qualcomm's nest of patents: Qualcomm's real competitive edge is that they are experts at lobbying to have their patented tech built into government and NGO standards.
You don't need to make decent chips or support them for more than a couple of years if it's illegal not to use them.
Did they end up buying Intel's wireless division off of them? I believe they already had their own, but buying it for the patents (and transferable patent licenses) would be valuable to them.
If someone won't give you favorable patent terms but you can buy a company that got better ones...
One potential avenue here is if Apple, with a cellular modem of their own, just includes the modem in all of their devices and cut out a bunch of SKUs.
A little bit of both. Apple’s chips are highly customized for their use case and that proves out in certain benchmarks where they have a dramatic lead, but even without that customization they still have a small lead by default due to being on the newest process.
Apple (and Nvidia) can afford to pay to be first in line for the latest TSMC process. But that alone doesn't explain why Apple's 2.5 year old mid-range offering is faster than the latest and greatest from Samsung.
What a gross trivialization of the chip design process. If all a company had to do was get first in line for TSMC's process, Intel would drop all their fabs and just pay that money to TSMC to beat AMD.
> If all a company had to do was get first in line for TSMC's process, Intel would drop all their fabs and just pay that money to TSMC to beat AMD.
What money? They already paid them. Building fabs has a massive upfront cost that you depreciate for decades. The economics have to make sense for them to move to TSMC
That would be a very costly mistake for Intel since then they couldn't cater their existing markets anymore. AMD and Nvidia are already struggling since they must share TSMC's capacity with Apple. Also, it remains to be seen whether the x86 architecture can keep ahead of ARM-based designs and maybe also RISC-V in the far future.
Apple has good designs, consistent long-term plans, and doesn't have to directly compete with Intel over domination in the x86 market. They offer a complete package outside the x86 market. This fits well with who a market leader like TSMC would want as a partner.
It's a side business for Intel. Unlike AMD, Intel has never managed to produce GPUs that perform close to the current state of the art.
For TSMC, it would be an error to start large-scale production of chips for someone that still has their own manufacturing capability. TSMC would have to allocate less fab capacity to their existing customers, and those won't like that.
They have unlimited cash and buy capacity in advance.
Also, in the old days when they weren’t the juggernaut they are today, they always were good and minimizing SKUs and economy of scale. In 2005, the #1 part on state contracts were iMacs, even though Apple market share was like 3%.
That level of control and planning means they know what they need and can adjust. Overages in Apple Watch CPUs are subsidizing the HomePod, etc. In the case of the iPhone, they put an overpowered chip in there because why not.
This, especially with regards to backwards compatibility. Apple doesn't have to worry about some other OS / app vendor updating to support new silicon; they ship new hardware, new operating system, new Xcode, and almost everything just works.
Also their silicon itself is just more advanced. I don't think anyone else is doing UMA the way they are, though I'm not 100% sure and would welcome correction.
Customers with expensive tastes help you roll out new product lines. Cheap customers may end up costing you money, or at the very least represent a negative opportunity cost. You have to work out for yourself whether the gravitas of having a full schedule lets you get more paying customers in the door.
> Everyone in this thread is arguing about operating systems and their mobile OS preference... why?
It's like football game for geeks, it's not a big deal. It's fun as long as you don't take it too seriously.
On a more serious note, I prefer Apple's style of doing things and pray to the gods Android doesn't obliterate Apple's OS. Just last week I got my hands on a Amazon Fire TV, it was cool until the AirScreen app started not working for some reason and my blood started boiling with disgust towards Android and everything it stands for. I'm a huge "Just Works" enjoyer and Android's market share dominance scares me.
I got a Shield to try to save some cash, getting hardware with a good TV interface that could do h.265 decoding.
Bugfest and terrible (and goddamn laggy) UI. Ended up on an AppleTV, which is what I should have gotten in the first place I guess. Every time I try to save money by avoiding Apple I end up paying far more for it in jank, lost time, and frustration. I hate how shit my other options are in nearly all of Apple's product categories, because it's not like Apple doesn't screw up constantly, just not enough that I wouldn't be cutting of my nose to spite my face by switching. If others would close the gap I'd feel a lot less uncomfortable with how much power they have.
> Every time I try to save money by avoiding Apple I end up paying far more for it in jank, lost time, and frustration. I hate how shit my other options are in nearly all of Apple's product categories
This was me recently. Our old TV broke so I bought a new Samsung at Costco. The setup process was ominous: they want you to sign away all of your data to whoever they choose to sell it to, and the only way to get it on the Wi-Fi was to use their setup app which refuses to let you configure the TV unless you give it background high-precision location tracking permission. They lie about that being needed to configure Wi-Fi in response to negative reviews.
I set it up before uninstalling the phone app, and fired up Disney+ for my son. Mission accomplished!
He makes it like 5 minutes in to Finding Nemo and complains because it’s doing jerky 1-2 fps slideshow mode any time the scene has much motion at all.
We switch to Netflix. Same problem.
Maybe it’s our normally very reliable Wi-Fi? Nope, everything works great on his iPad and that can even AirPlay to the TV flawlessly. Also it downloaded its software updates at like 500Mbps according to the Eero app so it seems like it would have to be a very selective network problem.
The most likely explanation is that Samsung sells 4K TVs with processors which can’t reliably keep up with a complex 4K stream.
I see where this is going, and factory reset the TV before blocking it on the Wi-Fi. It’s a beautiful display and I don’t want it turning into e-waste so time to solve problems the American way by shopping. Amazon delivered an Apple TV early the next morning and it’s everything Samsung wants to be when they grow up: the UI is designed by professionals and noticeably more responsive, the setup process is painless, and it can play 4K in any app flawlessly.
Now, I know that this is because Samsung put the equivalent of something like a decade-old phone SoC in there while Apple is using an A14 which is basically laptop-class and costs considerably more, but if they want to save money on their BOM they shouldn’t advertise things on the side of the box when their hardware doesn’t support it.
I tried a few times over the years saving money by not buying Apple, all ended up in frustration. I hope the competition catches up with Apple because I would love having options even if I stick with Apple.
I don't know if it is all about the bloat. Even the 3rd party apps themselves seem to be made with less care. This AirScreen app I'm talking about apparently is a paid app(free to install, subscription for some features) that can just stop working on a fresh device and give cryptic error messages that don't help and complete uninstall and re-install doesn't fix it.
Don't confuse Amazon "Fire" performance with a "real" Android device. Amazon is subpar in my experience, and is several (many) generations behind.
>Amazon began referring to the Android derivative as Fire OS with its third iteration of Fire tablets. Unlike previous Fire models, whose operating system was described as "based on" Android, Fire OS 3.0 was described as "compatible with" Android.
I'm familiar with "this is not true Android" line. If it was not a derivative but vendor version the solution would have been that I should try Pixel or something which is pure Android. If it was the pure Android, the solution would have been that I should give a try to <BRAND />.
That's also why I don't like Android, you can't have it all in a single device. Everyone does something very well but lacks hugely in something else, so for each use case you need a new device.
Good Android experience is for the super rich, who can afford all the devices and use the correct one when needed.
Eh, I think it’s somewhat of a big deal because (to stick with your analogy), just like football, it can be all consuming if left unchecked. I’d argue it’s because the anti-Apple zealots are much louder, but even if one disagrees, the result is the same: the comment thread for pretty much every HN post even tangentially involving Apple becomes a platform war.
Like you, I prefer Cupertino’s way of doing things and would like to have measured conversations about the same without the BS diatribes from the haters. Impossible to do around here and has been for years.
>Qualcomm is currently focused on performance in a way that they wouldn't be if Apple hadn't lit a fire under their ass.
No, Qualcomm has been consistently behind for years.
The reason their chips are doing significantly better now is because it takes a little while for the talent they bought- the people responsible for Apple's current massive lead in the first place- to bear fruit (longer than usual since they were brought on in 2019).
As such, I have reason to suspect they'll have more success going forward until Qualcomm stops paying enough and they go back to Apple; the circle of life. AMD's no stranger to this way of operation; they just re-hire Jim Keller when they get tired of losing to Intel.
There is no danger of Apple becoming a monopoly in the future AR industry. Their products will be very expensive and out of reach for the majority of worlds population. Most of those who can afford them will still prefer a more open ecosystem from the likes of Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Huawei, etc. even if their offerings are slightly less advanced.
With their A and M series SOCs Apple had an advantage in mobile, tablet, laptop, even desktop PC markets. That advantage didn't result in a monopoly. If you live in US it may look like iPhones have a monopoly in the smartphone market, but they are a lot less popular in the rest of the world.
But those who like apple actually like the cohesive ecosystem which I would argue is fundamentally on the other side of the fence from an open ecosystem.
> Everyone in this thread is arguing about operating systems and their mobile OS preference... why?
Simply because performance of mobile phones is not an issue anymore. Nobody cares if one phone is 5% or 5 times faster than the other. I have a 2,5 year old 200€ Chinaphone and performance is not an issue at all. Unlike a few years ago I never even once thought that a slightly faster phone would be any better. That's why.
Aside from the caveat that Samsung's device kicked the hell out of iPhone on MULTI core benchmarks - you know, the ones that matter if your doing anything modern with your phone, like playing 3d games and video editing for the 'tok.
But sure, it is leaps and bounds ahead of that task no one really cares about.
Fully agree, they’re very quickly up to the races of intel and Amd for their laptop M series chips. Typically every two gens we see a larger bump, so the next M series (after the one just released) will probably be even worse for intel especially
I know we are typically against monopolies (pls don’t flame me) but why should we care if it’s not something that’s actually important like food/water/medicine?
I don’t see the sense when the government tries to break up a monopoly like Google for being too good at selling online ads, or likewise worrying about some company dominating augmented reality chips.
I’d be more interested in making sure that such technology is never required for basic living than about stopping companies from achieving it.
> I don’t see the sense when the government tries to break up a monopoly like Google for being too good at selling online ads
The problem is that Google isn't "too good" at selling online ads, they're just the most profitable because their monopoly makes it impossible for better competitors to beat them. That means the world is stuck with Google's mediocre/shitty service even though consumers/the market doesn't want it. Innovation stops happening, quality of life drops, the economy suffers, etc.
Apple's big lead in chips right now seems like a great thing, but if the government weren't so shit at regulating competition, we could've had breakthroughs like this a decade ago. Instead innovation is (predictably) moving at a glacial pace.
The free market only works when there is competition, so since our economy is based on the free market, it makes sense to write laws that protect it. Monopolies directly contradict with the basic operation of the free market, which is why they're bad.
It doesn't matter if it's a life or death situation. Things don't have to be dangerous to your health to be illegal.
Personally I care because, as an example, I'm interested in AR, and I wouldn't want that space to be limited to just just the hardware Apple chooses to make, and the use cases and content they deem acceptable.
You 're talking about the american market. Most of the world uses android phones
I think samsung and qualcomm are more important companies, because they compete in components, making incremental changes in the electronics industry . Apple is a vertically integrated, closed monolith and the rest of the ecosystem will not / cannot benefit from their innovations. Samsung should focus on differntiating itself from apple rather than trying to look more like it. Good, functional phones with lots of customizability and ports are a strength. Speed of apps is immaterial to me , and i m using an old Samsung. Most people use messengers and browsers, which run just fine in older phones. 3D avatars and fancy animations are not crucial to anyone
Second this: not sure what good an hdmi, audio Jack or else would be for me or the average consumer at this point. Usb-c would be cool but it’s not as water proof as lightning
I like my slower android in which I can run my browser engine of choice, install any program I want in an easy way without time limitations and customize it in general as I want. Did I mention that it has a USB-C connector too?
Disclaimer: I have an old iphone, used iphone 11 for weeks then went back to Android and I daily drive a M1 Pro Macbook
Hopefully with USB-3 speeds. Last I understood, the iPhone still transfers data at USB-2 speeds. This is crazy when you want to transfer large videos, or backup.
I would be absolutely shocked if they made such a basic hardware feature region-specific. There is practically zero chance that USB-C isn't rolled out worldwide with the iPhone 15.
Hopefully they’ll at least keep a couple models around with lightning, I don’t want to re-buy my dongles and parse things like USB-C 3.2 Gen 1x2 vs USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 (and does it have thunderbolt).
Both Chrome and Safari are the new IE, but for different reasons; the former, pushing their own browser standards, and the latter, falling behind in standards and being a pain to develop for and use.
mozilla is an org that lost its focus and goes after butterfly projects while their browser is the slowest and heaviest on battery with a tiny user base.
i am a firefox user everywhere except ios, where it's safari. i dont mind the diversity actually, use a safari integrated blocker, not much worse than ublock and i'm sure my battery thanks me for it.
You would want a USB-C connector so you can drive every device you own with one cable. You would want Gecko if you like arbitrary extensions - sure, iOS lets you have (somewhat weaker) adblock, but there's a whole world of useful extensions beyond that. And you'd want to run arbitrary code on a machine you own because phones are computers, and some of us like to be able to use less-hobbled software on them.
You would want a USB-C connector so you can drive every device you own with one cable.
In practical terms that doesn't really happen. People still use device specific cables. If I have 4 USB-C devices and one lightning device I have 5 cables. If I replace the lightning device with a USB-C device, I still have 5 cables. The only time "cable consolidation" matters is when traveling or in a backpack.
My USB-C security cameras need their dedicated cables, my Oculus Quest needs a dedicated 16 ft cable, my random amazon junk device cables don't support the PD that my laptop requires, etc. By forcing everyone to use the same tips without enforcing featuresets all its doing is confusing consumers even more. To all my older relatives and non-tech savvy friends, an iPhone cable is an iPhone cable. It's way less confusing than figuring out the right power brick wattage and cable combination and wondering why this USB-C cable doesn't transmit video to that monitor.
I just have a 65W USB-C by my couch, which I use for everything. Charge my computer while on my lap, or my phone if it needs some more juice, my gopro after biking, my headset, my nintendo switch. Sooo convenient. One cable, works for every gadget I have.
Yeah but at least you can charge with any of them. Even when you find a Lightning cable, there's a good chance it won't charge for whatever bs reason. That's the only thing I care about. Syncing is over wifi anyway.
> In practical terms that doesn't really happen. People still use device specific cables.
YMMV, I guess? My portable devices float around with one USB-C cable per room just fine. Granted, that's mostly lower-power devices and I prefer to trickle-charge, but if I started running power-hungry machines then I'd move everything to nice beefy PD bricks and it'd still work.
You are of course free to do whatever you like, but I would like to mention the two dangers I see with that approach:
1. If no-one uses the free version until it's necessary, it might decline and die, and then won't be around to save you. I'd say this is the Firefox / Chrome dynamic currently.
2. If you don't have the freesom to do something, you might not know what you're missing. Re: your comment in another branch, I have done all of "moving stuff around a file browser, installing ad-hoc apps, opening a command line, etc" on my phone in the past 24 hours, and had a great time doing it.
1. I'm ok with that. If some day the need for a more open one arises, someone will make it and probably knock off a lot of stuff from the locked-down one. If people want to keep the alternative alive in the meantime, that's cool, but I'm not gonna volunteer. Android isn't at risk of dying out, nor is it very free to begin with, Firefox is though.
2. I hardly even use the feature set the iPhone already gives me. I used to jailbreak my iPhone too, just for fun, but that was a long time ago. There's a reason phones aren't centered around a graphical file system. I'm a power user on my Mac and my Linux servers, that's enough for me.
There is an increasing trend of younger generations using phones for tasks that we'd use computers for. I've even heard of cases where students write short essays using Google Docs and their phone rather than pulling out their laptops (although I can't verify these stories). Some social apps (like Hive, an attempted Twitter replacement) don't even have desktop/web versions and require using the mobile app to interact.
While you don't use your phone like a PC, I think there's a strong case to be made for allowing for that kind of functionality. However, like you said - you don't need to switch if you don't need that capability. I personally install a lot of apps from FDroid or straight from APK files, but I don't use my phone like a PC like I just described. The range varies, and having that flexibility is nice.
Yes some people do work tasks on a phone. There's a difference between that and using a phone like a PC. They aren't moving stuff around a file browser, installing ad-hoc apps, opening a command line, etc. They're still doing things the locked-down way, so the iPhone is fine for them, in fact younger people tend to prefer that.
Apple is moving to wireless instead of cables so who cares when it's only used for charging? I can use my iPhone as a webcam, my iPods Max for audio, and two Macbooks can be placed next to each other to share one keyboard and move browser sessions between them. All wireless. I can even use the phone for internet connectivity while using the phone as a webcam for the macbooks. Zero cables!
I mean sure it would be slightly nicer to have my iPhone and iPods use the same USB-C charging port but I wouldn't choose Android and give up all of convenience of 'just works' wireless interop with all my devices.
Silly apple boys, android has been doing wireless charging for years....
It's shyte like this that makes me giggle at the Apple boys and girls they swear up an down when Apple does something android does its "revolutionary" for all... fuck out of here wit that shyte.
Despite what some may think, there are more Android developers [Hardware/Software] then apple developers in this world. That is why Android will always be ahead of the game regardless what Apple does.
Old wise tail: You can polish a turd with bells and whistles, however it's still a turd no matter how you present it. Fin.
On phones, just as on desktops, there is no way I'm visiting any web page, or using YouTube, without uBlock Origin or SponsorBlock. Couple that with other stuff like YouTube Vanced or Tachiyomi, and I'll keep my Android over an iPhone.
Why anyone would get a Samsung is beyond me. The amount of bloatware they install is insane and a lot of that you can't even uninstall. Plus it takes so long to get OS updates. And then there is Bixby or what that piece of shit is called.
On an iPhone 13 pro right now but miss a few things about Samsung/Note series phones:
Stylus. Better web browser options. Dex. 360 support. knox/secure secondary area. ability to install multiple versions of same app (eg for two diff whatsapp numbers). fingerprint sensor. custom launchers with better widgets. better youtube clients. chromecast receiving. windows and side-by-side displays. And I actually really liked the ability to remap the bixby button on older devices as a dedicated back button. I fully suspect future iPhones will have more hardware (ish) buttons on the sides of phones. or dedicated touch points on the phone rim for certain functions/programability. Especially since 'Shortcuts' are a thing in ios.
iphone wins hands down for battery life, processor speed (especially video/processing), and arguably for some aspects of camera.
2017 called and wants your comment back. Samsung is best Android manufacturer in class regarding OS upgrades and security updates, Bixby can be switched off and actually performs well in tests. Visible bloatware has been reduced significantly and most of the visible apps you can uninstall or deactivate.
I have an S21 FE, which despite its name is only a year old.
Updates are not timely. We often get updates a month behind, sometimes even two. I remember in early Jan we were still on the Nov security patch. Google is faster, and often Oneplus is faster. They are probably 2nd or 3rd for update timeliness. Better than Moto, at least.
Bloatware...depends on your definition. I consider their stupid Google app copies of everything bloatware, but maybe not everyone does. Most cannot be uninstalled.
Other bloatware...I seem to remember it had FB, LinkedIn, and some Microsoft apps. Last time they also wanted to install TikTok.
That said, I was able to disable everything via adb and got it to a state I like, so it is possible. But it would be nice to be able to do so without resorting to adb.
I like the phone fine, but my next phone will not be a Samsung.
It's not that comforting just being able to uninstall/disable things after paying ~$1000 for hardware loaded with apps that benefit everyone but the customer.
That's because Ars didn't do proper investigation into how storage is computed. One UI reports storage conversion losses associated with representing 1,024 bytes per KB as 1,000 bytes per KB. For example, a device advertised with 512 GB of storage actually has closer to 476 GB (GiB) of usable space. Likewise, a 128 GB model has approximately 119 GB of storage, with 256 GB yielding 238 GB of space.
Basically, higher the storage size, more the inaccuracies and more number of ghost storage will appear in system. It does this because [Android basically computes](https://twitter.com/MishaalRahman/status/1622706823940698114...) all files 'f' and empty size 'e' separately and finds the difference of given total size and (f+e) and assigns that to system.
lol, you can't tell iPhone zealots that their antiquated mocks are out of date. They're still using the same old stuff because they can't handle the fact that iPhone hasn't added a new feature that wasn't present on Android first in 5+ years.
I think on my Samsung A51 there was maybe 5 preinstalled Samsung apps? And for some there's no good AOSP alternative like Music anyways. I ended up grabbing the Samsung e-mail client from the Samsung Store because it's halfway decent unlike the Gmail also pre-installed one which is crap for everything but Gmail. I kinda like OneUI and updates are faster than other phones like Motorola despite them using basically stock Android. And it was several hundred cheaper than a Pixel 4a or whatever was comparable at the time.
Beyond comical is Samsung's insistence on running a type-1 hypervisor (real time kernel protection, aka RKP) for security purposes: https://archive.is/6ClWm
The evidence is that Geekbench isn't biased towards Apple Silicon given that other benchmarks agree.
For example, AnandTech runs a bunch of SPEC CPU benchmarks and found that the Apple A15 was a lot faster than the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 or Exynos 2100 (all 2021 processors): https://www.anandtech.com/show/16983/the-apple-a15-soc-perfo.... You can check the second page for graphics benchmarks.
Apple has been making their own CPU cores for a while while Qualcomm and Samsung are both using the ARM-designed cores. In the case of the above benchmarks, both the Snapdragon and Exynos are using the Cortex-X1 cores from ARM. Google's Tensor processor also uses ARM's X1 cores. Newer Snapdragon processors like the 8 Gen 1 and 8 Gen 2 have used X2 and X3 cores.
Apple's ability to produce their own CPU designs has been a big win for them, especially for single-core performance (really important for the majority of what people do with their phones including web/javascript) and for power efficiency (really important for the vast majority of time when users might be using their devices, but not in a taxing way).
Apple's custom CPU cores give them a real advantage.
It is biased towards passively cooled CPUs. It's dev once stated in an interview that they tried to recreate the typical bursty usage patterns of mobile phones, and therefore the added little pauses between the tasks.
> Geekbench began as a benchmark for Mac OS X and Windows and was created by John Poole who ran the now-defunct Geek Patrol website, which reviewed hardware and software designed for Macs, and featured editorials and interviews of interest to the Mac community. [0]
Basically, imagine an Nvidia enthusiast writing a system-agnostic GPU benchmark. I'm not as militant about rejecting Geekbench as some others, but you can't pretend the correlation is hard to make.
Regardless though, it's not hard to see Apple being 1-2 years ahead of Samsung's output. If the iPhone is being manufactured on recent TSMC silicon, it will annihilate anything Samsung's fabs are capable of producing.
Samsung has consistently manufactured their Galaxy S series in two different versions -- a Qualcomm one, and an Exynos one (Samsung's in-house CPU division), with different geographic markets getting different options. America has always gotten the Qualcomm version (which has consistently been faster), but other markets have seen shifts over time.
The S23 Ultra went Qualcomm-only for the first time. In the year running up, they've been slowly expanding Qualcomm to more markets instead of Exynos.
It seems like they're gradually phasing out Exynos, at least from the higher-end phones -- since they've always struggled to produce an SoC competitive with even Qualcomm, which is already behind the curve compared to Apple.
