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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. |
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