muthuk_vanalingam

AppleInsider said:

Android makers have sought to drive the adoption of extremely high resolution displays-- in particular Samsung, which develops its own screens and seeks to use these to differentiate its smartphone offerings. However, as we have repeatedly noted, Samsung's incessant push toward higher resolution displays has fallen behind its efforts to include the horsepower to drive them.

In contrast, Samsung's Galaxy S8 uses an incredibly high resolution screen with more than 4.2 million pixels, but is paired with a chip that can't keep up, giving it benchmarks about in line with cheaper Androids from Huawei and Xaiomi that have much lower screen resolutions.

While DED is absolutely spot on with majority of the contents in this article, there are few misleading conclusions which I think are not correct. Poor performance of Samsung's phones has MORE to do with "Poor Software" than "raw power" of SD 835/Exynos 8895. SD 835/Exynos 8895 are perfectly capable of handling QHD+ resolution phones without any issues. Samsung's latest phones (S8, S8+, Note 8) offer an option to reduce the screen resolution. Even after using this feature to lower the resolution, the performance did not improve in Samsung's latest flagships based on the reviews that I have read. The conclusion was - "there is no visible difference in performance whether the screen resolution is FHD+ or QHD+", suggesting the SOFTWARE is at large to blame for poor performance.

While Apple's SoCs are objectively better than SoCs used in Android flagships for last 2+ years (from A9 onwards), Pixels and other near-stock Android phones (from HTC/Sony/Motorola) do NOT exhibit the same performance issues observed in Samsung's phones. They run perfectly fine with the same high resolution QHD+. Fact is - Apple's SoCs (A9+) can handle QHD+ resolution (with A11 even UHD) comfortably without any issues. The fact that Apple has chosen to go with lower resolution has nothing to do with "raw performance", may be more to do with battery life. It could also be that higher resolution does not visibly improve the quality of display, but HDR and high refresh rate do and Apple is focusing on those areas to bring meaningful improvements to the end users.

Soli said:

muthuk_vanalingam said:

Soli said:

muthuk_vanalingam said:

Soli said:

rogifan_new said:

ryanvannote said:

rogifan_new said:

... I know people with an iPhone 6 who really feel the limitation of only having 1GB RAM....

I have an iPhone 6 Plus, and I don't really know about the limitation. My battery life is still pretty good, too. I'm not likely to upgrade because of money and such, but I'm not really dissatisfied with what I've got. I previously used a 3GS for 5 years and I don't see why this iPhone 6 Plus couldn't last just as long. I don't think there's a whole lot of apps that won't run on this phone yet.

Did the 6 Plus only get 1GB RAM? I know a lot of people on AI like to snark about this (and I remember seeing many a post defending 1GB RAM as good enough) but I can only go by what others have told me their experience is plus what I recently experienced using an iPad mini 3. It wasn’t that a specific app no longer worked it was that things weren’t buttery smooth. Overall slowness and lag. Apple likes to tout older devices getting software updates but it’s not so great when there’s performance degradation. My guess is it has more to do with RAM than the A-series chips which have been beasts for many years now.

1) The iPhone 6 series had 1 GiB RAM, and the 1Phone 6s series received 2 GiB RAM the next year.

2) The only time that RAM has ever been a real issue for me is the original iPad where Safari would reload pages even after just switching tabs within the app. It did only have 256 MiB RAM.

True, but even 3GB RAM chips were available when iPhone 6 series phones were launched. So there is really no excuse for crippling those devices with 1GB RAM.

Oh, there are plenty of reasons why Apple doesn’t abide by the “if it exists then include it” notion popular amongst sideline engineers.

Not a valid argument again. As @Rogifan_new nailed it in his comment - the amount of RAM for a phone should be decided based on " how many software updates Apple expects the device to get". If you have ANY valid argument against this point, please feel free to mention it explicitly. Any other argument like "Apple knows better", "Apple has sold 200 million iPhone 6 series, so they are right" ARE not valid arguments. There are plenty of reasons why iPhones sell well compared to competition. Less RAM, less battery life are NOT among those. It is "despite" those drawbacks AND due to other bigger advantages that iPhones have compared to competition that they are selling extra ordinarily well. That does NOT mean Apple should NOT strive to improve on deficiencies. Far from it.

OK, here's something very explicit: Using the number of updates a device may receive over its supported lifespan as a guide for how much RAM a device should receive as a minimum is the dumbest thing I think I've ever read on this forum. So far, we've seen between 9 to 11 beta OS updates since WWDC, so based on our quoted text of "how many software updates Apple expects the device to get" the one that got 11 beta updates should get more RAM or a higher percentage bump (you never stated anything explicit) because of a raw value of the number of updates.

So Apple releases x.1, as they often do, and then a day later releases x.1.1 because there was a critical bug found, as often happens, you somehow expect Apple to plan for that years in advance and give the device more RAM to correct something that may not have nothing to do with the RAM, but could be an update that makes the system more RAM efficient. You and Rogifan's entire system is merely based on the number of times the fucking OS gets updated so you'd argue that if the iPhone 8 only get 2 GiB RAM that it means that Apple should pull an Android stop supporting the device the next year? Do you not see how explicitly inexplicable that method would be?

PS: I only focused on Apple's OS updates but you didn't explicitly state it was OS updates. This could also be carrier updates and App Store updates. Certainly when games are updated the can end up using more resources than previously, so I really should've assumed that you would also include every time Facebook and Dropbox, and millions of other apps are updated.

Soli said:

muthuk_vanalingam said:

Soli said:

rogifan_new said:

ryanvannote said:

rogifan_new said:

... I know people with an iPhone 6 who really feel the limitation of only having 1GB RAM....

I have an iPhone 6 Plus, and I don't really know about the limitation. My battery life is still pretty good, too. I'm not likely to upgrade because of money and such, but I'm not really dissatisfied with what I've got. I previously used a 3GS for 5 years and I don't see why this iPhone 6 Plus couldn't last just as long. I don't think there's a whole lot of apps that won't run on this phone yet.

Did the 6 Plus only get 1GB RAM? I know a lot of people on AI like to snark about this (and I remember seeing many a post defending 1GB RAM as good enough) but I can only go by what others have told me their experience is plus what I recently experienced using an iPad mini 3. It wasn’t that a specific app no longer worked it was that things weren’t buttery smooth. Overall slowness and lag. Apple likes to tout older devices getting software updates but it’s not so great when there’s performance degradation. My guess is it has more to do with RAM than the A-series chips which have been beasts for many years now.

1) The iPhone 6 series had 1 GiB RAM, and the 1Phone 6s series received 2 GiB RAM the next year.

2) The only time that RAM has ever been a real issue for me is the original iPad where Safari would reload pages even after just switching tabs within the app. It did only have 256 MiB RAM.

True, but even 3GB RAM chips were available when iPhone 6 series phones were launched. So there is really no excuse for crippling those devices with 1GB RAM.

Oh, there are plenty of reasons why Apple doesn’t abide by the “if it exists then include it” notion popular amongst sideline engineers.

Rayz2016 said:

muthuk_vanalingam said:

Soli said:

rogifan_new said:

ryanvannote said:

rogifan_new said:

... I know people with an iPhone 6 who really feel the limitation of only having 1GB RAM....

I have an iPhone 6 Plus, and I don't really know about the limitation. My battery life is still pretty good, too. I'm not likely to upgrade because of money and such, but I'm not really dissatisfied with what I've got. I previously used a 3GS for 5 years and I don't see why this iPhone 6 Plus couldn't last just as long. I don't think there's a whole lot of apps that won't run on this phone yet.

Did the 6 Plus only get 1GB RAM? I know a lot of people on AI like to snark about this (and I remember seeing many a post defending 1GB RAM as good enough) but I can only go by what others have told me their experience is plus what I recently experienced using an iPad mini 3. It wasn’t that a specific app no longer worked it was that things weren’t buttery smooth. Overall slowness and lag. Apple likes to tout older devices getting software updates but it’s not so great when there’s performance degradation. My guess is it has more to do with RAM than the A-series chips which have been beasts for many years now.

1) The iPhone 6 series had 1 GiB RAM, and the 1Phone 6s series received 2 GiB RAM the next year.

2) The only time that RAM has ever been a real issue for me is the original iPad where Safari would reload pages even after just switching tabs within the app. It did only have 256 MiB RAM.

True, but even 3GB RAM chips were available when iPhone 6 series phones were launched. So there is really no excuse for crippling those devices with 1GB RAM.

Battery. 

Soli said:

rogifan_new said:

ryanvannote said:

rogifan_new said:

... I know people with an iPhone 6 who really feel the limitation of only having 1GB RAM....

I have an iPhone 6 Plus, and I don't really know about the limitation. My battery life is still pretty good, too. I'm not likely to upgrade because of money and such, but I'm not really dissatisfied with what I've got. I previously used a 3GS for 5 years and I don't see why this iPhone 6 Plus couldn't last just as long. I don't think there's a whole lot of apps that won't run on this phone yet.

Did the 6 Plus only get 1GB RAM? I know a lot of people on AI like to snark about this (and I remember seeing many a post defending 1GB RAM as good enough) but I can only go by what others have told me their experience is plus what I recently experienced using an iPad mini 3. It wasn’t that a specific app no longer worked it was that things weren’t buttery smooth. Overall slowness and lag. Apple likes to tout older devices getting software updates but it’s not so great when there’s performance degradation. My guess is it has more to do with RAM than the A-series chips which have been beasts for many years now.

1) The iPhone 6 series had 1 GiB RAM, and the 1Phone 6s series received 2 GiB RAM the next year.

2) The only time that RAM has ever been a real issue for me is the original iPad where Safari would reload pages even after just switching tabs within the app. It did only have 256 MiB RAM.