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If your iPad is 10 years old, then it’s an original iPad. The original iPad received its last update 8 years ago. I really enjoyed my launch day original iPad —

If your iPad is 10 years old, then it’s an original iPad. The original iPad received its last update 8 years ago. I really enjoyed my launch day original iPad — it was incredible, just because it was such a new experience, but the hardware was severely underpowered even for the time. Laptops from 2010 are probably much better equipped to browse the web today than that 2010 iPad. It just seems very idealistic to expect most websites to cater to a browser that hasn’t received an update in 8 years running on a processor that has a fraction of the power of any Raspberry Pi 2 or above. Modern iPads are served the “real” web by default, further emphasizing why you would benefit from upgrading at least once a decade.

jamil7 6y ago
But what is the great new experience offered by something like twitter’s web site that demands all that new power and brings that machine to it’s knees? What cutting edge features is it offering that it didn’t offer in 2010? Thats kind of what made the web a cool platform, it was backwards compatible by default and could run on all kinds of things.
- pmlnr 6y ago
  Tracking and data collection. The way the make money. Twitter in 2010 was actively losing money, if I recall correctly. That said... modern frontend that doesn't run proparly on a core 2 intel machine with no adblocking should be massacred.
echlebek 6y ago
A 1 GHz Cortex-8 is a ton of computing power. The proof of this is iOS itself. When you bring the GPU into the mix, it's obviously capable of a lot as an operating system. There are no problems displaying high resolution static content and video content on an iPad. But around the same time, it became fashionable to start rendering static content on the fly, maybe inserting some not-so-static content around it to justify this choice. Add in advertising. And a browser that you might have trouble controlling script execution on. Add in tracking. Remember that story about how eBay fingerprints your browser in part by mapping the open websockets you have? That costs power and cycles. And the cookies have been piling up since the 90s. Speaking of storage, it's now much more common to use localStorage. Now anyone with a website on the internet can store appreciable amounts of stuff on your computer if you visit their website. And they can read and write that storage as much as they want while you're on their site, without regard for your computer's performance. And all of this is just considered normal and regular. This isn't even getting towards abusive behaviour like running a crypto miner in a browser or something. This is just web applications continually expanding their resource entitlements. The web is a great honking tire fire. Many articles and books have been written about this, many of them are summarily dismissed by web developers as ivory tower nonsense. But the trajectory of system requirements for displaying mainly-text documents is growing at an unsustainable pace, and there is eventually going to be some kind of reckoning. I have a $3000 1 year old laptop, and sometimes slack gets so slow I have to kill the browser process and start over again. The issue is not hardware.
- miffy900 6y ago
  >I have a $3000 1 year old laptop, and sometimes slack gets so slow I have to kill the browser process and start over again. The issue is not hardware. Keep in mind, the 1st gen iPad was single core and only had 256MB of RAM, which was the same RAM capacity as the then current iPod touch. Compare it to any PC with a single core Intel CPU and the experience will be largely the same, except of course the Intel CPU will require x10 more energy to run. And yes, it did have a really great CPU for it's time. It's core CPU architecture remained largely unchanged for 2 more generations. The iPad 2 added an extra core (A5), and with the iPad 3rd gen, Apple gave it more GPU power in the SoC (A5X).
  - giantrobot 6y ago
    The issue is that when the GP's iPad was new, it didn't have many problems browsing the web. I know mine did not. Outside of Flash-using sites or extreme JavaScript beasts the original iPad was a pretty capable web browsing machine. The web has regressed when an old iPad (or PC) can no longer reliably view it. It's not like words got harder to display in the intervening decade. A blog post, news article, or a tweet shouldn't require a quad core CPU and gigabytes of RAM to be readable.
    - coder543 6y ago
      > The issue is that when the GP's iPad was new, it didn't have many problems browsing the web. I know mine did not. Those are some rose colored glasses. The first page (technobuffalo) loaded in this video takes 10 to 15 seconds: https://youtu.be/caTUPKJ5Zfo https://youtu.be/caTUPKJ5Zfo Based on what was said, that page had already been loaded once, and it still took that long. Loading a Google Search took only about two seconds, because of how extremely minimal and optimized the search page was back then. Loading The NY Times took about 8 to 12 seconds, depending on where you draw the line. So, at the time, maybe we were used to webpages taking a while to load on mobile devices, and it seemed very reasonable. I’m sure there were some extremely simple websites that loaded quickly, but The NY Times was one that Apple promoted heavily at the time (apparently) as demonstrating what a good experience the iPad browser was. Nowadays, we hold the web and our devices to much higher performance standards. It’s not an apples to apples comparison because the content is entirely different, but the context of this thread is that modern websites are significantly harder to load and render. Even though content is supposedly much more resource intensive today, my 2018 iPad Pro loaded the technobuffalo home page initially in less than 3 seconds, and subsequent page clicks are even faster. This iPad loads google search results even faster than the original iPad. This iPad loads the New York Times in under 3 seconds, with subsequent page clicks taking the same or less time. Based on the numbers, a contemporaneous 2010 iPad was 3x to 5x slower at browsing the 2010 web than my 2018 iPad is when it comes to browsing the 2020 web, and that’s a roughly two year old iPad design, so it should be even more at a disadvantage. My iPad is also rendering more than 5x as many pixels while doing that. In conclusion, the original iPad was severely underpowered. > A blog post, news article, or a tweet shouldn't require a quad core CPU and gigabytes of RAM to be readable. Conceptually, I agree, but every image and video we use for content in websites now is significantly higher resolution and quality than they were back then. If you just want to read text, then you’re correct.

jamil7 6y ago

But what is the great new experience offered by something like twitter’s web site that demands all that new power and brings that machine to it’s knees? What cutting edge features is it offering that it didn’t offer in 2010? Thats kind of what made the web a cool platform, it was backwards compatible by default and could run on all kinds of things.

pmlnr 6y ago
Tracking and data collection. The way the make money. Twitter in 2010 was actively losing money, if I recall correctly. That said... modern frontend that doesn't run proparly on a core 2 intel machine with no adblocking should be massacred.

echlebek 6y ago

A 1 GHz Cortex-8 is a ton of computing power. The proof of this is iOS itself. When you bring the GPU into the mix, it's obviously capable of a lot as an operating system. There are no problems displaying high resolution static content and video content on an iPad. But around the same time, it became fashionable to start rendering static content on the fly, maybe inserting some not-so-static content around it to justify this choice. Add in advertising. And a browser that you might have trouble controlling script execution on. Add in tracking. Remember that story about how eBay fingerprints your browser in part by mapping the open websockets you have? That costs power and cycles. And the cookies have been piling up since the 90s. Speaking of storage, it's now much more common to use localStorage. Now anyone with a website on the internet can store appreciable amounts of stuff on your computer if you visit their website. And they can read and write that storage as much as they want while you're on their site, without regard for your computer's performance. And all of this is just considered normal and regular. This isn't even getting towards abusive behaviour like running a crypto miner in a browser or something. This is just web applications continually expanding their resource entitlements. The web is a great honking tire fire. Many articles and books have been written about this, many of them are summarily dismissed by web developers as ivory tower nonsense. But the trajectory of system requirements for displaying mainly-text documents is growing at an unsustainable pace, and there is eventually going to be some kind of reckoning. I have a $3000 1 year old laptop, and sometimes slack gets so slow I have to kill the browser process and start over again. The issue is not hardware.

miffy900 6y ago
>I have a $3000 1 year old laptop, and sometimes slack gets so slow I have to kill the browser process and start over again. The issue is not hardware. Keep in mind, the 1st gen iPad was single core and only had 256MB of RAM, which was the same RAM capacity as the then current iPod touch. Compare it to any PC with a single core Intel CPU and the experience will be largely the same, except of course the Intel CPU will require x10 more energy to run. And yes, it did have a really great CPU for it's time. It's core CPU architecture remained largely unchanged for 2 more generations. The iPad 2 added an extra core (A5), and with the iPad 3rd gen, Apple gave it more GPU power in the SoC (A5X).
- giantrobot 6y ago
  The issue is that when the GP's iPad was new, it didn't have many problems browsing the web. I know mine did not. Outside of Flash-using sites or extreme JavaScript beasts the original iPad was a pretty capable web browsing machine. The web has regressed when an old iPad (or PC) can no longer reliably view it. It's not like words got harder to display in the intervening decade. A blog post, news article, or a tweet shouldn't require a quad core CPU and gigabytes of RAM to be readable.
  - coder543 6y ago
    > The issue is that when the GP's iPad was new, it didn't have many problems browsing the web. I know mine did not. Those are some rose colored glasses. The first page (technobuffalo) loaded in this video takes 10 to 15 seconds: https://youtu.be/caTUPKJ5Zfo https://youtu.be/caTUPKJ5Zfo Based on what was said, that page had already been loaded once, and it still took that long. Loading a Google Search took only about two seconds, because of how extremely minimal and optimized the search page was back then. Loading The NY Times took about 8 to 12 seconds, depending on where you draw the line. So, at the time, maybe we were used to webpages taking a while to load on mobile devices, and it seemed very reasonable. I’m sure there were some extremely simple websites that loaded quickly, but The NY Times was one that Apple promoted heavily at the time (apparently) as demonstrating what a good experience the iPad browser was. Nowadays, we hold the web and our devices to much higher performance standards. It’s not an apples to apples comparison because the content is entirely different, but the context of this thread is that modern websites are significantly harder to load and render. Even though content is supposedly much more resource intensive today, my 2018 iPad Pro loaded the technobuffalo home page initially in less than 3 seconds, and subsequent page clicks are even faster. This iPad loads google search results even faster than the original iPad. This iPad loads the New York Times in under 3 seconds, with subsequent page clicks taking the same or less time. Based on the numbers, a contemporaneous 2010 iPad was 3x to 5x slower at browsing the 2010 web than my 2018 iPad is when it comes to browsing the 2020 web, and that’s a roughly two year old iPad design, so it should be even more at a disadvantage. My iPad is also rendering more than 5x as many pixels while doing that. In conclusion, the original iPad was severely underpowered. > A blog post, news article, or a tweet shouldn't require a quad core CPU and gigabytes of RAM to be readable. Conceptually, I agree, but every image and video we use for content in websites now is significantly higher resolution and quality than they were back then. If you just want to read text, then you’re correct.