Yes. Absolutely. We just forget that opening an app--or restarting the device, or recovering from airplane mode--was an action that incurred a noticeable delay once and does not tend to anymore.
Out of curiosity, where? I went from the 12 something to the 15 Pro and the speed in connecting to networks and rendering pages was memorable. Now I don't notice it anymore; the old phone is just slow.
Still, I can't say I've ever thought, jeez, this thing is slow to render a page.
> the speed in connecting to networks
I'm not even sure what you mean. Connecting to 4G? a) mine's practically instant and b) how often are you doing this?!
(Not being snarky there. Genuinely don't understand how this is a thing someone would notice. But you may have a different use-case to me.)
I see a lot of "this 200€ phone is as good as the 1000€ one"
Sister, i would kill someone to not have to use Google maps on a phone 10% slower.
In 2020 i returned my samsung A7 (decent phone for the era) because i just couldn't support how laggy it was. Thst phone was better than most phones around me but i felt the slowness. (ended up with a Huawei mate 20 pro)
I'm on the other side of the fence, and just replaced a Pixel 7 with a 9. And quite frankly I bought it because I was Supposed To. I'm sure there are benchmarks to say otherwise, but routine use is basically instant on both and absent a professional desire I quite frankly would have just waited until I broke it.
This obviously revolves around what one perceives. Data speeds on mobile are objectively faster on their newer devices [1]. But we normalise those speeds without needing additional cruft; waiting for a page to load just ceases to be a thing one notices except when it doesn't work.
[1] https://www.opensignal.com/2023/09/07/users-should-upgrade-t...
I’ve done performance tuning long enough to develop some rules of thumb:
Just about everyone will detect a 3x performance difference if told about it. (5x even if they’re not told.)
Only gamers and some IT pros will notice a 50% difference.
Nobody will notice 20% or less.
Anything under 10% is hard to even measure.
One career trick is that if you have three changes that provide a 20% boost each, release them at the same time instead of trickling them out one at a time. Sure, this is more risky for the company but is great at review time because otherwise your contributions would go unnoticed. Unethical? Maybe, but this is the incentive structure. Hate the game, not the player.
There is also an adaptation factor: Good performance is only noticeable in contrast to poor performance. You get used to it very fast and stop noticing, unless you go back to the old system which suddenly feels "broken", even though you may have considered it perfectly acceptable before.
For example, if the first visible paragraphs takes the same time to show up, but the rest of the page is slower (but still not slow enough to be visible even if the user starts to scroll right away), then there is objectively 0 improvement on user interaction
Where?