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>A new iPhone 18 has 2.5x the performance of an iPhone 11. But we are talking about something as simple as opening safari and camera app. How does that glitch

>A new iPhone 18 has 2.5x the performance of an iPhone 11. But we are talking about something as simple as opening safari and camera app. How does that glitch and require 2.5x the performance 7 years later with no hardware changes whatsoever to the camera and network/ssd/display etc.

tristanj 4mo ago
Both apps you mentioned (safari and camera) have been almost completely rewritten in the past few years. The software is designed, written, and tested on latest generation hardware. It is then backported to older devices. Apple developers don't daily-drive 7 year old devices, they don't encounter this sluggishness and have little incentive to optimize old devices. The software is optimized for devices with 2x the performance and 3x the RAM. It's no surprise at all that it's slow.
- fsflover 4mo ago
  Why didn't the same happen with Firefox or Chrome? They still work fine on older devices.
  - tristanj 4mo ago
    Both of those apps feel slower, I'm not sure what you're talking about. Newer versions of iOS use significantly more RAM than older versions. I'd estimate that OS RAM usage increased from ~1GB to ~1.5-2GB. This has minimal effect on newer phones with 12GB of RAM, but on older phones such as the iPhone 11 with 4GB of RAM the performance impact is noticeable. Userspace apps spend more time paging and are slower. Also, webpages have gotten 2-5x heavier over the past decade. App sizes have increased by a similar multiplier.
    - fsflover 4mo ago
      It hasn't happened to Firefox. Sent from desktop Firefox running on my GNU/Linux phone announced in 2017.
      - tristanj 4mo ago
        This discussion is about iOS and your Linux phone is irrelevant to this conversation.
        fsflover 4mo ago
        It is relevant. I gave a counterexample, demonstrating that the software must not become much slower with improvements, unlike what Apple fans want to believe.
        tristanj 4mo ago
        No, you pivoted to talking about your Linux phone, because your claim of "look at Firefox it's not becoming slower" is demonstrably false on iOS. The latest version of Firefox for iOS is pushing 400MB, over a 10x increase from a decade ago. I doubt they added 10x as many features. The developers of Firefox iOS chose to make the app larger and more bloated. Firefox on iOS today is far more bloated than the version released a decade ago. It has more features, more bloat, and will run slower than the version released years ago. Claiming "It hasn't happened to Firefox" is a lie and that's why you deflected.
      - handedness 4mo ago
        Sometimes you endorse Firefox on the Librem 5 as a good experience, sometimes you indicate that due to it being fairly underpowered, JavaScript needs to be disabled on a number of sites in order to have a usable experience. Setting aside the functional implications of disabling JS, can you help me square the two?
        fsflover 4mo ago
        The browser itself did not become slower. JS-heavy websites did. But a lot of other websites still work fine, including HN. This confirms that there is no need to make newer software slower. It's the bloat that makes software and websites slow, not new features.

tristanj 4mo ago

Both apps you mentioned (safari and camera) have been almost completely rewritten in the past few years. The software is designed, written, and tested on latest generation hardware. It is then backported to older devices. Apple developers don't daily-drive 7 year old devices, they don't encounter this sluggishness and have little incentive to optimize old devices. The software is optimized for devices with 2x the performance and 3x the RAM. It's no surprise at all that it's slow.

fsflover 4mo ago
Why didn't the same happen with Firefox or Chrome? They still work fine on older devices.
- tristanj 4mo ago
  Both of those apps feel slower, I'm not sure what you're talking about. Newer versions of iOS use significantly more RAM than older versions. I'd estimate that OS RAM usage increased from ~1GB to ~1.5-2GB. This has minimal effect on newer phones with 12GB of RAM, but on older phones such as the iPhone 11 with 4GB of RAM the performance impact is noticeable. Userspace apps spend more time paging and are slower. Also, webpages have gotten 2-5x heavier over the past decade. App sizes have increased by a similar multiplier.
  - fsflover 4mo ago
    It hasn't happened to Firefox. Sent from desktop Firefox running on my GNU/Linux phone announced in 2017.
    - tristanj 4mo ago
      This discussion is about iOS and your Linux phone is irrelevant to this conversation.
      - fsflover 4mo ago
        It is relevant. I gave a counterexample, demonstrating that the software must not become much slower with improvements, unlike what Apple fans want to believe.
        tristanj 4mo ago
        No, you pivoted to talking about your Linux phone, because your claim of "look at Firefox it's not becoming slower" is demonstrably false on iOS. The latest version of Firefox for iOS is pushing 400MB, over a 10x increase from a decade ago. I doubt they added 10x as many features. The developers of Firefox iOS chose to make the app larger and more bloated. Firefox on iOS today is far more bloated than the version released a decade ago. It has more features, more bloat, and will run slower than the version released years ago. Claiming "It hasn't happened to Firefox" is a lie and that's why you deflected.
    - handedness 4mo ago
      Sometimes you endorse Firefox on the Librem 5 as a good experience, sometimes you indicate that due to it being fairly underpowered, JavaScript needs to be disabled on a number of sites in order to have a usable experience. Setting aside the functional implications of disabling JS, can you help me square the two?
      - fsflover 4mo ago
        The browser itself did not become slower. JS-heavy websites did. But a lot of other websites still work fine, including HN. This confirms that there is no need to make newer software slower. It's the bloat that makes software and websites slow, not new features.