How iOS 12 is making
my iPhone SE feel like new again.
my iPhone SE feel like new again.
Though I love the four-inch form factor, I've always been a bit disappointed in how Apple treats the SE. It lacks the flagship advanced technology that we love in even the bottom tier ("bottom tier" being above the SE) iPhone. Its guts and hardware are years old, technologically. Even when it was only a year old, I had already noticed a slowdown in performance.
A note on betas
Though I am giving my first-hand experience running iOS 12 on an iPhone SE, it's important to keep in mind that it is still in its beta stages.
Things may, and likely will, change before iOS 12 officially launches this fall.
These performance improvements may change (though they will probably only get better), so what I say now isn't necessarily reflective of what you'll see in the Gold Master release.
The test
Even though I've moved onto the iPhone X, I still keep my SE around because I love the size. This year, I decided to turn it into a beta testing device and installed the public beta of iOS 12.
The performance improvement was immediately noticeable.
When Apple unveiled iOS 12 at WWDC 2018, it noted that one of the major new features coming this fall is performance improvements. The latest software update is supposed to make app launching up to 40% faster, the keyboard to appear up to 50% faster, and the camera to launch up to 70% faster.
"Cool," I thought, but didn't really consider it after that.
Not until I started testing iOS 12 on my iPhone SE. Having switched to the iPhone X, the SE really felt like a dinosaur before. I didn't even like using it very much because everything took so much time to load.
It's not magic
With iOS 12, it feels like the SE is brand new, with a brand new processor chip and extra RAM, even though it's the same exact iPhone I got three years ago.
We like to say things like, "It works like magic," but really it's not magic at all. The development team at Apple worked very hard to make these significant improvements to iOS performance.
iMore Editor-at-Large Rene Ritchie explains in detail how Apple managed this feat with faster processor ramp-ups, improved scrolling, and fetching data in the background.
Most importantly, Apple made changes to how our devices react to memory requests. In iOS 12, an app will 64, 32, or even 8-bits, depending on what the request calls for. This significantly lowers how often large memory demands are active.
These under-the-hood improvements are not so under-the-hood. It's like dropping a Hemi into a classic Impala. You notice it.
What's old is new again
There's no mistaking that iOS 12's performance enhancements help older devices. It's the little things that I noticed first.
When I launch an app, it loads much faster, even third-party apps. Trello is a perfect example. I basically hate using it, but it's the companywide program for tracking what we write about every day. In iOS 11, on my iPhone X, it takes a very long time to load and often freezes for nearly a minute before working at all.
Trello on my iPhone SE loads in seconds and, though it still freezes up on occasion, it gets back on track much faster.
Many other apps load at the exact same speed on my iPhone SE running the iOS 12 beta as they do on my iPhone X running iOS 11.4 when they've been opened before. They still load faster on iPhone X when I'm launching an app that was previously closed in multitasking, but it's definitely faster than before.
The Camera app loads at the exact same speed as it does on my iPhone X in iOS 11. Whether I'm tapping in from the app, loading from Control Center, or swiping left from the Lock screen. There is no hesitation.
You have no idea how good it feels to see my iPhone SE working as fast and smooth as an iPhone X. I'm so proud of the little guy.
My iPhone SE finally feels like a pro
People with newer devices aren't as likely to notice the performance improvements. Your iPhone is already speedy! These changes are going to really feel good to iPhone owners that haven't upgraded in a couple of years. I noticed it as soon as I started using my iPhone SE with the iOS 12 public beta 1.
If you're still holding on to the four-inch form factor and your favorite mobile device is the iPhone SE. You don't have to wish so hard for the second-generation version now. With iOS 12, your iPhone SE is going to feel new again, which will make you much happier as you wait for the rumored SE 2.
Remember: iOS 12 is still in beta. The performance improvements I talk about here may not necessarily be the same when the software update launches to the public this fall.
Have you tried it?
Are you running the beta of iOS 12 on an iPhone SE? Have you noticed the performance improvements? Tell me about your experience in the comments section.
iOS 12: How Apple is taking us through the looking glass with ARKit 2
With support for environment maps, 2D and 3D objects, persistence, and multi-person experiences, Apple just augmented ARKit — for real!
One day, Augmented Reality (AR) will live in our glasses or contact lenses, in the photons hacked on their way to our visual receptors, or embedded right into our brains. For now, it lives inside our iPhones and iPads. Apple seems to want to make sure it goes as fast and as far as possible with the technology on our current devices so it's as mature as possible by the time we get to whatever comes next.
That suits me just fine.
Reminders of the last ARKit
ARKit is Apple's framework for understanding what the camera sees and tracking the position and orientation of that camera relative to the world around it. That includes surfaces, objects, and faces, and their movements and expressions.
ARKit 1.0, introduced just one short year ago this month, could handle single-user experiences and horizontal surfaces, as well as lighting conditions, and could render virtual 3D objects into the scene — using SpriteKit, SceneKit, or Metal templates — that felt almost like they belonged in the real world.
ARKKit 1.5, which shipped earlier this year, included support for vertical and irregular surfaces, continuous autofocus, and relocalization so apps could resume from background.
ARKit 2.0, currently in beta, includes 4:3 video formats (think iPad); 2D image tracking and 3D object detection, so a photo can drag an augmentation with it, and a real-world model can come alive through AR; environment textures and mapping to make the augmented look more real; persistent experiences, so you can put that model away at home today, take it back out at school tomorrow, and continue right where you left off; improved face tracking, specifically for winking, gaze, and tongue — yes, tongue — movement; and… wait for it… multi-user experiences.
What's new in ARKit 2.0
There's a ton of cool tech in ARKit 2, including a new, standardized file format for AR called USDZ. It was launched in collaboration with Pixar and Adobe, so it should catch on.
The mesh for face tracking still looks totally sci-fi. Apple renders it with lighting that estimates intensity, direction, and ambient color temperature, but also provides spherical harmonic coefficients — yeah, I had to look it up, too — for apps that need them. It basically makes rendered augmentations look like they fit into the real world around them.
Some find the new gaze-tracking creepy and the tongue detection a tad on the excessive side. I haven't explored the former enough to form an educated opinion on it, though I'll be doing just that before the fall. The latter is just plain fun, though. (It's also binary for now, so tongue in or out, no elaborate gymnastics just yet.)
Map saving and loading are what enables persistence and multi-person experiences. Instead of generating and then throwing away the 3D world map, ARKit now provides it to developers, complete with simple anchors and support for custom anchors, to keep and share.
That multi-person though...
For multi-user, because the world map represents a single, real-world coordinate system, one person can initiate the experience and then share it with one or more other people. Each of them shares the same AR space from their own physical perspective. It does this by being not only faster to initialize in iOS 12, but through faster and more robust tracking and plane detection.
The experience is shared locally through multi-peer Bluetooth and Wi-Fi networking, which means you're not relying on the cloud, which is great for performance and privacy. You can use the internet when you want to, not because you have to.
There's also a fiendishly clever system for reflection mapping. While building the world map, ARKit also uses computer vision to build out a cube or other map representation based on scene texture. Machine learning is used to fill in any holes and create the "hallucination" of a complete map — as long as you don't look too closely. Reflection probes then detect objects and apply that texture when and as appropriate.
I had the chance to try the LEGO ARKit experience at WWDC and it was a ton of fun. It uses the 3D object detection, which means the object needs to be both built in the real world and scanned into the digital one first. Those objects need to be textured, rigid, and non-reflective, at least for now.
The real-world LEGO building sat on a table but, with an iPad, I could crack it wide open, drop the Joker in, and watch as he promptly set it on fire. Then, another person I was playing with could call up The Batman, get him into the chopper, and rescue the clowns (?!) while a third positioned a firetruck to put the blaze out. I've built LEGO for years, including a pretty great Arkham Asylum set, and I'd like nothing more than to bring it to life with my godkids for a few hours every week.
I also played a bunch of the SwiftShot game, which is a code sample for ARKit. You have three catapults. Your opponent has three catapults. Last catapult standing wins. What made it so much fun, especially the tournament on the last day of WWDC, was that multiple people could join in and watch and, when that happens, it starts to blur the lines between augmented and reality.
More than just fun and games
Shared experiences are going to be transformative in everything from education, where a teacher can lead a classroom through augmented explorations and labs, to enterprise, where teams can collaborate on prototyping, production, repair, and iteration.
So, yeah, we're all still semi-awkwardly holding up our phones and tablets to do all this – for now. But, again, at some point in the near future we won't be. And Apple will have all this technology — and apps will have all of this content and these services — for us when that time comes.
Clever fruit company.
iOS 12: How Apple will make your old iPhone feel new again
With iOS 12, Apple is doubling down on speeding up.
There are some core elements of software that Apple believes are important enough to require dedicated teams to keep them in focus. Privacy is one. They're involved in the design of new features from the very beginning. Security is another. Nothing should ship that compromises the integrity of the system. Accessibility, because the company rightly believes it isn't a nice-to-have but a must-have. And performance, who constantly seek zero regression not just for new features and devices but for every feature and device currently being shipped.
Members of the performance team, for a long time, have carried older devices running upcoming operating systems to help make sure the new bits worked well on old atoms. Individuals on the software engineering teams have done likewise. It's not just part of the job, they know their family members and friends have older devices — in some cases very old devices — and not only do they want to ensure the best experience possible, they know that, come the fall, they'll get an earful about it if they don't.
But, most years, getting version x.0 launched on time is a sprint to the finish line. Everyone does their best but, inevitably, deal breakers and showstoppers begin to swallow more and more time and attention, and reality sets into what you can do now vs. what you'll have to leave for x.1, x.2, or even x.3 or x.4.
This year, though, performance wasn't just part of the job, it was the headline feature of iOS 12. And that meant everyone, from the executives and managers setting the priorities to the creators and directly responsible individuals who first built or now own the specific frameworks, were invested in devoting all of their resources into making iPhone and iPad faster and more responsive not just on current generation, 2017 hardware, but on up to five generations going back to 2013.
You are what you update
While, by virtue of its modular model, it takes Google months, sometimes a year or more, to get the latest version of Android onto a single-digit percentage of the existing devices that run it, and many of those devices are lucky if they ever see any updates at all, let alone a year, two, or three down the line, Apple makes it a point of pride that every iOS device, on every carrier, in every part of the world, all gets the same update at the same time, and keeps getting updates multiple times a year, going back generations.
With iOS 12, Apple is supporting the same set of iPhones, iPads, and iPod touch it supported with iOS 11: Everything with a 64-bit processor, which is everything since late 2013.
Apple believes those updates are part of the value of the products it sells. It may not be any more immediately tangible than the free classes offered at Apple Stores, but it hopes when prices are compared, it's not just the product people see — it's the commitment to supporting that product and actively helping you get the most out of it.
It makes Apple's software and services a better fit for its hardware, which typically stays active for generations — not just years after it was bought, but through successive owners, as it's sold or handed down.
It might seem like a poor business decision on Apple's part. After all, people happy with their old devices aren't as likely to upgrade to new ones. I think Apple sees it as an investment, though. People happy with their old devices are more likely to buy from Apple again when they finally do decide to upgrade to a new one. They're also more likely to convince friends and family, some of whom have creaky, cracking, nearly un-chargeable, almost always un-updatable, devices from other vendors to upgrade to Apple next as well.
It's an optimistic model, but when it's both the best thing and the right thing to do, you do it.
For a while, though, some of that added value and optimism has been tarnished. People still got the updates but some started to see them not as great new features but as increased load on already straining hardware.
Late last year that all came to a head with the #iPhoneSlow controversy, and Apple's decision to gate performance in order to preserve battery life and prevent unexpected shutdowns.
it's easy to say Apple is damned if it does and damned if it doesn't: Claims that Apple adds new features to overload old devices to push upgrades are matched by equal and opposite claims that Apple witholds new features to inflate demand for upgrades. But it's Apple's job to navigate those treacherous, often ludicrous waters, and find the absolute best balance for as many customers as possible.
Enter iOS 12.
From #iPhoneSlow to #iPhoneGO!
There are never enough engineers. Not even for a company as wealthy as Apple. The number of people capable of working at Apple's level, willing to work in Cupertino, California and everything that entails, will accept the secrecy and industry isolation that comes with the job, and aren't tempted by startups, VCs, IPOs, or less demanding, less restrictive options elsewhere, is always limited in a way money alone can never solve.
Typically, the best and the brightest spend the year working on the big new flagship features or the foundational improvements that will enable subsequent big new flagship features.
This year, Apple had many of them spend a lot of their time improving the performance of existing frameworks and technologies instead. (You could argue, and I'm guessing many did, that this is a foundational improvement that will enable subsequent big new flagship features.)
The results can be found in the numbers Apple gave during the WWDC 2018 keynote:
- Apps launch up to 40% faster.
- Keyboard launches up to 50% faster and remains more responsive.
- Camera launches up to 70% faster.
- Share sheet launches up to 100% faster.
And, impressively, much of this remains true even when an older device is already under load.
Everything old is new-feeling again
Achieving the kind of performance enhancement iOS 12 offers starts with the silicon. Because Apple designs its chipsets in-house, it can build and optimize for exactly what it needs. That includes changing the normal, slow processor ramp up to an almost immediate one. (Think going from something that graphs like a gentle, symmetrical hill to something that looks like the front end of a crashing wave.)
This, for example, helped solve a weird situation where a device under no load would drop frames but, when under slight load, it would not (because, in the latter case, it was already ramped up). And it was done by passing information about what scrolling was happening and when acceleration will be needed from the interface frameworks to the CPU controller. That way, the silicon knows what's about to happen and what's needed to make it happen smoothly.
On the software side, Apple worked to improve scrolling (UITableView, UICollectionView, and similar custom views). On most devices, which operate at 60Hz, there's 16 milliseconds to set up, fill, and draw content into the cells that make up a view before frames start to drop and scrolling is affected. On a 120Hz iPad Pro, just 8 milliseconds.
iOS 10 began to address this with a prefetch API, which could work in the background to prepare views and prevent work having to be done on-demand when resources could already be strained. With iOS 12, Apple removed some edge cases which caused problems like drawing the same frame twice (which is indistinguishable from a dropped frame). In general, iOS 12 is also more intelligent about how it schedules prefetches, avoiding concurrency and handling them serially instead.
Auto Layout, the foundation for size classes, affects all of Apple's multi-size and, for iPad, multi-window displays. It's also been significantly improved in iOS 12. Independent sibling views, for example, used to scale linearly. Now, they scale slight sub-linearly. Dependent sibling views in iOS 11 scaled exponentially. Now, they scale linearly. Same with nested views.
Apple also addressed memory, which directly relates to performance. Previously, when apps made a large memory request, the system had to go find that memory from somewhere — likely other apps. That delayed the current app but also undermined the other apps. (If you later went back to one, it would likely have to reload either partially or completely, which takes time.)
iOS 12 helps address this, for example, with new techniques like Automatic Backing Stores. That means an app can draw a full fidelity Portrait Mode image if it needs to, but if it's only drawing a low fidelity line-art image, it can drop from 64-bits down to 8-bits to significantly reduce the demands on memory.
Apple is also deprecating the old UIWebView API for the more modern WKWebview, which works on both iOS and macOS, and runs in its own process, so even if it crashes, it doesn't take the app down with it.
From zero regression to postive progression
The performance fixes in iOS 12 go deep. Running the beta on older hardware right, I can already see and feel significant improvements at the system level.
Now, some improvements depend on developers adopting Apple's performance recommendations. So, we'll have to wait until the fall, when iOS 12 ships and iOS 12-optimized apps arrive in the App Store along with it, before any final gains can be measured and conclusions drawn.
I'm optimistic though. Not just that iOS 12 will improve the performance of iPhones, iPads, and iPod touch going back to the introduction of 64-bit back in late 2013, but that maintaining that performance isn't just a one-and-done but a key part of Apple's strategy going forward.
After all, the higher you want to go, the better you have to maintain your foundations.
Read the full iOS 12 Preview: The deep dive
How iOS 12 is making my iPhone SE feel like new again.
Reviewed by Jenni William
on
19:52
Rating:
Reviewed by Jenni William
on
19:52
Rating:
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