5 ms·

With most technologies, there's a saturation point after which improvements are mostly incremental. For iPhones the saturation point was the 6S. For iPads it wa

by wenc 6y ago

With most technologies, there's a saturation point after which improvements are mostly incremental. For iPhones the saturation point was the 6S. For iPads it was the iPad Air 2. The 6S is the lowest model that contact tracing apps will run on, and of course the oldest phone the latest iOS will support. I switched from the 6S to 11 last Christmas, and most of the improvements I noticed were largely incremental -- apart from a handful of things like FaceID and the camera which were significantly better. Ok, the battery is a lot better too. But the 6S didn't feel obsolete at all -- it felt like a current generation phone -- because it was running current generation software. My iPad Air 2 runs the latest iPadOS and still works great -- not sure when I'll make the jump to a newer iPad. p.s. the only thing the iPad Air 2 lacks support for is Apple Pencil. But now that I'm into fountain pens and high quality notepads, I don't really miss it. Also if I need to create Martin Kleppmann-esque hand-drawn architecture diagrams -- which I do occasionally -- I just use any number of rubber-tipped styluses (many inexpensive options on Amazon) with the Sketches app. Gets the job done. Kleppmann himself uses Fifty Three and Maglus styluses I believe. I'm way cheaper -- I just use the styluses that I get as swag from tech conferences.

Bud 6y ago
I agree with your main thesis, but I'm going to disagree on the inflection/saturation points you chose. I think it's closer to the iPhone X and the iPad Pro, 2nd-generation, or thereabouts. Compared to the devices you cited, raw speed and graphics power improved massively in the A-series chips during the years in question, the camera system is almost unrecognizably better as is the neural-net processing and computational photography. The displays improved markedly as well. I agree with you that the 6S is not obsolete, and that's a credit to Apple, but my current iPad Pro is miles ahead of the Air 2, which I owned as well. This has enabled me to do all kinds of new things with the device, and do them better. I wouldn't be able to go back. The last couple iPad Pros are 3x faster in Geekbench single-core than the Air 2, and more than 4x faster in multi-core. It's going to start to get hard though, moving forward, to make that kind of massive improvement. We already have 120Hz refresh, we now already have raw CPU power that is superior to almost all current laptop computers including MB Pros, we now have about as good of a screen as can be imagined, laws of physics will start to bar further major physical camera improvements, etc. Apple's already at the 5nm mode with its silicon; there are only a couple steps left before transistor sizes are just a few atoms across.
- ihattendorf 6y ago
  You've listed multiple technical improvements, but overall the user experience difference between a 6S and an 8 isn't nearly as big as the difference between the 5S and 6S. The biggest noticeable difference probably being RAM. The 6S and 8 (non Plus) both have 2GB ram, while the 6 and 5S only had 1GB.
- wenc 6y ago
  Interesting. Just curious, what do you do on your iPad Pro that you wouldn't have been able to do as well as on the iPad Air 2? I've been eyeing the iPad Pros for a while now but have never been able to pull the trigger. Just curious what use cases would push me over the edge. I spend most of my time on the iPad on consumption activities like Twitter, Youtube, Prime Video, etc. My iPad is my travel device -- I don't even own a personal laptop anymore. My content creation activities include writing stuff on Google Docs, editing photos synced from my iPhone, light 720p video editing on iMovie and of course drawing architecture diagrams on Sketches.
  - nickthegreek 6y ago
    For me, the 12.9" ipad pro screen is just gorgeous. It is an absolute pleasure to read on and side-by-side apps feel right. On the regular ipad, side-by-side felt cramped. For media consumption, the big screen and the the stereo speaker is night and day. I just picked up the new macbook air and I use the ipad pro as a second screen and it feels natural. The one thing you want to think about is the increased weight.
  - IkmoIkmo 6y ago
    I mean, the apple pencil can be a nice touch which apparently isn't compatible with the 2. But mostly it's just a more pronounced form-factor of what the iPad is all about, in particular in comparison to an iPhone. The bezel to body ratio gets cut in half from about 30% of the body, to about 15%. It's kind of crazy when you think of it like that (instead of screen-to-body), as almost 1/3rd of the body is bezel on the Air models. On the original it was even 37%) At around 15%, you're approaching the iPad's true form-factor: just one big screen. That's pretty wonderful for consuming content. All this screen real-estate is what sets it apart from say an iPhone for content-consumption, while retaining the notion of it being a lightweight mobile-device you can throw in your bag and whip out easier than a laptop e.g. on an airplane, in bed, in the bus, on a trip, on the couch. But it's not like you can do all that much extra. For me personally though, reading a digital version to a paper newspaper or even a website always felt a little bit cramped on a regular iPad. It feels most websites and magazines are about 13 inches. For example, The Economist is about 13 inches diagonal. It's very natural to read on the 12.9 inch iPad Pro. Quite alright on the 11 inch, but just a tad too small on the 9.7 inch, requiring more frequent zooming in or alternative views. The iPad air 3(rd gen) by the way is already a pretty decent middle-ground, at 10.5 inches, nearing a 20% bezel, and very fast for years to come. But the Pros also have Promotion, which gets you 120 hertz refresh rates. Makes everything buttery smooth. Really not a big deal, but it's one of those things that made me feel like I was using some futuristic device you'd expect in a Star Trek universe. But again, really not a big deal, it's just a feeling. Usually there's some lag, some stutter, some delays. With 120 hertz it feels as if we're moving towards a world in which there is no UI lag and the tech is really futuristic. Combined with an insaaaanely fast device, the only time you get confronted with any latency is when the internet is involved. Not something that'd make me buy the Pro, but it's fun to know that this'll be coming to all normally-priced devices in a few years. You also get more colours, it gets brighter, and there's truetone display. The display is really something else, I'd check it out in stores and see if it matters. The rest don't matter much to me. FaceID, four really great speakers, ultra fast, better camera, LIDAR, neural engine, I don't really care for. USB-C is a nice touch as I find it's always around for charging. And the magic keyboard is a nice touch together with the pencil, google docs should be a lot nicer with the keyboard and drawing diagrams with the pencil, but then it starts to get quite expensive. https://phonesized.com/compare/#483,1422,1423 https://phonesized.com/compare/#483,1422,1423
Jtsummers 6y ago
Right. Once you hit a certain feature set (certain clock speed, core count, hardware shaders, minimum RAM, RAM speed, storage speed and capacity) everything after that becomes much smaller improvements. You won't see doublings of the numbers anymore, instead you'll see much smaller percentage increases that, while important in the long run, aren't going to impact users significantly. Let's just look at the CPUs: 1st gen: 412MHz, 1 core, 32-bit (under clocked) 3G : 412MHz, 1 core, 32-bit (under clocked) 3GS : 600MHz, 1 core, 32-bit (under clocked) 4 : 800Mhz, 1 core, 32-bit (under clocked) 4S : 800MHz, 2 core, 32-bit (under clocked) 5 : 1.3GHz, 2 core, 32-bit 5S : 1.3GHz, 2 core, 32-bit 6 : 1.4GHz, 2 core, 64-bit 6S : 1.85GHz, 2 core, 64-bit 7 : 2.34GHz, 2 core, 64-bit (4 cores, 2 used) 8 : 2.39GHz, 6 core, 64-bit X : 2.39GHz (2 cores) & 1.42GHz (4 cores), 6 cores, 64-bit XS : 2.49GHz (2 cores) & 1.52GHz (4 cores), 6 cores, 64-bit 11 Pro : 2.66GHz (2 cores) & 1.82GHz (4 cores), 6 cores, 64-bit So you initially got some major bumps (0%, 50%, 33%, 50%) then it starts slowing down until the jump from 6S to 7 (about 33% again), then it's just creeping up each year. Core count makes a major jump from 7 to 8. But after the 8 there really is no major improvement in the CPU itself (with respect to these raw numbers) so most users won't see a major difference between them on that front. (NB: I took these numbers from Wikipedia, I'm assuming I read them correctly as I just threw this together in a couple of minutes. There's probably a mistake or two, and I skipped some versions like 5C, XR, and 11.)
- ihattendorf 6y ago
  Emphasizing the RAM would also be nice, which jumped from 1GB to 2GB for the 6S.
  - Jtsummers 6y ago
    Yes, but I got tired of making the tables :) I've pointed that out in some other comments, that was a massive jump and is probably a major reason the 6S is still supported.
- Bud 6y ago
  Clock speed of the CPUs doesn't tell the tale here at all. Geekbench does a far better job of capturing the massive improvement in Apple's CPUs in recent years. And the GPU improvements have been even larger.
macNchz 6y ago
Indeed the 6S definitely marks an interesting moment in the iPhone timeline. I'm still using mine after buying, and then returning, an 11 Pro last fall. I've had iPhones since 2009 and had, admittedly, very high expectations for the upgrade. When it didn't thrill me out of the box (as had previous upgrades), I kept using it for a week before deciding to just repair my 6S and save the $1000.
kayoone 6y ago
I had a 6 instead of 6S and started getting stutter and slight lags in the UI after the latest ios update around 2018. It was getting annoyingly slow at that point but i was happy with a 7 Plus until i got a good deal for a X recently.
manicdee 6y ago
I have the 53 stylus but it isn’t supported anymore that I know of, is Kleppmann still using it as a pointy stick or is there some way to get the old functionality back?
- wenc 6y ago
  Not sure what the latest is on the Fifty Three. Kleppmann tweeted his stylus choices some time ago.

by wenc 6y ago

Bud 6y ago

I agree with your main thesis, but I'm going to disagree on the inflection/saturation points you chose. I think it's closer to the iPhone X and the iPad Pro, 2nd-generation, or thereabouts. Compared to the devices you cited, raw speed and graphics power improved massively in the A-series chips during the years in question, the camera system is almost unrecognizably better as is the neural-net processing and computational photography. The displays improved markedly as well. I agree with you that the 6S is not obsolete, and that's a credit to Apple, but my current iPad Pro is miles ahead of the Air 2, which I owned as well. This has enabled me to do all kinds of new things with the device, and do them better. I wouldn't be able to go back. The last couple iPad Pros are 3x faster in Geekbench single-core than the Air 2, and more than 4x faster in multi-core. It's going to start to get hard though, moving forward, to make that kind of massive improvement. We already have 120Hz refresh, we now already have raw CPU power that is superior to almost all current laptop computers including MB Pros, we now have about as good of a screen as can be imagined, laws of physics will start to bar further major physical camera improvements, etc. Apple's already at the 5nm mode with its silicon; there are only a couple steps left before transistor sizes are just a few atoms across.

ihattendorf 6y ago
You've listed multiple technical improvements, but overall the user experience difference between a 6S and an 8 isn't nearly as big as the difference between the 5S and 6S. The biggest noticeable difference probably being RAM. The 6S and 8 (non Plus) both have 2GB ram, while the 6 and 5S only had 1GB.
wenc 6y ago
Interesting. Just curious, what do you do on your iPad Pro that you wouldn't have been able to do as well as on the iPad Air 2? I've been eyeing the iPad Pros for a while now but have never been able to pull the trigger. Just curious what use cases would push me over the edge. I spend most of my time on the iPad on consumption activities like Twitter, Youtube, Prime Video, etc. My iPad is my travel device -- I don't even own a personal laptop anymore. My content creation activities include writing stuff on Google Docs, editing photos synced from my iPhone, light 720p video editing on iMovie and of course drawing architecture diagrams on Sketches.
- nickthegreek 6y ago
  For me, the 12.9" ipad pro screen is just gorgeous. It is an absolute pleasure to read on and side-by-side apps feel right. On the regular ipad, side-by-side felt cramped. For media consumption, the big screen and the the stereo speaker is night and day. I just picked up the new macbook air and I use the ipad pro as a second screen and it feels natural. The one thing you want to think about is the increased weight.
- IkmoIkmo 6y ago
  I mean, the apple pencil can be a nice touch which apparently isn't compatible with the 2. But mostly it's just a more pronounced form-factor of what the iPad is all about, in particular in comparison to an iPhone. The bezel to body ratio gets cut in half from about 30% of the body, to about 15%. It's kind of crazy when you think of it like that (instead of screen-to-body), as almost 1/3rd of the body is bezel on the Air models. On the original it was even 37%) At around 15%, you're approaching the iPad's true form-factor: just one big screen. That's pretty wonderful for consuming content. All this screen real-estate is what sets it apart from say an iPhone for content-consumption, while retaining the notion of it being a lightweight mobile-device you can throw in your bag and whip out easier than a laptop e.g. on an airplane, in bed, in the bus, on a trip, on the couch. But it's not like you can do all that much extra. For me personally though, reading a digital version to a paper newspaper or even a website always felt a little bit cramped on a regular iPad. It feels most websites and magazines are about 13 inches. For example, The Economist is about 13 inches diagonal. It's very natural to read on the 12.9 inch iPad Pro. Quite alright on the 11 inch, but just a tad too small on the 9.7 inch, requiring more frequent zooming in or alternative views. The iPad air 3(rd gen) by the way is already a pretty decent middle-ground, at 10.5 inches, nearing a 20% bezel, and very fast for years to come. But the Pros also have Promotion, which gets you 120 hertz refresh rates. Makes everything buttery smooth. Really not a big deal, but it's one of those things that made me feel like I was using some futuristic device you'd expect in a Star Trek universe. But again, really not a big deal, it's just a feeling. Usually there's some lag, some stutter, some delays. With 120 hertz it feels as if we're moving towards a world in which there is no UI lag and the tech is really futuristic. Combined with an insaaaanely fast device, the only time you get confronted with any latency is when the internet is involved. Not something that'd make me buy the Pro, but it's fun to know that this'll be coming to all normally-priced devices in a few years. You also get more colours, it gets brighter, and there's truetone display. The display is really something else, I'd check it out in stores and see if it matters. The rest don't matter much to me. FaceID, four really great speakers, ultra fast, better camera, LIDAR, neural engine, I don't really care for. USB-C is a nice touch as I find it's always around for charging. And the magic keyboard is a nice touch together with the pencil, google docs should be a lot nicer with the keyboard and drawing diagrams with the pencil, but then it starts to get quite expensive. https://phonesized.com/compare/#483,1422,1423 https://phonesized.com/compare/#483,1422,1423

Jtsummers 6y ago

Right. Once you hit a certain feature set (certain clock speed, core count, hardware shaders, minimum RAM, RAM speed, storage speed and capacity) everything after that becomes much smaller improvements. You won't see doublings of the numbers anymore, instead you'll see much smaller percentage increases that, while important in the long run, aren't going to impact users significantly. Let's just look at the CPUs: 1st gen: 412MHz, 1 core, 32-bit (under clocked) 3G : 412MHz, 1 core, 32-bit (under clocked) 3GS : 600MHz, 1 core, 32-bit (under clocked) 4 : 800Mhz, 1 core, 32-bit (under clocked) 4S : 800MHz, 2 core, 32-bit (under clocked) 5 : 1.3GHz, 2 core, 32-bit 5S : 1.3GHz, 2 core, 32-bit 6 : 1.4GHz, 2 core, 64-bit 6S : 1.85GHz, 2 core, 64-bit 7 : 2.34GHz, 2 core, 64-bit (4 cores, 2 used) 8 : 2.39GHz, 6 core, 64-bit X : 2.39GHz (2 cores) & 1.42GHz (4 cores), 6 cores, 64-bit XS : 2.49GHz (2 cores) & 1.52GHz (4 cores), 6 cores, 64-bit 11 Pro : 2.66GHz (2 cores) & 1.82GHz (4 cores), 6 cores, 64-bit So you initially got some major bumps (0%, 50%, 33%, 50%) then it starts slowing down until the jump from 6S to 7 (about 33% again), then it's just creeping up each year. Core count makes a major jump from 7 to 8. But after the 8 there really is no major improvement in the CPU itself (with respect to these raw numbers) so most users won't see a major difference between them on that front. (NB: I took these numbers from Wikipedia, I'm assuming I read them correctly as I just threw this together in a couple of minutes. There's probably a mistake or two, and I skipped some versions like 5C, XR, and 11.)

ihattendorf 6y ago
Emphasizing the RAM would also be nice, which jumped from 1GB to 2GB for the 6S.
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  Yes, but I got tired of making the tables :) I've pointed that out in some other comments, that was a massive jump and is probably a major reason the 6S is still supported.
Bud 6y ago
Clock speed of the CPUs doesn't tell the tale here at all. Geekbench does a far better job of capturing the massive improvement in Apple's CPUs in recent years. And the GPU improvements have been even larger.

macNchz 6y ago

Indeed the 6S definitely marks an interesting moment in the iPhone timeline. I'm still using mine after buying, and then returning, an 11 Pro last fall. I've had iPhones since 2009 and had, admittedly, very high expectations for the upgrade. When it didn't thrill me out of the box (as had previous upgrades), I kept using it for a week before deciding to just repair my 6S and save the $1000.

kayoone 6y ago

I had a 6 instead of 6S and started getting stutter and slight lags in the UI after the latest ios update around 2018. It was getting annoyingly slow at that point but i was happy with a 7 Plus until i got a good deal for a X recently.

manicdee 6y ago

I have the 53 stylus but it isn’t supported anymore that I know of, is Kleppmann still using it as a pointy stick or is there some way to get the old functionality back?

wenc 6y ago
Not sure what the latest is on the Fifty Three. Kleppmann tweeted his stylus choices some time ago.