Quote:
Originally Posted by benb
There are all kinds of different issues going on here everyone should chill.
Apple is likely way less guilty of a lot of this stuff than other manufacturers.
- First they actually do try and tailor/eliminate some of the new features for the old phones to try and mediate performance issues on old phones. So does Google.
- A lot of android phones never even get the updates. You can't complain about your 2-3 year old android phone being slow with the latest software because chances are you are not even being given the choice to upgrade it.
- Don't discount the battery issue vs CPU Speed. Apple usually doesn't advertise the CPU Speeds but you can usually find them if you look at some of the more technical hardware centric websites that cover this stuff. Apple phones usually have VERY conservative maximum clock speeds compared to Android designs. Apple does this partly to get good battery life and partly because they spend more time customizing their CPU cores for their needs, and partly because iOS + it's apps are forced into a more efficient design. Android phones were advertising 2Ghz+ maximum CPU clock speeds years ago, I'm not sure but I don't think even these latest iPhones do 1.5Ghz. Some iPads do have higher clock speeds because the iPad has a huge battery compared to a phone.
- All these devices almost never run at their full clock speed. If you have an app that locks in the phone at 100% maximum rated CPU Clock speed and keeps the phone wide awake with constant network access (a video game would be the most likely candidate) you can drain the batteries incredibly quickly, even on a brand new phone. To keep this from happening the phones all aggressively slow their CPU speeds down and turn off bits of the system every chance they can get. And both Google & Apple have reams of documentation and recommendations for you if you're programming an application to make sure your application doesn't have bad behaviors that kill batteries. I haven't written an iOS app but I have written an Android app that did background network activity and there is a lot going on with battery stuff, very interesting. Because of some of the factors mentioned above Apple phones actually run at a higher % of their maximum more often than Androids usually do. The Android designs often have higher temporary "turbo" functionality that is great for marketing/advertising, but they might not be able to sustain it long due to heating and/or battery factors.
- Add up the above and now you've got a 2 year old battery. It's got 50-60% capacity of a new phone. The choice on the manufacturer + software side is do you want that user to be complaining about the battery life (the phone keeps running everything like it's brand new) or the CPU speed (the phone changes it's performance profile to try and preserve a longer battery life).
All that is going on here is Apple has been fiddling around with the balance. Certainly in the past I think iPhones had much worse battery performance after a year or two.
You can get the Apple support app and request they run a battery diagnostic on your phone.. I did so yesterday, I have a 6S that is getting older. The speed is not really getting on my nerves yet. They said I had about 400 charge cycles on my battery but the battery health was still about 90%. My understanding is there is a threshold where the health starts dropping faster in the 500-600 cycle range. I'm going to keep waiting on mine.
If you use your phone incessantly it's going to hit these problems faster as you'll go through more charge cycles per time period.
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Good points all--but I would add that my old Android phone was crippled, not so much by OS updates, as by Google-pushed application updates, often for applications that I did not use but were bundled with the phone and not removable.
I do think that the new business model is obsolescence and replacement--well, that was probably the old business model too--but the cycle is running so much faster now, especially with the phone market.
I'm currently helping to clean up an estate's old Mac computers--we sold the very old/antique stuff to collectors--and I've got a series of Macs starting with a Powerbook 500c, and ending with a Mac Pro tower ~2008 that I need to wipe and donate or resell. What strikes me is how antique the old Powerbook is (even though it sold for a whopping $5k + in 1994), and the slow development of models (the next one I have is a 5400c) and features. It's not until the G4 tower that we're at something that looks fairly 'modern' with ethernet capability etc--5 or 6 years later.
Now a new model of a phone can be developed, prototyped and marketed in an 18 month cycle...