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Agreed, with reservations. iPhone 4 itself was a grossly mis-executed product, though it wasn't obvious at the time. The core issue is that the iPhone 4's CPU

Agreed, with reservations. iPhone 4 itself was a grossly mis-executed product, though it wasn't obvious at the time. The core issue is that the iPhone 4's CPU and GPU performance are only marginally better than the 3GS it replaced, but it pushes 4x the number of pixels around. At the time we weren't really pushing the performance envelope, so everything appeared fine. Now we are - it's trivially easy to hit the upper bound of iPhone 4's performance envelope, whereas the 4S (and the 5, 5S) have a lot more wiggle room. More critically for app and OS developers, the GPU performance on iPhone 4 was woefully inadequate for the number of pixels it's tasked to render. IIRC the iPhone 4's GPU has a fillrate (i.e., max pixels rendered per second) that's about 13% higher than the total number of pixels it has. This is to say, if you draw even a trivial amount of stuff in the background, you're going to start dropping frames. For the 4S, 5, and 5S, the lack of CPU performance can often be made up by moving things to the GPU judiciously. On the 4 we don't even have that. Here's where I disagree: > "There is no good reason for iOS 7 to be slower than iOS 6. The "it requires more processing power for animations" reason is bogus" Of course it is, but no one stated that the slowness is due to animations. A large part of the slowness comes from the "blur everything!" design of iOS7, which is inherently GPU-heavy, and thus performs very poorly on the iPhone 4 and its shittastic GPU. The blur is everywhere, even (especially?) the stock apps where every tool bar and navigation bar blurs items behind itself. You may want to try turning the blur off: http://www.redmondpie.com/how-to-turn-off-ios-7-blur-effects/ http://www.redmondpie.com/how-to-turn-off-ios-7-blur-effects... This really has little to do with optimization - iOS is on the whole a pretty performant OS and platform. This has everything to do with Apple deciding to include features that are beyond the performance envelope of a targeted device (or conversely, failing to drop support for a device when features move past its performance envelope).

pilsetnieks 13y ago
Blur is off by default on the iPhone 4 already, as well as a number of other resource intensive features and effects: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/09/new-lease-on-life-or-death-sentence-ios-7-on-the-iphone-4/ http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/09/new-lease-on-life-or-de...
- Detrus 13y ago
  Yea I was wondering where the cool promised effects were. I'm a light user of the phone and iOS7 was a noticeable improvement. UI is better, idle battery life doubled. But that's my particular use case. Could be the experience of non nerd users as well.
matwood 13y ago
The core issue is that the iPhone 4's CPU and GPU performance are only marginally better than the 3GS it replaced, but it pushes 4x the number of pixels around. A lot like the first retina iPad.
jwr 13y ago
I disagree with this reasoning. The number of pixels to be pushed around did not change from iOS 6 to iOS 7. It's still the same. The fancy graphics effects are reduced already by default, and you can reduce them even further. My phone doesn't do visibly anything different from what it did under iOS 6. And yet it is much, much slower. I already did everything that the article you quoted suggests. My phone runs in high-contrast, super-accessibility, no-fx-please mode. And performance still sucks. To give you an example: I sometimes press power-on, nothing happens for a second or two. Then I press the home button and after another two-three seconds I get… a screenshot, just as if both buttons were pressed simultaneously. Number of pixels, blur, seriously? We haven't even gotten to displaying the lock screen yet! I still believe there is lots that can be optimized, but Apple chose not to do it. It wasn't laziness, it was a business decision — their time is better spent implementing new stuff — but that is a decision I disagree with. Or, more precisely — I disagree with this decision given that they called iPhone 4 "supported".
- Terretta 13y ago
  > I sometimes press power-on, nothing happens for a second or two. Then I press the home button and after another two-three seconds I get… a screenshot, just as if both buttons were pressed simultaneously. Sounds like your phone's borked in some way. That happens to me sometimes (1 in 10?) when bringing in legacy settings on to a new device. I've helped upgrade several 4 (not 4s) users and they're happy. On all of them I turned off motion, turned off blur, turned off background updates, turned off auto music/app/updates downloads. If a phone still has slowness, it's usually a bad setting brought forward. Seems to usually be in email or network settings. I delete email accounts, reset network settings, and recreate email accounts, leaving iCloud as Push and all others as Fetch, Manual. If that doesn't fix, I try again, this time "Erase all settings". (Not Content and settings.) These are the same steps I use to get back battery life losses. Something goes wrong, runs in background, kills batt and slows phone. Finally, one friend has Downcaster and always ends up with a full phone. Below a level of free memory the device definitely slows drastically. Touch and wait kind of slow, less than 2GB on 64GB device is noticeable, less than 500MB get to be a real problem.
WoodenChair 13y ago
Partially agree. Your point stands since the iPhone 4's GPU was a very marginal improvement over the iPhone 3GS's. However, the iPhone 4's CPU was significantly faster - 50% in my tests which is in line with its raw clock speed increase across the same architecture (1 GHZ Cortex A8 vs 600 MHZ Cortex A8).

pilsetnieks 13y ago

Blur is off by default on the iPhone 4 already, as well as a number of other resource intensive features and effects: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/09/new-lease-on-life-or-death-sentence-ios-7-on-the-iphone-4/ http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/09/new-lease-on-life-or-de...

Detrus 13y ago
Yea I was wondering where the cool promised effects were. I'm a light user of the phone and iOS7 was a noticeable improvement. UI is better, idle battery life doubled. But that's my particular use case. Could be the experience of non nerd users as well.

matwood 13y ago

The core issue is that the iPhone 4's CPU and GPU performance are only marginally better than the 3GS it replaced, but it pushes 4x the number of pixels around. A lot like the first retina iPad.

jwr 13y ago

I disagree with this reasoning. The number of pixels to be pushed around did not change from iOS 6 to iOS 7. It's still the same. The fancy graphics effects are reduced already by default, and you can reduce them even further. My phone doesn't do visibly anything different from what it did under iOS 6. And yet it is much, much slower. I already did everything that the article you quoted suggests. My phone runs in high-contrast, super-accessibility, no-fx-please mode. And performance still sucks. To give you an example: I sometimes press power-on, nothing happens for a second or two. Then I press the home button and after another two-three seconds I get… a screenshot, just as if both buttons were pressed simultaneously. Number of pixels, blur, seriously? We haven't even gotten to displaying the lock screen yet! I still believe there is lots that can be optimized, but Apple chose not to do it. It wasn't laziness, it was a business decision — their time is better spent implementing new stuff — but that is a decision I disagree with. Or, more precisely — I disagree with this decision given that they called iPhone 4 "supported".

Terretta 13y ago
> I sometimes press power-on, nothing happens for a second or two. Then I press the home button and after another two-three seconds I get… a screenshot, just as if both buttons were pressed simultaneously. Sounds like your phone's borked in some way. That happens to me sometimes (1 in 10?) when bringing in legacy settings on to a new device. I've helped upgrade several 4 (not 4s) users and they're happy. On all of them I turned off motion, turned off blur, turned off background updates, turned off auto music/app/updates downloads. If a phone still has slowness, it's usually a bad setting brought forward. Seems to usually be in email or network settings. I delete email accounts, reset network settings, and recreate email accounts, leaving iCloud as Push and all others as Fetch, Manual. If that doesn't fix, I try again, this time "Erase all settings". (Not Content and settings.) These are the same steps I use to get back battery life losses. Something goes wrong, runs in background, kills batt and slows phone. Finally, one friend has Downcaster and always ends up with a full phone. Below a level of free memory the device definitely slows drastically. Touch and wait kind of slow, less than 2GB on 64GB device is noticeable, less than 500MB get to be a real problem.

WoodenChair 13y ago

Partially agree. Your point stands since the iPhone 4's GPU was a very marginal improvement over the iPhone 3GS's. However, the iPhone 4's CPU was significantly faster - 50% in my tests which is in line with its raw clock speed increase across the same architecture (1 GHZ Cortex A8 vs 600 MHZ Cortex A8).