This is important for developers to know about because if you use a recent iPhone your experience is not just fundamentally better than any Android user's but it's especially significant compared to the kinds of cheaper phones many people buy. Look at the chart here: a Galaxy S22 is comparable to the iPhone XS which shipped 4 years earlier but even the S22 towers over the Moto E30 & other budget phones.
https://infrequently.org/2022/12/performance-baseline-2023/#...
Theoretically, I would care. But in practice, I just took out an old budget android phone, gave it a go at browsing the web (news, images, and videos), and it seemed not to be noticeably slower than my much newer and pricier iPhone.
Benchmarks would probably show a great difference between the two, but my eyes can't tell.
Only thing that would make extra performance matter are video games and I don't play those on phone.
It’s cool and all for Apple to have an edge in single core performance but it doesn’t matter all that much in the real world and the s23 is objectively the faster phone.
Faster performance today means longer lasting tomorrow.
Exactly. I use a 2nd gen iPhone SE, and a big reason I bought it was that it had the then-beefy A13 chip despite being a “budget model”.
It’s now nearly 3 years old and still feels like a brand new phone.
Almost all apps run well with the exception of Google's, which have consistently gotten worse. The camera still starts up quickly, and the fact that most apps are still performant compared to an iPhone 13 is impressive.
Google Docs is unusable - even small documents can't be opened, and the app hangs when opened more than half the time. Google Maps keeps adding misc features which adds significantly to startup time and responsiveness.
And more importantly to me, longer lasting tomorrow tends to mean longer official OS support. At least for Apple devices.
I wish this was true for my old Android phone. I still have a OnePlus5 lying in my drawer, which still has stellar performance, but doesn't get any new software features.
They drastically increased RAM recently: https://9to5mac.com/2022/12/31/iphone-ram-list/
Every flagship iPhone since 2011 has gotten at least five years of OS updates, with some of the more recent models getting six years. Security updates extend past that.
only if CPU performance plateaus in future generations. as long as new phones keep having drastically better performance, apps will keep updating to use it.
For example I might consider: 1. Does it run Android? 2. Physically size- does it come in not obnoxiously large? 3. Does it support NFC payments? (surprisingly this still isn't a given) 4. Adequate performance 5. Camera quality 6. Screen quality 7. Battery life 8. Price 9. Community ROM support 10. Community Linux distro support 11. Can it run a desktop when connected to a usb-c screen 12. Geekbench
Only if everything else is equal would it make my decision
If not, unacceptable. Ergo, all iPhones are unacceptable. (Yes, I used to work at EO, running the GO PenPoint Operating System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PenPoint_OS?useskin=vector , and also worked at GRiD, putting wireless LAN into the GRiDPAD RC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRiDPad?useskin=vector. I like pens. I might be biased.)
I can't remember the last phone I had that survived long enough for me to feel I needed to upgrade it.
Whenever I have to use an older phone to do anything. App and web developers seem to be in an arms race with moore's law to see if they can waste the extra resources faster than hardware manufacturers can provide them.
* does javascript execute fast
* which video codecs are hardware accelerated
No, Android phones browser performance is still a joke compared to I phones, which are faster than desktop PCs!(in speedometer)
for me it's literally every day. frames missed, jittery animations everywhere on top-of-the line phones, this drives me completely mad.
On devices with gigahertz multicore CPUs, gigabytes of RAM and fast flash memory, absolutely everything local should be 100% instant
So I welcome any and all single-thread performance improvements, if only because of lazy developers.
Multi core performance on a phone is like towing capacity on a sports car.
Don't take it from me, take it from Linus Torvalds (you know, the guy who created Linux) - https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=136526&curpost...
Not how long battery lasts before needing charge, but how many years it lasts before dropping to say 80% of original capacity that it needs to be replaced or the phone needs to be updated.
Most, if not all, modern phones are performant enough that I won’t need to update for a long time, if not for the battery issues. At least for my use case.
If you have a charger at your desk/car then honestly you could likely go even longer.
I've seen people struggling after 2 years though so it's rather random.
Just a random N=1 sample for you
1) Firefox on mobile, with addons. Battery consumption is reduced a lot with less javascript, less ads downloaded, less domains contacted etc. From my quick tests, Firefox was perhaps efficient as a default installation compared to Chrome, or on a wifi with a pihole/nextdns type setup. But out and about in the world
2) Downloaded videos, podcasts, music or books. If I store my stuff on the device by downloading at home on wifi, it uses way less power than streaming over mobile data. My battery lasts for really long time playing videos from storage compared to for example Youtube.
I often wonder how much the battery life of a phone is a function of battery size and phone cpu & screen technology, vs web technologies and website design/performance. I can sort-of control for the latter.
I also find Brave a lot simpler than Firefox + installing add-ons, and it uses uBO lists by default which is mostly what I care about.
1. The keyboard in ios: its unintuitive and ancient compared to the android counterparts. And No, Gboard, swiftkey keyboard in ios suck equally bad too.
2. Battery drain issues: Battery drains randomly, main culprit being "find my" process. This alone drains ~8% of battery overnight on my iphone and ~18% on my ipad overnight even with background app refresh turned off.
3. Lack of the back button is a huge pain in the ass. Some apps design their own navigation pattern and it sucks to operate the phone in 1 hand. For e.g, Youtube requires you to pull down on the video currently playing to go back to search results than allowing the native back swipe or back arrow on top left.
Meanwhile, I have agree that the apps in iOS are much nicer than the android apps, the same apps I used in android which sucked big time work flawlessly in iOS. FaceID is much reliable than the shitty in screen fingerprint readers in Samsung/Android phones.
So both Android and iOS have their pros and cons, and after using both, I can confidently say iphone is not the best phone in the world and user had to experience both to choose what suits them better.
You probably have an AirTag around you, there's a bug causing that. Update the AirTag firmware.
> 3. Lack of the back button is a huge pain in the ass
Swipe from the left edge of the screen to right, that's the iOS back button.
Anyway, I'm returning to Android after 4 months for the same reasons. Lets see how this goes. I haven't found difference in the few apps that I use and since there is universal praise that iOS is smooth, every little hiccup called my attention. So, there are hiccups as well (lags, not responding to touches for half a second, etc)
1. Reliable performance from the OS: what I mean by this is, small features like auto brightness has worked right for me from day 1 on iphone vs me having to adjust it in android and gps lock on maps is always on point. Small things like this work in both Android and iphone, but in iphone it works right all the time.
2. Apple Wallet: I've used both Gpay and Wallet, my wife still uses Gpay on her android, But Apple wallet has worked without a hassle every single time.
3. Quality of apps in Appstore: When comparing same app released for both iOS and Android, the iOS app feels much stable to use without any crashes and better design. For example, the banking apps like Chase/ Capital one were absolute mess in my android(S20 FE), but in iOS I haven't seen them crash/hang ask for reload etc.
4. Software updates: You get software updates as soon as apple releases it vs Samsung taking months/years to add their bloatware and push it.
Thank you for acknowledging this. I think few people actually appreciate the need for better single-core performance. It's, in comparison, easy to just add more cores and use more power, but what is hard is making one core faster and faster and use less power.
Apple wanted to build apps using web technology, but realized it was nowhere near fast enough. So they reused parts of the OSX toolkit, including the programming language which compiles down to optimized assembly. (and it wasn't even that great in performance due to obj-c's way of doing things, it had more runtime overhead due to the message passing system).
Meanwhile, Android always was on Java and the JVM, which, while pretty fast, isn't as fast or energy-efficient as a lower level language. If I recall correctly it took something like five years - and quadcore CPUs - before Android started to get close to iOS in terms of perceived performance and speed, and the iPhone still beat Android phones in terms of energy efficiency. It took even longer than that (again, if I recall correctly) for the iphone to even start having a dual-core CPU.
And Apple is doing it again with their own CPUs now, the energy efficiency of their new macbooks with no compromise on performance is really impressive.
Moreover, if someone really is interested in the speed of normal applications, then it is more useful to directly measure things like start-up times of popular apps. Apple isn't ahead here, as far as I know, despite higher single-core performance.
It takes a special sort of arrogance to look at literally the entire industry and go "psssst, savages don't know what they're doing. Single core performance is where it's at."
It’s just that not much improvement can be done in single thread performance anymore and it is much more easier to design and market “n times as many cores” then “we bumped single threaded performance by 0.2%”. Mind you, almost every single application you have will ultimately depend on single threaded performance, relatively few problems can even theoretically make use of multiple cores, let alone are programmed to do so. Sure, multiple single-threaded process will like more available cores, but it is more limited on mobile devices, where few very fast cores and more slower ones are the norm.
The article just proves you wrong
Apple's products are lightyears ahead from Android phones in perfomance. Apple CPU design always put single core perfomance upfront, because they know most application are still optimized to single core usage. how is not not relevant?
On the other hand, the results also show how much work Apple will need to put into their GPUs, as the clearly inferior chip is still beating the iPhone 14 hands down in terms of GPU horsepower.
The relevant review, though, is performance per watt. This video (https://youtu.be/s0ukXDnWlTY) from a few months ago explores the power efficiency graphs and that's probably what most phone users really want. Nobody is gaming on their phone until it hits the limits of passive cooling and very few people will need the raw CPU performance for more than a second per page load. I don't even know what intensive single core benchmarks are even good for in real life, maybe Javascript if you're somehow running the JS VM at 100% for minutes straight? That doesn't sound like something I'd want my phone to do!
Qualcom's advancements in speed and longevity have been incremental, sometimes even decremental, for years now. Mediatek, previously the chipset for every 100 dollar Chinese phone, keeps closing while Qualcom desperately tries to squeeze just a little more juice out of their cores.
Apple's progress is also slowing down, but not nearly as much as their most important competitor's. It's a shame, really. Hopefully Google and Microsoft will develop their own chips for real in the future because you can't just wait for Qualcom anymore. Microsoft REALLY wants a good M1/2 competitor but the other chips in the ARM space just aren't up for the task. I'm sure Google would also love for their Chromebooks to become more powerful, though their own mobile devices seem to focus on midrange performance with benefits in software and dedicated silicon instead of fast general purpose compute.
In the end, I have no horse in the game because I don't think I'll be upgrading any time soon. My current phone is more than fast enough for my needs. The battery is slowly fading but as long as I can still get through the day I'm satisfied. With the absolutely ridiculous prices of phones these days, I'm putting off an "upgrade" for as long as I can.
Beyond that, who cares?
It also wouldn't matter if the thing could recharge super fast.
The M1/M2 laptops have done this, I noticed that people who used to bring chargers with them at conferences/meetings don't even bother anymore, or don't bring it out of the bag.
I haven't brought my charger to work since I received my M1. My bag just contains snacks. Not having to worry about charging is really a very different experience.
They are all the same at this point, we are way past when Specs actually mattered(outside of JS performance on mobile, thank you Snapdragon!), they are just too small for anything useful, at least for me personally.
I just buy a pixel and install GrapheneOS/CalyxOS on it, and call it a day.
Its a phone that works, and I can relatively trust it, certainly more than other spyware, even if sandboxed google services are installed.
Nonetheless, iPhones are also great from a security perspective out of the box, and the hardware is superior so I just couldn’t switch to a pixel, even though I wanted to at every version. They are unfortunately simply riddled with some stupid mistakes, like that emergency call one.
Although Apple most definitely still leads on these factors, I think battery life, general latency/responsiveness of doing daily tasks, reliability, etc, are more important than some random coremark.
Unfortunately iPhone can't do that so who cares about the better Geekbench score...
Can I still put it on my nightstand at 10pm with 15% battery and have my alarm go off at 8AM with 8-9% charge remaining? Cool, don't care how fast it benchmarks.
I would say no, but they are a means to compare raw performance between phones.
Which isn't the best metric, but it's one of them. I mean at some point, Samsung was caught fudging the numbers, overclocking or disabling thermal / power saving options when it detected a benchmark app running.
So for their customers, or customers comparing phones, benchmark results do matter, to the point where it became a marketing tool. I don't think that's the case anymore though.
> Geekbench 5 scores reveals Apple’s 2½ year old iPhone 12 outperforms Samsung’s latest flagship in single-core performance by 6.15%.
I do every computation and gaming outside my phone.
My Xiaomi Redmi Note 8 from 3 years ago feels as good as when I bought it when reading the net, watching youtube, chatting, emailing or editing pictures.
And my Redmi scores 300 in the same Benchmark, where the S22 scores 900, the S23 1500 and the iPhone 14 Pro 1900.
Maybe JS performance could be slightly better? But I rarely navigate to such poorly optimized websites.
On apple, the animations are slicker, the hardware much better, and arguably the software stack higher quality. The Bluetooth audio quality was noticeably better on every device I used, from old car to brand new stereo.
But the always on display isnt as good, focus modes didn't work quite like I wanted, widgets are less powerful, the notifications UI is inferior, and accessing system settings is more cumbersome.
Bonus: the lightning port is inferior.
So yes. I would love the android software architecture with apple hardware and privacy.
i figure system settings are annoying because the default is good enough for most users.
Started with iPhones, then added iPads, then AppleTV since the screen mirroring was great and we use it for Plex. Then the next thing you know, the entire household is now MacBooks because shared clipboard is amazing, handoff is nice, being able to reply to text messages from the laptop is great.
Took a decade for the transition to complete, but now it is done and the stickiness of it will be hard to overcome.
Now the Windows machines are just gaming machines, nothing else.
Though my Desktop is still a Tower with a 12 Core / 24 Thread 3900X. And the next laptop would probably be a frame.work.
Though for a family computer the low spec Mac Mini looks nifty.
"Then you are forced to buy the second Apple device" :)
The test (single thread with -j1 flag) has some interesting result. Time taken to calculate 1 million keys:
i7 8650U=2m5s, Oracle Cloud A1 VM=3m30s, Ryzen ThreadRipper Pro 3945WX=3m30s, GCE VM Xeon 2.2Ghz=6m.
So in this particular use case, an 8th gen Intel mobile CPU is the winner. Would you want to use 8650U based on this test result? Probably not.
I really feel like old man yelling at cloud, but the more advanced phones and the software get, the more I miss the days of my cheapy Motorola flip phone.
(You bought several new phones without checking their specs? Come on.)
My GF uses my phone more than I do because her iPhone is usually dead by the end of the day if she doesn't remember to charge it every few hours.
I'm willing to accept a slightly slower phone if it means my phone can make it through the day without me being a hostage to charging.
Going through the battery usage report and pruning apps is like flossing: most people should do it more often than they do.
The problem is the poor battery management on the phone. Not fair to blame the apps for Apple's failure.
I still rock my 1983 Toyota, sure. I still rock my 20yo HiFi system.
But I don't "still rock" my iPhone 11, it was only recently out of production for God's sake!
This does look to just be geek bench CPU, and we need to be honest, people play games on phones now so GPU performance matters, so if you're going to make an extreme claim like the headline, you need more than a single category of a single benchmark.
Lighting connector is 10 years old now, and is USB 2.0 speed. Still funny to see hotels with the pre-lightning connector and got screwed, but its been a long time now.
I'm pretty sure my iPhone XS is slower, but still less annoying than Android+Samsung UI.
The best reason for having a faster chip is that if it gets the job done quicker then battery times will improve.
Sounds a bit like intel vs amd.
Even if it is, it's such a huge compromise to use an Apple device given the nannying and lack of features, it isn't worth it.
If you are in the Apple ecosystem, get an iPhone.
If you are pleased with Android and not in Apple's ecosystem, then get something like the Samsung.
Who the hell cares about this crap?
Which phone should I get? Or am I too picky for something I want to pay >$1000 for?
What matters is user's perceived speed.
The interesting point here, which is corroborated by different sources than just TFA, is that Apple's silicon is 1-2 generations ahead of everyone else.
Whether you like iPhone or Android, I think we should all agree that's a bad situation for the world to be in. Apple's advantage in mobile CPUs is coming at a time when new types of devices are appearing, like AR glasses. If Samsung and Qualcomm don't catch up soon, Apple will win that space and have an even more unassailable monopoly.
There's isn't much hope on the horizon for more competition when it costs hundreds of billions to build a new next-gen fab, there's a significant chance of process shrinks failing economically, and the institutional knowledge required is concentrated in a few isolated groups, with most STEM students in most countries not finding the semiconductor industry attractive. There's a crunch on pretty much every axis.
Apple has a track record of bankrolling build-out of cutting edge manufacturing facilities in a weird business loan/prepurchase arrangement where essentially they get stuff 18 months before anyone else would have been able to get it without doing the same thing. Waiting around for businesses to see a market and then a long line of processes necessary to make that a reality slows things down.
When Apple made their first Intel laptop, they got a CPU bin that didn't actually exist for something like another 9 months. If Lenovo had shown up asking for it, they would have been told no, in no small part because Lenovo would have wanted 10x the capacity that Apple needed for those first macbooks. But Apple could handle waiting for what were essentially perfect chips to trickle out of a fab still working on yield.
As Apple has gotten bigger they've had to make their own weather more and more. I have no doubt that if Apple hadn't shown up to TSM with a bag of money that Intel would only be a year or so behind TSM instead of whatever they are right now (which is Really Really Bad)
The main reason is Apple has the profit margins to be able to afford to use large chips with lots of cache and plenty of premium features. Look at the M1 architecture, those chips are monsters. Android OEMs don’t have the margins, so are trapped in a race to the bottom against each other.
For example, it was a big deal when they moved from IBM/Motorola to Intel, and Macs started getting much faster right away. A decade later and Intel is struggling to keep up at the high end, woefully behind in low-power contexts, and Apple is again hamstrung in their plans.
So at some point they decided to make their own chips. Well, to design them, and to use their leverage with TMSC to get them made exclusively. It’s true that they have fewer dependencies than a more general-purpose manufacturer like Intel, but don’t discount the many years they’ve spent eating shit while waiting for their “partners” to catch up. In the CPU space, they’ll never do that again.
It's the difference between tuning a game for consoles and tuning it for a PC.
Apple's is funding TSMC's latest process by guaranteeing future orders.
The other manufactures could do this but there is more profit in using older processes.
Only a fraction of Android devices are using a process that isn't 3+ years old.
Apple has end dates for their process. They are aim for this and the other companies are not.
This isn't Apple Bad(tm)
This is Android manufactures have a different focus. Android devices are priced to be disposable.
Also, in the old days when they weren’t the juggernaut they are today, they always were good and minimizing SKUs and economy of scale. In 2005, the #1 part on state contracts were iMacs, even though Apple market share was like 3%.
That level of control and planning means they know what they need and can adjust. Overages in Apple Watch CPUs are subsidizing the HomePod, etc. In the case of the iPhone, they put an overpowered chip in there because why not.
It's like football game for geeks, it's not a big deal. It's fun as long as you don't take it too seriously.
On a more serious note, I prefer Apple's style of doing things and pray to the gods Android doesn't obliterate Apple's OS. Just last week I got my hands on a Amazon Fire TV, it was cool until the AirScreen app started not working for some reason and my blood started boiling with disgust towards Android and everything it stands for. I'm a huge "Just Works" enjoyer and Android's market share dominance scares me.
Bugfest and terrible (and goddamn laggy) UI. Ended up on an AppleTV, which is what I should have gotten in the first place I guess. Every time I try to save money by avoiding Apple I end up paying far more for it in jank, lost time, and frustration. I hate how shit my other options are in nearly all of Apple's product categories, because it's not like Apple doesn't screw up constantly, just not enough that I wouldn't be cutting of my nose to spite my face by switching. If others would close the gap I'd feel a lot less uncomfortable with how much power they have.
Bloat. Virtually every android everything is so bloated that the underlying chip speed gains are rendered useless.
>Amazon began referring to the Android derivative as Fire OS with its third iteration of Fire tablets. Unlike previous Fire models, whose operating system was described as "based on" Android, Fire OS 3.0 was described as "compatible with" Android.
Like you, I prefer Cupertino’s way of doing things and would like to have measured conversations about the same without the BS diatribes from the haters. Impossible to do around here and has been for years.
Is it? Qualcomm is currently focused on performance in a way that they wouldn't be if Apple hadn't lit a fire under their ass.
https://hothardware.com/news/snapdragon-8-gen-3-decimates-ap...
No, Qualcomm has been consistently behind for years.
The reason their chips are doing significantly better now is because it takes a little while for the talent they bought- the people responsible for Apple's current massive lead in the first place- to bear fruit (longer than usual since they were brought on in 2019).
As such, I have reason to suspect they'll have more success going forward until Qualcomm stops paying enough and they go back to Apple; the circle of life. AMD's no stranger to this way of operation; they just re-hire Jim Keller when they get tired of losing to Intel.
With their A and M series SOCs Apple had an advantage in mobile, tablet, laptop, even desktop PC markets. That advantage didn't result in a monopoly. If you live in US it may look like iPhones have a monopoly in the smartphone market, but they are a lot less popular in the rest of the world.
Simply because performance of mobile phones is not an issue anymore. Nobody cares if one phone is 5% or 5 times faster than the other. I have a 2,5 year old 200€ Chinaphone and performance is not an issue at all. Unlike a few years ago I never even once thought that a slightly faster phone would be any better. That's why.
But sure, it is leaps and bounds ahead of that task no one really cares about.
I don’t see the sense when the government tries to break up a monopoly like Google for being too good at selling online ads, or likewise worrying about some company dominating augmented reality chips.
I’d be more interested in making sure that such technology is never required for basic living than about stopping companies from achieving it.
The problem is that Google isn't "too good" at selling online ads, they're just the most profitable because their monopoly makes it impossible for better competitors to beat them. That means the world is stuck with Google's mediocre/shitty service even though consumers/the market doesn't want it. Innovation stops happening, quality of life drops, the economy suffers, etc.
Apple's big lead in chips right now seems like a great thing, but if the government weren't so shit at regulating competition, we could've had breakthroughs like this a decade ago. Instead innovation is (predictably) moving at a glacial pace.
The free market only works when there is competition, so since our economy is based on the free market, it makes sense to write laws that protect it. Monopolies directly contradict with the basic operation of the free market, which is why they're bad.
It doesn't matter if it's a life or death situation. Things don't have to be dangerous to your health to be illegal.
because monopolies can manipulate market and prevent a healthy competition. no competition, means prices will be artificially high.
Cell phones are a requirement for basic living. That's a large part of why it matters.
HN is not against monopolies. Hacker News ardently cheers on browser and adtech monopolies.
HN is against anything that limits surveillance capitalism.
I think samsung and qualcomm are more important companies, because they compete in components, making incremental changes in the electronics industry . Apple is a vertically integrated, closed monolith and the rest of the ecosystem will not / cannot benefit from their innovations. Samsung should focus on differntiating itself from apple rather than trying to look more like it. Good, functional phones with lots of customizability and ports are a strength. Speed of apps is immaterial to me , and i m using an old Samsung. Most people use messengers and browsers, which run just fine in older phones. 3D avatars and fancy animations are not crucial to anyone
Disclaimer: I have an old iphone, used iphone 11 for weeks then went back to Android and I daily drive a M1 Pro Macbook
Soon on iOS too, to be fair. USB-C to follow most likely.
Only because Apple was forced to by an EU ruling. I wouldn't be surprised at all if they restrict sales of USB-C phones to EU-only, out of spite.
however silly it is, apple's silly browser rule is the only thing standing in full on chrome monoculture.
chrome is the new ie.
Truly, Firefox is the only one that stops either.
It is by definition a choice
> an act of selecting or making a decision when faced with two or more possibilities.
It's more choice than a monopoly.
iphone wins hands down for battery life, processor speed (especially video/processing), and arguably for some aspects of camera.
The fact that Samsung is the de facto standard manufacturer in the Android world is very depressing.
For example, AnandTech runs a bunch of SPEC CPU benchmarks and found that the Apple A15 was a lot faster than the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 or Exynos 2100 (all 2021 processors): https://www.anandtech.com/show/16983/the-apple-a15-soc-perfo.... You can check the second page for graphics benchmarks.
Apple has been making their own CPU cores for a while while Qualcomm and Samsung are both using the ARM-designed cores. In the case of the above benchmarks, both the Snapdragon and Exynos are using the Cortex-X1 cores from ARM. Google's Tensor processor also uses ARM's X1 cores. Newer Snapdragon processors like the 8 Gen 1 and 8 Gen 2 have used X2 and X3 cores.
Apple's ability to produce their own CPU designs has been a big win for them, especially for single-core performance (really important for the majority of what people do with their phones including web/javascript) and for power efficiency (really important for the vast majority of time when users might be using their devices, but not in a taxing way).
Apple's custom CPU cores give them a real advantage.
This video from Geekerwan takes more of a sustained performance / thermal throttling perspective.
Though, part of it I think may just be Geekbench's design as a microbenchmark that doesn't do long-term strain or attempt real-world tasks.
