Hacker News Reader

Comment by thekevan | Hacker News Reader

"For what it's worth, PCs are subject to the exact same slow decline"

Maybe eventually, but not within 5 years. I'm currently typing on a 2011 Dell with an i3 proc and 6GB of RAM, running Ubuntu. I have 19 other tabs open in Chrome. It dual boots Win7.

I can use this 7ish year old PC for social media, email, HD videos and streaming music with few annoyances due to performance, in either OS. Not so with the 5 year iPad he describes. While I can do several of those things at once, it seems he has trouble with even just one.

View on HN

My i7-2600k, which is 7 years old by now, still does everything I need it to do (among them being gaming newly released titles) and more. I did upgrade the GPU a couple of times, but the basic system is still the same and performing like it always did.

In that regard, I really don't understand what's happening with smartphones/tablets that suddenly makes them incapable of performing the same tasks, at the same performance, they always did. It's not like I'm suddenly trying to use some performance hungry app/game I never used before, it's the same apps I always use, but they simply perform worse.

If it wasn't for this simple fact I'd probably be still on my iPhone 4s, but after a while, that became even too slow for simple stuff like using WhatsApp. It can't be that the apps become that much more demanding, WhatsApp still did what it always does: Sending and receiving messages, so I really don't understand where that extra demand for performance comes from which suddenly turns whole generations of portable hardware into fancier paper weights.

A lot of performance is lost to feature creep in the underlying OS. This is easy to see in Windows as you can open up services.msc all the way back to Windows 2000 and see something like a tenth of the number of running services (or less). (Now I wish I had a Windows 2000 disc to test that theory out with)

Plus factor in that the app frameworks themselves get more complex, and the current trend of using-browser-as-frontend (plus all the bloat of the web) and one can see how old devices don't cut it as much. And since each iteration gets bigger, the longer an OEM maintains support the worse it performs.

It would be interesting to compare how well old devices function by how soon OS support is cut -- I'd bet that the earlier a given device is left behind, the better it ends up running.

This is so naive.

You think WhatsApp of today is the exact same app or backend server logic from a year or two ago?

Any online service is constantly adding functionality on the server side even if the app code is constant ( given its a mobile app this is simply unlikely)

Unless you have an app that's not been upgraded and running in offline mode it's definitely not doing the same thing as a year ago.

> it's definitely not doing the same thing as a year ago

To me as a user, it does exactly the very, mundane, same thing it always did: Sending and receiving messages. It's not like WhatsApp now has become an awesome 4k video player, it still does the very same thing it always did.

In that regard, "Added functionality on the server side" does literally nothing for me except make the usability worse by making my client perform worse, so what's in it for me except being forced into buying new hardware? As far as I can tell: Nothing at all.

> what's happening with smartphones/tablets that suddenly makes them incapable of performing the same tasks

Competition, that’s what happening.

On PCs we had no competition for many years, that’s why performance has stalled. For example, cpubenchmark.net gives 8739 points to i7-2700K from 2011, and 12078 points to i7-7700K from 2016. Very modest 38% improvement in 5 years and 5 generations of CPUs. Same 4 cores/8 threads, same 8MB cache.

Not anymore, but it's only recently that that's been spun as a good thing.

Tell someone around 2000 that a 7ish year old PC would be adequate and you'd get laughed at. 1993 to 2000, for instance: You'd be comparing a Pentium at 60Mhz (some quick googling says 60Mhz was first hit this year) on the high end to a 1Ghz Athlon. Probably >20x real performance improvement (the clock alone is 16.7x).

Mobile devices will catch up and stagnate too, sadly.

But it's largely because today's improvements have gone into lower CPU consumption than core count. But it could have gone core count, it just 99% of users wouldn't know what to do with more cores and would rather take the battery life.

>it just 99% of programmers wouldn't know what to do with more cores

Fixed that for you. Remember that every time you experience an unresponsive GUI anywhere, and that's the easy case.

Beyond that, parallelization is generally not easy.

I think the vast majority of the time unresponsive GUI are because of blocking network or IO calls. A faster CPU won't do anything. I rarely max out my CPU.

A UI shouldn't be unresponsive in that case. It should present a progress bar, or other visual indicator that the UI [thread/actor/process] is waiting for the IO [thread/actor/process]. A UI should only become unresponsive when only one [thread/actor/process] is trying to do everything (I.e. both IO and UI), which should only occur if your application is not written with concurrency in mind.

Mobile SoCs still increase core count but it doesn’t need to increase power consumption.

E.g. Qualcomm SDM845 has 8 cores in total, 4 faster ones that are only used rarely, and 4 power efficient ones.

Also they offload increasing amount of work from less power efficient general-purpose CPUs to other on-chip hardware, DSPs (for many years), and now GPUs (marketing folks call them neural engines or AI chips).

You say "recently" and then compare computers from 18 and 25 years ago. That's just about a generation in human years. The comment I replied to said, "For what it's worth, PCs are subject to the exact same slow decline". ARE subject, not WILL BE or USED TO BE.

"Mobile devices will catch up and stagnate too, sadly."

Uh, if they catch up to my point, then they will still be useful at 5 - 7 years, thus the opposite of stagnant.

I almost typed up the comment that you responded to, probably for the reason that 2000 is still "recent" in my mind :/

>Uh, if they catch up to my point, then they will still be useful at 5 - 7 years, thus the opposite of stagnant.

I believe the GP meant that the rapid progress of feature improvement will stagnate, which means older devices won't 'age' as quickly.

My parents kept using their 1989 Mac SE to do most of their typed work up through at least 2005 (a job for which it arguably worked a lot better than many later machines, with simple predictable software and a fantastic keyboard).

Plenty of people used 7-year-old computers in 2000.

Just because someone did it doesn’t mean it wasn’t horrible. You are comparing people who are obviously way behind in technology. There was and is a large portion of people who aren’t tech savvy but not a tech dinosaur.

My grandpa never got a smart phone. But he was never more than 5 years behind in Home computing well into his 80s.

It wasn’t horrible. It was a very well made little machine, and it did just what they needed it to do. I would argue it was quite a bit nicer for what they wanted than a typical PC of 2005. (For one thing the keyboard was dramatically better.)

Gadget nerds have criteria for computers which are not necessarily related to predictability, sturdiness, or fitness for a particular narrow purpose. Instead there is a mix of excitement about technology qua technology, new toys to experiment with, status signaling, etc., in addition to functional improvements for doing real work.

Not everyone shares a gadget nerd’s sensibilities. It’s fine for people to be happy watching TV on a 18" CRT, listening to music on a cassette player, reading paper books instead of a screen, rolling down their car windows with a little crank, playing card games instead of VR games, etc.

Well, yes and no - the Mac SE had a really tiny screen, native resolution was 512x342[1], which I would say is pretty small for composing text of any length on (though I wrote plenty of undergrad papers, including a 110 page thesis on mine).

1: https://everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_classic/specs/mac_se....

In the year 2000 you could still find mainframes in some companies. They still worked and did their jobs.

Not exactly mainframes, but the amount invested in AS/400 still today astounds me.

As you can in 2018.

There was an odd hole where machine lifetimes got really short. They didn't used to be. An Apple //c (manufactured 1984) with an ImageWriter printer and a second floppy drive was happily in use for school papers, spreadsheets, correspondence, basic accounting, casual games and kids learning to program through about 1996. And it was passed on to another family after that, where it was used for another 3 years or so. Mainly as a Number Munchers/Carmen Sandiego/Oregon Trail/ChopLifter/Moon Patrol machine, I think. And while I'll grant that was a longer-than-average useful life for the time, we weren't the only ones I knew to keep an 80s machine with a 70s core in service well into the 90s.

Then somewhere around when people started to expect Windows on a computer the lifespans got quite a bit shorter, and that seemed to stick into the late 00s. And it's swung back the other direction now... my late 2011 MacBook Pro is good with current Mac OS or current Windows 10 installations, and is only being retired because its soldered-on discrete GPU has started to flake in a way that makes it unusable. (And a replacement motherboard would be stupid expensive.)

I think part of that is the abstraction layers.. The apple][ had a really long lifespan. The IIe had a production run of 11 years and was a slight evolution on a 7 year old design when it was released. During that time you were free to run nearly any apple][ application (excluding the IIgs ones) despite many of them being 10+ years old. Their functionality wasn't reduced and you didn't have to deal with an OS that changed under the applications and dropped support for them. People understood the target and the applications were tuned for it (similar to game consoles).

The advent of hard disks, and installable OS environments changed the model. Outside of zOS, and maybe IBMi, there simply aren't any OSs that actually have provided a fairly stable OS API over time. Even windows has decided they don't care about backwards compatibility despite the fact that for most purposes the core win32 API present in win2k provides basically everything needed to host the vast majority of modern applications. Games might be the exception but people forget the directX was an install-able component until MS decided to tie to to the OS with vista).

> Even windows has decided they don't care about backwards compatibility

I can run 25-year-old Windows 3.1 applications on a 32-bit Windows 10 box and they work correctly. If I have upgraded to 64-bit, I am merely constrained to 22-year-old Windows 95 applications.

Unisys has ClearPath, going all the way to 1961.

I use my 7-year old iPad 2 for social media, email, and running the audio system for my video studio. Works fine.

The death of older mobile hardware is at least somewhat exaggerated.

I agree. But one important difference - tablets have gotten 10x faster in that time period while laptops have not.

19 tabs opened in chrome with 6gb ram? Are you sure? Last time I used my friends pc with 4gb ram and it froze after I opened 12 tabs. Ram was fully used at 7 tabs.

The laptop I retired four months ago (Asus 1215b) has 4gb ram and an AMD E-350 CPU (slightly better than an Atom back in 2011). Still I can open 100+ tabs in Firefox (on Linux).

I would love a screenshot with 100+ opened tabs in firefox on a 4gb machine, sorry I am skeptical about that. Not just empty tabs but tabs with some website loaded. I have 3 tabs opened with some websites right now and it's already eating up 1gb of RAM. https://cl.ly/2y3k0I1T2i09

Reply on news.ycombinator.com