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Apple Doesn't Deliberately Slow Down Older Devices According To Benchmark Analysis (macrumors.com)
According to software company Futuremark, Apple doesn't intentionally slow down older iPhones when it releases new software updates as a way to encourage its customers to buy new devices. MacRumors reports: Starting in 2016, Futuremark collected over 100,000 benchmark results for seven different iPhone models across three versions of iOS, using that data to create performance comparison charts to determine whether there have been performance drops in iOS 9, iOS 10, and iOS 11. The first device tested was the iPhone 5s, as it's the oldest device capable of running iOS 11. iPhone 5s, released in 2013, was the first iPhone to get a 64-bit A7 chip, and iOS 11 is limited to 64-bit devices. Futuremark used the 3DMark Sling Shot Extreme Graphics test and calculated all benchmark scores from the iPhone 5s across a given month to make its comparison. The higher the bar, the better the performance, and based on the testing, GPU performance on the iPhone 5s has remained constant from iOS 9 to iOS 11 with just minor variations that Futuremark says "fall well within normal levels." iPhone 5s CPU performance over time was measured using the 3DMark Sling Shot Extreme Physics test, and again, results were largely consistent. CPU performance across those three devices has dropped slightly, something Futuremark attributes to "minor iOS updates or other factors."
hardware.
Same difference at the end of the day.
Nobody claimed that they were inserting nops. The claim is that they load the phone up with stuff the old specs can't handle, and then actual application performance (not CPU benchmarks!) suffers.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It makes sense that as features are added, it will require more CPU and/or GPU to handle it. The only exceptions are when the features are not active, which CAN be the case for some things, but not for all. The real question should be why you don't see more of a performance decrease on older devices, unless there just isn't much that has been added to the newer versions.
As I said, there CAN be exceptions, but the more things that are actually active, the more CPU/GPU you SHOULD expect will be needed to handle those things.
Actually, I am still waiting for the installer to load.
I had a 2008 BTO MBP that cost north of 5k. It was the nvidia Chernobyl edition.
After two motherboards, and the court case forcing them to increase support time to 4 years, they released a patch that underclocked the cpu and gpu so benchmark performance was less than a 1200$ mbp. Stuff-you-very-much apple.
Refund? no. Denial? yes. Benchmarks? terrible.
Why wouldn't they do it on modern things? Apple's become a fashion accessory, not a computing device. it's only business. Deal with it.
will not shutter performance when popular games and benchmarks are being run. It's just like what we use in AMD and NVIDIA's control panels or profile managers, but opposite.
Why would Apple, actively or passively, want to slow down Apple devices?
No amount of revisionism and misdirection by these people can disprove it.
If it's because of more swapping because of increased memory requirements, unoptimized video drivers, or whatever, it doesn't matter.
from a usability standpoint is to avoid any IOS upgrade after the second year. I have seen it with three devices that the usability severely suffered with the third upgrade to a point that you did not want to use that device anymore. Intentional, I dont know but apparently it happened with all three devices with the third os upgrade they got. I came to the conclusion not to buy IOs devices anymore. The problem is the situation is not better on the Android side. The device manufacturers leave you hanging entirely after the second year but at least the devices are still usable then.
This is an entirely hellish situation from a security standpoint of course.
How the fuck isn't this the case for nearly all open source software, as well?
I recently tried to install the most recent release of Debian on an older PC I had sitting around. Although it did finally install, it was a miserable experience when it came to using it. It was excruciatingly slow, especially when trying to use Gnome 3. I also tried a beta release of Firefox 57, which is supposedly fast, but even it was terribly slow.
I've used iOS on just-barely-supported devices, and the performance was nowhere near as bad as what I experienced using Linux on older hardware.
If Apple allegedly does a "bad job" optimizing newer software for older hardware, then the many open source developers out there must be doing a far, far, far, far, far worse job.
They sure as hell made the iPad One obsolete within 3 years of launch, entirely via non-optional software "upgrades."
You mean a consumer device went obsolete in 3 years? The HORROR!
Honestly, get a grip. I can't believe anyone would complain about this.
... but OS may detect several popular benchmarking apps and make sure to get out of their way as much as possible. Samsung did it in their Android phones.
Three years from introduction to the market. That's a 'trick' people like you use. The metric should be how long after the model of gadget ceases to be sold as new/current.
Come on, the ipad 1 as obsolete the day it rolled out the door with no camera. It was obvious ipad 2 was the one to wait for.
Good-bye
Im typing this on an 8 year old PC i built myself. I use it for pretty bleeding edge VR research....But yeah, keep thinking that way, my stock portfolio loves it.
Good-bye
It's not raw CPU that makes a device feel fast or slow, though.
It's both the API to draw to the screen, and the swapping time from app to app, or desktop to app and back again.
The claim from the study is much, muuuuch broader than the data they tested actually shows.
Wow, a CPU benchmark on a physics engine? That's the best they could come up with?
My iPhone 6 runs like shit on iOS 11. But not because they slowed down the CPU clock. It's because clicking a text field now takes 200 more milliseconds. Typing a character adds a couple milliseconds. Scrolling happens at 3-4 less frames per second. It now takes at least 5-10 seconds for my camera to start.
If you want a make a real test, why don't you actually write a simple GUI app and make benchmarks on that?
I'm 100% sure that Apple purposely makes old iPhones run like shit. But it's not about adding nops. It's about adding lag to the GUI and forcing people to wait pointlessly all the time.
Yeah but they do it for free. We only complain about greedy capitalists around here.
Wow, you sure a a trained little consumer drone.
Introductions always take time.
My Iphone 4s never worked the same again after it received an OIS update. I believe the Iphone6 was out at this time. I only used my iphone 4 for phone calls and my own mp3s. After the update the phone was sluggish/half as responsive when I was doing the same stuff. My Iphone 3GS was unaffected and still to this day runs like a raped ape. Imagine that. The 3GS wasn't compatible with the update......
Exactly this. This is what the apple apologists dont want to hear.
I recently tried to install the most recent release of Debian on an older PC I had sitting around. Although it did finally install, it was a miserable experience when it came to using it.
You can blame systemd for that. Try running something more 'Unixy'.
And even if you can't run the latest software, unlike with Apple, older versions are still available. People are still maintaining the 2.6 kernel.
Honestly, get a grip. I can't believe anyone would complain about this.
Oh, right, a consumer device like a TV (dumb, not smart one), a car, a fridge and so on should become obsolete in 3 years. Get a fucking grip yourself, moron!
what would be fair to both the corporations that sell smartphones and the customers who buy them is, instead of trying to jam an updated system in a phone that will degrade performance why not just build a stripped down operating system that continues to let the phone function as a phone and camera get rid of everything else, just phone and camera, or just phone and forget the camera, at least it will still be a usable phone, that will work until the customer can afford to buy a new phone, for many people throwing a 1000 bucks down on the new phone is not always do-able at every moment, sometimes other things need paid for that takes precidence
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
At one point, it was discovered that gas stations were hacking the pumps so that the test amounts would always come out correct to fool the inspectors e.g. 1 gallon, 5 gallons, 10 gallons but all other amounts would be short. So who's the say that the OS isn't written such that benchmarks work great but other stuff doesn't.
People install all sorts of crap on their devices and then report that it's slowing down over time. A factory reset will solve that problem.
Maybe, but someone paid $700 for one and gave it to us... it was a really nice device for a couple of years, and built like a tank, unbreakable even by 7 & 9 year old boys using it unsupervised. There's no (justifiable) reason why it had to "upgrade" its software into an unusable state - the software worked just fine before they revised it.
We got later iPads, but they were physically fragile - kinda taking a break from the whole tablet scene with the kids now.
I have the newest Debian, Arch and Ubuntu all running on very old machines (some with only 128MB of RAM). One is even my media machine for watching movies in the background (controlled via SSH and mplayer) and they are pretty fast if you are clever about what software you use.
The key is installing using command line only, to start with. For desktop you don't want to install a manager you just want to install Xorg by itself and launch with startx. You should use Openbox or Fluxbox or TWM or PekWm or i3 for the desktop. I can get a bare desktop that way with maybe using only 80MB of RAM. The browser you would want would be Opera (different distros have switched to the new one that is basically Chrome, but some still have the old style one and it's pretty fast). I can also use Firefox sometimes but if it's truly an old machine you'll be swapping fast but if you disable JavaScript it's still not that bad. w3m with graphic support is okay and so is dillo or graphics enabled links browser. For watching movies you can use vlcplayer or mplayer.
Another fast OS for an old machine is one of the BSDs. Up until last year I had NetBSD with a custom complied kernel running fluxbox in under 32MB of RAM without swap space including running conky, a browser and a few xterms.
It wasn't obsolete, asshole. It was broken and non functional. My Commodore 64 is obsolete, but it still does what it did 35 years ago.
Fuck off, niqqer.
Benchmarks are targeted at the hardware, they do all they can to be isolated from the OS, so any OS changes will have limited effects upon outright graphics or CPU performance. However, user-space applications interface with the hardware via the OS, and so OS updates have every opportunity to selectively 'negatively optimise' the user's experience of using the device.
And what incentive to Apple have to positively optimise the user experience on an iPhone 5 now? None whatsoever.
A relevant examination of the question would look at the user experience, not the benchmarks Futuremark looked at. For example, how long does it take to boot the iPhone, how long does it take to launch and re-launch apps, etc.? Each major release of iOS likely slows these tasks down, as the OS increasing includes more UI and security features.
Futuremark was essentially measuring specific library calls that Apple likely didn't alter much, if at all, from release to release for prior devices.
My weed stores and smokes for 2 years and that's a plant.
I expect items to last longer than dead plants.
I wish I could go back, I don't see any of the benefits but feel a lot of pain. I'm thinking of wiping and restoring but its a work provisioned phone and I don't want to be cut off then have to go to the, ahem, Help Desk.
Usually they figure a way to optimize things but this time I can REALLY feel the impact. Oh well, it is an older device.
The entropy of any computer system will tend to increase with system and application updates - databases will grow, files will fragment and access to them will slow.
It seems like this happens to Windows, MacOS and Android. With WIndows or MacOS you can fix it by reformatting and reinstalling or imaging onto a new drive. With Android I usually do a firmware reset.
Probably the same thing is happening to iOS too. I.e. Apple might not be deliberately slowing things down but a phone with a bunch of applications and firmware updates applied to it is always going to be more sluggish than one with has a fresh factory install.
Mind you I bet the fresh factory install of any OS had a lot more scrutiny than a security update for performance - each phone with a bunch of updates and apps is basically a unique leaf in the tree of all possible states the system can get into whereas the factory install is the single root of the tree.
Going to alphas to betas to release candidates to releases involved a lot of hurdles the software has to clear. I.e. when you buy the device it's identical to all the other ones with the same hardware and factory firmware. After a couple of years it's almost a unique individual with a unique set of performance and stability problems.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Or...use XFCE, Mate, LXDE, IceWM, or Openbox instead of GNOME, KDE, or Unity...? If you're just now finding out how terrible GNOME 3 is for older hardware, don't blame Linux and OS community for that. It's been terrible since day one (quite a few years now). XFCE uses only around 300MB vs. GMOME 3/Unity 1GB at login and isn't as annoying to use. If you need menu search, use the Whisker Menu (right-click panel to add items).
The people bitching the most about programmed device death are using iPhone 5 and earlier, yet they started with iPhone 5s and iOS 9. Duh....of course they're not going to find anything. iPad 2 users know what I'm talking about as well.
What is a benchmark good for? Devices gets slower in common tasks like swiping through apps, opening apps etc etc. The CPU / GPU benchmark won't change accordingly.
After every major update of ios or mac os x the spotlight index gets cleared and it will take several days/weeks to repopulate that index, with a lot of cpu and disk usage,
I'd love to hear the modders explanation of how your post is off-topic. this post is off-topic.And troll
Fuck stupid fanboys.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
I lost all my weed in a series of small fires.
The difference is that no one is forcing you to use the latest release of Debian on old hardware. You can choose which version to install. If it doesn't work or it's too slow, you are allowed (and in fact, have the right) to install something else.
ps. I call BS. You probably don't even know what Debian is and, most likely, never even understood what open source is. By the way, "Older PC" is a very loose definition.
It's because no manufacturer manipulate or abuse benchmark software...
Well, they are part of the target market. Kids who need exclusive toys that they will grow out of in a couple years. Still doesn't do anything useful for me. Maybe in another five or ten years. Probably never.
These benchmarks don't measure ui fluidness, app start times, etc.
The editor is Beauhd, a known Apple apologist and former part-time Apple Store employee. He's not even trying to hide his bias. You can bet that a shitload of off-topic mods come from him personally, he even bragged about it a while ago.
lucm, indeed.
Any company that did the proper research and found the true results apple would sue into oblivion.
Not just sue. Apple would send the SWAT like they did for that gizmodo guy who dared post a sneak preview of the iPhone.
That company has traded its soul for pure greed and malice. If Steve Wozniak was dead, he would turn over in his grave.
lucm, indeed.
It's when the damn things became a status symbol or work perk everyone went Apple crazy. Their products suck butt now. Sorry but that analysis is biased. Laptops or Phones there is no innovation, they add proprietary gimmicky crap to their hardware, over charge for it, then make it an expensive paperweight in less than 3 years. Ditto with your highly hacked BSD based OS. I still don't get why people will pay 2-3 times for a laptop or phone nonetheless choose an Apple product..unless you have to develop apps for their products specifically. Seriously. Apple you suck. You were a better company in the days of OS9, pre-iphone... hardware reliability/durability sucked back back then, but it's nothing like your little Ponzi scheme now.
Apple is very VERY good at making software.
Can someone mod the parent +1 Funny?
lucm, indeed.
To hell with the camera, due to its memory limitations compared to the iPhone 4, there was already iOS software that simply wouldn't run on an iPad 1 at its launch.
Which is why he was modded down This site has become a cesspool of shit.
I have an iPad 1 that I rediscovered after moving earlier this year. I reset it and I was able to download the âoelast compatible versionâ of apps. It currently has Netflix, Hulu, Crackle, Google Drive, Plex, Spotify, Pages and Numbers running well. I used Google Drive to read PDF.s. The built in apps work well except for Safari. Safari Is painful with 256Kb of RAM.
My 6s came out with iOS 9 and runs iOS 11 well.
But would you prefer the alternative? Android devices often donâ(TM)t get updated at all and never after 2 years.
I'm still using my iPad2 (though I did get fed up with how slow it is for the web and other stuff and finally order a replacement last week). For Apple controlled tasks (iBooks, Mail, and such) it's not bad. For 3rd party stuff, especially the horrific Web 2.0 crap we have going these days, it's fucking terrible.
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I think it's far more likely that newer software expects the performance of the newer phones and runs poorly on the older phones. You PERCEIVE your phone is getting slower because the newer software runs slower on it. It's the software, not the phone.
These devices are assumed to last forever, because they are allegedly "solid-state". Why, I have a television from the 60's that still works! Smartphones are the same thing; why don't they last 50 years?
Answer: Solid-state ain't really. Aside from the obvious cumulative physical damage from handling a small object constantly every day for years (something no other machines in our lives are subjected to except wristwatches and motor vehicles,) smartphones suffer from an internal degradation of their thermal handling. Put simply, they get worse at transmitting waste heat away from the things that make it, primarily the CPU and GPU.
In a laptop, the culprit in this effect is usually thermal paste. It just flakes away, and a machine that used to run beautifully five years ago now has Main Fan Turn On syndrome all the time, even sitting "idle". What's changed? Supposedly just the software. So, people blame the software. Even people who really, really should know better; people relied upon as experts by industry and family members alike. Many's the time a techie has wiped an old machine clean and installed old software only to discover that it still runs like crap, then shrugged their shoulders and moved on.
In a phone it's more likely to be microscopic fracturing of the heat piping and microscopic distortion of the circuit pathways, causing heat buildup, causing the chip to throttle down. This distortion has not been eliminated by the lower power usage of modern chips, it's only been counterbalanced, if that, because of reductions in pathway size. (The Apple A8 CPU that powers the iPhone 6 was produced using a 20nm process. For comparison, the first Intel Pentium P5's released in 1992 were made with an 800 nanometer process. Remember, that's not just a 40x smaller chip, that's a 40x reduction along each axis, making a chip with _1600_times_ more circuitry in the same area.) Then that phone is wedged into a pocket and dropped and kicked around. For an iPhone 6, that's 3 years of kicking around since it was released. It's no surprise that some people are seeing slowdowns. What should be surprising is test results like above: Tested across a range of devices, the slowdowns disappear. These devices are holding up remarkably well.
That leaves software. Specifically, since these benchmarks still run on the frameworks that comprise the OS, that leaves _application_software_.
In May of 2013, the Facebook app took up 32MB. Now it weighs in at 382MB, over _ten_times_ that. Snapchat was 4MB around that time. Now it is 212MB. Is this Apple's fault? Do you think there is a secret email chain from Apple management to these companies, ordering them to add more API calls and screen art to deliberately obsolete old devices? No. Apple actually works fairly hard to optimize for old hardware, and has done so for years, especially after the internal uproar over what happened when they released a poorly optimized iOS upgrade onto the iPhone 3GS. Their internal "dog food" users were outraged, and management was forced to take heed.
Meanwhile, find me a four-year-old Android device that can take an upgrade to the latest OS. Find me _ONE_. No need to optimize for old hardware when you just straight-up don't acknowledge it exists at all, aye?
What design flaw would that be? The only major stupid design decision I know of about the iPhone 4 was the antennae, and that wasn't as bad as some of the media claimed. The home buttons on our iPhone 4s (plural, not model) worked just fine, bought new and shiny and one of them passed down to my sister-in-law, who replaced it a couple of months ago.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
No, it isn't very clear for me to see on my iPhone 5S running iOS 10. I consider its performance to be just fine.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I went to the debian.org site, went for downloading debian stable (on odd years, debian is newer than Ubuntu LTS!).
I could not find the debian+xfce or debian+lxde isos, only the generic ones. I wouldn't want to download an iso, dd a USB stick and find out it's an iso to install a gnome 3 debian desktop (would have done it on fast internet)
Was there a change of policy? I prefer the debian+lxde as it's lightweight enough it should run on a coffee maker.
There's always net install but an lxde iso is useful to install with slow and unreliable internet or no internet at all.
There's Lubuntu 17.10 I guess (tip : after installing Lubuntu, change the icon theme to a better one). But Debian is nice too.
Agreed : Gnome 3 etc. are like Vista and up. Shouldn't be _excruciatingly_ slow though, if it is maybe you're out of RAM (64bit linux on 1GB RAM on heavy weight desktop should be fairly atrocious) or more likely the combination of "3D acceleration" and your graphics driver and hardware makes everything slow (could be super CPU hungry, a bad thing on a single core). Worse yet (but sometimes better for stability) it might well be using software OpenGL rendering. The renderer in question, llvmpipe, is much faster than classic software rendering (should use SSE2 and multicore etc., and favors speed over pedantism). But it your PC is slow using it for the entire desktop is shit.
Perhaps using the "Gnome Classic" session turns off 3D (formerly gnome-flashback, gnome-fallback)
PS : damn it's an old discussion and I hadn't noticed, but here's my comment.
Nice; lxde is great for this as well, gives you a 1990s kind of desktop at least :) (well, like 1990s Windows and 2000s Linux if you allow me that remark)
A lazy thing can be to ssh -X to a better machine to run firefox (anyhow they said it requires SSE2 now). Also using VLC is pretty lazy but runs well for xvid movies (perhaps low res h264 video can work well if the old PC has a decent enough CPU)
Dillo and elinks are nice "lazy" browsers (w3m seems harder to use or something)
Firefox itself ran great a few years ago on pentium 3 and 512 MB RAM.. Note that Firefox on linux still has a "failsafe" in that hardware acceleration is disabled by default I think (note that even if hardware acceleration doesn't make things crash, there's the issue that it may have a lot of overhead. E.g. using OpenGL to render fonts or what not is folly when this requires much overhead in API calls, setting up shit, transferring data over the bus, running some OpenGL shader etc. I think we had it better with GDI graphics acceleration from Windows 3.1 to XP and also the "overlay" feature in video player and graphics card in Win 9x and XP (I think "xv" under linux used that)
I don't call bullshit he downloaded Debian and ended up with Gnome 3 which is 100% why it was shit. I didn't find the other isos on the site - I guess he has to use net install instead, which works perfectly if you have good enough internet like DSL.
Then likely web sites are really shit, stick to lightweight enough ones like wikipedia. Slashdot works but its javascript to load comments is slowish (be patient and wait a few seconds that's all, but don't forget to run ublock origin or similar)
Youtube seems to want to become shittier, breaking shit. So there's youtube-dl, smtube to play vids without going through slow html5 and javascript to play vids but as they update their bullcrap you need to stay current enough (that's why weak ARM hardware relies on android apps and H264 hardware decode but sometimes google changes their APIs and the old android or something app might not work anymore)