This is EXACTLY the kind of clarification I try to bring to conversations abut things like battery longevity. People in my comments easily drop a pithy "it need to have better battery, last two days on a charge", ignoring the fact that every battery (and SOC efficiency) improvement we get just encourages more use. Always appreciate a chat with some nuance. 👍

This is why the old guys love C, memory management. New programmers just assume there's enough memory.

This is exactly the issue. When computers didn't have extra resources software engineers had huge focus on efficiency. But with more hardware they have stopped the focus on efficiency and focussed more on feature and multiples iterations on what peopel do not even necessarily need or even want. 😅

Software will just become more bloated to force you into buying new crap!

The issue isn't that phones are getting more powerful, it's that the software is so locked down that it prevents the optimal use of the power. When my phone can do everything my laptop can do, then I'll be interested in more performance.

I would rather want better battery life and a phone that doesn't easily break.

Let's hope that in 100 years Gary Sims becomes a historical figure to be recorded in every elementary/secondary school textbook ever.

Great video: tech philosophy! There’s also, I think, one more thing to add to these reflections: the industry sells things the consumers don’t necessarily need just to make obsolete their products; it’s not just a quest for the faster or the better. One example: do we really need 4K in a handheld 5 or 6in display? For that, GPU requirements and power must be enormous. Wouldn't it be more practical - and resource savvy - to concentrate on more efficient, more luminous and contrasty screens (yet, if needed)? The Jevons’ Paradox is certainly doped with marketing.

For what it’s worth, on iPhone at least, it kinda feels like we hit a software stagnation point a few years back. There’s very little outside of 3D gaming or alt market emulation that’s gonna really make the phone feel “too slow”. The “race to sleep” paradigm of modern processors has really done a lot to make a processor that feels super fast but doesn’t chug battery.

As for android, Google has been choosing sandboxed security over efficiency/perf with their Scoped storage etc changes, so we dont feel the gains from better SoCs, as software is being written badly to compensate for all the improvements in H/W

I mostly agree with you, but I find it funny because I haven't bought a flagship phone since 2015; Nexus 6. It wasn't a much better experience than my Moto X 2014 and some older phones. I think the gap for "regular use" quickly closed and I explored finding the best value for the money phones for a few years. I have been using the current Pixel A phone since the series started. I also have an iPhone 13 and I feel my Pixel 6a is an overall better experience. 7a kills it.

8:40 There's a caveat in the first point in that like with any computer, storage has the biggest impact in this area, I got the chance to use two different SD 855 devices, one had UFS 2.0 other 3.0 and there's a huge difference in responsiveness in 3.0, to the point that having an 855 was almost pointless because an older 835/845 was nearly as responsive, only reason I even upgraded was because I received an older phone with a cracked screen.

Everyone just wants longer battery life, it's hilarious that we don't have 7 - 14 day battery life already. Would make perfect sense for them to innovate on power storage as we're already outsourcing computational power to the cloud.

I've watched this effect since personal computing became popular back in the 1980s. It's amazing how much work you can get done on a computer without a windowing system or graphical output. But times have changed and there's no going back.

i used to always express this phenomenon in terms of Intel giving us more power every year or so, and Microsoft coming right behind them gobbling it all up with a bunch of bloated crap. As quickly as things change in the tech universe, some things just never do.

One of my favorite paradoxes 🤓 Thanks for pointing out this interesting, big picture approach

I think we are seeing a plateau of smart phone upgrades mainly because no new features are coming out. Apple has seen this. And they also had a plateau of Mac sales since the M1 came out. Even the M2 did not improve sales because the incremental increase in performance did not warrent an upgrade.

Absolutely amazing job. This should be on everyone's feed

i miss the days when we were satisfied with a phone being able to make/receive calls and sms😅

Excellent Gary, thank you. Thought provoking.

Thanks for the episode 😊

great video gary, thanks for making this

I think a better statement is that there will always be benefit for faster smartphone cause the thing is, I agree that there are tasks that my 5 year old phone can't do because it's just simply excruciatingly slow. However, I simply have no desire to do that task on my phone, even when given the appropriate tools to make the task enjoyable, I still won't realistically do it on my phone. To some people smartphones can be fast enough, at least fast enough in a longer timeframe than the current upgrade cycle. Not because there's no harder task to tackle but simply because they have no desire to tackle it on their phone. I would legitimately love a phone that has middling processor but is thick and built to be able to last and repairable. That's a tradeoff I'm willing to make. I think that's what those commenters are trying to say. not that things are going unecessarily fast rather, if I there's improvement in smartphone technology, i want it to be in other area

Clear explanation. Thank you sir.👏

I have heard it stated this way: Any gains that the hardware engineers make the software engineers will piss away. :)

Windows 11 is a very good example for the "bloat" talked about in this video with all the web crap replacing native code.

Great one Gary! 👍

I think it depends on the utility of the device. I have been completely satisfied with the performance of my phone for years now (Pixel 4XL 4 years ago and a pixel 6a for the last half year). If I could plug my phone into a usb4 dock, power two monitors, a keyboard and run Linux that would be different - I would crave performance improvements of my phone then

I changed from a sd 835 6 year old phone to a s21 cos it was spare. Fluidity, webpages, apps, games etc its maybe 10/20% more responsive, not 500% different. Apps like utube no difference. Emulation zero diff other than ps2 n above. Photos are again maybe 20% better, looking back i cant tell which photo was taken with which phones. Apps get optimization for lower end n older spec devices cos they are common.

For everything in general… These companies would rather us pay a regular subscription than to own!

while you might be spot on - there is something else to consider... 1. planned obsolescence - manufacturers need you to buy their latest and greatest 2. lack of software updates (mostly android world), apple does ios updates for quite some time but some features are missing (some due to hardware changes but mostly it is to rob you of the latest and greatest features and force you into buying a new device currently i am using a oneplus 8 and it still works great - good piece of hardware with decent software at this point 3+ years old and i reckon if i installed lineage os on it it would work even better, even a factory reset would probably make it work much better

I just want better reception… 3d scanning would be cool… but idk anything else I need my from my phone

Dude, so much knowledge

Google Maps devs have really taken Wirths law to the next level

Back in the 90's at Intel, we used to say "Intel giveth, and Microsoft taketh away."

In a world ablaze with screens so bright, Our smartphones race, in a ceaseless flight, But heed the tale of paradox's might, Why faster chips won't quench our light. Jevons spoke of a curious lore, A paradox hidden in progress' core, As efficiency grows, we ask for more, Desiring more speed than ever before. With chips that hum and processors grand, We hold technology's gift in our hand, Yet thirst unquenched, a boundless demand, Faster, swifter, at our command. The Jevons Paradox, a truth profound, In each breakthrough, it can be found, For as devices quicken, we're tightly bound, To yearn for more, in a cycle unbound. A swifter app, a snappier game, Only fuels the hunger, the eternal flame, To stream and surf, to stake our claim, In a digital world, always aflame. So, heed the lesson that history imparts, As innovation quickens, in all its arts, The yearning for speed never departs, A dance with paradox, where progress starts. No matter the chip, no matter the code, The thirst for speed forever bestowed, In this boundless race, our fate is sowed, A paradox eternal, in circuits that glowed.

This is great, I do think there is a sense of what is good enough for today however that could be explored. I mean even Apple thinks last year’s iPhone. Chip is good enough for this year’s iPhone. I understand that there will always be a need for more and more compute power but for the average smart phone user putting a pause on increasing performance, and just focusing on efficiency for a generation or two would be a welcome change. Every time Pierce and see what’s out a new node apple talks about how many more billion transistors they can add. If they instead kept the transistor counter, the same, oh, and simply focused on power efficiency it would be amazing what they can do. (they actually did something very similar with the iPhone 13, the iPhone 13 had vary little performance uplift over the 12 but because of the efficiency gains they made, the 13 had an extra 2 hours of battery life.

I'm still waiting for a distributed computing future. Where processes can be offloaded from a weaker device, on to a stronger one, or uses the entire network computing power for certain tasks. Our network speed is almost as fast as the internal bus speed of older processors. I know there are certain industry already having applications doing that, like for video rendering. But I would like to see that as a functionality at the hardware level and in the OS kernel for any processes. That would also make wearables more functional, as they can "leech" into each other resources for processing power and whatnot when running in a PAN. While retaining their power efficiency.

Great piece of commentary professor

Good video and stuff to think about

With current technology Performance/Watt goes up as performance goes up, but that doesn't mean some future technology couldn't give massive power reduction coupled with small performance changes. Gaming platforms like the steam deck allows the user to configure the TDP (Thermal Design Power) so that the user can configure their device to limit the power used by the CPU/GPU giving the user the choice to give up some performance to get better battery life.

You forgot one statement in the is enough bulletpoints: "8GB of VRAM is enough to play at 1080p uktra/high settings" by Nvidia

I don't know my phone has been fast enough, but my laptop with 64 gb ram is struggling with all photoshop and all other resource intensive programs I'd never use on mobile.

This explains a lot about why my new phone after 2.5 years starts to feel slow doing the same tasks. What is your recommendation on how often one should upgrade there smartphone?

I dunno. I'm pretty happy with my s23. So much so that I've kept it in low (light) performance mode since I got it 🤷

I'm perceiving it as V8 engine, it's quite efficient when you're driving 60 mph. But it also can accelerate you faster than small cars. Same with new APUs it's quite efficient on not demanding tasks, but it can handle much harder tasks, when you need it. But overall I agree with the Jevons Paradox, camera apps become much more demanding over years, animations, 120hz games, all of these eat more juice and we will never stop to increase efficiency, performance, and apps that eat more and more battery.

I am a software developer, a geek, a gadget lover - and now I choose a mid range waterproof phone, add a bulky case and a glass screen protector to protect it, disable 120hz refresh, disable animations, disable fast charging, limit charge at 85% It can do all the task I need it to do. I do not need a faster one. More storage and battery life would be welcomed - and I hope replacable batteries will become the norm as I really miss it from the current device.

I haven't really experienced any major performance issues with a phone in the past decade. I even went with a budget phone for a couple of years, and that was adequate. I would prefer optimizations for battery life and better batteries. Bloat is absolutely a problem with software. Feature creep over decades has created this mess of heavy software that's more prone to bugs and security concerns, and some features could be deprecated without most users even noticing. Adding tons of processor intensive silliness like animations to things nobody wants to cares to have animated, is also stupid. (Remember Windows Aero desktop animations? Did anyone use it or just turn it off?) Microsoft Word asks for a minimum of 4GB of HDD (SSD now) on Windows machines. For a word processor! Why? It also requires 2GB of RAM for the 64-bit version. I am hoping AI will have the ability to heavily optimize code and lean out these applications so they are more reasonable.

Fantastic! I adore such discussions! Brooks’ book is a must-read for anyone. Another fantastic book about prediction in technology is “Fumbling The Future” by Smith and Alexander.

Umm, I dunno why I have this differing thought. Through the power of streaming, and the potential to capitalize on such services, I have this idea that the software of the future will be streamed to the devices. HP already demoed this with their last HP Elite X3 Windows 10 Mobile suite for streaming PC-grade software to the device when docked and via Continuum. Currently, we can stream and play high-end AAA games on our phones that can only "dream" of running the games natively. NVidia allows me to use 3D rendering software on their online GPU services - no need for my laptop to have the latest and greatest. So I'm thinking that's more or less the trajectory.

RIGHT! 🤗

My smartphone is fast enough for my needs

The explanation of the roads shows clearly what he's trying to explain, no matter how much resources a phone gets it literally uses it, that's the reason of the business, just to sell the Illusion of a more efficient and powerful machine

“Luxuries become necessities“ - Y. N. Harari

Phone will be able to run the graphics needed for further reality augmentation?

I use my phone as my daily PC via Samsung DeX to a 1440p external display so I welcome more performance.

The thing is, what will happen if we start massively disusing computers? As in, in response to this consumer nightmare, what happens if users force computers to somehow de-evolve and leave their regular lives?

ikr

I do agree with you but there is also a lot of bloat on our phones eating battery and performance. I have installed aosp android 13 on it and I was shocked, it's fast the battery lasts for more than a day I would even say that it feels faster than my daily phone. I don't doubt that we will always need faster processors but won't better optimisation of cleaning garbage background telemetry help our performance today?

No telemetry, background apps running all day, ""secrets backdoor" and obsolescence as main goal to profits simple as that solved issue.

Having said all that, is this year worth upgrading from the iPhone 11 pro max to the 15 pro max??

Users crave for a better battery life so when they hear "power efficiency" they get excited but when they buy the product, it's just another disappointment🤦‍♂. The argument here is there's no proper scaling between the usage of the device and it's battery life, some do actually use their devices moderately so they expect the "promised efficiency"! But companies allow themselves to take that extra juice and use it somewhere else so we end up with the same usage time from 5 years ago!

Definitely its bloated apps, operating systems, and bloated websites. Phone users are mostly using their phones for the same stuff as 10 years ago. I shouldn't need to install windows 10 LTSC, made for embedded systems, on my home PC to get good performance.

This would also apply to general energy consumption, the more energy and efficiency humanity gets the more energy we use and this isn't declining, that's why we need more and more green energy sources for the always increasing demand.

People saying we need efficiency not performance is not that wrong 8g1 888 and 865 have about the same efficiency (talking about cpu) because 865 didn't use more than 6-7 watts but 8g1 can ramp up to 12watts is cpu heavy stuff so absolute performance is higher but it's useless

Separating "coding" from "designing" is a core fail right there. That practice stems directly from the "man-month" mindset. It presumes that one can hitch the "wagon" of some "project management team"-puppeteered "designer" to a long mule team of low-ball coders and get results anywhere near using proper developers requiring minimal oversight and paid a reasonable salary for their value.

M$ should write a guide on how to create BLOAT! There r plenty of so called “bloated” devs and system designers today and very few who get the concept and art of programming with system design right! Shame on M$ for setting this bloat as standard with their Windowses and others SW. Gates deserves a statue in the amusement park with the quote of needing only 640 KB👋🤦‍♂️ Thx Gary for making this vid.

It’s is and has been so since last four years. Have replaced the battery once and will do it again.

Although we've been seeing exponential growth for a long time, it will eventually plateau on a long enough time scale.

In the age of Commodore 64 people had to do with the memory at hand. Now that I have that in gigabytes it's time to load up the memory and the 64Gb has been spoken for.

Depends what you use it for, if all your doing is browsing, UKposts, streaming etc than it will be fast enough for quite a while. If your on the bleeding edge than yeah nothing will be fast enough for you lol.

So does this warrant the need to upgrade a phone every year to a newer processor?

What happened to speed test g?

got the asus rog 7 ultimate not sure if I need a new one for the next 4 years or more. That thing is fast.

Most expert predictions don't age well... kinda hoping Gary's will be the exception. Screens are getting bigger, foldable phones are starting to make sense...game console maker ATARI went out of business making similar mistakes that Nokia made ... exciting times ahead for sure. God willing I'll be a witness. I wonder where the good ol' PC is headed next though? Any predictions?

I need a living computer in my pocket.

6:00 They're not exactly wrong, Most flagship chips nowdays are more than capable of running any daily apps & 99% of Top 25 most popular games smoothly for a phone's lifecycle (which varies from person to person but I like to think it's about 3-5 years before they upgrade to the next one) Phones have gotten 500% faster but apps & games haven't gotten 500% more demanding over these 8 years.

Someone needs a 64 core x3 core at 2.4ghz cpu for dat minesweeper!

There's no reason for any individual to have only one computer in their home

Those bullet points of comments people make is interesting, it shows people are willing to keep there phones and tech for longer, which is responsible I am told.

need to get a phone with 10,000 mah battery

It's everything never enough for us people

Ok sure, but I still disagree that you need a more powerful soc to just scroll social media. Yes websites and apps are getting more demanding but that rate is much slower than the rate of performance we get from soc generations. For example my old Galaxy S9+ is still plenty powerful to do all the basic things a phone does despite being 5 years old. The only reason I had to upgrade was battery degradation and Samsung dropping support. It definitely wasn’t because the phone didn’t have enough performance

Its always the same , the more power we have , the more we find more ways to use to use it up :) .

Honestly, look into refurbished phones. I know,....but let ME explain. First, I would suggest buying from a refurbisher on eBay or Amazon. Canadian Amazon only offers 90 days warranty. I bought mine from an eBay authorized refurbisher and got a year's warranty. My Note 10+ arrived in pristine condition, good battery life and really, has more features than newer models. It won't get more software updates but will get security updates for another year or two. That's not even a big deal anymore. Android components mostly get updated from the Play Store now. Samsung updates many components from their store. At this point you won't get much of a processor update year to year. All high end smartphones from the last few years are more than good enough for the point and shoot photography most of us do (birthday parties, kids, pets) Buy an entry level DSLR for more serious stuff. You have some extra cash, after all. The little lenses on your smartphone will never be as good. It's just not physically possible no matter what Samsung or Apple puts on the spec sheet.

And there you go folks...BLOATWARE it is! All Operating System designers should ideally make two versions of their software, the flagship and the lite version...or if not, embed a code that "learns" the hardware and debloats the OS on-the-fly.

Ok I can understand wher the bp" just make the battery bigger" croud is coming from, for their ous of yheir pone the lerformance is allready good enugh, but their battery runs down to quickly, and what us the mist obvious and simplest ( ignoring the space constraints in other phones for a second) way of doing that, , I'l tako obvious answers fror 100 plz yea increasing the size of the battery. Ofc this allmost never happens brcause 1 the gtoup yhat runs out of battery and is onwilling to carryba powerbank is small compared to the gtoup that wants more features. Allsp features are easier to sell then longer battery life in most cases because they provide better screenshots/demos so we can guess where the pr people are pushing. Change over time is an odd thing 500%over a 8 years sounds like a lot but it is (only) 22.3%/yr now this is still pretty fantastic.

Except I don't use it any different, I use my cellular for calls, texts and UKposts. So I have seen better battery life and all that. I also don't upgrade phones every year, Lol.

I am just waiting for the day when we can control the smartphone using our minds. This is already possible with computers (research).

I will say that my current phone is 5 years old (XS Max), and it's more than fast enough, never feeling sluggish. My last phone likely wouldn't have kept me happy this long. So while I don't disagree with your presentation, I would amend it by saying demand isn't increasing exponentially or even linearly with increased cpu efficiencies. The same can be said with desktops, I have computers that are pusing 9 years old, not only do they still work, they have kept up with the increased burden of modern websites and apps; taking a computer from 91' and using it in 98'/99', that would've been unthinkable however. I think as technologies mature, our expansion of new uses decelerates over time...never stopping of course. ...I also feel coal isn't a perfect facsimile for computational efficiencies, but alas I've no energy to explain, typed enough already.

People are never satisfied with what they’ve got , they always look to the next thing.

advanced computational pho... ah yes... photography

I don't see why we would ever need more than 64GB RAM for home computing. And that's being generous.

The only performance i need is Qualcomm to beat apple in geekbench single core 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 But in reality the performance is plenty good as of right now

The reason why we don’t drive 300mph cars is that other factors - road capacity and safety- limit performance. It’s the same with phones - network and backend server capacity and speed are the things that actually determine the experience of the vast majority of users.

My Huawei P20 Pro is 5 years old. The battery still lasts 2 days and I find it's as fast as the day I bought it.

3:06 Apart of Intel recent CPU :) ( a joke ish)

Well everything is proportional to your screen size. If you keep your screen size constant your benefit from faster cpu is marginal. I noticed Apple has introduced 15" macbook air after furnishing this line with a powerful cpu, because you don't need that powerful cpu if you are using an 11" toy laptop. Simalar trends exists in phones too, they now introduce flip phones to maximize the display size. I wonder why nobody makes slim 18" laptops and 16" tablets?

Maybe with the new advancements in AI, code creation can be made to be more efficient if developers uses it as an aid. Just a thought like have an AI scan over a developers source code and point out where his or her's code is inefficient and suggest efficiencies in the code like an AI over the developer's shoulder keeping a closer watch.

I call bullshit. The theory is nice and all, but is only a possible situation. The rising efficiency of my washing machine doesn’t significantly increase my demand for it, unless I previously didn’t wash out of fear of the cost. It would have had to be the limiting factor, and CPU performance at least isn’t limiting here. Very true still for servers, but I’ve never fully utilised the capabilities of my iPhone and probably won’t given the stagnating nature of apps on it.