I guess my question is - why do I care about geekbench? When was the last time someone who doesn't play games on their phone thought "man, I wish this was faster"? Because it's been years for me. The good news I hear is that Samsung is finally improving their battery life. That is a score that I actually care about.
You care about single-core performance when you use the web: things like JavaScript processing, layout, etc. will bottleneck on one core and since developers are shipping more code this is probably the most noticeable difference. It's also a little hard to tell in some cases since there are many “native apps” which use an embedded web view for some of their UI.
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.
> You care about single-core performance when you use the web:
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.
While I agree it's important for developers to know, I think that Ca.gov example would have been more compelling if we'd had side by sides between various systems - as it was it was incredibly slow, but that's an aberration, and it was a universal problem. Otherwise we have to once again resort to benchmarks. I've been happy with the experience on my last Android phone for 3 years now, another benchmark isn't swaying me, my phone is more than fast enough.
I was using a 12 year old desktop for my main system at home until I recently and impulsively decided to upgrade. I don't notice any difference because a lot of what I do is web browsing. The only thing that was transformational was things like using Photoshop, gaming and any high-intensity applications, which are few and far between. Even using Excel was hardly noticeable.
Yeah and the s23 has double the memory so it’s going to absolutely kick the crap out of the iPhone12 after it starts to swap your tabs into memory even accounting for the JVM.
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.
I am using Xiaomi Mi 8, it is four and a half years old now. I don't have visible problems with websites performance. The battery is quite degraded though:(
I use an iPhone X (released 2017) and I wish it kept up with modern app performance requirements. The iPhone X doesn't support built-in OCR in images and apps take 1-2s longer to launch than my iPhone 13.
Faster performance today means longer lasting tomorrow.
I still use an iPhone X (with new battery from last year). The Pixel 2 was released around the same time and is e-waste.
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.
> Faster performance today means longer lasting tomorrow.
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.
> Faster performance today means longer lasting tomorrow.
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.
>Faster performance today means longer lasting tomorrow.
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.
I am a bit surprised to hear the iPhone X doesn't do the OCR stuff. The iPhone Xs (2018) does, and I use it all the time. And I kinda thought those phones were identical in all notable respects.
I only use an iPhone X so I don’t have a point of comparison but I’ve never felt it was slow to launch any apps, that’s why I haven’t felt the need to upgrade.
It's worth caring about, but only as one data point amongst many.
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
The main factor that drives when I replace my phone is when I damage it enough that it seems like a better idea to replace the phone than have it repaired (I usually buy ~100-150 pound phones because I somehow have a near magical ability to totally seriously damage phones irrespective of how expensive they are)
I can't remember the last phone I had that survived long enough for me to feel I needed to upgrade it.
> When was the last time someone who doesn't play games on their phone thought "man, I wish this was faster"?
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.
Note: they can. Moore’s law didn’t end in its original form (we do get more transistors per unit still), but the usual interpretation of “faster CPUs” are long gone. So hopefully stronger focus on performance will happen soon.
It's not about CPU power, it's about software. Just putting a mutex in the wrong place or doing serious computation in UI thread will get you jitters, no matter how fast your CPU is. People do smooth screen updates on Commodore 64s and real time audio on things that are basically microcontrollers.
I think the simple answer is that you will get more years of use out of a highly performing chip. App bloat is inevitable and eventually the phone will slow down. You might get an extra year or two out of a flagship phone than a midrange phone. Android seems particularly vulnerable to this bloat due to a combination of cheaper components bottlenecking performance, most manufacturers loading up the OS with bloat, and apps having to target a much broader range of devices and having that take away from the performance tuning you can spend time on in iOS. Take it all together and the new Samsung you buy today will probably feel sluggish much sooner than a new iPhone.
People mostly care about app launch performance for productivity tasks. It was the norm for many years for budget Android devices that were a year old to wipe the floor on those tests with the latest, most powerful iPhone due to how poorly optimized iOS was. iPhone might have caught up since then.
I do. Recently did think exactly that when I was using Pixel 7 Pro. Opening a photo and pressing edit. Loading editor takes ages (relatively speaking). Pressing tools in that editor, takes ages to switch. It is really good editor with a horrible user experience due to all that loading time.
I care about it. I work on a video editing app for iOS (we also target Android). Raw CPU and GPU performance has a significant impact on our ability to ship features, not to mention user experience with things like number of simultaneous streams of video, rendering/export time, etc.
Funny, I often think I wish this or that app was faster, but the reality is that for architectural reasons developers are putting heavy computations on the main thread and leave all other cores unused.
So I welcome any and all single-thread performance improvements, if only because of lazy developers.
I don’t really want multi-core phone apps for the most part. Smartphones aren’t like full computers, they are small devices with little batteries. I want my phone to run single core programs with smooth scrolling and no jitter.
Multi core performance on a phone is like towing capacity on a sports car.
Last time I cared about Geekbench and such was highschool.
The metric is so generic it's irelevant in normal conversation.
It's same kind of topic EV cars are trying to introduce with instant torque and crazy acceleration - nobody in real life scenario cares about it.
You don't. It's widely discredited for comparing platforms. They also cherry picked JUST single core performance here (which has 0 bearing in any real life usage scenario).
Considering that 80% of App Store revenue came from games according to information that came out in the Epic Trial, there are a lot of people that play games.
The one, and only benchmark, I care about is battery longevity.
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.
You take your phone to a shop and come back an hour later and boom you have a new battery. I once had a microphone fail on my phone and it was exact same scenario. It's really not a big deal.
I wish. We bought a Cat B35 because it looked cool. Phone speaker got quieter and quieter, I bought it to several phone places, nobody wanted to touch it. Maybe it wasn't popular enough?
All phone battery longevities are probably within a factor of 2x (for reputable brands). An iPhone official battery replacement is $100 installed. Is longevity really that material for a component that is 1/8 the price of the phone?
Apple wouldn't replace my ipad battery and is bullshitting me saying it is at 100% health. The device is 4 years old and I can tell it's only lasting half to 2/3 of the original battery life (even with only safari open). I'd be happy to pay $100.
FWIW my iPhone 7+ went 5 years and holds a charge for ~12 hours. It was just at 78% when I replaced it a few weeks ago but TBH that number is very... random (I used to do phone repair).
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.
But, the battery chemistry is almost the same across the phones. There is no magic sauce for one phone company. However, bigger batteries generally last longer, because they go through less full cycle refreshes. Getting better battery chemistry is the same order of difficulty as curing a particular cancer! May be you care about cheaper battery swaps, and that is something we all can get behind.
And as an addendum to this, faster/more efficient processors mean the phone takes less time before it goes back into a low powered mode. There's a strong correlation here.
This is one of the main reasons I use two particular things on Android:
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.
Battery longevity is much less a concern for me these days with fast charging. My phone dropping from being 70% when I plug it in to 30% would only increase my time on the charger by a few minutes since it charges so much faster at low percentages.
To all the iphone diehards, I recently switched from Samsung to iphone 14PM and I whole heartedly hate following things:
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.
On a random note I used to be an "I'll never go apple guy" but having to do some app dev had to get one so got a 13PM and recently upgraded to the 14PM and also copped a Pixel 7 Pro and man... going back to Android feels like regressing, sure swiftkey etc is nice but every app feels lesser than it's ios counterpart in terms of polish and feel, ios gestures are also way better. I haven't used my Pixel in weeks outside of work and a few calls despite having spent the last decade or so on Android. I once heard someone say even a baby can use an iphone and it shows, I don't think when I'm on it, it feels very natural and you quickly get used to the inconsistencies. I now have a M1 and a watch, heh.
I used to be that guy too :D First got and iPad, then Macbook M1 pro, then Airpods, then iPhone. So I got sucked in by the ecosystem, but I realize that such ecosystem comes with productivity benefits that otherwise isn't possible.
From what I understood the "back gesture" is not universal - sometimes you still have to use that Back link on the top?
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)
Ah I see, I don't have an airtag. must be my neighbour's. In any case, I don't want to pay the penalty for maintaining the network for someone else's airtag :(
Overall pros I've noticed is the stability and attention to detail in the small things we daily use.
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.
> However, single-core performance is generally considered more important when it comes to overall speed for everyday usage, as most tasks are unable to scale efficiently across multiple cores.
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.
Another tangential but related one is core architectural decisions made early on.
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.
Counterargument: Single core performance is more important for most applications, but it is rather unimportant overall. Most phones have already more than enough performance for usual applications. What matters for performance is heavy applications, games, for which GPU and multi-core performance are important, not so much single core performance.
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.
"Few people appreciate it" because it's no longer relevant with modern operating systems and programs for the vast majority of users and applications, which is why in almost every market imaginable, CPUs and SoCs have migrated toward higher core counts.
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.
> because it's no longer relevant with modern operating systems and programs for the vast majority of users and applications
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?
This doesn't really showcase how much Apple's chips are as much as how far Qualcom has fallen behind.
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.
Performance per watt only matters until you hit 1+ day battery life in regular usage.
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.
> 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.
At this point I really don't care about what is the latest and greatest in phones
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.
Why buy a Pixel only to replace the OS? Pixels are basically minimum viable hardware to deliver Google software. Without the Google software, its just a mid-range phone at high-end prices.
That's just plain not true. It's at least $100 below market average and performance is great. Not mentioning camera which is easily one of the best on the market, if not the best one.
Pixels are one of the few Android phones that actually have some decent security features in hardware (that’s why they are the only supported grapheneOS targets).
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.
the a series are well priced/supported and do more than enough for me, you can pick one up for $300 and be good for years.. all while there are people making monthly payments for 1,200 iphones
Does benchmark results really matter that much for phones? I don't see myself compiling code, playing graphics intensive video games, multitasking with many engineering software running simultaneously, on a phone.
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.
I do all of the above on my smartphone. I just use the USB-C connector to plug it into a hub and plug in a display, keyboard and mouse. I have OpenVSCode-Server running within Termux, along with Python installed there.
Unfortunately iPhone can't do that so who cares about the better Geekbench score...
Battery life (especially idle battery life) and feeling responsive are all I care about. iOS devices have usually done far better on those fronts while having smaller batteries and weaker hardware compared with Android devices, so, yeah, super don't care about it benchmarking as faster than an Android device.
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.
Since when does ios devices have weaker hardware (besides lower RAM)? Even as per the article, years old, low-end iphones easily beat out flagship android devices CPU-wise, to the point it is not even funny. Apple is just generations ahead in CPU design.
> Does benchmark results really matter that much for phones?
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.
Late to reply (sorry) but this is an incorrect assumption. Benchmarks do not generalize to everything, especially loading apps from non volatile memory where users might notice latency the most. This is also usually a bottleneck by the memory related components instead of the core itself. Also, its not hard to just throw more brute clock speed at something, which will absolutely consume more energy overall than a slower but more efficient system.
Readit News
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
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25205588
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...
Dead Comment
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.
https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/battery-replacement
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.
Deleted Comment
1. The keyboard in ios: its unintuitive and ancient compared to the android counterparts. And No, Gboard, swiftkey keyboard in ios suck equally bad too.
2. Battery drain issues: Battery drains randomly, main culprit being "find my" process. This alone drains ~8% of battery overnight on my iphone and ~18% on my ipad overnight even with background app refresh turned off.
3. Lack of the back button is a huge pain in the ass. Some apps design their own navigation pattern and it sucks to operate the phone in 1 hand. For e.g, Youtube requires you to pull down on the video currently playing to go back to search results than allowing the native back swipe or back arrow on top left.
Meanwhile, I have agree that the apps in iOS are much nicer than the android apps, the same apps I used in android which sucked big time work flawlessly in iOS. FaceID is much reliable than the shitty in screen fingerprint readers in Samsung/Android phones.
So both Android and iOS have their pros and cons, and after using both, I can confidently say iphone is not the best phone in the world and user had to experience both to choose what suits them better.
You probably have an AirTag around you, there's a bug causing that. Update the AirTag firmware.
> 3. Lack of the back button is a huge pain in the ass
Swipe from the left edge of the screen to right, that's the iOS back button.
Anyway, I'm returning to Android after 4 months for the same reasons. Lets see how this goes. I haven't found difference in the few apps that I use and since there is universal praise that iOS is smooth, every little hiccup called my attention. So, there are hiccups as well (lags, not responding to touches for half a second, etc)
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.
Thank you for acknowledging this. I think few people actually appreciate the need for better single-core performance. It's, in comparison, easy to just add more cores and use more power, but what is hard is making one core faster and faster and use less power.
Apple wanted to build apps using web technology, but realized it was nowhere near fast enough. So they reused parts of the OSX toolkit, including the programming language which compiles down to optimized assembly. (and it wasn't even that great in performance due to obj-c's way of doing things, it had more runtime overhead due to the message passing system).
Meanwhile, Android always was on Java and the JVM, which, while pretty fast, isn't as fast or energy-efficient as a lower level language. If I recall correctly it took something like five years - and quadcore CPUs - before Android started to get close to iOS in terms of perceived performance and speed, and the iPhone still beat Android phones in terms of energy efficiency. It took even longer than that (again, if I recall correctly) for the iphone to even start having a dual-core CPU.
And Apple is doing it again with their own CPUs now, the energy efficiency of their new macbooks with no compromise on performance is really impressive.
Moreover, if someone really is interested in the speed of normal applications, then it is more useful to directly measure things like start-up times of popular apps. Apple isn't ahead here, as far as I know, despite higher single-core performance.
It takes a special sort of arrogance to look at literally the entire industry and go "psssst, savages don't know what they're doing. Single core performance is where it's at."
It’s just that not much improvement can be done in single thread performance anymore and it is much more easier to design and market “n times as many cores” then “we bumped single threaded performance by 0.2%”. Mind you, almost every single application you have will ultimately depend on single threaded performance, relatively few problems can even theoretically make use of multiple cores, let alone are programmed to do so. Sure, multiple single-threaded process will like more available cores, but it is more limited on mobile devices, where few very fast cores and more slower ones are the norm.
The article just proves you wrong
Apple's products are lightyears ahead from Android phones in perfomance. Apple CPU design always put single core perfomance upfront, because they know most application are still optimized to single core usage. how is not not relevant?
On the other hand, the results also show how much work Apple will need to put into their GPUs, as the clearly inferior chip is still beating the iPhone 14 hands down in terms of GPU horsepower.
The relevant review, though, is performance per watt. This video (https://youtu.be/s0ukXDnWlTY) from a few months ago explores the power efficiency graphs and that's probably what most phone users really want. Nobody is gaming on their phone until it hits the limits of passive cooling and very few people will need the raw CPU performance for more than a second per page load. I don't even know what intensive single core benchmarks are even good for in real life, maybe Javascript if you're somehow running the JS VM at 100% for minutes straight? That doesn't sound like something I'd want my phone to do!
Qualcom's advancements in speed and longevity have been incremental, sometimes even decremental, for years now. Mediatek, previously the chipset for every 100 dollar Chinese phone, keeps closing while Qualcom desperately tries to squeeze just a little more juice out of their cores.
Apple's progress is also slowing down, but not nearly as much as their most important competitor's. It's a shame, really. Hopefully Google and Microsoft will develop their own chips for real in the future because you can't just wait for Qualcom anymore. Microsoft REALLY wants a good M1/2 competitor but the other chips in the ARM space just aren't up for the task. I'm sure Google would also love for their Chromebooks to become more powerful, though their own mobile devices seem to focus on midrange performance with benefits in software and dedicated silicon instead of fast general purpose compute.
In the end, I have no horse in the game because I don't think I'll be upgrading any time soon. My current phone is more than fast enough for my needs. The battery is slowly fading but as long as I can still get through the day I'm satisfied. With the absolutely ridiculous prices of phones these days, I'm putting off an "upgrade" for as long as I can.
Beyond that, who cares?
It also wouldn't matter if the thing could recharge super fast.
The M1/M2 laptops have done this, I noticed that people who used to bring chargers with them at conferences/meetings don't even bother anymore, or don't bring it out of the bag.
I haven't brought my charger to work since I received my M1. My bag just contains snacks. Not having to worry about charging is really a very different experience.
They are all the same at this point, we are way past when Specs actually mattered(outside of JS performance on mobile, thank you Snapdragon!), they are just too small for anything useful, at least for me personally.
I just buy a pixel and install GrapheneOS/CalyxOS on it, and call it a day.
Its a phone that works, and I can relatively trust it, certainly more than other spyware, even if sandboxed google services are installed.
Nonetheless, iPhones are also great from a security perspective out of the box, and the hardware is superior so I just couldn’t switch to a pixel, even though I wanted to at every version. They are unfortunately simply riddled with some stupid mistakes, like that emergency call one.
Although Apple most definitely still leads on these factors, I think battery life, general latency/responsiveness of doing daily tasks, reliability, etc, are more important than some random coremark.
Unfortunately iPhone can't do that so who cares about the better Geekbench score...
1. https://www.nreal.ai/air/
Can I still put it on my nightstand at 10pm with 15% battery and have my alarm go off at 8AM with 8-9% charge remaining? Cool, don't care how fast it benchmarks.
I would say no, but they are a means to compare raw performance between phones.
Which isn't the best metric, but it's one of them. I mean at some point, Samsung was caught fudging the numbers, overclocking or disabling thermal / power saving options when it detected a benchmark app running.
So for their customers, or customers comparing phones, benchmark results do matter, to the point where it became a marketing tool. I don't think that's the case anymore though.
> Geekbench 5 scores reveals Apple’s 2½ year old iPhone 12 outperforms Samsung’s latest flagship in single-core performance by 6.15%.