11 ms·

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 fast

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.

peoplearepeople 4y ago
All I care about is: * does javascript execute fast * which video codecs are hardware accelerated
- jacooper 4y ago
  > * does javascript execute fast No, Android phones browser performance is still a joke compared to I phones, which are faster than desktop PCs!(in speedometer)
itake 4y ago
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.
- super256 4y ago
  > 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.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    If you can unlock the bootloader, it looks like LineageOS is still serving up fresh builds for it: [bad link, i removed it]
    - sublinear 4y ago
      Do not link unofficial mirrors https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/cheeseburger/ https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/cheeseburger/
    - BoppreH 4y ago
      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.
    - super256 4y ago
      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.
  - InCityDreams 4y ago
    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).
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    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).
  - manojlds 4y ago
    Same. My OP5 is still very good and I prefer it to the bulky monsters. My wife upgraded from same to iphone 14 pro max and is seriously questioning what's so great that it's such a bulky device.
    - amalter 4y ago
      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.
- nordsieck 4y ago
  > Faster performance today means longer lasting tomorrow. And more importantly to me, longer lasting tomorrow tends to mean longer official OS support. At least for Apple devices.
- oliveshell 4y ago
  > Faster performance today means longer lasting tomorrow. Exactly. I use a 2nd gen iPhone SE, and a big reason I bought it was that it had the then-beefy A13 chip despite being a “budget model”. It’s now nearly 3 years old and still feels like a brand new phone.
  - onemoresoop 4y ago
    I second this. I am using a SE second gen and works very well. I got it used (looks and performs like new) for a whopping $100 on e-bay.
  - mbigras 4y ago
    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).
    - hot_gril 4y ago
      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.
      - mbigras 4y ago
        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.
        hot_gril 4y ago
        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.
- diebeforei485 4y ago
  Apps taking longer to launch is generally a RAM issue (unless you swipe up and force-close your apps each time). They drastically increased RAM recently: https://9to5mac.com/2022/12/31/iphone-ram-list/ https://9to5mac.com/2022/12/31/iphone-ram-list/
  - cma 4y ago
    Drastically still looks way lower than Samsung flagships (12GB).
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      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.
      - sliken 4y ago
        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.
        kaba0 4y ago
        Ref counting is garbage collection. But it trades off better throughput for less memory overhead that is true.
        stolsvik 4y ago
        You keep saying that, but it is not true.
        kaba0 4y ago
        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.
- Thaxll 4y ago
  Makes you wonder how things get slow overtime, even phones from 5 years are very powerful, the app we use are simple so what gives?
  - RulerOf 4y ago
    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.
    - microtonal 4y ago
      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.
  - thfuran 4y ago
    Just amazingly outlandish inefficiency.
- twobitshifter 4y ago
  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.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    I only use an XS, and I cannot notice any slowdown either.
    - WWLink 4y ago
      I have an XS and a Galaxy Fold 4. The XS is a LOT slower at some things. But that might reflect more on the app developers than the phone.
      - lotsofpulp 4y ago
        It is also me not doing anything other than messaging, safari browsing, reading, watching, and taking pictures/video. I am sure I would notice something if I were to play games or do something graphical.
        WWLink 4y ago
        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.
- GeekyBear 4y ago
  > 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.
  - mrtksn 4y ago
    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.
    - GeekyBear 4y ago
      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. https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/8/22523351/ios-15-iphone-6s-plus-se-compatibility https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/8/22523351/ios-15-iphone-6s-...
      - mrtksn 4y ago
        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.
- MagicMoonlight 4y ago
  No that’s because your battery is old. Swap the battery and that “slow old phone” suddenly has the exact same speed as the current flagship
  - jrochkind1 4y ago
    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?
    - JanSt 4y ago
      It’s not perceived but actually worse. iOS reduces speed to improve battery-life
    - pkulak 4y ago
      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.
    - altec3 4y ago
      When the batteries get older, iOS throttles performance to ensure the device doesn't shut down unexpectedly. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208387 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208387
    - mrtksn 4y ago
      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.
    - isoprophlex 4y ago
- byee 4y ago
  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.
  - robert_dipaolo 4y ago
    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.
    - doetoe 4y ago
      That is actually 55% more (or three other way around, 35% less)
    - byee 4y ago
      True, but if you can afford it you absolutely can get 35% more lifetime out of an iPhone X.
  - itake 4y ago
    My iPhone 13p can't run Google Docs without crashing on 50 page low-density docs. It is so frustrating.
  - kaba0 4y ago
    Google apps don’t work anywhere properly to be honest, it is not due to the iphone X.
- alliao 4y ago
  lol same iphoneX here, just cracked my screen so maybe it us time to upgrade...
- notatoad 4y ago
  >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.
  - mmcnl 4y ago
    That's precisely what is meant right? If the phone is faster today, there is more headroom to accommodate for future increased hardware requirements.
    - notatoad 4y ago
      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.
      - kaba0 4y ago
        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.
- hackmiester 4y ago
  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.
ccouzens 4y ago
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
- GeorgeTirebiter 4y ago
  0. does it have a stylus / pen? If not, unacceptable. Ergo, all iPhones are unacceptable. (Yes, I used to work at EO, running the GO PenPoint Operating System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PenPoint_OS?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PenPoint_OS?useskin=vector , and also worked at GRiD, putting wireless LAN into the GRiDPAD RC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRiDPad?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRiDPad?useskin=vector. I like pens. I might be biased.)
  - vuln 4y ago
    > 0. does it have a stylus / pen? 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_?
    - jeroenhd 4y ago
      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.
      - vuln 4y ago
        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).
scarface74 4y ago
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.
- oneoff786 4y ago
  Most of those games don’t require faster speeds though
izacus 4y ago
[flagged]
- brianwawok 4y ago
  Having a rough day bub?
- notyourwork 4y ago
  This comment added zero value to the conversation.
- sidlls 4y ago
  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.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - goosedragons 4y ago
    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.
    - pb7 4y ago
      >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.
vidarh 4y ago
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.
_aavaa_ 4y ago
> 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.
- kaba0 4y ago
  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.
  - _aavaa_ 4y ago
    But why would stronger focus on performance happen? Is, e.g., Microsoft teams in danger of losing market share because of its horrible performance? Is product speed really a differentiator that affect’s people’s buying decision?
dougmwne 4y ago
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.
acdha 4y ago
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. https://infrequently.org/2022/12/performance-baseline-2023/#mobile https://infrequently.org/2022/12/performance-baseline-2023/#...
- basch 4y ago
  Id rather the web have less javascript than my phone be faster.
  - Tagbert 4y ago
    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.
  - acdha 4y ago
    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).
    - basch 4y ago
      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.
jcelerier 4y ago
> 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. for me it's literally every day. frames missed, jittery animations everywhere on top-of-the line phones, this drives me completely mad. On devices with gigahertz multicore CPUs, gigabytes of RAM and fast flash memory, absolutely everything local should be 100% instant
- oriolid 4y ago
  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.
kccqzy 4y ago
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.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  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.
xnx 4y ago
I agree. Sometimes faster can also mean better battery life because processes complete sooner.
hot_gril 4y ago
You don't. You care when your phone lags, and Geekbench is measuring one of the big factors that will play into that.
skrowl 4y ago
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). Don't take it from me, take it from Linus Torvalds (you know, the guy who created Linux) - https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=136526&curpostid=136666 https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=136526&curpost...
nixass 4y ago
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.
armadsen 4y ago
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.
lern_too_spel 4y ago
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. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25205588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25205588
sumek83 4y ago
resale value? Maybe this is one of the reasons iPhones have generally higher resale value than Android phones
Sanddy11 4y ago
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.

peoplearepeople 4y ago

All I care about is: * does javascript execute fast * which video codecs are hardware accelerated

jacooper 4y ago
> * does javascript execute fast No, Android phones browser performance is still a joke compared to I phones, which are faster than desktop PCs!(in speedometer)

itake 4y ago

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.

super256 4y ago
> 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.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  If you can unlock the bootloader, it looks like LineageOS is still serving up fresh builds for it: [bad link, i removed it]
  - sublinear 4y ago
    Do not link unofficial mirrors https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/cheeseburger/ https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/cheeseburger/
  - BoppreH 4y ago
    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.
  - super256 4y ago
    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.
- InCityDreams 4y ago
  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).
- bee_rider 4y ago
  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).
- manojlds 4y ago
  Same. My OP5 is still very good and I prefer it to the bulky monsters. My wife upgraded from same to iphone 14 pro max and is seriously questioning what's so great that it's such a bulky device.
  - amalter 4y ago
    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.
nordsieck 4y ago
> Faster performance today means longer lasting tomorrow. And more importantly to me, longer lasting tomorrow tends to mean longer official OS support. At least for Apple devices.
oliveshell 4y ago
> Faster performance today means longer lasting tomorrow. Exactly. I use a 2nd gen iPhone SE, and a big reason I bought it was that it had the then-beefy A13 chip despite being a “budget model”. It’s now nearly 3 years old and still feels like a brand new phone.
- onemoresoop 4y ago
  I second this. I am using a SE second gen and works very well. I got it used (looks and performs like new) for a whopping $100 on e-bay.
- mbigras 4y ago
  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).
  - hot_gril 4y ago
    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.
    - mbigras 4y ago
      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.
      - hot_gril 4y ago
        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.
diebeforei485 4y ago
Apps taking longer to launch is generally a RAM issue (unless you swipe up and force-close your apps each time). They drastically increased RAM recently: https://9to5mac.com/2022/12/31/iphone-ram-list/ https://9to5mac.com/2022/12/31/iphone-ram-list/
- cma 4y ago
  Drastically still looks way lower than Samsung flagships (12GB).
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    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.
    - sliken 4y ago
      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.
      - kaba0 4y ago
        Ref counting is garbage collection. But it trades off better throughput for less memory overhead that is true.
        stolsvik 4y ago
        You keep saying that, but it is not true.
        kaba0 4y ago
        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.
Thaxll 4y ago
Makes you wonder how things get slow overtime, even phones from 5 years are very powerful, the app we use are simple so what gives?
- RulerOf 4y ago
  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.
  - microtonal 4y ago
    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.
- thfuran 4y ago
  Just amazingly outlandish inefficiency.
twobitshifter 4y ago
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.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  I only use an XS, and I cannot notice any slowdown either.
  - WWLink 4y ago
    I have an XS and a Galaxy Fold 4. The XS is a LOT slower at some things. But that might reflect more on the app developers than the phone.
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      It is also me not doing anything other than messaging, safari browsing, reading, watching, and taking pictures/video. I am sure I would notice something if I were to play games or do something graphical.
      - WWLink 4y ago
        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.
GeekyBear 4y ago
> 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.
- mrtksn 4y ago
  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.
  - GeekyBear 4y ago
    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. https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/8/22523351/ios-15-iphone-6s-plus-se-compatibility https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/8/22523351/ios-15-iphone-6s-...
    - mrtksn 4y ago
      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.
MagicMoonlight 4y ago
No that’s because your battery is old. Swap the battery and that “slow old phone” suddenly has the exact same speed as the current flagship
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  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?
  - JanSt 4y ago
    It’s not perceived but actually worse. iOS reduces speed to improve battery-life
  - pkulak 4y ago
    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.
  - altec3 4y ago
    When the batteries get older, iOS throttles performance to ensure the device doesn't shut down unexpectedly. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208387 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208387
  - mrtksn 4y ago
    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.
  - isoprophlex 4y ago
byee 4y ago
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.
- robert_dipaolo 4y ago
  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.
  - doetoe 4y ago
    That is actually 55% more (or three other way around, 35% less)
  - byee 4y ago
    True, but if you can afford it you absolutely can get 35% more lifetime out of an iPhone X.
- itake 4y ago
  My iPhone 13p can't run Google Docs without crashing on 50 page low-density docs. It is so frustrating.
- kaba0 4y ago
  Google apps don’t work anywhere properly to be honest, it is not due to the iphone X.
alliao 4y ago
lol same iphoneX here, just cracked my screen so maybe it us time to upgrade...
notatoad 4y ago
>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.
- mmcnl 4y ago
  That's precisely what is meant right? If the phone is faster today, there is more headroom to accommodate for future increased hardware requirements.
  - notatoad 4y ago
    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.
    - kaba0 4y ago
      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.
hackmiester 4y ago
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.

ccouzens 4y ago

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

GeorgeTirebiter 4y ago
0. does it have a stylus / pen? If not, unacceptable. Ergo, all iPhones are unacceptable. (Yes, I used to work at EO, running the GO PenPoint Operating System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PenPoint_OS?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PenPoint_OS?useskin=vector , and also worked at GRiD, putting wireless LAN into the GRiDPAD RC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRiDPad?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRiDPad?useskin=vector. I like pens. I might be biased.)
- vuln 4y ago
  > 0. does it have a stylus / pen? 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_?
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    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.
    - vuln 4y ago
      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).

scarface74 4y ago

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.

oneoff786 4y ago
Most of those games don’t require faster speeds though

izacus 4y ago

[flagged]

brianwawok 4y ago
Having a rough day bub?
notyourwork 4y ago
This comment added zero value to the conversation.
sidlls 4y ago
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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- goosedragons 4y ago
  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.
  - pb7 4y ago
    >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.

vidarh 4y ago

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.

_aavaa_ 4y ago

> 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.

kaba0 4y ago
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.
- _aavaa_ 4y ago
  But why would stronger focus on performance happen? Is, e.g., Microsoft teams in danger of losing market share because of its horrible performance? Is product speed really a differentiator that affect’s people’s buying decision?

dougmwne 4y ago

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.

acdha 4y ago

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. https://infrequently.org/2022/12/performance-baseline-2023/#mobile https://infrequently.org/2022/12/performance-baseline-2023/#...

basch 4y ago
Id rather the web have less javascript than my phone be faster.
- Tagbert 4y ago
  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.
- acdha 4y ago
  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).
  - basch 4y ago
    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.

jcelerier 4y ago

> 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. for me it's literally every day. frames missed, jittery animations everywhere on top-of-the line phones, this drives me completely mad. On devices with gigahertz multicore CPUs, gigabytes of RAM and fast flash memory, absolutely everything local should be 100% instant

oriolid 4y ago
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.

kccqzy 4y ago

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.

bee_rider 4y ago
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.

xnx 4y ago

I agree. Sometimes faster can also mean better battery life because processes complete sooner.

hot_gril 4y ago

You don't. You care when your phone lags, and Geekbench is measuring one of the big factors that will play into that.

skrowl 4y ago

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). Don't take it from me, take it from Linus Torvalds (you know, the guy who created Linux) - https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=136526&curpostid=136666 https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=136526&curpost...

nixass 4y ago

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.

armadsen 4y ago

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.

lern_too_spel 4y ago

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. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25205588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25205588

sumek83 4y ago

resale value? Maybe this is one of the reasons iPhones have generally higher resale value than Android phones

Sanddy11 4y ago

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.