Seems like an obscene amount of computing power for a phone. Who is pushing their phone that hard? Majority of people just want to send/receive texts and scroll through Instagram.
I was completely fine using a well-taken-care-of iPhone 8 until Instagram's input boxes became unusably slow on it, now I have an iPhone 13. I'm guessing that there'll be a race to make more powerful AI assistants, but makers of far more mundane apps will gobble up the computing power readily.
What is it actually doing with all that compute? Is it every animated thumbnail? Is it scaling thumbnail images? Re-flowing the page 120x/sec? Mining bitcoin?
That's an insult to basic messaging, I've seen better UX in tutorials on writing a chat application/website than the sorry excuse Instagram has. Same goes for their comments.
Because they have to be stupid. Otherwise the "AUTHORITY" will come knocking. You are too smart, tone back, you have to look like stupid... per the invisible/unspoken rules.
World is fucked. And those who create these invisible rules must be carpet nuclear bombed out of this world.
I don't follow what you are alluding to, if it's content moderation you are reaching to I'd say that has absolutely nothing to do with how unresponsive the UI is, content moderation is not done client-side.
That's exactly why I miss the Samsung DeX [1], it gave me the option to turn my mobile phone into a desktop, solving one choice problem. But, of course, there’s always another choice around the corner. I don’t even trust Linux in battery management, and while Chrome OS Flex [2] offers a decent alternative, in the end, I don’t miss notebooks and their battery-draining habits. I’ve learned to embrace the fruit… and its own ecosystem: iPhone + MacBook.
I expect someone will really wake up soon, but as long as companies like Microsoft continue to be cash cows, I don't think it'll happen anytime soon. Even if Qualcomm makes the chips, Microsoft Windows won’t handle the energy efficiently.
Seems like an obscene amount of computing power for a personal computer. Who is pushing their desktop that hard? Majority of people just want to send/receive emails and write a document.
I know this is meant to be sarcastic, but it's a perfectly reasonable point. Not only that, it already came true; a lot of the time compute power has become so plentiful that we're more concerned about battery life and efficiency than actual raw grunt in personal computers. The main exceptions are gamers and people who use productivity software, but let's face it: Grandma does not need a 7995WX to log into Facebook.
I’d go even further, at least anecdotally - most people don’t seem to have a desktop or even laptop computer these days.
Literally none of my non-techie circle own a personal desktop. Only a few own a personal laptop - and even then, it only gets turned on occasionally. Most of them do all their personal computing on an iPad or smartphone.
My fiance takes a lot of videos on her phone. She has become a pretty talented video editor. Watching her “work” is actually a wild experience because it really is a whole different way of using a computer. She is comparably fast to someone on a desktop editor.
4K video editing — you need a pretty powerful desktop PC to smoothly edit/preview 4k video. CPU, GPU, and memory.
Yes I love gaming on my phone!! I love the feel of the inprecise touchscreen controls, the worse experience compared to a console or PC and all the ads and microtransactions!!
Anyone that can afford a new iphone and games should just get a console or PC... jesus.
I have to agree. I enjoy games so much better now that I always carry on me my second PS5 and my 36” 4k monitor. I have trouble getting on planes however because they won’t allow my True Sine Wave UPS through security.
Heard of a real handheld console like Nintendo Switch? Or a handheld emulated one like an Anbernic? Maybe this tip will help you. Stay safe and be blessed :)
But approximately nobody actually bought them, which comes back to the point about all that compute power being a solution in search of a problem. People don't want to play AAA games on a phone.
Thats a lousy article. Its based on 3rd party estimates of sales of a game released only 2 weeks before the article date. And, its a 2017 console title released on iOS in 2024, so presumably most fans of the series had already played it (it was released on 8 platforms before iOS).
"AAA" is kinda a vague term, but there are definitely some big budget games on mobile that do massive numbers (hundreds of millions of dollars).
Even for the most mundane phone usage I find the faster and faster socs being better at driving mobile safari to keep up with desktop websites. That alone I think is worth periodically upgrading.
I imagine at some point you’ll be able to take your phone to any screen and use it as a desktop computer. Obviously there are a lot of UI differences for touch vs keyboard interfaces, but it feels like that’s going to be the future at some point.
They also take pictures and videos. That takes a ton of compute nowadays, with all the computational photography stuff going on in the background. Most laptops cannot do realtime processing and compression of 8K video.
I do. I can almost do my entire knowledge worker job from the phone. My 14 is getting slowed down by iOS Microsoft Office enhancements, so hopefully the 16 can make me just as productive as I was last year.
The whole selling point of Apples AI stuff is that the processing for most things can be done on the phone and thus your private data won't have to leave you device
I fully expect remote solutions to smoke local options
Once you include the all the network overhead of sending images/video files to a server and back over a not very fast connection, I suspect it will be closer than you think for most real world use cases. And even if a cloud solution can improved the overall performance from say 4 seconds to 2 seconds, I don't see that as a huge win overall.
All that being said Apple does also offer an AI cloud compute solutions for operation too heavy to run on the phone.
Except what would have been a Mac mini plugged into your router is now handheld and way less janky than needing the user to maintain two separate devices.
The phone doesn't have the memory/compute/cooling/or power budget to be a meaningful replacement for a desktop device which in turn doesn't hold a candle to the power or economy of doing it on the server side.
Herein privacy and utility are clearly in tension. The only sane thing to do is do it on the server but if you ARE going to do it locally doing it on a computer on the clients premises is the only way to actually do it because mobile devices power/compute/cooling/power budgets are so anemic whatever a synthetic benchmark says a device can do in the space of a moment or two.
I'm presuming that the ultimate strategy that a lot of players are going to actually follow is all server all the time wherein companies who are terribly concerned about privacy will rather than doing it locally do it on a server that they own.
It doesn’t need to be a desktop. The point is they make their phones overpowered because nighttime operations while on a charger need that extra juice.
The point of this subthread is directly and only in regards to AI. The original comment I replied to is thus
> The whole selling point of Apples AI stuff is that the processing for most things can be done on the phone and thus your private data won't have to leave you device
A desktop computer or server has substantially more power than an iphone even a nice one like the one which is the topic of the linked article because it has substantially more memory, power, cooling, and so forth.
I fully expect us to continue to rapidly expand what we can do with AI and such usages to require substantial resources to run wherein mobile devices will continue to be too grossly insufficient to run.
It almost definitely does and probably always runs at a fraction of that speed while using up the battery. Even current gen phones don’t do face recognition unless you’re connected to a charger.
And an operating system that's designed for it, because if you want to you can hook up those things now you can cobble something together hooking up those things but to call that experience "desktop like" is mostly held back by how much consideration iOS has put into the concept of a "cursor" designed for clicks. If you hook up a mouse to iOS and want a cursor, you need to turn on some assistive touch accessibility feature to get a circle that's about the size of an index finger tip, with about 10 times the click surface of an ordinary cursor. If you can activate a setting that feels like a hack and get past the bad cursor, only done 2/3 at a given time myself, but I'd imagine if you hook it up to a bigger screen, the resolution probably won't adapt and your cursor will be massive, but you can mirror an iPhone screen to a monitor. As far as using a wireless keyboard though, no issues I've really noted there, behaves like I'd expect a keyboard to, I was surprised when I could CMD-Tab to switch between apps on iOS like a desktop machine, surprised that feature exists in iOS because I don't see how you would invoke that except without an external keyboard, i.e. via touch, so it exceeded my expectations there by supporting that shortcut. If Apple elevated the cursor to less of an afterthought it would open things up a lot more.
Mobile computing performance is largely bounded not by how much work you can do this second but by how much work you do without exhausting your battery too quickly to be usable or overheating.
Comparing them as if both were equally capable of going flat out is deceptive.
Other things being equal working faster means spinning down quicker and using less juice.
That was in a time when people didn’t envision every person in the first world having access to their entire lives at their finger tips.
I would tend to agree that today’s apps are… dogshit. Without a doubt, the vast majority of today workloads (99.9%) should be able to run on 2008ish era processing power if they were well programmed.
This might seem like obscene fast now, but remember, most people replace their phone only when the battery dies, not when next years model comes out.
In other words, thanks to the “overkill” that Apple is willing to sell now, their user five years down the line will still feel that their old phone is a premium product. And they’ll be happy to buy a replacing iPhone for it when it does die.
People can and do replace iPhone batteries, but it's usually taken as a sign that you had the phone long enough to morally justify getting an update. The old phone with dead battery is very often sold and the battery gets replaced - Apple sells refurbished phones too.
> It sure is a shame that we can’t do more with this power. I think it’d be really cool to be able to plug in your iPhone to an external USB-C monitor and run Stage Manager with an external mouse and keyboard.
Even if Apple did this (they won't) having to use Stage Manager for multitasking would make it intolerable anyway.
Which is exciting, except for the fact that this much computing power is useless on a phone. You can't even do 'real' multitasking, and your applications are incredibly limited.
I’m mostly happy with the computing power of my iPhone SE. It has been a bit sluggish lately. It could be new apps being less efficient but I suspect it’s mostly the phone throttling because the battery is old and can’t supply as much current without dropping voltage.
Yet I think the computing power of the A18 is great, and plan to upgrade to iPhone 16 now. Not for what I need today, but for what I need years down the line. Phones last a long time these days. The processor in my iPhone SE (2nd gen) is ancient, yet it’s still OK. My kid will probably use it for a couple of years more.
I’d say that there is a decent chance of phones becoming actually good smart assistants now. Much of that will be driver by specialised hardware, but the general processing power will be useful for some of that processing.
At this point it should be possible to just read the page and extract only actually meaningful and relevant information (+ navigation bits) from it, effectively presenting a "reader mode"-like view instead of the original page content with all the junk and bloat.
Ah, that's cool if it's better than other browsers' reader modes. I'm currently on GNU/Linux so I don't have this option, and none of the browsers that I know about have anything actually usable as a daily driver (so, site navigation, simple forms, etc) rather than decluttering articles now and then.
>It sure is a shame that we can’t do more with this power. I think it’d be really cool to be able to plug in your iPhone to an external USB-C monitor and run Stage Manager with an external mouse and keyboard. Maybe one year.
To dissipate heat you need volume/mass to soak it and surface area to dissipate it. Phones will never have the volume/mass or surface area to compete with normal size computers.
For this use case, since we are already talking about the phone being wired to some physical infrastructure, I don't think it's too much of a leap to imagine a dedicated cooling dock for the phone.
Put a Frore AirJet MEMs fan (or conventional fan) on a holding pad, and that phone could sustain vastly better performance.
Ideally I'd love to see gaming handhelds so the same. I would love a Deck with for example the upcoming Strix Halo APU, that has to throttle way down when portable, that can't effectively cool itself and doesn't have the batteries to run at it's real capabilities. But then you dock the Deck onto a big power supply with active cooling and boom: gaming monster.
We ought to be building portable systems that need external cooling assistance to be fully utilized. Scaling down is enormously effective & advantageous today.
The other point I'd make is that while, yes, maybe even an unaided phone isn't going to win a sustained benchmark, most users on desktops are probably near idle 90%+ of the time. the phones inability to sustain high power isn't really a key factor at all for most computing usages. That there happens to be a big display and keyboard and mouse doesn't really mandate more than what a phone already offers, for the vast vast vast majority of desktop use. So why not?!
It'll be exciting to see Android 15 finally bring forward this promise and potential. I doubt it'll cause a big shift fast. But these capabilities are going mainstream, and phones should be up to it!!
The concept works just fine, Samsung etc have at various times demoed this exact concept with their own android handsets.
Sure it might not be able to run at 100% load for long periods due to cooling restrictions, its still going to be more than fast enough for a lot of the activities most people do.
One of the nice things CPU improvements bring us - the amount of thermal "volume/mass" needed for a given task is going down all the time, and right now an iPhone would comfortably drive a monitor and keyboard, just like the iPad with similar cooling constraints and physical architecture already does.
The screen on the latest iPhone runs at up to 2,868 x 1,320 at 120hz on the Pro Max - some desktop monitors would actually be easier to drive (1080/60 etc) than its own internal display.
The average person spends about 800 on a phone and about 700 on a computer most commonly a laptop.
The latest and best iphone is about $1200. To use it you are going to want an acceptable battery, a screen, a case, keyboard. I should think This will run at least $300–500. You have not for the same amount the average person paid acquired a good phone and a mediocre laptop.
You also have no redundancy if one device is stolen, lost, or broken.
For value minded folks stepping up to a phone nice enough to serve as a mediocre laptop is a non-starter not to mention they probably already have an acceptable version of one when they are shopping for the other.
For the folks more concerned about quality than value they are apt to be very disinterested in stepping down. There is basically no market for this. This is a nerd trap its one of the ideas that seems like it ought to be able to made sense of which has no practical application.
I find that for writing (not coding, writing) I don't need the external monitor. There's an even simpler solution.
I just pair my phone with a lightweight butterfly-foldable BT keyboard ($40) and I can type on the train, plane, etc. It works really well, no laptop needed.
It's a great way to take notes in a lecture hall too, or to do some writing in a cafe while I'm traveling. I've done lots of long-form writing this way and it's perfectly fine. Also great for writing HN comments with.
Lugging a laptop around always seemed overkill to me. Even an iPad is too much weight to carry around.
No, but I don't carry a backpack due to back issues.
Instead I have a small messenger bag which I lug, and you'd be surprised how much a 1 lb iPad Pro 10.5" bears down on you when you are carrying it all day.
You could create a cooling, charging dock for that purpose with an HDMI or DP out. Hell, you could put it in the base of the monitor even. It's definitely feasible for a company like Apple and I could see a market for it in the corporate space.
Current generation computers, sure, but I think there's still steady progress toward increasing amount of compute per unit of energy. For phones, that's almost as important for heat dissipation as it is for battery life, as we're less likely to get more energy per unit of volume in the near future.
This shouldn't be too surprising, should it? The M1 itself is a somewhat scaled up phone CPU. Four years later the baseline has caught up to scaled up.
There were people in the Zen 5 release thread saying the reason AMD had < 10% of the increase on single core after 2 years is just the reality of physics. In half that time this year Apple to the single core score of the iPhone from below the 7950X to above the new 9950X.
Scaling has slowed down in some aspects, it's definitely not the late 90s anymore where your PC is just obsolete 4 years later, but things like this are a good reminder execution by chip designers is still by far the bigger factor in how large the generational growth will be.
Only the low level Mac book. Knowing Apple the dock will cost half the price of a MacBook anyway. Also make it a pro/max feature only that price delta is pure profit.
MacBooks are a looser for profits. They make way more on the pro and upgraded versions that people would still buy. The phone would act like a gateway MacBook lite. Get people hooked on the ecosystem
Crazy times... also newest Snapdragon 8 gen 4 is apparently a bit slower in single core but faster in multicore compared to it, so practically no performance gap across the market, then it boils down to various optimizations.
I just want to have my computer plug into my monitor and transform into a desktop. I’ll pay twice as much to have one device capable of adapting to every form factor.
