Is software deliberately being 'slowed down' in order to sell 'faster' hardware?

Maurice Chavez

Good afternoon,

I have recently been thinking about how every single phone I've owned since the "smartphone" takeover ends up grinding to a halt after a year or so, and after 2-3 years it's almost completely unusable even after clearing all data.

I remember one of the first ever Android smartphones I purchased was the Orange San Francisco (aka ZTE Blade), I had owned a couple of Windows Mobile devices before this but they were not as great as Android. I recall opening the internet browser and being astonished at the speed at which pages loaded. Web pages loaded with blazing speed and it was extremely responsive, especially after rooting the phone and installing optimised custom roms with bloatware removed.

Now fast forward to today, and the same web pages and same apps and same functions on the same phone are extremely slow at least 500-1000% slower in fact.

Take whatsapp for example, back then it was blazing fast on a phone with 600Mhz singe core cpu and 256MB of ram, always loaded instantly, and was very responsive. Now the latest iteration of whatsapp requires 30-50 times more memory footprint and 10 times more cpu resources, yet it performs exactly the same functions as 10 years ago, it's just a basic messaging app. Even bog standard text messaging apps now require a quad core processor and a 20 times larger memory footprint just to send a text message.

This isn't limited to the phone industry. All software & hardware has been subject to this. Lets take BBC News website for example. If you go to BBC News it displays exactly the same information as it did 10-20 years ago, however nowadays it requires 30-50 times more memory, yet the information being displayed is exactly the same, several paragraphs of text and a couple of images.

Another example is Microsoft word. I tried loading up Microsoft Word on an old P4 system and it took about 0.5 seconds and uses about 8MB of memory. However I tried office 365 on a relatively new i5 machine and it's terribly slow, uses considerably more ram and CPU resources, yet it's performing exactly the same functions; type a little, maybe draw a table, apply some styles, change the font, etc, the only difference is the visuals are slightly more modern.

In my opinion, no one needed to upgrade their hardware after about 2012, 2015 at most, but we have been forced to keep on upgrading because software is becoming so much more bloated and slower, instead of becoming optimised and faster. I believe this is what needs to happen in order for them to keep on selling new phones. I mean we get new phone models every single month they are churning out new phone models faster than the disposable film cameras of the 90s.




My question is when will it stop? We keep on increasing hardware performance 5-10 percent every year, and slowing down software by 5-10 percent every year. So will we simply keep on going until we are all forced to carry 96-core phones with 64 Terabytes of ram (and beyond) just to send a text message?

Thanks for reading and would love to hear everyone's opinions about the relationship of performance between software and hardware, as well as your thoughts of the future and where this is headed.

Bl4ckGryph0n

There are a lot more features nowadays. And often the 'slow' part is actually because applications have a habit of 'phoning home'. So sloppy coded software waits for those events to be completed before it continues.

Tempest

I would say it's more along the lines of what's been stated for literally decades now.
Computers have got far far faster, RAM and storage have got cheaper and cheaper.
Programmers have got sloppier and lazier as there is no longer, for the most part any need to code like you used to have to long long ago and optimise your programming.

I kinda also suspect, but may be wrong here, some programmers from the past were about to do things, that some today would not have a clue how to when it comes to getting things done in a small space.

The hacking crew demos, in assembler still remind me of what someone really clever can do it so little space.

Or course, I may be speaking total rubbish

Johnmcl7

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

I'd say the simple answer is no I don't think it's deliberate but I think it's more sloppiness.  What I've noticed now there's a real change in attitude to blame the hardware not the software, I was working on a server for someone and when I logged in I commented to the owner I was impressed at the specification as it had 24 cores and 64GB ram which was a huge amount at the time.  However the owner said you wouldn't know it as the performance on the server was poor blaming the hardware not the software.

Similarly whenever a system is running poorly the first requested solution is always to add more cores, more ram never the fault of the software.  In turn that means software writers don't need to be so efficient because people will add more resources to sort the problem.

Webpages have changed significantly from fairly basic text and graphics to sophisticated scripts and media, many are also marred by very intensive advertising which consume a large number of resources.

I also think there's problems with a lack of optimisation with older devices even though they have sufficient performance.  One of the reasons I retired an older Note 4 was because the final version of Android Samsung released for it performed poorly even though its CPU is fast and there's newer much lower spec devices which performed better.  At that point the phone was three years old and there's little reason for Samsung to improve it, the custom rom community can be very good at supporting older devices if they can get suitable access which unfortunately manufacturers won't always provide.

The desktop market has very much levelled off over the last few years with no real advancements in performance for general users, the processor manufacturers can more and more cores but that's of no benefit for most people.  The advantage however is that there's not the same need to upgrade hardware any more, a solid dual core machine with 8GB memory and an SSD should perform most general tasks well.  I remember in the early 2000's as Intel and AMD were fighting it out and I found I was upgrading every 18 months or so to keep my machine on top.  Nowadays my performance desktop which I still use for high resolution gaming, VR and video production was bought back in 2011 with its original i7 3930K processor which still does a decent job.  It's had some other upgrades but even those are doing well, the GTX 1070 graphics card is almost four years old now and the new 20xx cards don't really offer much advantage aside from ray tracing.

I think we're going to see the mobile market level off in the same way although I still think we'll see older handsets not offering suitable performance because they're not given the work needed to keep them optimised.

My much bigger concern though is the hardware design itself which is definitely not designed to last.  One of the reasons my Note 4 lasted because it was tough, it had a few drops with barely a mark to show for it and even when I crashed my mountain bike and slid along the ground on the phone all it had to show for it was a very slight bend in the frame and a very slight pink blemish to the screen.  The Note 8 I've replaced it with though feels very fragile in comparison as it has a slippery glass back and the way its screen curves round the edges means where the frame would have taken the impact, now it will easily shatter the screen.  I'm actually surprised it's lasted two years even though I'm careful as it's so normal now to see people with cracked screens.  The non-removable battery is a pain as well as I can't quickly and cheaply replace it.

Tempest

I can't understand why some things take so long.
Like say when you flip a switch and it needs to go thru some setup routine, like a normal BIOS on a PC.
Running at millions of operations a second, I don't see why it's not pretty much done it all, before your finger has hardly even left the button.

Steven

Am with @Tempest and @Bl4ckGryph0n it is simplification to take the cynical view it is all about capitalism and money making without holding all stakeholders to account

It is also hyperbolic to suggest whatsapp has not changed in ten years. Introducing video calling was pretty big

The problem with anecdotal posts on the internet is precisely there is no context. Whatsapp runs fine on my Samsung Note 4, a model released in 2014.  Anecdote.