4 ms·

My i7-2600k, which is 7 years old by now, still does everything I need it to do (among them being gaming newly released titles) and more. I did upgrade the GPU

My i7-2600k, which is 7 years old by now, still does everything I need it to do (among them being gaming newly released titles) and more. I did upgrade the GPU a couple of times, but the basic system is still the same and performing like it always did. In that regard, I really don't understand what's happening with smartphones/tablets that suddenly makes them incapable of performing the same tasks, at the same performance, they always did. It's not like I'm suddenly trying to use some performance hungry app/game I never used before, it's the same apps I always use, but they simply perform worse. If it wasn't for this simple fact I'd probably be still on my iPhone 4s, but after a while, that became even too slow for simple stuff like using WhatsApp. It can't be that the apps become that much more demanding, WhatsApp still did what it always does: Sending and receiving messages, so I really don't understand where that extra demand for performance comes from which suddenly turns whole generations of portable hardware into fancier paper weights.

tomc1985 9y ago
A lot of performance is lost to feature creep in the underlying OS. This is easy to see in Windows as you can open up services.msc all the way back to Windows 2000 and see something like a tenth of the number of running services (or less). (Now I wish I had a Windows 2000 disc to test that theory out with) Plus factor in that the app frameworks themselves get more complex, and the current trend of using-browser-as-frontend (plus all the bloat of the web) and one can see how old devices don't cut it as much. And since each iteration gets bigger, the longer an OEM maintains support the worse it performs. It would be interesting to compare how well old devices function by how soon OS support is cut -- I'd bet that the earlier a given device is left behind, the better it ends up running.
r00fus 9y ago
This is so naive. You think WhatsApp of today is the exact same app or backend server logic from a year or two ago? Any online service is constantly adding functionality on the server side even if the app code is constant ( given its a mobile app this is simply unlikely) Unless you have an app that's not been upgraded and running in offline mode it's definitely not doing the same thing as a year ago.
- freeflight 9y ago
  > it's definitely not doing the same thing as a year ago To me as a user, it does exactly the very, mundane, same thing it always did: Sending and receiving messages. It's not like WhatsApp now has become an awesome 4k video player, it still does the very same thing it always did. In that regard, "Added functionality on the server side" does literally nothing for me except make the usability worse by making my client perform worse, so what's in it for me except being forced into buying new hardware? As far as I can tell: Nothing at all.
Const-me 9y ago
> what's happening with smartphones/tablets that suddenly makes them incapable of performing the same tasks Competition, that’s what happening. On PCs we had no competition for many years, that’s why performance has stalled. For example, cpubenchmark.net gives 8739 points to i7-2700K from 2011, and 12078 points to i7-7700K from 2016. Very modest 38% improvement in 5 years and 5 generations of CPUs. Same 4 cores/8 threads, same 8MB cache.

tomc1985 9y ago

A lot of performance is lost to feature creep in the underlying OS. This is easy to see in Windows as you can open up services.msc all the way back to Windows 2000 and see something like a tenth of the number of running services (or less). (Now I wish I had a Windows 2000 disc to test that theory out with) Plus factor in that the app frameworks themselves get more complex, and the current trend of using-browser-as-frontend (plus all the bloat of the web) and one can see how old devices don't cut it as much. And since each iteration gets bigger, the longer an OEM maintains support the worse it performs. It would be interesting to compare how well old devices function by how soon OS support is cut -- I'd bet that the earlier a given device is left behind, the better it ends up running.

r00fus 9y ago

This is so naive. You think WhatsApp of today is the exact same app or backend server logic from a year or two ago? Any online service is constantly adding functionality on the server side even if the app code is constant ( given its a mobile app this is simply unlikely) Unless you have an app that's not been upgraded and running in offline mode it's definitely not doing the same thing as a year ago.

freeflight 9y ago
> it's definitely not doing the same thing as a year ago To me as a user, it does exactly the very, mundane, same thing it always did: Sending and receiving messages. It's not like WhatsApp now has become an awesome 4k video player, it still does the very same thing it always did. In that regard, "Added functionality on the server side" does literally nothing for me except make the usability worse by making my client perform worse, so what's in it for me except being forced into buying new hardware? As far as I can tell: Nothing at all.

Const-me 9y ago

> what's happening with smartphones/tablets that suddenly makes them incapable of performing the same tasks Competition, that’s what happening. On PCs we had no competition for many years, that’s why performance has stalled. For example, cpubenchmark.net gives 8739 points to i7-2700K from 2011, and 12078 points to i7-7700K from 2016. Very modest 38% improvement in 5 years and 5 generations of CPUs. Same 4 cores/8 threads, same 8MB cache.