[lkxijlewlf]

Day to day, anything past an iPhone 6s or 7 and phones pretty much feel the same speed.

If you game or edit pics or anything else that needs a faster proc, sure, you'll notice not having the fastest phone. But if you email, reddit, HN, twitter, etc, you're really not going to notice much.

Rumors are the iPhone 14 will have the same A15 and only the Pro will get the A16. I think you'll see a bunch of people freak out about this, but honestly, phones really don't need to be faster at this point.

[danpalmer]

Having had an iPhone 6s, X, and 12, I disagree. I'm a heavy user but of relatively basic functionality – I'm not gaming on my phone.

Switching apps, latency for apps to restore state once you switch to them, latency for the camera to save a photo, latency on pretty much all interactions is noticeably better.

I'm not talking about dropped frames, Apple have always been good at ensuring a fluid user experience, but there are lots of points where apps can take a few seconds to do something on older hardware, or do it nearly instantly on newer hardware.

Does a few seconds make a difference? To my life, no. To my enjoyment of using the device, yeah. Whether it's worth frequent upgrades or not is a value judgement we can only make for ourselves, but there are many perceptible differences devices more than a few years apart.

[wiredfool]

Having just upgraded from a 6s to a Xs, yeah, there's a speed difference with basic web browsing, even on lightweight sites like HN. It's the difference between fast enough and snappy.

[nicoburns]

How is the battery on your 6S? I don't doubt that the older processor is slower in places, but one with a degraded battery will be much slower.

[danpalmer]

When I upgraded it I think it was at 87% health and my X when it was at about 83%. Apple claim there is no throttling for these amounts.

[trixie_]

It's also not as much the hardware, but the software running on the chip. Any programmer can make a fast chip feel slow if they're not careful. Especially year after year as changes stack up. Apple tends to not abandon old hardware as readily as their competitors do. They actively work to ensure software updates do not cause performance regressions in older models. People in our industry have a tendency to abandon 'released to production technology' so quickly it really hurts the end user. I think Tesla is another example of a company that doesn't abandon their software after it leaves the door like most other car companies.

[gruez]

>reddit, [...] twitter

Probably not the best examples because they have bloated webapps that are pretty slow/laggy.

[mike97]

For reddit you can use Infinity or other reddit clients, I use Infinity and I don't even need an account to subscribe to subredits that I want to follow and for me it seems to be a lot faster then the official reddit app.

[Sohcahtoa82]

If you're using reddit on mobile, use any app besides the official one. Personally, I use Bacon Reader.

If you're on desktop, use the old reddit layout, and install RES if you can.

Nearly every complaint I see about reddit's UX is because of people using the official app (Seriously, how is the official app the worst one?) or the new reddit UX.

As for Twitter, I've never felt its website or app to be slow on mobile.

[bee_rider]

I think most people use the reddit website.

If you have to download an app to use what is fundamentally a website, that website has failed miserably.

[yissp]

If you access the website from a mobile browser it will nag you at every opportunity to switch to the app. It's quite annoying, so I wouldn't be surprised if most people give up.

[frosted-flakes]

There's a button to turn off the nags the menu. I don't think you even need to be signed-in.

[frosted-flakes]

Apps force you into a single-threaded experience, which I dislike. Browsers have tabs, which I like.

[nicce]

You can use nitter instances instead of Twitter. UI on there is super lightweight and usable, something you hope the original one would be. Also you are not distracted by constant popups for logging in.

[orangepurple]

RedReader

https://f-droid.org/packages/org.quantumbadger.redreader/

[999900000999]

Agreed.

Reddit on a desktop does this kinda weird jiggle thing.

I thought my eyes were going bad, and then you notice the page is still loading after 10 seconds.

[lkxijlewlf]

Fair. But they're laggy on everything.

[alvarlagerlof]

No

[lkxijlewlf]

Yes.

[google234123]

Yeah, Reddit is just (deliberately!) bad on mobile.

[reaperducer]

The only feature fight I want to see from phone makers and networks anymore is latency.

Voice latency is a big part of why people type on a telephone, instead of talking on it. We're entering a second generation of people who have no idea what it was like talking on an analog POTS network. They'll even argue with you, claiming their VOIP connection across the ocean has the same quality and latency as someone talking on a hard line to a neighbor down the road. Ummm... no. Not even close. Sadly, the older generations didn't realize how good they had it.

Remember when phone companies used to compete on quality? AT&T's "You get what you pay for" campaign. Sprint's "So clear you can hear a pin drop" campaign. MCI's "Static-free coast-to-coast."

Today, it's "We'll bundle six other services you don't want with your phone service and charge you a $1,200 for a new phone. Aren't we great!"

[Sohcahtoa82]

VOIP needs added latency when done over a mobile connection. Digital mobile connections aren't the most stable or reliable. I can ping Google from my phone and get results anywhere between 30 and 300 ms. With latency being all over the place, you have to add a significant buffer to avoid audio cutouts.

And personally, I'd rather have a little latency added than have to talk over a shitty POTS line. I always had a hard time understanding people over it.

[cl0ckt0wer]

IIRC, Sprint was just increasing the bass somewhere in their connection. But you can't really think that a POTS call sounds better than a modern VOIP call? Maybe the super-compressed crap you get when you dial a number, but apps use way better sounding codecs.

[reaperducer]

IIRC, Sprint was just increasing the bass somewhere in their connection

That was AT&T's method. AT&T even had a demo line that you could call that would play various sounds and music and you could press a button to switch between the modes to hear the difference.

But you can't really think that a POTS call sounds better than a modern VOIP call?

Yes, I can. Because just before the pandemic, I was able to use a real POTS network in a remote part of the country. Called from one ranch to another over a rural switch. And it was awesome.

The quality of a call is about more than its audio bandwidth. If that was true, then people wouldn't be able to tell the difference between an iPod and a vacuum tube amp. And, again, latency is a massive factor, as is true asynchronous communication. Arguing over POTS is a whole different thing than arguing over VOIP.

People who defend VOIP claiming it's just as good have never done a side-by-side comparison. The only advantage VOIP has over anything is the usual "make it cheaper" race to the bottom.

[StillBored]

POTS, is largely of varying service too. The switched network of old was mostly replaced by G.711 on TDM connections, which is probably an improvement for long distance. So at that point it was no longer strictly analog, but then the phone companies started shaving pennies and doing things like pair gain to cram more phone lines down the same wires, which was a fairly large reduction in line quality for local calls.

These days so much of it is routed over IP, which is where all the latency got added.

So, its hard to know what your "ranch" actually was.

OTOH, its hard for any hardwired system to be half as bad as your average cell phone which are dealing with constant channel quality issues, which results in the robot voice (for lack of a better description), and all the broken up audio, or simply silence that one frequently gets from a cell phone. Basically cell phones suck for actually talking to people. <shrug> But once again, convenience trumps quality.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

I use an ancient SIM-free phone and the place I notice the speed issue is never within the applications I use it for (Stellarium, Maps, All Trails, IRS etc). It's switching between applications. Once you're "fully inside" one of the apps, yeah, the speed of this 10 year old device is completely adequate and almost indistinguishable (with these apps at least) from a similar phone today.

[snovv_crash]

That sounds like slow flash, not a slow processor.

[adolph]

Another aspect of Apple processor updates is increased battery performance per unit of work.

Battery in SE 2 compared to 3 is 11% larger (1821 mAh to 2018 mAh) but advertised "video playback" duration is 15% larger (13 h to 15h). This is unlike the comparison of SE 1 to 2 in which an 18% larger battery (1624 mAh to 1821 mAh) was entirely eaten by screen, etc. for no improved playback duration.

13 h 15 h

[parkingrift]

>Rumors are the iPhone 14 will have the same A15 and only the Pro will get the A16. I think you'll see a bunch of people freak out about this, but honestly, phones really don't need to be faster at this point.

I think if this rumor were true then Apple would not have launched the iPhone SE with the A15. There was really no reason for the SE to have the A15 but they shoved it in there, anyway.

[lkxijlewlf]

The SE is an odd ball device. It is a device that is explicitly for the crowd that will not upgrade their phone every year. Apple wanted to make sure they had a 5G phone for that crowd because they want all their devices on 5G now. They could have put an A14 in it, but they needed the efficiencies of the A15 to make up for the 5G battery suck because they could only increase battery capacity so much and still fit the iPhone 8 frame.

[parkingrift]

Possibly. However, Apple does continue to sell the 12 and 12 Mini. However, the 12 Mini is substantially more expensive... because reasons.

TBH the Apple lineup has never been more confusing.

[theriddlr]

Had an SE 1st gen. I had to upgrade last year as Duolingo wouldn't load anymore even after killing all other apps. The 13 Mini is too big for one-handed use and gives me migraines from PWM.

[ssully]

I don't keep up on phone rumors. Do you think the 14 will stick with the A15 to get the regular iPhone lower in price compared to the Pro?

[k8sToGo]

Higher Refreshrate is quite useful.

[zitterbewegung]

A great deal of the processor on phones and for people to upgrade aren’t necessarily the processor speed but a better ISP and also an accelerator to process pictures faster. The secondary reasons to buy a phone is getting a better camera and battery life / battery is nearing end of life.

Then again I upgrade phones if they come out in green also. My last upgrade was for a 120hz screen refresh rate.

[pmontra]

Add to the list being constantly out of disk space because of all the pictures and videos on whatsapp. It used to happen to people with 16 GB phones, the latest safe size is 64 GB now.

[lkxijlewlf]

Okay, but the article was about the multicore speed difference.