What’s the oldest/cheapest iPhone with Touch ID? I’m thinking about picking up a second hand one to replace my iPod.
Get a SE. 5S is oldest but not worth considering.
I am not a phone person. I am not a technophile. I have used Apple stuff since 1987, off and on, but in the past couple of years have weaned myself mostly off of the Cupertino teat for a variety of reasons. One, I actually prefer Windows 10 for day to day computing stuff. Two, I pretty much loathe the Apple eco system, and have very little use for any of it, including the App Store, iTunes, iCloud, or what ever. Three, as much as I respect their often excellent hardware, decades of enduring the smugness of the often totally clueless Apple cult followers has finally made me just want to say, no, just no to anything with an apple on it.
From a tech perspective, an iPhone would rock. Great camera, great performance, all round great phone. But I refuse to be drawn back in to that version of the People’s Temple. I have an old MacBook Pro which runs nothing but iTunes, a slightly newer one provided by my college which is my work computer (until I can foist it off on someone and get something faster), and an iPad Air 2 for Gems of War, but I moved my portable music onto a non-Apple digital player and SD cards and I’ve always had an Android smart phone.
This is totally personal, and in no way intended to slight or criticize anyone who uses or loves Apple stuff. Hell, the vast majority of my colleagues and my students do. It’s hunky dory by me. My own feelings are my own. But it sure as hell is no fun having the choices or non-choices you have if you don’t want to go Apple for a phone. All of this stuff is expensive, and even buying the most pricey Android phone results in objectively worse performance–regardless of what you think of Wumpus’ crusade, I think he’s made this point pretty well. Oddly enough, it’s not the numbers that bug me–I’m not a benchmark kind of guy–but it’s the psychology of paying potentially $800 for a phone that intellectually and emotionally I know is not as good as what I could get if I paid the same amount of money to Apple.
I’ll probably end up getting this generation of Android when the next gen drops, to save money. And really, I guess, none of this matters that much to me, because as I said, I don’t use my phone for that much, though I do get mildly annoyed when my HTC One M8 is so damn slow doing stuff. tl;dr, I think Wumpus has a point, the point matters to some more than others, I find Apple snooty and not for me these days, and I’ll crawl back in my log cabin now.
To be fair, the M8 (which was great, don’t get me wrong, I owned one) is four generations old now.
Oh yeah, I know, I know. Anything I get now will be faster. It takes me several phone generations to get to the point of wanting to switch,because I don’t use my phone as intensely as others. It’s still annoying that after that many iterations the new stuff isn’t that much better.
In many ways, it is, though. The low light camera on the S7 (let alone the S8) is vastly better than the M8’s. The screen is bigger and better. It’s waterproof. It has a fingerprint sensor that you can use for Lastpass and other apps as well as unlocking. At least for the S7 Edge, the battery lasts longer. I don’t know what version of Android the M8 got up to, but the quick settings are much more user friendly on Nougat and/or current TouchWiz. It multitasks better.
About the only thing that isn’t much better is the speaker. It’s true you’re not going to get as dramatic an increase in pure processor performance as you would switching to an iPhone (or even upgrading an iPhone). The upside is everything else except maybe the camera improves much faster.
I can’t abide the Samsung look and feel. My wife has a Galaxy S7 Edge, and I just don’t like it much. I’m much more drawn to the squarer, blockier phones, but most of them are quite a bit behind the Samsung it seems in performance and features.
Sigh. I’m just not cut out for the phone generation I don’t think.
Uh oh, not looking good for my theory. Under 4100 is weak relative to performance leaps in previous iPhone generations. iPhone 7 was 3300, and the corresponding A10x iPad was 3900.
It indeed has more cores, but that doesn’t really matter for day to day perf.
I’m surprised no one mentioned Project Treble in Android O when it comes to denouncing Qualcomm.
In the past, before O, even Nexus phones using Snapdragon SoC, which essentially runs stock android, will not be updated after 2 years, because Qualcomm, for whatever reason (one can speculate easily though), do not make old Snapdragon works for newer Android flavours. OTOH Apple support their phones for more than two years with their iOS yearly upgrade, for at least 3-4 years.
With project Treble introduced to Android O, OS updates can happen independent of SoC updates. So Qualcomm need not be involved in Android OS upgrade anymore.
So I’m not performnce obsessed like wumpus, but I would still like to eff Qualcomm right in their effing Qualcomm-hole, because they are hobbling Android OS roll outs.
Yeah Treble is important, sadly it will be years before its influence is felt.
Super informative article. A lot of people don’t realize that Clockspeed orbits Pipeline in an elliptical orbit instead of a circular one.
Well yes and the good news is Qualcomm has promises to keep, and miles to go before they sleep ;)
Also I’ll just… leave this here.
Not that it matters in the context of phones and I think it would be just a better chart if he just removed the line for the thinkpad, but that thinkpad CPU is total shit from 2012 so he updated to at least include a current chip. It’s also weird that it has the S7 instead of an S8. “Wow, it completely smokes everything I had laying around in my office” would be a better conclusion from this chart.
Not that the 8 isn’t fast, this is just a silly way to express it.
It also lacks the iPhone 7 which was significantly faster, so the jump from 6s looks extreme. But, comparing to a 15w laptop cpu is completely fair in a way that comparing to a 100w desktop cpu, is not.
He said he ordered a one plus 5 to get a modern snapdragon in there and will report back. Spoiler alert: it will still be slow.
what is this measured in? ms?
I’m surprised at how nice and responsive my new-to-me IP7+ is in iOS11 compared to the hiccups I experienced on my 6S+
So let’s see…
Geekbench 4 single threaded tests say, 4204 iPhone 8, 3444 iPhone 7. That is 1.22× faster, yes? And we know that single threaded perf is the most representative of JavaScript perf on a device, yes?
But then I measured some JavaScript performance myself on both devices:
I’m seeing 1.4× to 1.5× better performance in JavaScript cc @jsnell
Also if you like being super depressed, try running any of those benchmarks on any Android device on the planet. Someone on Twitter said the OnePlus 5 gets 3097ms in Kraken, for example. That’s “only” 4.4× slower.