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> Why can my 2008 Vista laptop be upgraded all the way to 8.1 and use software that come out today and my 2008 pocket computer / smartphone cannot do that? In

by JackC 12y ago

> Why can my 2008 Vista laptop be upgraded all the way to 8.1 and use software that come out today and my 2008 pocket computer / smartphone cannot do that? In 2008 the 2nd gen (3G) iPhone launched. It had the same 400mhz 32-bit processor, 128MB of RAM, and 480x320 px screen as the 1st gen iPhone, so it basically represents the very beginning of what is now a six-year explosion in phone performance. iOS had seen a total of one year's public use. The App Store launched alongside the 3G -- outside of the tiny jailbreak community, no one had ever tried to write and sell apps for iOS before. The iPhone 5S, released five years later, is roughly 50 times as fast,[1] meaning performance more than doubled each year from that starting point. Give it another few years and your complaint will make sense. But right now, it would be a tremendous waste of time and potential to limit apps, APIs and OSes to what can run on the first round of iPhone hardware. Especially since, as far as I can tell, that hardware represents somewhere less than 1% of iOS phones in use. [1] http://gabrieltomescu.com/blog/2013/10/25/how-accurate-is-the-iphone-5s-cpu-performance-chart http://gabrieltomescu.com/blog/2013/10/25/how-accurate-is-th...

slantyyz 12y ago
>> The iPhone 5S, released five years later, is roughly 50 times as fast,[1] meaning performance more than doubled each year from that starting point. That may be true, but the iPhone 3G when it came out launched and ran the phone app very quickly and reliably. By the time it received its last supported OS update, it could barely even run the phone app. As a "normal user", my expectation would be that the latest and greatest supported OS for my device lets me run the core apps at a decent speed, and to everything else to be slower. That wasn't really the case during the Forstall era of iOS.
- swang 12y ago
  This is happening now too with my 4s with ios7. It acts the same as my old 3GS during the ios5? updates. I fear that my 4s won't be able to handle ios8. I don't expect Apple to support phones forever, but why does something like texting/inputting into a keyboard get worse and worse as the life of the phone goes? Doesn't seem to make sense.
Kayou 12y ago
Then we'll see in a few years :) It seems like phone specs are being more and more stable anyway, the 3 last iPhones all have 1GB of RAM, the iPhone 6 only has a 17% CPU boost over the 5S whereas the 5S had a 92% advantage over the 5! On the android side, flagships still have 2GB of RAM, same as 2 years ago, the CPUs are generally Snapdragon 8XX, with a small improvement over last year's Snapdragon 800. Also, I guess I'm spoilt by the PC and Android world where you can install new software on old devices.

by JackC 12y ago

slantyyz 12y ago

>> The iPhone 5S, released five years later, is roughly 50 times as fast,[1] meaning performance more than doubled each year from that starting point. That may be true, but the iPhone 3G when it came out launched and ran the phone app very quickly and reliably. By the time it received its last supported OS update, it could barely even run the phone app. As a "normal user", my expectation would be that the latest and greatest supported OS for my device lets me run the core apps at a decent speed, and to everything else to be slower. That wasn't really the case during the Forstall era of iOS.

swang 12y ago
This is happening now too with my 4s with ios7. It acts the same as my old 3GS during the ios5? updates. I fear that my 4s won't be able to handle ios8. I don't expect Apple to support phones forever, but why does something like texting/inputting into a keyboard get worse and worse as the life of the phone goes? Doesn't seem to make sense.

Kayou 12y ago

Then we'll see in a few years :) It seems like phone specs are being more and more stable anyway, the 3 last iPhones all have 1GB of RAM, the iPhone 6 only has a 17% CPU boost over the 5S whereas the 5S had a 92% advantage over the 5! On the android side, flagships still have 2GB of RAM, same as 2 years ago, the CPUs are generally Snapdragon 8XX, with a small improvement over last year's Snapdragon 800. Also, I guess I'm spoilt by the PC and Android world where you can install new software on old devices.