Do Apple and Google Sabotage Older Phones? What the Graphs Don't Show 281
Harvard economics professor Sendhil Mullainathan takes a look in the New York Times at interesting correlations between the release dates of new phones and OSes and search queries that indicate frustration with the speed of the phones that people already have. Mullainathan illustrates with graphs (and gives plausible explanations for the difference) just how different the curves are over time for the search terms "iPhone slow" and "Samsung Galaxy slow." It's easy to see with the iPhone graph especially how it could seem to users that Apple has intentionally slowed down older phones to nudge them toward upgrading. While he's careful not to rule out intentional slowing of older phone models (that's possible, after all), Mullainathan cites several factors that mean there's no need to believe in a phone-slowing conspiracy, and at least two big reasons (reputation, liability) for companies — Apple, Google, and cellphone manufacturers like Samsung — not to take part in one. He points out various wrinkles in what the data could really indicate, including genuine but innocent slowdowns caused by optimizing for newer hardware. It's an interesting look at the difference between having mere statistics, no matter how rigorously gathered, and knowing quite what they mean.
Not Just Phones (Score:2, Interesting)
It seems like *everything* starts slowing down or breaking for no reason. I don't buy wear/tear as a reason when everyone and their grandmother suggests that you need to update the firmware to get it working again. If it worked fine with the old firmware, why is updating the firmware fixing the problem? WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY OLD FIRMWARE!?
No need for a conspiracy (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think there's any reason to read a conspiracy into the situation. They release a new phone that's much faster, and then they release an updated OS with new features to take advantage of that extra computing power. Adding features that use more computing power makes the old phones seem slow.
I'm tempted to compare it to the development of desktops and laptops, both of which went through similar upgrade cycles before leveling off a bit. However, there's a big difference in that desktop and laptops were developing quickly to cram features into the OS, at the cost of focus on efficiency, which serves as a partial explanation as to why things became "slow" with upgrades. Desktop and laptop software went through a period of bloat, and then in recent years, additional features traded off against speed gains from recoding things with efficiency as a goal. Meanwhile, Android and iOS needed to be written to be efficient from the start. They wanted to make the hardware as small/thin/light as possible, which meant that the power requirements had to be low. To give an example of the effects of this, a requirement for using as little power as possible has been the reason iOS has always limited multitasking.
Re:Graph is search results, not speed measurements (Score:4, Interesting)
It is a bit strange they did not correlate to iOS releases, but iPhone releases.
I find it much more likely that when you upgrade to iOS+1, the new features slow your phone down. I've experienced that several times, my 3GS became "much slower" after upgrading it. The new iOS had more eye candy etc.
But that's not the same as saying the old hardware is slower.
Weird premise (Score:3, Interesting)
The article says, "phones feel slower over time as they hold more software". How does this follow? How does the phone get "slower" just because more software is installed? This sounds an awful lot like the cargo cult thinking of "well the hard drive is full so we have to buy a new computer because this one is slow."
I know some software will start agents on boot, but they just sit in the background and do little. top reveals very little CPU time and memory consumed by these.
Re:my ipad 2 still works (Score:5, Interesting)
You must not be very observant or extremely patient if you think iPad 2 is the same "use speed" as it was 2-3 iOS versions ago. It's tremendously slower under iOS 7...
Re: Not Just Phones (Score:5, Interesting)
The question though is whether they're instructing the compiler to *optimize* for each target platform, or if the only difference is the drivers, etc. included for the different hardware.
Re:Human recall slows down too. (Score:4, Interesting)
perhaps Apple and google will ration their back end service such that a user of an old phone only gets the equivalent compute power that was available at the time the phone was first sold. Newer phones thus pay for upgrades in the computing infrastructure, and thus are entitled to superior backend services.
Re:Not Just Phones (Score:5, Interesting)
Graph is search results, not speed measurements. (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly! The methodology is incorrect. And, after having spoken with the good people at AT&T (that's right, buy at the sign of the Death Star) it is the Telcos that are responsible for slow-downs, not the telephone makers.
Why? The Telcos want you using the latest tech so that you will have a two-year contract with them that you cannot easily get out of without paying them lots of money. This keeps you "loyal." And it gets you on the treadmill of upgrades that ensures your loyalty. So what the telcos do is that they "sunset" technology that supports the older phones. And all of their upgrades on their cell towers (which usually aren't really towers that much any more) support new radios and signaling, not the old stuff.
So blame Apple and Samsung all you want, but it's the Telcos that are responsible for slowing down the older tech, not the manufacturers.
Re: Not Just Phones (Score:5, Interesting)
My smartphone (Samsung Galaxy II) started running slowly. Even after I removed all the unused apps that I had downloaded, movies and photos, it was still running slow. Then I started looking through every single folder. It seems that the trash-cah wasn't actually emptying, and that there was a directory called ".faces" which seemed to archive every single picture that the AI software thought was a face. After those files were removed, my phone regained it's original speed.
Re: Not Just Phones (Score:4, Interesting)