Comment by slt2021
7 days ago
these performance hungry "improvements" are forcefully introduced to legitimately slow down older devices and force the device refresh across the user base.
I have been using 8 year old iPhone just fine, but features like these over time will make the experience slower and slower and slower, until I am forced to refresh my iphone
I think probably a much bigger problem is app bloat. Devs are usually using very recent if not brand new top end devices to test and develop against which naturally makes several types of performance degradation invisible to them (“works on my machine”). Users on old and/or low end devices on the other hand feel all of those degradations.
If we want to take increasing device lifetimes seriously we need to normalize testing and development against slow/old models. Even if such testing is automated, it’d do wonders for keeping bloat at bay.
More likely it's a result of pressure to ship highly visible "improvements," combined with a lack of ideas that could improve the experience in a meaningful way. What do you do in that situation? Ship an obvious UI update that wouldn't have performed on the last gen hardware.
I haven’t used the new UI, so don’t assume this to be an endorsement of it, but even if you have good ideas about UI improvements and implement them, there still is pressure to make the UI look different because that, at a glance, shows users that they get something new.
And yes, “looking different” doesn’t have to mean “requires faster hardware”, but picking something that requires faster hardware makes it less likely that you will be accused of being a copy-cat of some other product’s UI.
And you base your first sentence on…? Surely not the ol’ “my phone slows down when my battery is failing so that I’ll buy a new phone” canard?
To be clear, these are new features that will likely have a setting to turn off. There’s no conspiracy, nothing “forcefully” added for the purpose of driving upgrades. (Ah, ninja edit): There’s not even a guarantee these features will be supported on an eight year old phone. EDIT: wait a minute...your eight year old phone won't even be supported.
(EDIT: reworded first paragraph to account for the ninja edit.)
What’s the exact canard here?
It’s a legitimate concern even assuming good intent.
But Apple has had to publicly admit bad intent specifically with their batteries and had to offer people money etc.
Strange to criticize people for something Apple publicly admitted they did wrong.
Apple publicly admitted they did wrong.
When is the last time a company has admitted wrong-doing? No, Apple admitted to slowing down phones when the battery was shot so it wouldn’t just suddenly shut down.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate
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They didn't admit bad intent. They admitted to doing something with good intent(the slowing was to stop crashes with near EOL batteries) but that they weren't transparent about it.
I'd much rather us have progress and people with 8 year old phones suffer than ensure that everything continues to run smoothly on any old device for eternity.
Disagree. I much preferred my phone running slightly slower to shutting down randomly. Maybe that’s just me.
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No matter what happens in the world someone will blame it on a top down conspiracy decided in some smoke filled back room.
But this one is true. Apple obviously puts out slowdown updates right as they release a new phone. They made my iPhone 7 unusable the same week they released the iPhone X.
Do you have some actual evidence that this is the case ?
Otherwise saying it is definitively true is misleading to put it mildly.
I'm very happy with my iPhone 13 Mini, my wife is very happy with her iPhone 12. They feel exactly the same as when bought new.
Whatever is it that you're saying that Apple does, it's either not obvious or they're shit at it.
Apple announces all iOS updates in June and releases them simultaneously with the newest iPhones in September. So you're right, but only trivially so.
Replying to you from an iPhone 7 that I use daily.
if conspiracy makes hundreds of billions $$$ then nothing stops people really.
like Charlie Munger have said: "Show me the incentives and I will tell you the outcome"
I don’t think your overall take is wrong (it’s about money), but maybe the simplicity of it is.
Reality is that designers, product managers, engineers — they all wanna build cool things, get promoted, make money etc.
You don’t do that by shipping plain designs, no matter how tried and true. The pressure to create something new and interesting is ever present. And look we have these powerful Apple silicon chips that can capably render these neat effects.
So no I don’t think it’s a shadowy conspiracy to come after your iPhone 8. Just the regular pressure of everyday men and women to build new and interesting things that will bring success.
In the late 90s/early 2000s desktop computing was moving at such a pace that an 8 year old PC was near unusable. Overtime progress slowed and its not unusual to have a decade old desktop now. The problem is thinking that mobile has slowed that much too. Mobile is still progressing quite rapidly so yeah an almost decade old device is going to feel slow.
You have what an iPhone 6? 1GB of RAM vs 8GB for modern devices, the first A chip came out 2 generations after yours as has 2% of the power of a current chip so modern chips are likely close to 100x as powerful as your phone.
Why should we hold back software to support extreme outliers like you?
> Why should we hold back software to support extreme outliers like you?
What are apps and mobile sites doing differently today besides loading up unnecessary animations and user tracking? How has user experience improved for those operating on devices fast enough to make up for developer laziness?
Games are dramatically bigger in scale and graphics quality.
I can now do on-device transcription without issue, security improvements at the chip level, HD graphics for video streaming, etc.
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So trashing fine working hardware that was produced using valuable and rare resources sounds perfectly sane to you?
For what? So a designer can get a promotion? This is not progress, this is pure fashion. As if the planet being literally on fire needed more fuel.
Yes, everything has a lifetime, 10 years is a very good run for a complex piece of technology you can carry in your pocket. Send it in for recycling.
So that we can have better features and functionality in our future systems. Backwards compatibility is an anchor. If you want new things then expect to get new platforms to run them on don't expect everyone to limit their possibilities to support you.
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I am totally fine if I stop getting software updates. In general I prefer not to update software either, because every new version brings only bloat
Windows 10 keeps telling me I need to buy a new Desktop in October. I don't remember when I bought it, but it runs fine for everything I do. I've been running Linux for ages on my laptops, I be upgrading my desktop to Linux too!
Windows 10 is EOL. As a fellow internet user I'm glad Microsoft is taking a harder line these days on people running EOL software. The internet has a history of being swamped by people running EOL versions of Windows full of security issues causing problems for everyone else.
No one is holding back software. You're not running local LLM or anything useful, you're adding performance cost for merely displaying icons on screen.
No one is holding back software because they aren't being allowed. If we were forced to support decade+ old devices though software would for sure be held back.
Laggards cost society by running insecure devices that generally impact the rest of the world besides just complaining about no one continuing to support them long after the useful life of their devices.
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