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Do Apple and Google Sabotage Older Phones? What the Graphs Don't Show
Harvard economics professor Sendhil Mullainathan takes a look in the New York Times at interesting correlations between the release dates of new phones and OSes and search queries that indicate frustration with the speed of the phones that people already have. Mullainathan illustrates with graphs (and gives plausible explanations for the difference) just how different the curves are over time for the search terms "iPhone slow" and "Samsung Galaxy slow." It's easy to see with the iPhone graph especially how it could seem to users that Apple has intentionally slowed down older phones to nudge them toward upgrading. While he's careful not to rule out intentional slowing of older phone models (that's possible, after all), Mullainathan cites several factors that mean there's no need to believe in a phone-slowing conspiracy, and at least two big reasons (reputation, liability) for companies — Apple, Google, and cellphone manufacturers like Samsung — not to take part in one. He points out various wrinkles in what the data could really indicate, including genuine but innocent slowdowns caused by optimizing for newer hardware. It's an interesting look at the difference between having mere statistics, no matter how rigorously gathered, and knowing quite what they mean.
It seems like *everything* starts slowing down or breaking for no reason. I don't buy wear/tear as a reason when everyone and their grandmother suggests that you need to update the firmware to get it working again. If it worked fine with the old firmware, why is updating the firmware fixing the problem? WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY OLD FIRMWARE!?
speed is about the same too. i plan to use it until it dies or i can't get any new apps which will probably be a year or so after ios 9 ships
In the end, the professor, after writing thousands of words, comes to no conclusion. In other words, what a waste of time. Additional new code will take more cycles to run. Gee, what a simple explanation.
Apple, who continues to provide updates to older phones years after they're released. Some users find these new features slow down their older phones.
Google, who doesn't have a mechanism to provide updates to almost any of their phones years after they're released. Some users find their phones slow down years after release anyway.
It is a big leap, there could be various other explanations of varying degrees of malice. As the new release comes through, bug fixes for older releases are put on back burner, apps are changed and tuned to take advantage of new version run slower in older version.. Or the way graphics subsystem is organized in iOS might have different bottlenecks based on the display resolution. So as new releases come in, default sizes for buffers and hashtables might change deep in the OS slowing down older apps.
And if you are going to postulate "Apple might slow down older versions deliberately", why can't you postulate, "Google might spike and skew the history of the past searches to make Apple look bad"?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
experienced and best- Microsoft!
Every time they come out with a new OS, the old one suddenly needs security "updates" at a faster and faster rate, and for some reason, more and more of them require reboots. Likewise MS Office- they change the file formats with each release to prevent compatibility with older versions and especially compatibility with freeware office suites.
Interesting musings but the first thing that came to my mind is the reverse - is Google sabotaging the search results? I know this sounds a bit strange but could it be possible that Google is being 'creative' with the raw Google Analytics data. Would it not serve Google's best interest to fudge the results to make Apple look bad right around the time of one of their releases trying to drive people to Android.
My $0.02
I don't think there's any reason to read a conspiracy into the situation. They release a new phone that's much faster, and then they release an updated OS with new features to take advantage of that extra computing power. Adding features that use more computing power makes the old phones seem slow.
I'm tempted to compare it to the development of desktops and laptops, both of which went through similar upgrade cycles before leveling off a bit. However, there's a big difference in that desktop and laptops were developing quickly to cram features into the OS, at the cost of focus on efficiency, which serves as a partial explanation as to why things became "slow" with upgrades. Desktop and laptop software went through a period of bloat, and then in recent years, additional features traded off against speed gains from recoding things with efficiency as a goal. Meanwhile, Android and iOS needed to be written to be efficient from the start. They wanted to make the hardware as small/thin/light as possible, which meant that the power requirements had to be low. To give an example of the effects of this, a requirement for using as little power as possible has been the reason iOS has always limited multitasking.
It is a bit strange they did not correlate to iOS releases, but iPhone releases.
I find it much more likely that when you upgrade to iOS+1, the new features slow your phone down. I've experienced that several times, my 3GS became "much slower" after upgrading it. The new iOS had more eye candy etc.
But that's not the same as saying the old hardware is slower.
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
Finally, we see a big limitation: This data reveals only correlations, not conclusions. We are left with at least two different interpretations of the sudden spike in “iPhone slow” queries, one conspiratorial and one benign. It is tempting to say, “See, this is why big data is useless.” But that is too trite. Correlations are what motivate us to look further. If all that big data does — and it surely does more — is to point out interesting correlations whose fundamental reasons we unpack in other ways, that already has immense value.
And if those correlations allow conspiracy theorists to become that much more smug, that’s a small price to pay.
And the cost is going to be paid by some company or the other for the benefit of some class action house or another.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
So the basic argument is that Apple are not evil, they're merely inept buffoons who cannot keep their software working on any hardware but the single new platform they're putting out next. Wow, let me go buy an iPhone right away! I love inept buffoonery!
As the author points out, each phone release is accompanied by a major OS release. With a major software release comes bugs, as well as a raft of CPU-eating new features to play with, so it makes perfect sense that there would be a spike in complaints about performance and a host of other issues. No conspiracy necessary.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
The article says, "phones feel slower over time as they hold more software". How does this follow? How does the phone get "slower" just because more software is installed? This sounds an awful lot like the cargo cult thinking of "well the hard drive is full so we have to buy a new computer because this one is slow."
I know some software will start agents on boot, but they just sit in the background and do little. top reveals very little CPU time and memory consumed by these.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I have one of the first HSPA+ ("4G") phones, the T-mobile G2, and it still works 100%. But, it seems lately that getting a solid 4G connection is getting harder in the same places I've been using it for years. Shouldn't it be improving? Obviously, the carriers benefit from phone upgrades, too, as they are he primary retailers of them.
It seems rather backward to "optimize for newer hardware" since it is presumably faster than older hardware and so ought to need less "optimization" to function properly. So, focusing just on newer hardware artificially but wilfully puts older hardware on a bigger than necessary disadvantage, and is thus far from innocent.
It is de rigeur, though, and not just with hardware. Witness all sorts of websites previously functioning fine yet suddenly needing every visitor to install newer software (which is not always available!) to be presented... the exact same content as before, just in a newer and wilfully incompatible wrapper. This is a new face on the old refrain of browser wars, where in the end it's always the accessibility that suffers. Nevermind the longevity.
The methodology of testing the hypothesis is to look for google searches about "iphone slow" or "samsung slow". Assumption made is if people search for "iphone slow" Apple might have done something to slow down iPhones. The control group is Samsung which has the same motive as Apple but not the means because it does not control the OS.
Actually, the data was gathered to see if the professor's view that his phone had slowed down was also shared by other iPhone users; they found an interesting correlation between search spikes and new iPhone models but were careful to say that doesn't prove anything other than people perceive a slowdown when a new phone comes out. He points out some valid reasons why the Samsung / Apple data differs, primarily that Apple releases a new version of IOS with the new iPhone and thus the new iOS may not be optimized for older hardware while many Android users remain on an older version. In addition, since the Andriod device makers don't control Android they may find it cheaper not to spend a lot of time on the OS and rather invest in hardware improvements as the differentiator.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
For a moment there, I suspected Apple might have slowed down my old iPhone 3G to an unuseable crawl intentionally, but after reading the above, I finally understand that it wasn't intentionally done to annoy me. They simply pushed a wrongly optimised update to a phone that couldn't run it well, because they no longer gave a shit about me, since I was not upgrading to the latest device. So this was a totally "innocent" move! My trust in Apple is restored! Thank you, Slashdot, for informing me of "what the graphs don't show". I am so reassured. For a moment there I thought I was going to have to look askance at my most sacredest cow.
What concerns me far more is the tendency to hamper or break basic functionality, such as wi-fi and cellular performance when new OS versions come out. Kitkat has largely been a disaster in this area, yet we don't hear from Google on what the plan is to address these issues and when. But we do hear about all the new OS features and neato keen stuff. It suggests a problem with quality control and an unwillingness to take the necessary steps to fix it properly.
I'm going to go out on a limb and point out that neither Samsung, Apple, nor Google would give a rip if they DID get the rep for slowing down obsolete stuff intentionally. Each one has a long history of engaging in planned obsolescence activities and spiking performance metrics anyways, so doing a combination of the two isn't exactly something to be avoided by them. As for liabiliy? They've gotten away with Planned Obsolescence unscathed so far, what is this liabiliy you speak of?
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
I think its no secret that all business that makes products wants you to continue to feed their bank account by buying a new product. Its also no secret that both Apple and Google would focus new OS development on newer models and with that comes the ability to add more features that can take advantage of new hardware.
What I have seen lately in terms of backwards support is to not forget or drop support for past models, but to sometimes leave out features that are only available on new products. This has been my argument against tablets of late because Apple tends to advance its OS to a point of forcing a extinction of old hardware before it really becomes unusable. Case in point was the original iPad which does not even get security updates and many app developers were forced to abandon updating their apps for it as well. Microsoft is not stranger in dropping support for Windows phones on a whim either. Plus, you have how many versions of Android floating around on tablets and smartphones. Some never getting another update and some eligible for one. Very confusing for the consumer and then of course you have the hybrid mobile OS's in devices from Amazon and Barnes and Noble which borrow some cues from Android but do their own apps. I think with manufactures of smartphones, tablets and even other tech. The interest is getting the consumer to constantly upgrade to the latest model. I don't think a Google, Apple or Microsoft wants you to keep using any device beyond a point where advancements are hindered by backwards compatibility. They all will continue to nudge the consumer into new product.
Apple prevents you from downgrading your device to an earlier firmware that performs better.
So if you have performance issues with the latest version, you're stuck.
Since end-users have all sorts of firmware versions, developers want to test their apps on different ios versions. Developers are kind of screwed unless they keep dozens of devices with different firmware versions.
Apple does have a simulator, but it only does versions 6.1, 7.0 and 7.1 (and even then, simulators & reality aren't always the same): https://developer.apple.com/li...
I don't know if google does the same thing with android.
All Android devices up to version 4.3 get slower and slower over time because they don't have trim support. Device bussiness probably loved that feature, but I guess Google finally had to fix it when Nexus devices started getting affected.
>> Google on the other hand want everyone on there latest of OS which is why they are working on Project Butter and Project Svelte to optimize hardware.
Google want people on their latest OS? So why are they doing such a miserable job of it? Only 17.9% of android devices are running 4.4. Meanwhile 90% of ios devices are on ios 7.
It still confuses me as to why these companies release feature updates for older phones fairly quickly after release of hardware.
Don't you WANT people to get the new phones? All those delicious new features would make me want to update if I cared for phones.
But if they got rolled out on to older phones, I would put up with the speed issues until it got unusable.
Ideally if you are going to do things right, release the update after 1.5-2 years from the hardware release. That should get you the most people out there on to new hardware, leading to less problems with the whole "oh this is so slow" searches and complaints.
Either that or they do do this and everything posted here is completely different from how they do things.
I have no idea since I don't waste my time with such stupid crap. Why would I use a phone when the internet exists?
Travelling? Why would I use a phone when internet dongles exist?
All the usefulness of a phone WITHOUT the phone.
I don't like talking to people is what I am trying to get at here. Fuck people and their nasally voices. Good ol' standard text. You'll never annoy me. Unless you are comic sans, in which case I will delete you.
Apple doesn't do software well? That's the stupidest thing I've read here in a long time.
You obviously don't know how slow and inefficient Dalvik is.....
My samsung epic 2 gps antennae is much weaker than it used to be.
I suspect the other hardware is also designed to be "good enough to last a few years but not a decade" to save a few pennies.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
My old FroYo phone was glacier slow until I downloaded a fsTrim utility. It requires root, but it made my old dinosaur run MUCH faster. It even noticeably sped up my current 4.1.1 phone which doesn't yet have TRIM support built in. I think it was called LagFix Free in the Play Store, but I could be mistaken. If you have a rooted Android phone that DOESN'T already support TRIM, give it a go; it did wonders for both of my phones.
You obviously don't know how slow and inefficient Dalvik is.....
Except that was never true; ART is going full steam ahead in replacing Dalvik.
ART will increase the speed and efficiency of apps on Android phones. However, it will use up a bit more space on a user's mobile phone, along with longer install times. ART is also said to be able to give a slight improvement on a phone's battery life.
Again further improvements only earlier versions.
I've managed to keep my machines in service well past the updates in OS. If Apple products really go on the fritz near the time of new releases, they've been doing it for a long time.
You're right. Electronic equipment ages so fast. I've never seen a hard drive last more than a couple of years, and we are lucky if a memory chip lasts more than six months! There is nothing less reliable in the long-term than solid state electronics gear with no moving parts.
Meanwhile 90% of ios devices are on ios 7.
The problem under discussion is Apples earlier products not being able to cope with the the latest version of its OS which means a massive percentage of those products should never have been upgraded to iOS7. It is a problem Android does not have.
I'm going to go out on a limb and point out that neither Samsung, Apple, nor Google would give a rip if they DID get the rep for slowing down obsolete stuff intentionally.
Except it is not remotely true for Google, who want to make money from you doing more. They spend a lot of time making things faster to make more money.
The methodology of testing the hypothesis is to look for google searches about "iphone slow" or "samsung slow". Assumption made is if people search for "iphone slow" Apple might have done something to slow down iPhones. The control group is Samsung which has the same motive as Apple but not the means because it does not control the OS.
It is a big leap, there could be various other explanations of varying degrees of malice. As the new release comes through, bug fixes for older releases are put on back burner, apps are changed and tuned to take advantage of new version run slower in older version.. Or the way graphics subsystem is organized in iOS might have different bottlenecks based on the display resolution. So as new releases come in, default sizes for buffers and hashtables might change deep in the OS slowing down older apps.
And if you are going to postulate "Apple might slow down older versions deliberately", why can't you postulate, "Google might spike and skew the history of the past searches to make Apple look bad"?
There's another problem with his theory as well; as we all know, Android phones don't get many OS updates, if any at all. Every study that checks (using real methods) the Android versions currently in use based on hardware, vendor, or general population finds that unless you bought your phone very recently, there's almost no chance you're running the latest version of Android. So how is it that Google is managing to slow down old phones with code in the new versions of Android in the first place?
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Bullshit question, but I'll bite. Google has no financial motivation, nor any indication that htey can keep a project running long-term, that would encourage them to deliberately manipulate the search history of something like that.
On the other hand, querying google search volume is very valid, as manufacturers routinely do things in the OS to sabotage benchmarking software, but the feelings of hundreds of thousands of people can be influenced by their experiences. As the good professor repeatedly points out, his observation draws no conclusion.
The concept is called planned obsolescence , and it has existed for as long as people have been buying things.
Wouldn't it be trivial to detect speed changes after the newer OS is installed on the older phone model? Aren't all phones benchmarked by the trade press?
Apple markets and prices their products as status symbols. If you don't have the latest, shiniest gadget you aren't cool anymore, especially when your hipster friends are waving their latest toy in your face. So of course you need a reason to justify a new iAnything device.
The default setting for most apps is to phone home every 15 minutes or at some absurdly-high interval. Once you lose 4G coverage your phone slows to a crawl. When you turn off automatic updates and notifications (which can be arduous or impossible for some apps) even older smartphones run well.
Every time my Samsung Galaxy S3 is running slowly, some app developer forgot my preferences and turned back on auto updates. The ABC News app was the latest violator.
There is no reason why an app can't load content on demand while running. When apps are not open, they should do doing nothing! Apps not being open can be a strong indication that you are not in a coverage area, or coverage is poor. So automatic updates when no apps are running is the opposite of what you want to do.
The only thing I want to be happening in the background is backing up my files, and even then only on wifi and while charging. If I'm doing nothing, apps should be doing nothing.
If they weren't trying to encourage or force people to upgrade then why do they continue to offer upgrades rather than give us the option to forever stay at a particular release?
Oh yes, there are security issues that need to be patched.
Here Apple and Google should take a leaf out of Microsoft's book and maintain security patching for more than just their latest current release.
But do they do that?
No, for their premium products, they demand everyone to use only the latest and greatest.
Studies have also shown that as humans age their rate of recall also slows down, not because their brains are slower but because they have to navigate a database filled with entangled excess information. I've noticed that google searches by voice are vastly more word-accurate than siri searches by voice. But that's because google is doing something in the context of something else-- it has clues to context. Siri is trying to do free-form semantics over a much greater realm of possibilities. When you narrow Siri to a phone specific function, it does better than google. As the AI realm grows, perhaps to include sarcasm and slang, these services will require even more compute power to keep going.
However, these days, phone services are done on back end servers, so there is no great reason they should slow down in "modern" times.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The interesting thing to me actually is that the rate of searches on Samsung phones increases faster than the iPhone, which increases in spikes at major OS versions. The implication is that Samsung phones get slower over time without updating them, while with iOS it's simply that newer OS versions add more code and more for the phone to do.
If you plan to support new code base on old devices at all, development of a large project will result in hundreds of decision points where you can either have more features and faster or easier to maintain code on shipping hardware or better performance on discontinued devices. Just how much effort would YOU spend in the later, especially with a hard deadline coming up?
A new OS is also likely to create new demands on device drivers. How much support are you going to get from the manufacturers after they have discontinued the hardware, got out of an entire area of business or simply went belly up? Anyone who has a working knowledge of the chipset could already have left the company or be engaged on other pressing projects.
I think the most realistic solution is to release all available and legally unconstrained knowledge about the platform to community so that they can provide solutions like CyanogenMod as long as there is sufficient interest. In the meantime, try to treat free updates to discontinued hardware as a glass half full. The vendor has spent millions of dollars developing, testing and certifying it, with no commercial gains for itself besides reputation.
I've had each version of the iPhone (app development), so I've been privy to the speed profile personally. I don't think there is anything weird going on. Just hardware optimization and adding more software. And since my iPhone 5S, I've had no complaints about speed. It's been flawless.
--kev
This is hardly new . . .
I had the original G1, before they were tossing the word "android" around.
It interestingly sprouted a navigation system one day. I thought that was nice, until I tried to use it in general. The "upgrade" needed more cpu power and ram than that thing had.
Add features to use more powerful hardware, and they consume resources on the older phones, too.
The only exception seems to be OSX, which tends to have at least a moderate speed increase for older hardware with each major release.
hawk
EVEN IF the new software adds new features ... which work perfectly fine on an upgraded phone but destroy performance on the older one.
I own two iPhone 4s. One of them trusted Apple and got the OS 7 "upgrade" -- which was actually an enormous DOWNGRADE in terms of performance and readability and general function (e.g., cramming the buttons out too far under the presumption that older phones have the extra screen real estate of the newer phones).
The other phone mercifully survived the "upgrade" because it didn't have the memory to allow the upgrade without my deleting a bunch of apps first, which I didn't ever get around to doing.
For a while I worried about it and, yes, newer app software sometimes doesn't work on my phone.
However it happened, Apple very much KNEW what it was going to do to perfectly functional existent IOS devices when it recommended they drink the Kool Aide of an "upgrade" which was actually a huge downgrade.
Can I go back to IOS 6 on my corrupted phone? No...of course not! THAT says everything I need to know? Cui Bono? Shame on you, Apple. My old Palm Pre had excellent multitasking with much lower hardware than is in my 4S phones, so a grossly porkified IOS7 really wasn't necessary...but it serves Apple well. (At least in the short run; in the longer run it turns my allegiance).
You're right. Supporting older devices is more difficult. Good thing Apple has my best interests at heart; it is that special quality of Apple, which is not like other OS companies, that allows it to make a half-assed attempt at such a difficult job and ship the update to me, regardless. That's precisely the kind of move that won Apple my heart.
Hasn't Google been moving more things under the umbrella of their much more restrictively licensed Google Play Services? Basically building much of the face of Android on things no longer/never part of AOSP?
fencepost
just a little off
I don't think they intentionally sabotage them, but they are definitely slower. It's just that they keep getting pushed new OS updates, and new app updates, and the new updates expect faster hardware.
I bought a Galaxy Nexus 2 years ago, and when I got it everything was blazing fast. By a few months ago, my phone was frustratingly slow. For a while I considered that I was just looking at newer phones and thinking "Wow, that's so much faster than mine" but just thought that it was the comparison that made mine feel slow, not that it really was slow. I finally decided my phone was objectively slow, not just by comparison.
A few weeks ago I 'downgraded' to Android 4.2.2 (Had been running Android 4.3), and turned off auto app update. (I had previously tried various ROMs with 4.3, but they were all still slow.) Now my phone is fast again. Maybe not as blazing fast as it was brand new, but I no longer feel like I'm ever waiting for the phone.
So, I don't think there is a real 'conspiracy' to slow down old phones, but I think that old phones *are* slower, they know they are doing it, and just don't care. Why would they? They think we should be happy they are pushing updates to us, but they don't think they should have to worry about the experience on devices they sold years ago. But, I have the ability to refuse these updates, so I can keep my personal phone usable for the foreseeable future.
Get Greenify. Permanently hibernate every damn thing you aren't planning to use within the next hour. Android's 'any installed app can run in the background whenever it wants' regime is strictly for amateurs. Drove me absolutely insane until I found Greenify. Let this post not be seen as any kind of Google endorsement. Clearly Google is just trying to spy on us all with this system of near-unkillable apps. Unlike Apple, which would never do anything as evil as what Google does. That's why when there are holes in Apple's security, they aren't 'backdoors', because everyone trusts Apple, so if only Apple has access to your porn collection, then it automatically isn't a 'back door' because Apple can be automatically trusted. QED.
Would you pay $29.99 to update your device to a new version of iOS or Android? If so, I am sure you would get much better/longer support - more in line with Windows updates on existing hardware than current mobile status quo. But if most people figure they would rather get a new device as soon as their mobile contract is up for renewal every two years, why should device manufacturers care about support anything beyond this time?
In truth, contract subsidizes are not good for users by hiding the total cost they end up paying for their device. Most WOULD be better of paying for a higher quality OS update to make their $800 phone last 3-4 years instead of 2. We should also include full environmental cost of mining and recycling toxic elements of modern electronics into the device price. If someone can make these last longer rather than creating more pollution, they should have a solid incentive to do so.
Most people are blaming Apple directly for iOS getting slow with new releases. I've seen that in some cases with built in apps, but the real problem is usually third party apps. Developers by the latest and greatest iPad and iPhones and then they target those with their apps. The apps get big and have memory usage issues and start crashing on older devices. Usually toward the end of my contract I start having problems with twitter/facebook/google apps crashing a lot and many others that regularly receive updates. My contact timeline usually falls a few months after a new major number iPhone release. I've noticed people on the "s" releases tend to have less issues between hardware upgrades too.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
Apple does update iPhones and iPads to the point that they are slow. Try closing just about any app and pulling up the keyboard on a 3GS with iOS6 or an original iPad with iOS5. Its painfully slow just to respond to keypresses. I am pretty sure the problem is RAM. Apple was slow to go to 512MB and slow again to go to 1GB. I can see why some people might want the latest features without buying a new piece of hardware, but my two big complaints about Apple's practices are these: (1) Apple would never ship the product with such a slow response and thus a bad user experience and (2) Apple has successfully prevented downgrading so there is no going back - even the hackers can't downgrade your phone.
That's correct. The explanation is very simple, and it means Apple cannot be blamed for pushing code that requires too many cycles for your device. Even if Apple's update system tried to push OS X Mavericks onto a PowerBook 100, thereby completely bricking it, it would not be Apple's fault, because the simple explanation is, Mavericks is just new code that takes more cycles duh, and as every Apple user knows, the simple explanation that exonerates Apple is always the correct one.
Apple makes friendly human products, so I too, judge their products' performance as if they were people, with no reference whatsoever to the design of the underlying hardware. And as everybody who has studied human psychology knows, the hardest thing for a computer to use is locate the correct file. Therefore those old phones are probably just searching harder and harder just to find their own files on their drives. This is enough to explain everything: no need to fault Apple for this!
Thankfully for us, in the new improved version, even if your device isn't obsolescing as planned, Apple can send it a command to do so whenever it wants, in the form of a software update. This is right and good because Apple knows whats best for us, and if you end up trapped into a very-difficult-to-reverse update you shouldn't have had, then it's buyer beware. Which has always been the case, right? So nobody should complain when Apple decides their devices have had enough and its time to spend more money. People trying to make old hardware still hunt are just pathetic and just don't understand Capitalism which says companies are just evil by nature and therefore not at fault for anything.
Why would Apple let you DOWNgrade your phone? Apple always knows best. To allow a DOWNgrade would be to question that.
It does sound strange but caveat emptor requires many thoughts that seem strange but it's our responsibility to question. Every point of data served by Google could be "optimized" to serve their interests. Would it be fair to their shareholders if Google only reported the truth?
For Android devices, it's probably an accumulation of background apps/services. They tend to be like Windows desktop machines that way.
Don't forget app updates, Google's and everyone else's. The apps I use are getting bigger and slower as the OS stays the same - if they will run on the older OS at all.
No mention was made on the impact on the network of a new iPhone release. While many users upgrade from one phone to another on the iPhone release date, a huge number of new devices are also suddenly unleashed on the network on that date.
I am thinking that the network might simply throttle back all responses until the shiny new users quit playing with their new devices and go back to their normal day-to-day usage.
No way to tell if those searching for "iPhone slow" were new device users or old device users....
Yes I agree, it's the Overarching Monolithic Network that simultaneously sets everybody's speed across the world for doing anything. Blame The Network. Not Apple. P.S. It's taking forever for me to open this PowerPoint document. Did somebody break The Network again??
Can't beat that dead horse enough apparently. Those little fancy features add up on older systems. I was forced to upgrade laptops when I couldn't prevent Gnome 2 from bogging it down... and Linux is supposed to be the good guy to old hardware.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Exactly! The methodology is incorrect. And, after having spoken with the good people at AT&T (that's right, buy at the sign of the Death Star) it is the Telcos that are responsible for slow-downs, not the telephone makers.
Why? The Telcos want you using the latest tech so that you will have a two-year contract with them that you cannot easily get out of without paying them lots of money. This keeps you "loyal." And it gets you on the treadmill of upgrades that ensures your loyalty. So what the telcos do is that they "sunset" technology that supports the older phones. And all of their upgrades on their cell towers (which usually aren't really towers that much any more) support new radios and signaling, not the old stuff.
So blame Apple and Samsung all you want, but it's the Telcos that are responsible for slowing down the older tech, not the manufacturers.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
Yes. Linux does it too. Every single computer company pushes recommended updates directly to users without a warning, and then makes it as impossible as they can to downgrade back to what they had due to DRM-style software locks. I mean, Linux may not actually have any such locks, but hell, just yesterday, Linus Torvalds himself came to my house and said if I tried to downgrade Gnome 2 back to Gnome 1, he would personally send Richard Stallman and a couple of goons to beat up my pet animals. Save your cute pet animals! Buy Apple. They only use software locks to prevent you from taking back with their upgrade decisions Ã" NOT ANIMAL ABUSE.
Hypothesis one: users' irrational fetish/honeymoon-glow feeling about their old phone is brainwashed away by the advertising for the new phone model so that they're better able to perceive its slowness relative to laptops that cost the same amount.
Hypothesis two: users aren't searching because they suddenly think their phone is slow. They always thought their phone was slow, but before there was nothing they could do about it. They're searching for reviews comparing the speed of new and old phones, to see if there's really an improvement.
Hypothesis three: Apple and Google are somehow slowing down the phones without pushing software updates to them (since, except for Nexus, Google isn't even _able_ to time software update pushes).
Possible journalist approaches: measure the speed of the fucking phones. Ask users why they were searching with a poll on the landing page for the search. Conduct a web poll trying to distinguish hypotheses one and two, shortly after the release of a new phone. Ask Google and Apple if they are slowing phones down, and if they have any historical phone speed measurements they would like to share so you don't have to do it yourself.
To write the actual article: delete hypotheses one and two, then say "I have no evidence to confirm or deny [complicated hypothesis three scenario] but let me explain how it would work."
Fuck this guy. Google and Apple deserve, and desperately need, better criticism than this.
Seriously, please.
There is no need to believe in a phone-slowing conspiracy, just like there was no need to believe that Google or Apple was tracking users and saving location data, and there was no need to believe that Google was sniffing and storing unencrypted wifi traffic wherever its street view cars went, and there was no need to believe that government was saving all of our emails...
Sure. Tell me another good one.
it isn't a conspiracy at all... if so then microsoft would be the king of the hill... with every windows version released older computers get slower and slower... OR maybe it's because newer version of the manufacturer's OSes have more complex functions and capabilities not suited for older hardware that doesn't have the raw power to handle it, but since terminal users demand the newer versions of google and apple OSes to work with their old phones sacrifices have to be made... if you can't run windows 7 on a barelly workable xp pc you can't expect to run flawlesslly the latest version os android on a smartphone that barelly runs gingerbread
Yes. Here's a good one. Backdoors aren't 'backdoors' when Apple has the keys. They don't exist, understand? There is just a wall there. No door.
Absolutely. It has to be the third-party apps. After all, from a standing no-apps all-memory-released start, it takes my iPhone 3G with iOS4 only about 5 seconds to open the keyboard, and only 10 seconds to open the built-in iPod player. I count myself lucky I'm not waiting minutes every time. I mean, at least it's better than loading from a floppy. Gotta be those third-party apps, mm-hmm.
Incisive journalism!
Newer Operating Systems with more features perform slower on older hardware. Who would have guessed ...
Microsft spel chekar vor sail, worgs grate !!!
Even a perceived slowdown isn't a good metric as it's terribly subjective. I have an older computer that still runs just as well as when I purchased it, but it feels a lot slower since my new computer has an SSD and once you experience that, you can't go back without feeling like everything is painfully slow, never mind the extra cores and additional RAM. It was the same with dial-up internet back in the day. It didn't get any slower, but once you had used a cable or T1 connection, loading webpages on a 56k connection felt like a small eternity.
If someone were actually interested in evaluating this, they should buy some new phones and benchmark them for several different tasks and then wait a few years to compare the results after a few operating system upgrades. There are probably a few people who have never upgraded their devices, so even today a comparison could be made.
Totally. And to think, some idiots actually TRUST Apple's update recommendations. I mean, I know Apple wouldn't recommend anything against my interests, just to make more money, because that would be a conspiracy theory. But still, everybody knows that recommended updates are supposed to make computers run crappier. It's just common sense. Sure, Apple's products are aimed at the not necessarily computer-savvy, but there's not savvy, and there's being a TOTAL LOSER by trusting Apple.
I find it much more likely that when you upgrade to iOS+1, the new features slow your phone down.
That seems to be a problem fairly unique to certain expensive phones. Android gets faster with each version on the same hardware, the only slow downs being in manufacturer custom versions. Samsung and LG generally do okay, HTC not so well. Windows has been getting faster since Vista. Linux generally gets performance improvements but is a special case because there is no single distro and each kernel is custom built. I'm not sure about MacOS.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Android does get updates, it just depends on the handset. If you buy a £30 phone you can't expect much. On the other hand Google and Samsung flagship models get a couple of years of updates minimum. If you consider the point at which iOS makes your iPhone unusably slow they are pretty much on par. At least with popular Android devices you have the option to go to Cyanogen or any number of custom ROMs.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I would guess its not malice but a lack of constraints driven engineering. I used to work with a lot of ex-Apple employees and their practices favored only working on and testing the latest and greatest for much of the release cycle before panicking at the end to see if last gen worked. Id expect 8GB devices will no longer be supported if that hasnt already happened.
something Apple did in 2007.
In context of this article, newer versions of iOS work less well on same hardware. Personally I like my Operating System to improve not degrade. Seriously though saying Dakvik is bad (and spelling it wrong)...shows naivete on your part, The compiled part just shows you don't know how languages work.
There appears to be some validity to this; http://cl.ly/image/3N1l1t3H0V1...
It's time that some people start setting up some testing and recording of the results of phones accessing various media from controlled servers in order to provide evidence for or against this.
At least the person writing this provided the concept and didn't do like most journalist and fudge the results to meet their personal wishes.
.. still telling them to, and knowing that the optimizations for newer hardware will slow older hardware, is enough of a "conspiracy" to push people towards otherwise unnecessary upgrades. They don't need to insert a "slow iPhone 4" line anywhere.
Apple, and other manufacturers, should see it as their responsibility to warn consumers when an upgrade will slow their phone. The option to not upgrade, or the option to lose support and downgrade, should be a consumer's right.
My iPhone 4 is slow. That's not ACTUALLY a surprise. There was a time where I was on an upgrade treadmill with my PC. A new video card here, a new processor there. Then a full MB swap, more RAM...every year, something else would get replaced. Progress marches forward.
PCs eventually reached a bit of a plateau. Unless you're playing really intense games, you're not going to notice that your machine is old and slow. A four year old PC does most of the basic tasks asked of it, because those tasks aren't terribly hard anymore, and you've already got a lot of RAM and a 2GHz CPU.
But mobile devices are just starting to reach that plateau. Putting more RAM in a phone makes a difference, but they haven't been loaded up from the start because of size and power restraints. Every year sees a small advance in battery tech and low-power computing. So my old iPhone 4 is well behind that curve. That's how things go.
A four year old Android phone is going to have the same issues, assuming we can put aside the question of whether it's getting updates at all.
This is one of those cases where I don't think the manufacturers have a particularly malicious intent. My iPhone 4 is slower compared to the day I first got it, but it does SO much more, and it does those things a lot better than it used to. My experience is richer, even if I have to wait an extra second or two for certain tasks to complete.
Why would I use a phone when the internet exists?
To be able to call people who don't use the same VoIP client you use. And to be able to receive SMS messages from providers such as Facebook and Yahoo that require each subscriber to have a globally unique phone number that can receive SMS.
Travelling? Why would I use a phone when internet dongles exist?
To be able to carry your Internet access terminal without carrying a big heavy laptop. And to be able to communicate without having to find a place to sit down with that laptop. And to save money because some cellular carriers have historically charged less for service on a phone than for service on a computer.
Fuck people and their nasally voices. Good ol' standard text. You'll never annoy me.
When you need to contact someone who uses a land line, do you go through the deaf relay?
Big letters here kids: "PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE". That is, designed to fail. Nothing new to industry.
I have to say that Google certainly left my Nexus S in bad shape, they updated it all the way to 4.1.2 which was too resource heavy for it, then didn't update it to 4.2 which contained a bunch of performance improvements that the NS badly needed! I've been on a close to stock custom rom since then, and every major release has improved it until it's now very usable on KitKat.
Obviously in the mean time I upgraded, but it still makes a very usable 2nd phone running KK.
I'm almost certain Apple bricked my original iPhone after 2 new models were released. It never had any problems and right after it rebooted after an 'update' it suddenly stopped working and wouldn't even turn on. That's no coincidence if you ask me. They were actively trying to get their new iphone sales numbers as high as possible for the latest and greatest version that just came out and they published a software update that broke older phones on purpose as a motivator to get me to buy a new one.
I had an older windows smart phone that went from smart to useless as time progressed. Many vendors ended any form of support for their apps. Yahoo, and facebook I remember and other features just disappeared, (weather and stocks) the web browser ceased being updated and was more often then not orphaned from access. So it became useless as a "smart" phone. I was pissed off cause the hardware worked fine, and for my purposes had been great... but due to force outside my control I was granted a brick....
Nothing new to this thread, either, but hey-- who reads, anymore, am I right?
You know what? I never considered that. You're right, the probability of Apple misuing the software locks that have on our devices to push near-irrevocable updates that slow us down, something that is completely within their power and they would actually have to expend effort not to do, is approximately equal to the probability of Google predicting that someone would write an article like this and pre-emptively messing with their search algorithms, just on the off-chance that somebody might do a study like this. Every Apple defender should remember, when talking about Google. Apple might have verified near-total control of your device, and it might be plainly obvious to them how they could abuse it, but you should trust them blindly not to, because they are just that trustworthy. Apple has your best interests at heart. On the other hand, you should NOT trust Google blindly because maybe they are messing with searches they have no idea who is going to perform or why. Google might be psychic and be able to tell in advance what kinds of articles people are going to write and mess with search algorithms to throw them off. The mere outside chance possibility of this is enough because Google obviously does not have your best interests at heart. You see, it's all about trust. When you have trust in a company, you will let them in your underwear. When you don't, you don't even want their car in your neighbourhood.
I remember back when I had the iPhone 3G, it ran fine with iOS 3. But when I upgraded to iOS 4, it because very slow and unresponsive, it was almost unusable at times. Now that I have an iPhone 4S, I've stayed on iOS 6 for a while and don't feel like risking an upgrade to iOS 7.
Not to pick on one manufacturer, Motorola Mobility phones, and others as well absolutely require backend servers for web and internet features to operate. Without these thousands of CentOS boxes in this case, the phones are bricks because the scaling of images is done on the backend, not on the phone. Also, the integrated social apps like Facebook and Twitter won't work without the backend boxes.
The nsa upload on your phone gets upgraded to a higher bandwidth as phones get more capable. They roll out with new releases and do all phones at once.
Nsa increase their bandwidth each new hardware release to maximise their snoop. All phones are affected, older ones more so. If you reinstall os it goes back to previous setting until next device is released.
I'm sure of it!!! Even installing Cyanogenmod and other OSes the phone still going worse (even if more RAM available). The phone restarts, and freezes something that never happened before. So I'm sure the piece of code that slowsdown and causes errors is hardcoded in the core of the processor or maybe devices. Someone with a physics/engineering degree should study that. As it may change the market of cellphones to other, more trustable, companies. Emerging ones... :D
That's why I'm studing opencores.org, so I can swtich the processor one day... :D
Screw you Apple. You've made my iPad an insecure piece of junk.
The article show a clear correlation between the "iPhone slow" searches with the release dates. Only, without extra data, it doesn't mean anything. For example, what about the "iPhone" searches ? It's natural that when the new iPhone comes out, people will talk about iPhones, so all related queries, including "iphone slow" should raise. We need a baseline.
Also "slow" doesn't always mean "slow performance". Notice the large peak corresponding the the 5S release, a phone that supports slow-motion video.
The article than compare it to the "Samsung Galaxy slow" queries (still without baseline). However, unlike the iPhone, the "Samsung Galaxy" brand encompass a large number of devices, from low-end to high-end, with releases all around the year. Yet again, such data are meaningless without further analysis.
High end Android phone gets tons of updates... not sure what you're talking about.
Practically all HIGH END Android phones get at least two years of major updates in a timely manner. Each update is, generally speaking, 6-8 months apart - so 4 updates and is much more feature packed than i OS (which largely comes out on an annual basis, getting features Android already has, or a variant of said feature)
As for being "late" in updating, my Samsung S5 has *SO* much more features than stock Android built in. Some people call it shovelwear, some people call it bloat, most call it "I can just flip this switch and things magically happen without having to pay more or download stuff" (if at all possible, since some features like one-handed mode cannot be done through an app). A Nexus 5 with Stock Android 4.4 and a Galaxy S5 with Samsung Android 4.3 cannot be compared to each other - the S5 offers way more stuff. Heck, a lot of the time, Samsung has features in it that stock Android backports in a later version (see most recent obvious one, "Knox")
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Name a single Android handset, ever, which got more than a couple years of updates. 2 years is the absolute cap as far as I can tell.
Meanwhile, iPhone 4 (released 4 years ago, discontinued 1 year ago) is still on the latest OS.
I haven't really noticed any speed improvements with recent versions of Android. Just a lot of gimmicky "projects" (ex. project butter, project svelte) which didn't do much noticeable. It stinks of marketing.
But, I do have some hope for some improvement in the next version, from transitioning from JIT to ART. I think the reason most Andoid phones are so janky is due to wonky garbage collection. which is supposedly improved in ART.
Then again, same song and dance... how many times can a consumer fall for "Project XXX is finally going to get XXX subsystem up to par"?
When there are new phones, people start noticing, that the old ones got slow with the more ressource hungry apps and there is finally as fast one. And the developers start optimizing for bigger phones / not caring about low res ones.
correlation does not mean causation.
... Just solder the battery in so it 's not removable and your phone will die along with it in due time.
Yes, they could have done a better study, but that's true of quite litterally every study ever done. The fact that they could have done better does not negate their results. I think they did a good enough job to show there is an interesting correlation, and that can be studied further by more conclusive methods if someone feels compelled to acually fund one. But it is very common for scientists to use low budget sanity checks to find promissing things to study.