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.
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.
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
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.
Updates are not timely. We often get updates a month behind, sometimes even two. I remember in early Jan we were still on the Nov security patch. Google is faster, and often Oneplus is faster. They are probably 2nd or 3rd for update timeliness. Better than Moto, at least.
Bloatware...depends on your definition. I consider their stupid Google app copies of everything bloatware, but maybe not everyone does. Most cannot be uninstalled.
Other bloatware...I seem to remember it had FB, LinkedIn, and some Microsoft apps. Last time they also wanted to install TikTok.
That said, I was able to disable everything via adb and got it to a state I like, so it is possible. But it would be nice to be able to do so without resorting to adb.
I like the phone fine, but my next phone will not be a Samsung.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/02/the-samsung-galaxy-s...
It's not that comforting just being able to uninstall/disable things after paying ~$1000 for hardware loaded with apps that benefit everyone but the customer.
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.
> Geekbench began as a benchmark for Mac OS X and Windows and was created by John Poole who ran the now-defunct Geek Patrol website, which reviewed hardware and software designed for Macs, and featured editorials and interviews of interest to the Mac community. [0]
Basically, imagine an Nvidia enthusiast writing a system-agnostic GPU benchmark. I'm not as militant about rejecting Geekbench as some others, but you can't pretend the correlation is hard to make.
Regardless though, it's not hard to see Apple being 1-2 years ahead of Samsung's output. If the iPhone is being manufactured on recent TSMC silicon, it will annihilate anything Samsung's fabs are capable of producing.
If TSMC actually goes forward with its plans to build inside the US to the extent it's supposed to, it's no longer fully a foreigner player. Realistically it's a hybridization of TSMC for what-if scenarios. Once they do it, the US will not let them return to the way things were before.
I also think it'll be good for everyone when Apple starts competing with Qualcomm on 5G modems.
That's also why I don't like Android, you can't have it all in a single device. Everyone does something very well but lacks hugely in something else, so for each use case you need a new device.
Good Android experience is for the super rich, who can afford all the devices and use the correct one when needed.
Isn't it because they became "too good" at search?
This was me recently. Our old TV broke so I bought a new Samsung at Costco. The setup process was ominous: they want you to sign away all of your data to whoever they choose to sell it to, and the only way to get it on the Wi-Fi was to use their setup app which refuses to let you configure the TV unless you give it background high-precision location tracking permission. They lie about that being needed to configure Wi-Fi in response to negative reviews.
I set it up before uninstalling the phone app, and fired up Disney+ for my son. Mission accomplished!
He makes it like 5 minutes in to Finding Nemo and complains because it’s doing jerky 1-2 fps slideshow mode any time the scene has much motion at all.
We switch to Netflix. Same problem.
Maybe it’s our normally very reliable Wi-Fi? Nope, everything works great on his iPad and that can even AirPlay to the TV flawlessly. Also it downloaded its software updates at like 500Mbps according to the Eero app so it seems like it would have to be a very selective network problem.
The most likely explanation is that Samsung sells 4K TVs with processors which can’t reliably keep up with a complex 4K stream.
I see where this is going, and factory reset the TV before blocking it on the Wi-Fi. It’s a beautiful display and I don’t want it turning into e-waste so time to solve problems the American way by shopping. Amazon delivered an Apple TV early the next morning and it’s everything Samsung wants to be when they grow up: the UI is designed by professionals and noticeably more responsive, the setup process is painless, and it can play 4K in any app flawlessly.
Now, I know that this is because Samsung put the equivalent of something like a decade-old phone SoC in there while Apple is using an A14 which is basically laptop-class and costs considerably more, but if they want to save money on their BOM they shouldn’t advertise things on the side of the box when their hardware doesn’t support it.
i am a firefox user everywhere except ios, where it's safari. i dont mind the diversity actually, use a safari integrated blocker, not much worse than ublock and i'm sure my battery thanks me for it.
I think that's what GP meant.
- audio cable also acts as an FM radio antenna, which i have used when signal is bad
- wouldn't mind a desktop docking port
What about Emergency SOS?
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/11/emergency-sos-via-sat...
What money? They already paid them. Building fabs has a massive upfront cost that you depreciate for decades. The economics have to make sense for them to move to TSMC
Apple has good designs, consistent long-term plans, and doesn't have to directly compete with Intel over domination in the x86 market. They offer a complete package outside the x86 market. This fits well with who a market leader like TSMC would want as a partner.
For TSMC, it would be an error to start large-scale production of chips for someone that still has their own manufacturing capability. TSMC would have to allocate less fab capacity to their existing customers, and those won't like that.
Basically, higher the storage size, more the inaccuracies and more number of ghost storage will appear in system. It does this because [Android basically computes](https://twitter.com/MishaalRahman/status/1622706823940698114...) all files 'f' and empty size 'e' separately and finds the difference of given total size and (f+e) and assigns that to system.
https://twitter.com/Golden_Reviewer/status/16228515345634713...
https://www.notebookcheck.net/One-UI-5-1-bloatware-is-not-co...
Holy moly that’s crazy.
That’s three full 64bit win10 installs!
It doesn’t even have the a/b partitions! Which is just as well at 60GB!
Also their silicon itself is just more advanced. I don't think anyone else is doing UMA the way they are, though I'm not 100% sure and would welcome correction.
This is the key point. There used to be a lot of chip makers and phone vendors in the Android space (hell, even Sony had their own processors for their early phones), both ARM and the odd non-ARM effort. The way that the Android market has collapsed down to essentially "Qualcomm and Samsung" is what's hurting Android, and Qualcomm, in particular, are the reason that things like support lifecycles are such garbage. Google have been completely disinterested in solving this problem in any way, while Apple have.
I'd love to see them try again. And I feel like that's an area where their particular culture (of looking at vendors that make them resentful and trying to do something about it) might even put them in a place where they're willing to sell those chips or designs to other carriers because fuck Qualcomm.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-09/apple-pla...
I can't remember whether it was sourcing Intel modems or rolling their own, but yeah, either way they fell foul of Qualcomm's nest of patents: Qualcomm's real competitive edge is that they are experts at lobbying to have their patented tech built into government and NGO standards.
You don't need to make decent chips or support them for more than a couple of years if it's illegal not to use them.
This is more about Qualcomm being uncompetitive performance-wise, which has been true pretty much since the start of the smartphone wars.
The S23 Ultra went Qualcomm-only for the first time. In the year running up, they've been slowly expanding Qualcomm to more markets instead of Exynos.
It seems like they're gradually phasing out Exynos, at least from the higher-end phones -- since they've always struggled to produce an SoC competitive with even Qualcomm, which is already behind the curve compared to Apple.
I think the good old Galaxy Nexus was the last phone I've been using in a usb-drive mode
My point is that Samsung is not there yet.
If someone won't give you favorable patent terms but you can buy a company that got better ones...
edit: yes, they did (modem division):
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/07/apple-to-acquire-the-...
One potential avenue here is if Apple, with a cellular modem of their own, just includes the modem in all of their devices and cut out a bunch of SKUs.
In practical terms that doesn't really happen. People still use device specific cables. If I have 4 USB-C devices and one lightning device I have 5 cables. If I replace the lightning device with a USB-C device, I still have 5 cables. The only time "cable consolidation" matters is when traveling or in a backpack.
My USB-C security cameras need their dedicated cables, my Oculus Quest needs a dedicated 16 ft cable, my random amazon junk device cables don't support the PD that my laptop requires, etc. By forcing everyone to use the same tips without enforcing featuresets all its doing is confusing consumers even more. To all my older relatives and non-tech savvy friends, an iPhone cable is an iPhone cable. It's way less confusing than figuring out the right power brick wattage and cable combination and wondering why this USB-C cable doesn't transmit video to that monitor.
YMMV, I guess? My portable devices float around with one USB-C cable per room just fine. Granted, that's mostly lower-power devices and I prefer to trickle-charge, but if I started running power-hungry machines then I'd move everything to nice beefy PD bricks and it'd still work.
Its far too early to claim USB-C will be the final version of USB cabling? Looking around, I have devices that use
USB Type B (Scanner)
USB Mini B (charging wireless keyboard),
USB Micro B (PS4 controller, Fire Tablet, Arduinos/Raspi),
USB 3.0 Type A (Flash Drives),
USB 3.0 Type B (Astro camera),
USB 3.0 Micro B (SATA->USB device),
Many of these end with a USB Type A, but not all.
And of course, the "final version", USB-C (Oculus, Pixel, Macbook). And I have a bunch of USBA-USB-C cables and converting plugs.
And of course I have lightning devices, some older than the USB Type B Scanner.
I have a shitton of hardware and cables that I'm not going to throw away just for some connector that will be phased out in ten years.
>You would want Gecko if you like arbitrary extensions
On my desktop, sure. On my phone? Why bother?
>And you'd want to run arbitrary code on a machine you own because phones are computers
Disagree.
Most people already have USB-C cables. Apple people often have them b/c of a MacBook or w/e.
> On my desktop, sure. On my phone? Why bother?
Dark Mode, Ad Blocking, etc.
> Disagree
Freedom is important, even if you don't need it now. Someone else, maybe you in the future, may need it.
I will switch to Android if I ever need the ability to use my phone like a PC. So far (10-ish years), that hasn't happened.
I mean sure it would be slightly nicer to have my iPhone and iPods use the same USB-C charging port but I wouldn't choose Android and give up all of convenience of 'just works' wireless interop with all my devices.
My car has a lightning dock. Guess I should throw the car away. That's the easy thing, right?
I wonder if they'll roll it out on the iphone first or start with ipads and possibly the apple watch if they can get the power draw lower. That might be a good way to increase the battery life of those devices, lowering the gap between regular and low power mode.
If that turns out to be the case, the iPad has the largest battery and can absorb more of a regression than any of their other devices. But there's enough of those sold to get some progress toward a tighter solution
It's shyte like this that makes me giggle at the Apple boys and girls they swear up an down when Apple does something android does its "revolutionary" for all... fuck out of here wit that shyte.
Despite what some may think, there are more Android developers [Hardware/Software] then apple developers in this world. That is why Android will always be ahead of the game regardless what Apple does.
Old wise tail: You can polish a turd with bells and whistles, however it's still a turd no matter how you present it. Fin.
1. If no-one uses the free version until it's necessary, it might decline and die, and then won't be around to save you. I'd say this is the Firefox / Chrome dynamic currently.
2. If you don't have the freesom to do something, you might not know what you're missing. Re: your comment in another branch, I have done all of "moving stuff around a file browser, installing ad-hoc apps, opening a command line, etc" on my phone in the past 24 hours, and had a great time doing it.
2. I hardly even use the feature set the iPhone already gives me. I used to jailbreak my iPhone too, just for fun, but that was a long time ago. There's a reason phones aren't centered around a graphical file system. I'm a power user on my Mac and my Linux servers, that's enough for me.
While you don't use your phone like a PC, I think there's a strong case to be made for allowing for that kind of functionality. However, like you said - you don't need to switch if you don't need that capability. I personally install a lot of apps from FDroid or straight from APK files, but I don't use my phone like a PC like I just described. The range varies, and having that flexibility is nice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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)
What if it's not my AirTag?
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.
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?
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.
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.
Is product speed really a differentiator that affect’s people’s buying decision?
A lot of the carrier /manufacturer incentives (in the USA) have been fantastic lately, especially if you had an older device which could be traded in.
Right now, through Google, you can trade a Pixel 5a in when buying a Pixel 6a and pay $50 for the upgrade.
I like MacOS okay, but re: notifications, they too have this abysmally small "X" to clear out notifications. They're just... annoying.
I still have issues with Android's notifications though. Some apps insist on using a single "General" category that includes both notifications I require as well as marketing and advertisements.
I am sure I would notice something if I were to play games or do something graphical.
maybe less relevant in android, where phones generally have a wide spread of capabilities. but in iphone land, where most people are on the two most recent generations, you're always going to find developers assuming you have more processing power than you actually do if you're not on the latest generation.
You can't separate the two: if the apps are requesting the phone do more work, that's going to affect the battery life. That's why I suggested looking at the battery usage history since it often has surprises if you don't, and comparing two devices with different workloads doesn’t tell you much.
That was with a few hours of screen time - I found that it didn't matter to me because I'd just plug it in at home/work. I'd call it "servicable" but certainly not great - but for 5 years I was personally surprised.
Where apple does do well is supporting devices for much longer with software and security updates. So running older android phones is prob not a good ideas from a security perspective.
The speed thing is balanced out by UI tweaks and things like the Apple Watch that I still use. Unfortunately it was a dumb silly situation where I bought a novelty phone that I actually REALLY enjoy using... and then I don't wanna get rid of my iphone haha.
Edit: Another unfair comparison - the Google Nest app is ludicrously slow on my iPhone.
My experience was mixed: it works great, even my banking app. *Except* for the camera. The default camera app took blurry pictures; Google Cam from the app store cropped significantly from the preview; and the custom Google Cam made for OnePlus 6 couldn't use the front camera.
No amount of tweaking gave me anything close to what the original OS had.
In the end my phone's camera is one of the most important features, so I got a new one.
Of course the manufacturer could just choose to screw you over by not updating/not letting you update your self. But I mean there’s no way to account for bad behavior on the part of manufacturers (other than not doing business with them anymore of course).
My wife upgraded from same to iphone 14 pro max and is seriously questioning what's so great that it's such a bulky device.
As a web browser has become a general purpose VM, it has capabilities far surpassing what is needed at least 50% the time, I'd go as high as 90% of the time personally. Which is great that we have a magical run anything anywhere VM, but it's a double edge sword of the performance, security and privacy issues that come along with it.
If there was a well defined subset of functionality that browsers presented as the default "web enclave" and then opening up all the bells and whistles further was an opt in choice, a large chunk of those issues would go away. But that requires a bunch of people to agree on what that subset should include and the horror of trying to keep it updated over time. And that's _everyone_, including users putting up with "opting in" rather than everything just working.
I'm not sure I can see a subset of features becoming the default approach, at least until there is some horrible self propagating browser worm that impacts a large percentage of the world (or maybe by the 2nd or 3rd time, we will have had enough).
What about buying a ticket and it failing at the last step because your browser determined that js was unneeded?
It's actually universal when the App is built with the native UI components and it's part of Apple's App design guidelines. It doesn't work when the App is built with UI frameworks that don't adhere to this design convention. Sometimes even if the framework by default supports this, the devs can break it in an attempt to be creative but when it doesn't work, it means poor App design.
When my iPhone 6s received iOS 15, it didn't get the coolest stuff and the device performance was already less than decent. Even if the iOS itself wasn't slowing it down, the apps for iOS were made with expectation of higher performance.
> Six years is an awfully long life span for a mobile device, and certainly puts the 6S in the running for the longest supported phone to date. The iPhone 5S was five years old when it got its last OS update with iOS 12 but wasn’t eligible for iOS 13. On the Android side, Samsung has made recent moves to improve its device longevity by offering four years of security support for some of its phones. But six years of OS updates and security support puts the 6S in an entirely different league.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/8/22523351/ios-15-iphone-6s-...
Sure, Apple is pretty draconian when it comes to how much the developers have to keep their tooling up to date, but that's not the same on the consumer side anymore
All modern touch screen phones are compatible with a stylus. I'm sure it would be harder to find one that isn't. The accuracy may not be the best on budget models.
Unless you mean _is a stylus / pen included with the phone_?
Opinion here, but capacitive styluses suck. I wouldn't bother with a stylus unless it was something like Wacom or Apple Pencil tech.
Samsung has some phones that have the necessary screen support for their styluses, sometimes even if the phone didn't come with one, but that's only in very few models.
I can currently use the Apple Pencil as a _dumb stylus / pen_ on my iPhone 2022 SE (not that it's necessary but just to see if it can be done).
AND, when you intentionally remove it, by clicking, it pops out and the Notes app is automatically fired up.
Apple just doesn't do this on iPhones. Why not?
Basically have to keep giant lists of what js actually enhances the people experience vs just being useful to the publisher.
Android itself doesn't do that, but much like buying a PC, it's hard to stop manufacturers loading it up with cruft.
There's an iPhone that I only use for dev, and it surprises me at how bad it keeps charge when it's basically not in use, whereas my old S8 has far better standby time.
This is a bad compromise that didn't need to happen; I should just be able to plug headphones into my phone. In the end, I took my old iPhone 5 and left it in the car for playing music. It's the better phone.
Do you have any reproducible test results showing that or are you just asserting tribal loyalty? I jest, we all know the answer.
You might want to read up on how iOS and Android differ in key ways: native code versus JIT, garbage collection versus ARC, and all of the system level differences for how many things can run in the background as well as quickly apps can save and restore state - faster CPUs and SSDs allows iOS to be more aggressive there, too, and developers can tune more aggressively because they have fewer, more consistent configurations to support.
Also consider it from the perspective of the engineering trade offs that the manufacturers make. More RAM means lower battery life and a higher price, and consumers are also sensitive to both of those. Apple controls their stack so tightly that they designed a custom SoC and market-leading CPU, and they measure the user experience very closely since that’s a lot of what they’re selling — if there really was a gap, adding more RAM would be one of the easiest ways to close it. Similarly, Samsung wouldn’t make every phone they make have lower battery life and cost more if that only benefited a small percentage of users. They’re making different choices because they have different systems but both of them watch this stuff closely.
Apple hardware is just that much better, it is not about the software stack.
(And, yes, I should have said “Java's GC vs. ARC” since that tends to have higher peaks)
Reference counting is a GC algorithm.
Thanks, I knew that Android had native code support but I've always heard that described as something mostly used by games.
> Reference counting is a GC algorithm.
Yes, I should have been pedantic and written “Java's GC” since the point was that historically it's tended to trade RAM for performance. The classic complaint I've heard from our mobile developers was that Objective-C forced you to focus more on memory management.
My interest in this topic is mostly the same as the author of the post I linked, namely making sure that developers test and measure on lower-end devices to make sure they're not building sites which exclude key demographics. For example, a government site really needs to work well on the kinds of phones seniors get under the FCC Lifeline program.
But that is different from the observation of the beginning of this thread, which is that Geekbench scores don’t really reflect practical limitation of devices. A big difference in the score does not mean a noticeable difference in performance when doing everyday web browsing on the phone. An observation that my own experience echoes.
Even if I’m extra-tolerant (I don’t think I am), it would surprise me that a performance difference I can’t even notice is going to be so intolerable to another human being that they are excluded from using the website.
When it comes to governmental services on the internet, I think really the focus is on whether the site _works_ on all kinds of devices, which means whether the rendering and interactions are correct. Some can fail to render on a low budget phone, or if some button doesn’t work, etc. these are real problems but that is quite irrelevant to benchmarks.
The broader point wasn’t that you should buy an iPhone but simply that the reason to care about single core benchmarks is that browsers fit that profile. It’s still perfectly reasonable to conclude that’s good enough for the sites you use.
I also feel like there’s an interesting angle about ad blocking here since that probably matters more than multiple processor generations.
One factor which used to be under appreciated was battery degradation prior to that whole “Batterygate” flap back in 2016 where a lot of people learned that iOS throttled processor performance when the battery could no longer supply enough voltage for peak performance. That’s a lot more visible now so it’s less of a surprise than it used to be.
Most of the problem is that developers aren’t focused only on performance, so as the baseline hardware capacity increases the apps will slowly start to use more since very few people are going to spend time on something which seems fast enough.
That doesn’t happen all at once but it adds up over the half decade a phone will last. If you bought a phone and never updated anything, its performance would seem far more consistent … at least if you could avoid getting malware installed.
That third point is why I shared the link above: a lot of developers upgrade more frequently than average people and that means that our instincts for what seems fast enough might be missing things with our apps. That usually doesn’t mean things are unusable but it’s still polite to use your work on, say, the phone a senior citizen gets subsidized to make sure that you’re comfortable with that being the public face of your work.
(Bandwidth usage is at least as important here, too: use your website on 3G or ask how much it’d cost to use on a metered plan)
I have an iPPro + Pencil, and it is astonishingly good. It is no 'dumb stylus' on the iPPro. The exquisite detail one gets from a writing implement is not quite replicated with the Pencil -- but! The fact that Apple does advertise the Pencil and its features is a hopeful sign that we will continued to see more, and more sophisticated Pencils & apps that use them. I hope.
How can you do that? My apple pencil (the new gen) doesn’t even register as a dumb stylus on my iphone 12 pro max.
Why will I replace my phone if it's in just fine working condition and is sufficient for my needs, that too in just 4 years?
Battery replacement will work well for me once it's below 80%.
One, do a wipe and re-install from backups. If the device doesn't really have much of importance on it, just wipe it and start fresh.
Two, discharge the iPad until it shuts off, then fully charge it and leave it plugged in for several hours after that. That will update the battery capacity gauge.
You can see the internal battery stats by plugging the iPad into a Mac and running any of a couple of different utilities - one free one is coconutbattery.
My point being that you can't really change those batteries on demand.
Something tells me you're not really being honest with us, for the sake of a "apple suxx" story.
Unfortunately this can be hardly retrofitted to other OSs since it requires cooperation from the apps.
But!
I'm not complaining. It's an almost 6 year old device. That means, for every year of usage, I payed roughly 200€, or 16€ per month. That's not too shabby, tbh.
Though I agree that battery health hasn't been super important to performance. But resetting the phone can do wonders
An aged battery will show big voltage drops under load. What was looking like a fine and dandy voltage (voltage is used to infer state of charge) can suddenly plummet. It can get so bad that your phone might even shut down because it starts to undervolt.
So, choosing between the lesser of two evils, iOS throttles down max. power draw, and thus max. processing speed, when the battery ages. The alternative would be random shutdowns, or your battery jumping from 80 to 8% suddenly.
In settings -> battery -> health & charging you can check in which regime you are.
On most phones you realize that when an old phone goes from 15%, you do something CPU intensive and the phone dies seconds later.
So it's reasonable to lower the peak power use on older batteries to lengthen battery life and make it more stable. Generally battery life increases when you are gentle. Charge slowly (which results in lower temps), avoid charging over 90% or discharging below 10%, and decrease the peak loads.
It even turned into a huge scandal of "Apple deliberately slowing down old iPhones" which was portrayed as if Apple is doing it to make you buy a new iPhone.
My XS is currently at 74% of initial capacity (it tells you this too, which is really nice), and I don't even have the option to enable throttling yet, so it must not kick in until things get really dire
I have a Samsung Note. It has the best stylus on a phone.
(I also find it funny the Apple Fanbois decided to downvote my initial comment, when I was clearly showing that Apple is 'behind the curve' in this respect. Gosh, I used to work at Apple. I find this amusing.)
Even though, that is very cool line of work and I’m sure I would be similarly biased for the tech I helped form, but it is simply not a general requirement as shown by very very few phones having them.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/04/lithium-costs-a-lot-...
> This hasn’t worked for lithium batteries, partly because so many formats exist. “These batteries are all over the place in different sizes,” he said. A related challenge is that the technology for lithium batteries changes rapidly — every one to two years, he said.
(edit: I found a working link to the article: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41745-021-00269-7)
Apple is not throwing lithium batteries into landfills, and it is the one doing the replacement. Tesla is definitely not doing this, so what is left?
Probably those lithium rechargeable batteries you can buy on Amazon?
Pixel 6 pro and 7 pro prices are cheap compared to any other phone from the same tier.
The hardest thing is the strain the whole experience puts on my relationships. I already used up all my fiancé’s patience with my chronic melancholy about my perfectly functional but ultimately doomed phone; and end of life hasn't even happened yet.
Seeing iOS 12.5.7 was bittersweet, a glimmer of hope, a reason to hold on.
I would have agreed with you on the fingerprints being superior, but I have to say that I really can’t say anything bad about the face scanner. It is fast and accurate and very rarely fails (which would be the same with fingerprints, you may have gloves on, or your hands are dirty, etc)
Like if I'm using the map, it's swipe up from near the bottom to open nav options or swipe up from slightly below that to open app switcher; keep in mind I'm probably doing this hastily at a red light. Lock screen is swipe up to unlock but also to look at notifications. Home screen is swipe down for notifications or control center, depending on which side, I always forget.
Facial unlock has a hard time with my glasses. I have to input my pin half the time. If I'm driving, I can't look at my phone. Also idk why it has to auto-lock immediately like I'm paranoid; there used to be a setting to delay auto-locking for 30min unless I press the lock button myself.
The gap was never that big, it was more the software that was running than any hardware issues.
No, it really was. I wasn't hallucinating stock Android tablets dying over long weekends while iOS tablets would still be usable for testing without needing to plug in, after three weeks in a drawer. Or the phones needing a daily charge if you barely used them, while Apple phones could go 3-4 days under light use. There were no exceptions to this in Android land.
[EDIT] Incidentally, yes, I agree it was largely a software issue—but at the OS level.
Disable all the software crap and there was no real difference. You think it was more internal to the OS, and maybe part of it was, but even with just ending all the crap that fixed things.
We agree there were no significant differences in hardware though, and that was my point.
The battery health is also included occasionally in the analytics the iPad sends to Apple if you have sending analytics. In Settings go to Privacy & Security/Analytics and Improvements/Analytics Data.
That takes you to a list of various recent analytics files that have been sent to Apple. If battery health was included it will be in one of the files "log-aggregated" files (iPadOS < 16) or "Analytics" files (iPadOS 16).
Battery health isn't always included in the analytics uploads so you might not have it in any of the files. Then you just have to keep checking as new files appear.
Here's a video I found talking about this [2]. The author of the video has written a shortcut [3] that shows up in the shar sheet. When viewing an analytics file you can share it with that shortcut and the shortcut will try to find battery information in that file and display it.
I just gave it a try but my logs don't currently have health information so I don't know how well it actually works for that. It did get cycle count from my logs and that matches what Coconut Battery shows.
[1] https://www.coconut-flavour.com/coconutbattery/
Now if you want general ref counting you have to use atomic counters, and those will trash your performance on modern machines beyond fixing. And then we didn’t even mention that big object graphs will have to be recursively freed, an overhead that can’t be amortized in this case. Oh and you do need a tracing step one way or another to free cycles.
If you say that the comparison isn't relevant, I'll say yes: the whole point is that the industry has been innovating for computing power and computing power only. Cheaper versions exist to target low price. But no work is done to target long battery life because it's not considered profitable.