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Apple Hardware

Life's Too Short For Slow Computers (theverge.com) 137

Posted by msmash from the did-they-blow-it? dept.
Nilay Patel, the Editor-in-Chief of The Verge looks back the Apple Watch, the company's first wearable device which went on sale roughly a year ago. In the article, Patel notes that Apple Watch, a computing product, is just too slow at doing some of the most basic things such as running apps. He writes: Here's the problem with the Apple Watch: it's slow. It was slow when it was first announced, it was slow when it came out, and it stayed slow when Watch OS 2.0 arrived. When I reviewed it last year, the slowness was so immediately annoying that I got on the phone with Apple to double check their performance expectations before making "it's kind of slow" the opening of the review. [...] The grand ambition of the Apple Watch is to be a full-fledged computer on your wrist, and right now it's a very slow computer. If Apple believes the watch is indeed destined to become that computer, it needs to radically increase the raw power of the Watch's processor, while maintaining its just-almost-acceptable battery life. And it needs to do that while all of the other computers around us keep getting faster themselves.
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Life's Too Short For Slow Computers

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  • The apple watch (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Altus ( 1034 )

    is not designed to be a full fledged computer, treating it as such is stupid.

    Though I will freely admit that many third party apps suck (and are often trying to solve problems that are not suited to the watch).

    • Re:The apple watch (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04, 2016 @09:27AM (#52044391)

      Doesn't make it not uselessly slow.

      Here are two things that you'd think Apple would take care to ensure are fucking instant on a Watch but instead can take up to five seconds to load:

      Setting a timer, setting alarms.

      Sorry, but any complaint about the Apple Watch being too slow is completely justified considering that it's often faster to do things on the phone, and that includes things that watches have been doing successfully for fucking years such as starting a stop watch or setting an alarm to get you up in the morning.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Maxwell ( 13985 )
        It cant be worse than setting an alarm on a common Timex Ironman: 1) Press SETRECALL. Hour flashes. Press + or – to change hour; hold button to scan values. 2) Press NEXT. Minutes flash. Press + or – to change minutes. 3) Press NEXT. AM/PM flashes if in 12-hour time format. Press + or – to change. 4) Press NEXT. Alarm day setting flashes. Press + or – to select DAILY, WKDAYS, or WKENDS. 5) Press DONE at any step when done setting. To turn alarm on/off, press STARTSPLIT. Oh, by the

        • I think the point may be its a bad watch. And a bad phone.

          • I think the point may be its a bad watch. And a bad phone.

            Spoken like a true Hater. Mentions a phone when we were discussing a watch.

        • Meanwhile, I set an alarm on my iPhone by saying, "Wake me at 5 am." I presume the Watch has the same interface. The Watch will become more useful as its horsepower improves to the extent that Siri can do more things on it.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Altus ( 1034 )

        Thats not my experience at all, I find all of apples apps to be fast, responsive and designed well for the form factor. Setting a timer, not using siri, takes almost no time.

      • Re:The apple watch (Score:4, Interesting)

        by CronoCloud ( 590650 ) <[cronocloudauron] [at] [gmail.com]> on Wednesday May 04, 2016 @10:02AM (#52044681)

        I don't have an iPhone or Apple Watch, but can't you just set an alarm by talking to it? You know, like how I can say to my Android tablet:

        "OK Google, set alarm for 6:30 AM" or "OK Google, set timer for 20 minutes"

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by dadman ( 576569 )

        To me, it is instant:
        Raise the watch, then say "Hey Siri, wake me up at seven am tomorrow".
        Done!
        No button pressed, no waiting.

    • First post (Score:5, Funny)

      by goombah99 ( 560566 ) on Wednesday May 04, 2016 @10:05AM (#52044711)

      Sorry, I tried to make this the first post but my raspberry pi too so long to load the page I had to switch over to my $39 kindle and it took me a while to tap in these words.

    • As I'll tell anyone who wants to listen to my minor rants - the Watch has a split personality. And fails at both. Is it a watch or a host for apps?

      As a watch it is limited by battery life and waterproofness. Use the watch too much and the battery can be dead in hours (just raise and lower your arms while eating dinner in a family style restaurant will kill it - I know - I've done it several times)

      Apps? Most stink. The screen is too small, the UI too simple, and the CPU too slow. most apps are simply

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by KGIII ( 973947 )

        > I'm not sold on this experiment.

        From the sounds of things you are - you sound like you've bought one.

        • Yes - about 8 months ago. Bday gift from my wife. (previous I said 6...where does the time go. Fall of 2015).

          If the battery lasted longer I wouldn't be so down on it. And waterproof. Yes you can shower with it - I give the kids a bath and put my arms in the water. But you aren't supposed to swim with it. So I'm worried what I'm going to do when boating season comes - probably leave it at home and wear my $30 Timex.

          This is a $300 watch that I have to think about wearing. My $30 timex I don't think o

      • It isn't a watch and apps are a failure. All for $400. Look at the competition in the $400 range. I'm not sold on this experiment.

        11,999,999 other owners would tend to negate your hyperbole.

        • I offered it as my personal experience. I've had one for ~6 months now. 12 million of us bought into the dream. In my case my wife bought into it for my bday.

          But I'll probably throw $400 down on the next Watch hoping the dream will get better.

          I'd chat more but my notification reminder to charge my watch just popped up.

          • I offered it as my personal experience. I've had one for ~6 months now. 12 million of us bought into the dream. In my case my wife bought into it for my bday.

            But I'll probably throw $400 down on the next Watch hoping the dream will get better.

            I'd chat more but my notification reminder to charge my watch just popped up.

            Since you were disappointed in Watch 1.0, wouldn't it be more prudent to go try one out and do some online research, first?

            Unless $400 is just a trifle to you; then by all means, go for it! ;-)

    • is not designed to be a full fledged computer, treating it as such is stupid.

      Though I will freely admit that many third party apps suck (and are often trying to solve problems that are not suited to the watch).

      I agree. It's designed to be a companion to you phone just like the original smart phones were designed to be a companion to your computer.
      That being said, if I was going to create a watch as a companion, i would make it operate as a second display to the smartphone. Bluetooth has plenty of range to reach the phone in your pocket so why not let the phone do all the heavy lifting. You could use something similar to VNC and when you click on an app on the watch, it runs the program on your phone and you vi

      • You could even have apps on the phone that used both displays at once. This way the only thing the watch is responsible for is running the display not executing the app.

        I agree. And what do you wanna bet that they designed it that way at first? Then they decided they would get laughed out of town if all they released was a remote Bluetooth Display for your iPhone, so they had to try to make it run Apps, while striking a balance between usable battery life and performance, with the watch doing as much "autonomously" as it could.

        It's a very tough set of engineering constraints. Not surprised they didn't get it completely right the first time...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by IMightB ( 533307 )

      I agree, if you thought that the Apple Watch was supposed to replace a computer or even a smartphone, you're just stupid, willfully ignorant or making crap up. I know, let's go ask Dick Tracy how his wrist computer is doing.

  • Pebble got it right (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04, 2016 @09:11AM (#52044257)
    As long as the smartwatch needs to be tethered to your phone, it shouldn't have to be a computing powerhouse. Apple's Watch has been cart-before-horse from the start, and the battery tech just doesn't exist yet to make it a product that doesn't suck. It'll be years before the Watch, as Apple has it envisioned, is decent enough to not be a pain in the ass.

    Pebble got this one right, and Apple should have taken their cues from them. E-ink displays are where it's at now if you need to maximize battery life, and their latest color e-ink displays are actually quite pretty. They're not chocked head-to-toe with features like the Watch, but back in the day Apple used to be about user experience first, features second. Amazing how Cook managed to derail all that in such a short time.

    • Apple used to be about user experience first, features second. Amazing how Cook managed to derail all that in such a short time.

      Not Cook. The Engineering Department. Cook just isn't self-confident enough to trust when to put his foot down.

      Jobs if nothing else was brutal on "Scope Creep". He simply did NOT allow it to happen.

      So now, without his reigns, the Engineers are releasing DECADES of pent-up ideas, both good and bad, that didn't pass His Steveness' steely glare.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      For me, I want a stand alone smartwatch that doesn't rely on a smartphone. I will stick with my old school Casio Data Bank 150 calculator watch. :P

  • Does its speed matter? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Wednesday May 04, 2016 @09:13AM (#52044269) Homepage

    Its just a non-essential toy anyway. It does absolutely nothing that isn't done on a phone far better. The only reason to buy it is for the oneupmanship that fanboys love to play.

    • Its just a non-essential toy anyway. It does absolutely nothing that isn't done on a phone far better.

      Assuming you already have a phone on you, why couldn't it serve as the computer's (wireless) interface peripheral?

  • Well obviously it is no good. (Score:5, Funny)

    by mark-t ( 151149 ) <markt AT nerdflat DOT com> on Wednesday May 04, 2016 @09:13AM (#52044273) Journal
    The whole point of having a watch is to tell the time, and if the watch is slow, then it isn't fit for the purpose for which it is made, is it? :)

  • Life's too short for a lot of things (Score:3)

    by turkeydance ( 1266624 ) on Wednesday May 04, 2016 @09:14AM (#52044281)
    life, for one.

  • I'll settle for a very basic computer (clock, simple games, light source, etc.) plus a simple interface to selected iPhone apps, such as getting notifications, sending canned responses to texts, etc. I don't expect much in the way of zorch on the actual watch.

  • Shitty code encouraged by shitty IDEs (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Sorry, but the apple watch has no need to run slowly. What's slow is shitty code written by shitty programmers who are tied to their shitty IDEs and have no idea what a processor is or does. Spend 2 hours and a case of beer reading the processor spec sheet at a drunken level of detail and your code can magically become ten times as fast, just by not doing stupid shit. (I assume, of course, that you understand how a compiler works at some high level.)

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I doubt that's it. In my experience performance issues rarely come from a poor understanding of hardware and usually from a total lack of care about performance or poor understanding of algorithmic complexity. Developers run around saying stupid shit about premature optimization while knowingly writing O(n^2) solutions to problems that can be solved in O(nlogn) without much extra work.

      Performance gains from knowing the hardware are few, far between, and never as big as algorithmic improvements, in my expe

  • If "slowness" is the only complaint (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04, 2016 @09:16AM (#52044305)

    let me note that plenty of much older and slower hardware managed to run just fine, even snappy. Thus, hardware as such cannot be the problem. It's software that demands more from the hardware than the hardware can deliver. And that, as they say, is fixable in software.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Z80a ( 971949 )

      A beefy Amiga computer?

  • Life's Too Short for IoT (Score:5, Insightful)

    by EmagGeek ( 574360 ) on Wednesday May 04, 2016 @09:18AM (#52044317) Journal

    I think life is way too short to waste it immersed in the Internet of Things. There is so much more to do in life than spend it following an obsession with technology for technology's sake. I don't want computers dangling from my body, following me to the bathroom (that's what my dogs are for), monitoring my every breath, and of course, reporting every detail of my life to a bunch of marketers.

    I want to go outside, ride my bike, hike with my dogs, and enjoy time with my family, all without being constantly bothered, interrupted, and monitored by some device.

    Now, get off my lawn, you meddling kids.

    • following an obsession with technology for technology's sake

      Life's too short to read comments by people who dismiss technology they don't understand.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by zlives ( 2009072 )

        monitoring and marketing vs technology

        • Monitoring and marketing and IoT are two different concepts which overlap in some consumer cases. In other news the internet is used to distribute malware and monitor users so we need to get rid of this internet thing.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bondsbw ( 888959 )

      If your technology is getting in the way more than it is helping you, then you're doing it wrong.

    • I want to go outside, ride my bike, hike with my dogs, and enjoy time with my family, all without being constantly bothered, interrupted, and monitored by some device.

      If you can't think of dozens of ways IoT could make exactly those activities more accessible, more convenient, safer, richer, just.... "better" for so many potential definitions of better, I think you're not very familiar with the ideas around IoT.

      maybe humanity won't figure out any good uses for tiny, cheap, powerful, networked computers. seems a little early to call it.

  • Maybe your data and personal area network can run from your wrist (or arguably something a bit bigger, with more battery), being a watch gives it a function (yeah a crappy function, but a function). But putting the computing power in a tiny wearable just isn't the future. .. in the future your data/PAN will most likely be an implanted device that runs off ambient power ...

  • One Word: Bloatware (Score:3)

    by Lodragandraoidh ( 639696 ) on Wednesday May 04, 2016 @09:43AM (#52044535) Journal

    Processors today are orders of magnitude faster and more capable than just a few years ago. There shouldn't be a question that our apps run faster on them.

    The problem is we are loading them down with extraneous cruft. Remove the bloat and you remove the problem. Throwing hardware at it may solve some of the problem - but that is just a bandaid, and definitely won't allow you to lead the market if your competitor is producing leaner, faster code.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      While that's kinda important you also need to have active communication to be useful, which puts a rather significant drain on your power budget. And every time the user raises his arm so you think he might be looking at the watch and not just reaching for something on a shelf, the screen has to turn on. On the kind of battery you can fit in a watch, that's a pretty big deal. Ever put your cell phone in flight mode and not use it to game or listen to music? It'll barely sip power because it's not doing anyt

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by IMightB ( 533307 )

        That's an amazing observation, because I always use my smart phone not to game! And rarely use it for music. I usually use it as a phone and communications device. It gets OK battery life. I have to recharge it every night, which is inconvenient. I miss the decades old flip phone that would last for a week, and had communication stuff built in as well. No 3rd party apps!

        • If you turn off mobile data you'll likely see a week or so of battery life. If you like to rely on always on Internet connectivity you're not making a fair comparison with the flip phones of yesteryear.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by sinij ( 911942 )

      Processors today are orders of magnitude faster and more capable than just a few years ago. Remove the bloat and you remove the problem.

      Not quite. Processors today are mostly more power efficient, performance gains that we are got used to during 80s and 90s largely stalled quite a few years back. For example, 6th generation I5 (Skylake, 2015) is only marginally (~20%) faster than 2nd generation I5 (Sandy Bridge, 2011). At the same time, historical bloat growth rate remained constant and overtook meager computational gains.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jensend ( 71114 )

        A stat I like to tell people: in the 90s, in the same length of time - 4.5 years - that it took for today's 20% improvement, we went from P54C to Athlon and Coppermine - roughly an 800% improvement.

      • We're limited by DRAM bandwidth and have been for _decades_.

        Funny how the performance increase is in line with DRAM performance changes.

        Car analogy: it doesn't matter what kind of engine you have, if you're sucking through an asthmatic intake.

    • Processors today are orders of magnitude faster and more capable than just a few years ago. There shouldn't be a question that our apps run faster on them.

      The problem is we are loading them down with extraneous cruft. Remove the bloat and you remove the problem. Throwing hardware at it may solve some of the problem - but that is just a bandaid, and definitely won't allow you to lead the market if your competitor is producing leaner, faster code.

      What you gain by the layers of complex software is mostly flexibility. Older computers had vastly slower processors that could run application at speeds similar (or even slower) to those that we use today, but:

      - The software came distributed through magnetic media, or had to be run on a centralized mainframe accessed through a dedicated network.
      - You could only run one program at a time on a workstation.
      - Interpreted languages were awfully slow - you wouldn't run full-fledged applications on top of them.
      - F

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It's because smart devices have to look swish too, so they need to piss away several megabytes on some fancy graphics and throw in a ridiculously powerful GPU so that it moves at 60 FPS. Of course that means it takes 5 seconds to actually load the alarm setting app, but once it's done man does it move satisfying.

  • slow or no (Score:3)

    by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) on Wednesday May 04, 2016 @09:50AM (#52044585) Journal

    Apple Watch

    It's not so much that the Apple Watch is just slow, it's that it's slower than a mechanical watch that has a centuries-old design.

    If you've got to wait for your wristwatch to tell you the time, you've got an irritating product.

  • No, really. Do you type your essays on a phone? You could, but the device is not made for the task and you are going to have a frustrating experience. Watches are for scrolling through a few notifications, not interactive apps. What is needed is a fully water/dust proof device with WiFi access, payment support and reliable weekend battery life. Maybe also ability to unlock my house door. Apple watch is not it yet, and neither are other smartwatches. But if such a thing existed, it would finally make it pra

    • Well, you could always put a combination lock on your door and carry cash in a money clip - then you can leave your wallet and keys at home, at least!

      Actually, I have a phone case that has a spot for a couple credit cards. That's been fairly handy; it's for a smallish phone, so I just consider 'phone + case' to be wallet, with my ID and debit card in it.

  • Seems particularly bad... (Score:3)

    by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Wednesday May 04, 2016 @10:05AM (#52044717) Journal
    Releasing the watch when it was still too unpolished, or fast enough hardware just not available, to avoid feeling 'slow' seems like a particularly strange and foolish move for Apple given how much positive press and user satisfaction they enjoyed from the fact that iOS enjoyed the perception of being much snappier and more responsive than Android(less true now, thanks to a combination of Google's 'project butter' and other improvements, plus sheer brute force on the hardware side: but definitely true in the bad old days and on bottom-feeder handsets). Apple, of all consumer electronics outfits, seem like they should most understand that "if it doesn't feel fast, it's too slow; if it does feel fast, spec-sheet preening is pointless". This is how they've always sold their mobile devices; and largely how they've approached specs for all but workstation computer products.
  • I hate to break it to everyone: but computers aren't getting faster in general like they used to. The train is reaching the end of the track. You will see small bumps in performance year-over-year but don't expect the computers next year to be much faster than the ones this year. Digital processor technology is reaching its limits.

  • Performance (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ledow ( 319597 ) on Wednesday May 04, 2016 @10:27AM (#52044939) Homepage

    I'm torn here.

    There's no need for desktop-performance on a watch.

    But equally, there's no need for a watch to "feel" sluggish at all.

    Apple are even skilled at such tricks. Load up a modern Apple Mac OS X image in a VMWare machine. Dial down the specifications of the machine to the bare minimum. Make sure you DON'T have graphical acceleration etc. on.

    Now slide over the bottom row of icons that you get on Mac OS. It will look and slide as smooth as silk. How do they do that? They pre-rasterise the icons in a variety of sizes and keep them loaded in RAM so you're basically seeing a flickbook of all the different sizes depending on which icon your mouse is over at that moment. No, they ARE NOT using "scalable vector icons" - it's pre-rendered from an those vectors into multiple bitmaps instead ahead of time.

    It's simple, beautiful, fast. But it's also a con. It's not ACTUALLY resizing those icons or blitting them to the screen via an OpenGL filter or similar in real-time. It's just been optimised to its precise usage... to look "slippy, slidey, silky, bulgy" for the first time you log onto the machine and the thing you'll use to start all your programs. But you have to say that it "feels" nice even on a machine incapable of running anything else at a comfortable speed.

    Apple could do similar. There's no reason the watch can't be high-res and super-responsive and just a fraction of a second latent to the message coming in or whatever. But they haven't done that. They haven't spent time optimising it to its intended usage. They've rushed it to market. There's no need for it to be able to render 4K video at 120fps or whatever. It just needs to show a simple interface fast, something a Z80 could do in the same position if you were to really want it to, just tie it to a bluetooth chip to talk to the phone and make the phone do the heavy lifting and the watch just display what it needs to.

    That Apple, master of such tricks, hasn't done this means they aren't really interested in spending time on it, I think. It also means that competitors can have easy-wins. Nobody cares that the Apple Watch is 100 MHz and the Competitor Watch is only 99MHz if the competitors just feels so much sleeker to use.

    Now, personally, I hate Apple and have never owned a single product of theirs in my life. But some things, especially where appearance matters over substance, they utilise clever tricks to good effect. With the Apple Watch, it just ... seems sloppy. Like they don't expect it to be successful, or like they expect it to be successful no matter what it actually does (the famous "It's expensive, it must be good" factor).

    But just because the chip may not be the latest and greatest? That's no excuse for a bad user experience. The CPU and RAM specifications in my client machines haven't changed in years but going from 7 to 8 to 10 actually makes the same machine "feel" faster, even if statistically it may not be.

    That Apple can't avoid this tells me they had no idea what to do with it when it was being designed, or just don't care because they don't plan on any more of them.

    • Isn't it kind of stupid for you to opine on something you've never used?

      The Apple Watch is in fact, fast in all of the ways you laid out. Animations are very fast and fluid. Moving between various screens is quite fast.

      The singular thing that is very slow, is loading MOST (but not all) apps, because whatever the initial screen in requires watch to phone communication, and that takes just a bit too long right now.

      What that means in practice is that for most of the built in features and apps the Watch works

    • This is the first apple product after the CEO changed from asshole perfectionist to MBA supply chain beancounter.

  • Ya, I want a toaster strapped to my wrist..

  • Embedded systems have worked well with far more restrictive environments. Looking at its specs, it does not seem impossible task to have responsive system with what they have.

  • Life is too short for our currently blazing-fast computers to be bogged down by shitty bloated code.

    Fix that problem, and many of your other problems will magically vanish.

  • Apple watch? Bah. Why PS3 is so slow? It's slow to start, it's slow to load its dashboard, it's slow to load apps. Has always been, and it's getting more annoying each time I'm waiting for it. I mean, why does it take a good minute or two to load Netflix? What is it doing while booting up? Probing the hardware? It should already know everything about the hardware since the console was produced (it's the same for every console, and there is a handful of SKUs). Even if something was replaced, it should know t

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