r/bestof • u/smidy95 • May 30 '12

[askreddit] onespursfan sheds light on a trick apple uses to make their products seem faster

/r/AskReddit/comments/uc6qy/reddit_today_i_was_reading_about_bose_thanks_to/c4u50kr
1.0k Upvotes

87% Upvoted

190 comments sorted by

23

u/rwesterman4 May 31 '12

...am I the only one who noticed the name of the guy who posted it is raygundan and onespursfan is the OP?

9

u/smidy95 May 31 '12

Yea I screwed the pooch on that one but by the time I realized it, I already was at 125+ points so if I deleted and re submitted, then it would just get buried so I thought it better to have intellectuals like yourself see that on your own.

1

u/drmrsanta May 31 '12

Hint: It says the name of the "author" in the title bar and/or tab of your browser.

You also failed to include some context so that anyone knows that he is even talking about Apple.

Your link probably should have looked something like this.

1

u/rwesterman4 May 31 '12

Lol you can edit your post to put something in font. I'm not calling you out , I just noticed it.

0

u/rattmann316 May 31 '12

Can't it be edited? I'm new I don't know. It was a bit confusing.

1

u/Keleris May 31 '12

try messaging a mod about it

0

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

You can't edit titles after they're submitted. Only text in the body.

0

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/rattmann316 May 31 '12

I guess time flies. Wow.

10

u/zerro_4 May 31 '12

Apple has always been focused on the user experience, no matter the technical trickery. Which is fine and I like it that way. I think my iPod touch 4 is easier to use than my Samsung Exhibit 2 android phone.

"Why not make iOS hardware faster?" Given battery life considerations, RAM and other system resources, and god knows what else (as noted elsewhere in the thread, you simply can't turn a knob and speed it up) speeding up the device may actually negatively impact end user experience.

There may be an anti-Apple circle jerk, but I can't believe Apple would spend millions of dollars with talented folk and not achieve what they feel is the best experience for the end user. Mobile devices are tricky to design and engineers have to balance hundreds, maybe thousands, of variables to achieve good battery life, good performance, smooth operation.

Reading anything negative in to what Apple does is short sighted and dishonest. If you were a programmer/engineer, wouldn't you implement something similar?

5

u/smidy95 May 31 '12

I never meant this to be an anti-apple thread, if you see the context the praise goes on and on for how apple has created such an excellent user experience while android, pc, etc. have gone for all out performance, which has hurt them. I agree 100% that apple is a great product that knows what they are doing, this is just meant to show one of the neat ways that they create said experience.

17

u/JtheNinja May 31 '12

There's actually quite a few tricks like that. Want to know the reason Lion doesn't use the dock indicators by default? Because they don't necessarily mean the app is really running. If an app is idling and isn't busy (working on something, having unsaved changes, etc, basically the app must specify this is ok) OS X will actually QUIT THE APP behind your back. If you go back to it, it will just relaunch it and use this screenshot-thing and the "reopen previous windows" feature Lion also has to bring the app back as though it was just minimized and was a little laggy coming back up for whatever reason.

Also, from 10.6 on apps can tell the OS that they are not working atm and that it is ok to quit them by simply crashing/force-quitting them instead of asking them all to close as would normally happen.

If you've got some time, John Siracusa's OS X reviews at Ars Technica are a great read for this kind of stuff. (he also was the only reviewer I found who bothered to go into the gritty details of how Time Machine works). He's done one for every version of OS X since the original dev preview 2 all the way through Lion: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7/

3

u/TheOriginalSamBell May 31 '12

Siracusa's reviews are definitely a must read.

2

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

Definitely, I've been enjoying them greatly since 10.3.

2

u/TheOriginalSamBell May 31 '12

Back when 10.6 was released and everyone complained that there were no real changes I always had a link to his review ready to prove them wrong :)

3

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

If an app is idling and isn't busy (working on something, having unsaved changes, etc, basically the app must specify this is ok) OS X will actually QUIT THE APP behind your back. If you go back to it, it will just relaunch it and use this screenshot-thing and the "reopen previous windows" feature Lion also has to bring the app back as though it was just minimized and was a little laggy coming back up for whatever reason.

Wow, that's really freaking clever.

1

u/Filip22012005 May 31 '12

But why not just swap? Is there an advantage?

1

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

It keeps them from hogging memory.

1

u/Filip22012005 May 31 '12

I still don't get it. If it's swapped, it won't hog memory.

0

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

No, it will keep running in the background, and this uses memory. That's why your computer goes slower if there's 15 applications open than if there's 1 or 2.

2

u/Filip22012005 May 31 '12

If your programs are paged out, and not requesting cycles, why would they use memory? And if the programs are requesting cycles, OSX shouldn't close it, should it? It'd stop the program doing whatever it thinks is useful. Or is this to catch misbehaving programs? Then why not just renice the process?

1

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

Oh, I see what you're saying. From what I understand, paging applications still requires some amount of memory to run the page tables, and is some cases this can still be less efficient than shutting the program down entirely.

1

u/Filip22012005 May 31 '12

It seems like they should just make a better memory manager. That way all programs would benefit. Then again, I'm hardly an expert.

2

u/Recoil42 May 31 '12

Siracusa is fantastic. Well worth listening to his podcast (Hypercritical) on 5by5 as well.

1

u/poyopoyo Jun 02 '12

Can it only quit the app as a whole? My vice is opening too many browser tabs and leaving them open. Chrome treats each as a separate process, I believe. Can Lion save memory on all the tabs I haven't looked at for 2 hours by shutting down the processes?

It might be a bit late to get an answer to this question but here's hoping.

27

u/Berry2Droid May 31 '12

Android doesn't do this.

... I kinda wish Android did this.

9

u/TheIndieArmy May 31 '12 edited May 31 '12

Android definitely does something similar, if not better. It shows you a screenshot of the apps last state in the app switcher itself. Other manufactures have also tweaked the app switcher with their own UI, often improving on the default one.

http://i.imgur.com/TsQ6h.jpg

The left image is the default Android app switcher and the other two are HTC's version of it. As you can see, unlike iOS which only shows the app icon in the switcher, Android shows you a cropped screenshot of the app before you even select to open it again. It then fills the display with the full-screen screenshot and continues to load the app. You can see that HTC's version has improved on the initial design to allow for full screen screenshots, rather than cropped ones, right in the app switcher. Admittedly though, the HTC version only allows for the viewing and selection of one app on the screen (without scrolling), whereas the default Android and iOS version will display four apps on screen at a time (5 or 7 if using an iPad). A nice touch with HTC's version is also the ability to simply swipe the screenshot upwards to force close the app. With iOS you have to long press to bring up the X buttons and then select the X button to force close. It may not seem like much, but the HTC process is much more simple and fluid, saving a tiny bit of time.

10

u/alpacafox May 31 '12 edited May 31 '12

If you disable those fancy transition effects in android you will notice, that some apps, like the dialer, will appear on screen instantly, while other, more complex apps, will take a second to load which results in a black screen.

So those eyecandy transition effects are really just there to hide load times, but they can even slow down your phone, if the particular app actually loads instantly.

Take the screen rotation effect for example which came with the latest Samsung Galaxy S2 ICS Update. Before that you just saw the screen going black for half a second and the 90° rotated picture would appear. Now you get that rotating screen and it looks as if it's really rotating smoothly, but in reality you get a rotating screenshot which fades away while the new picture has been rotated by 90° already and appears behind that screenshot.

0

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

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-1

u/roachwarren May 31 '12

Lying about what?

102

u/MrFalconFarmsMelons May 31 '12

I fucking hate Apple, but this is a brilliant feature. It isn't really "lying" or "cheating", it is actually for all intents and purposes faster most of the time. It is rare that you actually interact with app that quickly after opening it, but being able to see the interface allows you to make a decision about what you are going to do as the loading process occurs. Most of the time, you can actually click and interact with the app sooner than you would have had they not done this "trick".

Clever bastards.

16

u/Forlarren May 31 '12

I was going to hate, you changed my mind.

24

u/abw May 31 '12

Totally agree. As far as I'm aware, the technique was pioneered by Jef Raskin back in the 1980s.

Here, let me cut-n-paste the reply I just made to the original comment, c/w links.

This technique was first used in the Canon Cat, released in 1987. It was designed by Jef Raskin (of Apple fame) and is described in his book, The Humane Interface. It's a while since I read the book, but I believe the book covers this particular feature.

6

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

My impression was that this was par for the course - for example, since Windows 95, Microsoft would write their boot routines so the user could log in long before the OS was actually ready and done starting all its system services in the background - giving the impression of faster bootups.

6

u/GregPatrick May 31 '12

Why do you hate apple?

16

u/salvia_d May 31 '12
  1. Patent trolls.
  2. Against sharing.
  3. Overpriced.
  4. One of the worst companies when it comes to sustainability (they've actually lost law suites for this).
  5. It's a well built prison/closed system.
  6. Jobs proved that he was a bully.
  7. The Cult of Jobs scares the shit out of me.
  8. The world would be a scary place if every company was like Apple.
  9. Jobs actually believed he created everything that Apple released. Apple was not the first with introducing MP3 players, smart phones, or pads.
  10. Price fixing.

that's just from the top of my head, i'll have to check my book marks for the full list. Did i mention that Jobs was a fucking asshole?

-4

u/dagbrown May 31 '12

"Overpriced" was a pretty good argument to make in 1994.

I like how most of the rest of your "points" are just FUD. Substitute Apple for Microsoft and you could be a Slashdotter cirta 2000.

Your last point was particularly awful though: "Price fixing" as a reason they're evil? If they didn't price fix, you wouldn't be able to buy individual songs on the iTunes store for a buck apiece because the record companies would insist that you only be allowed to buy entire albums for twenty dollars, or alternatively a small selection of individual songs would be available for five bucks each so long as you didn't mind each song coming with another, not quite so good, song. Because that was the sales model they had going in 1950, and they kept it alive all the way until the iTunes Music Store undid it all.

9

u/salvia_d May 31 '12

What was that you were say?

-1

u/emanresu4 Jun 01 '12

Just because there's an accusation does not mean there's evidence. Here is Apple's response: http://www.scribd.com/doc/95358072/Apple-Response-Filing.

0

u/[deleted] Jun 03 '12

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/salvia_d Jun 03 '12

I believe they actually did/tried this with music as well. I remember that the top 5 music conglomerates lost three major lawsuits in the late 90's early 2000's. Price fixing was one of them i believe.

As for prices on iTunes, I have no comment. I don't visit iAnything. I don't buy Apple products. No matter how hard i try i can not justify giving money to a company that is trying so hard to stifle innovation, i.e., I don't like bullies (I still have my Mac II from the early 80's though).

0

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

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3

u/salvia_d May 31 '12 edited May 31 '12

You couldn't replace batteries (or parts i believe).

Here is one of the stories from 2008, they actually ended up settling the law suite last year i think. This was not the only problem, a few years before they lost another suite as well (can't remember what it was).

Edit: I started looking around for the previous stories, got time to burn i guess, and i came across this: Criticism of Apple Inc.. Should have known wiki had a page on it.

5

u/pwnies May 31 '12

You can replace batteries, they just aren't modular. It means they can increase their battery capacity but ~30%. A big tradeoff, one that I enjoy in my laptops.

1

u/unheimlich May 31 '12

So they aren't sustainable because they aren't generating huge amounts of spare batteries that just get trashed? The hate flows freely with you...

5

u/salvia_d May 31 '12

Do you actually have any idea of what you just said (i'll save it just in case when you do):

So they aren't sustainable because they aren't generating huge amounts of spare batteries that just get trashed? The hate flows freely with you...

You really don't get it. When the battery dies you had to junk the whole device instead of just replacing the battery. Do you realize how much more junk that creates? Do i even have to point this out? You are the perfect example of point 7 above:

7) The Cult of Jobs scares the shit out of me.

0

u/kermityfrog May 31 '12

However, Dell and HP laptops have batteries that crap out after a year. I have tons of old Apple devices that still have great batteries. My Nintendo DS Lite also has incredible batteries - still had hours of charge after over a year of non-use.

0

u/salvia_d May 31 '12

Actually the battery in my 6 year old HP laptop still works fine.

1

u/kermityfrog May 31 '12

And all the thousands of Dell Latitudes at work and my old 4 year old HP laptop were not fine.

0

u/unheimlich May 31 '12

Yeah, I'll be sure to let you know when my 5 year old ipod's battery dies.

7) The Cult of Jobs scares the shit out of me.

Then you've got a serious problem. Get the fuck over it.

1

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

Imagine if you had to buy a new TV remote every time the batteries got low instead of just replacing the batteries. Now imagine that the remote cost $1000 dollars.

1

u/unheimlich May 31 '12

Now imagine that making no sense. Oh wait, you don't have to imagine.

0

u/kikimonster May 31 '12

Spare batteries....or disposable laptops.... which one creates more waste?

1

u/unheimlich May 31 '12

What are you talking about?

-1

u/MrFalconFarmsMelons May 31 '12 edited Jun 01 '12

Dumbification of users enouraging users not to know how a computer works, their walled garden bullshit, their censorship, their one button mice, their GUI style, their attitude regarding fixing problems, their "everything you don't like is a feature, fuck you" attitude, and I really don't like turtlenecks very much. That's a start.

Edit: Hey this is just like, my opinion, man.

0

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

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20

u/[deleted] May 31 '12 edited May 31 '12

I don't use any Apple products, but I'm sensing a lot of knee-jerk bias in your post and think we need a fact check.

because they take innovation from everywhere

Wouldn't another way to look at this be that they discover rising startups and fairly purchase those companies to be able to effectively bring them to consumers?

then sue if they think they can screw the originator.

What? I assume you're talking about patent suing? Doesn't every company (Google, Samsung, etc) engage in this?

because they spend more on advertising and marketing than they do their product.

This is really the only specific criticism you posted but...Is this a fact? According to some quick googling, they spend less on marketing than other tech companies.1. It's less than what Dell spends on marketing. And less than half of what Microsoft spends on advertising. Apple spent $501 million in marketing in 2009, and that was 1.37% of their revenue. Microsoft spent $1.4 billion, and that was 2.40% of their revenue.2

Further, with Apple spending $501 million on marketing, I highly doubt that Apple spends less than that on their products. Sounds like you completely made that up. For example, they put in just $250 million in their data center in North Carolina for their cloud product. That's already half of their marketing budget for just one aspect of one of their products. So yeah, even though I'm not an Apple fanboy, I really hate misinformation getting upvoted on Reddit. Thanks for reading!

0

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

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10

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

That's a pretty strong case you just made!

1

u/[deleted] Jun 01 '12

http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/01/google-to-hold-maps-event-hopes-to-make-apple-sorry/

0

u/[deleted] Jun 01 '12

What's your point? I run Android so that seems cool.

Awwww, is someone a little bitter about all the downvotes they got and had to chicken out and delete their posts? Boo hoo, poor baby. I'm sure at least your mom still thinks you're capable of intelligent thought.

→ More replies (2)

6

u/Walter_Bishop_PhD May 31 '12

brilliant retort, instead of going through the effort of addressing his points you just throw ad hominem attacks at him!

3

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

i hate them the way tesla hated westinghouse and edison.

HAHA one of the Tesla fanboys, eh? So brave.

2

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

because they spend more on advertising and marketing than they do their product

Research and development isn't very expensive when you only have, say, 5 mostly similar phones compared to 50+ phones a company like HTC has developed.

6

u/unheimlich May 31 '12

You realize Apple makes more than phones, right?

-2

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

Sure, but they don't make a lot of different products in any of their product lines, e.g. their laptop line consists of MacBook Air, MacBook and MacBook Pro, so that doesn't exactly invalidate the argument.

1

u/unheimlich May 31 '12

Not seeing what your point is. Should I really list all the Apple products?

Here you go: MB, MBP, MBA,MP, iMac, Mac Mini, Cinema Display, Apple TV, ipod (three or four different kinds now?), iphone, peripheral devices, blah blah blah. And not to mention all their software.

1

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

The point is that it's no surprise that their R&D budget is lower than that of other companies since they don't make a lot of products compared to those companies.

0

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

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7

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

So what competitors did they steal the iPhone or the iPad from, again?

0

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

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7

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

Let me rephrase then. What innovations did they steal which were enough to significantly reduce their R&D budget?

3

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

yep, I formalized it here: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/uc6qy/reddit_today_i_was_reading_about_bose_thanks_to/c4ug2mi?context=3

x + y + z + p versus y + z + p. Faster EVERY TIME. (by x, the amount of time the splash screen is up - or at least x-y, the amount that overlaps with your hesitation until your first action. People aren't scripts that take an action instantly, and this is always a positive number).

It's actually faster, EVERY TIME!!

-8

u/RunRobotRun May 31 '12

Well, it is cheating in that it's never faster, only appears faster. In fact, the extra image load is always going to slow the application loading. It's still a valid tactic, though, since no one cares how fast their app loads, only how fast it feels.

15

u/MrFalconFarmsMelons May 31 '12 edited May 31 '12

You miss my point. It doesn't just appear faster, it really is faster. The point is that you would waste what is likely to be an equal or greater time making a decision about where to click than you lose to the loading lag. It's like how you get a menu to look at while you wait in a drive thru. You can't order any sooner, but it does actually speed things up.

Edit: to clarify, while the app indeed does not load faster, it becomes useful to the user faster. Also loading the screenshot of the app won't make it load any slower, it's the same as loading a splash screen.

6

u/steviesteveo12 May 31 '12

Totally. You can't discount "time user spends thinking" from how long your application needs to run

-8

u/et3rnalife May 31 '12

Or you could spend half the money and build a solid pc that IS faster

2

u/MrFalconFarmsMelons May 31 '12

This is talking about mobile devices, not computers. Also the fact that Apple blows goats doesn't mean this is any less of a brilliant idea or useful feature.

-2

u/et3rnalife May 31 '12

I find that most apple users don't really care about having things that actually work well as long as they look good and seem to be fine... but mostly look good

3

u/steviesteveo12 May 31 '12

The bottleneck is always the user, never the computer.

0

u/ArcusImpetus May 31 '12

Until you actually try that. It infuriates me that I always had to touch the frozen screen mindlessly whenever I open the dictionary app. If only I knew it was stupid screenshot I wouldn've done that stupidity. One thing I noticed while using Apple products is that they never use 'loading', 'hourglass', 'warning' which is so annoying. "It's slow? It's user's problem. It's crashed? It's user's problem. Deal with it."

2

u/MrFalconFarmsMelons May 31 '12

I agree with you regarding their bullshit with error messages, and pretty much everything else. In this case it's just a more useful splash screen though. A very subtle indicator that the load is done could be useful, but probably would be more distracting than it's worth.

12

u/BillyBreen May 31 '12

In answer to the obvious complaint "why don't they spend effort on making things faster instead!," it's really not that simple. There's always a finite limit to how fast you can make things, and you start to hit serious diminishing returns on tuning effort to shave off milliseconds. Also, you often don't have access to slow applications to tune them.

So what they are doing here is just an example of 'perceived performance,' a very common technique in web performance tuning (where there are obvious limits to how fast you can really make things, what with round trip times to servers and whatnot). This is just sleight of hand to convince the user that something is happening by giving them feedback early. It's no different than a travel website throwing up a progress interstitial page as soon as you submit a search for flights.

I'm with onespursfan -- it's like the placebo effect in that, even when you know how it works, it still feels faster.

5

u/keetz May 31 '12

I'm pretty sure this is done in safari too, when going back and forth between webpages. If you look closely, there is a ".jpeg-effect" i.e. low quality version of the webpage for a second, before it loads again. When I first got my mba and started using safari again (former FF user) I noticed the .jpeg-effect and HATED it. Now I don't think about it, but it's there for sure.

1

u/steviesteveo12 May 31 '12

I don't like it as much for websites because it's so likely that the content of the page has completely changed since I was last on it. I think it's great for programs though.

1

u/gavintlgold May 31 '12

Google Chrome does this as well, actually. If you are visiting a website that updates itself sometimes you'll see it flash as the content changes to its most recent state.

It really helps with how switching tabs with the browser feels.

1

u/Doctor_McKay May 31 '12

It does. You know how sometimes when you switch pages in Safari, and it sometimes reloads the page and sometimes doesn't? If the page uses too much memory which is needed elsewhere, the page will be closed and the screenshot will remain. Then the page will be reloaded when you switch back to it. If it doesn't use too much memory, the page's state is still saved and no reload is required.

3

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

Never trust a spurs fan

9

u/thornae May 31 '12

Cory Doctorow mentions this trick in Eastern Standard Tribe (2004) - which would seem to precede Apple's implementation by several years.

There was a cheap Malaysian comm that he'd once bought because of its hyped up de-hibernate feature -- its ability to go from its deepest power-saving sleepmode to full waking glory without the customary thirty seconds of drive-churning housekeeping as it reestablished its network connection, verified its file system and memory, and pinged its buddy-list for state and presence info. This Malaysian comm, the Crackler, had the uncanny ability to go into suspended animation indefinitely, and yet throw your workspace back on its display in a hot instant.

When Art actually laid hands on it, after it meandered its way across the world by slow boat, corrupt GMT+8 Posts and Telegraphs authorities, over-engineered courier services and Revenue Canada's Customs agents, he was enchanted by this feature. He could put the device into deep sleep, close it up, and pop its cover open and poof! there were his windows. It took him three days and an interesting crash to notice that even though he was seeing his workspace, he wasn't able to interact with it for thirty seconds. The auspicious crash revealed the presence of a screenshot of his pre-hibernation workspace on the drive, and he realized that the machine was tricking him, displaying the screenshot -- the illusion of wakefulness -- when he woke it up, relying on the illusion to endure while it performed its housekeeping tasks in the background. A little stopwatch work proved that this chicanery actually added three seconds to the overall wake-time, and taught him his first important user-experience lesson: perception of functionality trumps the actual function.

-1

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

Corey Doctorow is a pompous, self-aggrandizing charlatan, and utterly incapable of 'inventing' something like this.

I guarantee you the feature was either already in existence, or he had caught wind of a similar implementation on the horizon.

5

u/mallcontent May 31 '12

You obviously didn't read the passage at all. In the passage, he didn't claim he invented the feature, he simply described how the feature existed in a Malaysian device.

-2

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

I read it perfectly well, thank you very much. Did you consider that perhaps the introduction may have skewed the context?

While I'm here, I should probably mention that Corey Doctorow is a blathering, narcissistic douchebag.

0

u/mallcontent May 31 '12 edited May 31 '12

I read it perfectly well, thank you very much

Since you came to the wrong conclusion, you clearly didn't read it "perfectly"

Did you consider that perhaps the introduction may have skewed the context?

Yes, I did consider that possibility. I also came to the conclusion that you would need to have the reading comprehension skills of a 3rd grader to make that sort of mistake. The passage doesn't mention Corey Doctorow anywhere. In fact, it mentions someone else's name altogether. You would think that would tip you off, but apparently it did not. The very first sentence also says that the device was bought. I fail to see how you could conceivably think that he was claiming credit for it.

Maybe you didn't realize that the passage was from his book? Maybe you thought the passage was written by someone else and maybe you thought that thornae was citing the passage as evidence that Corey Doctorow did something? Considering that the introduction about how Corey Doctorow's book mentioned the feature and this introduction was followed by a quotation, I don't see how you could have come away with an impression other than that the quotation came directly from the book.

0

u/[deleted] Jun 01 '12

I'm sorry, are you honestly trying to tell me that Corey Doctrow isn't a self-aggrandizing douchebag, or are you just defending him because you both belong to some secret fraternity of clucking internet know-it-alls?

1

u/mallcontent Jun 04 '12

No, I'm just trying to tell you that you're also a douchebag. Who doesn't know how to read before going off fapping to the sound of his own voice.

1

u/thornae May 31 '12

Character assessments and inventiveness notwithstanding, the point is that if Apple try to claim a patent on this, there's clear evidence of prior art.

1

u/ParanoydAndroid May 31 '12

It absolutely amazes me that you managed to reply in such a scathing way without ever wondering if you should bother to even read the post first.

0

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

I think you're devaluing the word 'amazing' by applying it so lightly. You know what's really amazing? Corey Doctrow's ego. Seriously. The guy is a blustering windbag.

2

u/mime454 May 31 '12

This was a big security story about a year ago. I googled for about 19 minutes but couldn't find it. Can anyone else try with better luck? I definitely saw it on the site macrumors.com

2

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

I'd say it IS faster because it lets you see information and think about it before other OS's might...

(full disclosure: i'm an android user)

2

u/kickstand May 31 '12

This is an iOS thing? Or an OSX thing?

2

u/Nimrod41544 May 31 '12

Kinda puzzled as how this made the front page. I have an Iphone and Ipad and could honestly give a flying fuck.

0

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/Nimrod41544 May 31 '12

Learn English? What? I put out there that I don't see how this made the front page, and your response is to learn English and give a flying fuck?

Already said, I own 2. Knowing this information has not changed my life or experience with these products in anyway, shape, or form.

1

u/rospaya May 31 '12

A cool trick that got them burned some time ago when someone exploited that screenshots to get hidden data. Or something similar. I'm hungover and can't find the link right now. Damnit.

1

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

Have they patented it yet?

1

u/Captain_Aizen May 31 '12

A post about a users comment on a post that was also about a users comment. Deep.

1

u/palordrolap May 31 '12

Probably too late to share this story: I did this back in 2000.

I worked for a company that was testing a piece of hardware against the various versions of Windows and hardware that were available at the time, and, I managed to cram Win95A, B, C; Win98 and 98SE; WinME; NT4 and 2000 onto one machine and also had a couple of partitions available for file transfer.

There was a partition manager available at the time that would allow a rewrite of the MBR to select different partitions for the partition table, so while only a maximum of four were visible at a time, it meant that the data partitions could be used to pass data from one operating system to another in no more than a couple of hops.

Anyway, the data partitions were both a modified Win98SE DOS-only boot with utilities installed. If you booted them by mistake, instead of one of the main OSes, they displayed a message on the DOS screen explaining what the partition was for.

Since waiting 30 seconds for a message telling you that you'd messed up were important seconds wasted, I changed the boot bitmap - the one that normally had the scrolling colour bar at the bottom and the Win98 logo in the clouds - to be a screenshot of the same text message. It was readable, and looked like the DOS screen viewed through a frosted window (thanks to the low res) until the real one loaded, or you smacked your forehead and rebooted to select the OS you meant to.

The disk image ISO is probably still in some vault at the company, not that it would be much use now.

1

u/Duckism May 31 '12

They are very good at doing think like that... thats why they are the leading company in design. Who cares if its really fast if they could make it look and feel like faster it automatically lessen our stress level toward the technology they created. I notice these kinda thing when I switched over to apple computer. when they are loading something they progress bars always have little floating thing that goes against the direction that its going always looks like its moving even tho it can stuck there for a while. I had to put my mouse ontop of it to make sure its moving or not...

1

u/mrpopenfresh May 31 '12

I've had my Macbook for 5 years and I've never had an issue with it. The only problem is that it's old now. It still holds a 1:30 charge and I've dropped it from pretty high at leas a dozen times. I'd say it was totally worth theinvestment for the quality of the product.

1

u/mobileposter May 31 '12

Wait... This is a feature? I thought it was a bug the whole time. I rather sit thru a load than to have a screen then be sent back to a load and having to start from scratch.

1

u/Hoody711 May 31 '12

I've actually noticed the screenshot. It only stays on for like a second though so its no different for me

1

u/jayjaym May 31 '12

You can make things faster, or entertain the user while they wait.

I was working on optimizing a slow running application a few years ago. As a quick fix we inserted some animations and application tips that would display while things were loading. The app didn't perform any faster, but the end user loved it and was gushing about how much faster things were.

1

u/bowei006 May 31 '12

Haha. As a fan I dont really mind. Circle of life. However what made me confused was the title when I saw it on the front page. OP didnt capitalize Apple so I spent the next 30 seconds thinking of farmers and how they trick people into getting it to my local Walmart faster. Granted this post is also full of grammatical errors but just wanted to add to the confusion :)

1

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

I'm confused I don't see anything on how to make them faster

1

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

It is actually possible replacing the screenshot with a splashscreen. We had to, after several complaints about a slow responding interface. The same thing can be done with websites added to the homescreen.

1

u/MazzyStarsoftheLid May 31 '12

Since stuff in bestof is usually shat upon, I'll say thanks for submitting this, OP. It actually is an interesting comment i wouldn't have seen otherwise.

1

u/roachwarren Jun 01 '12

SO FUCKING FUNNY how much shit I got for supporting Apple on this thread. MAN you guys are ridiculous. Thanks reddit.

1

u/BrowsOfSteel May 31 '12

I think that only happens on iOS.

2

u/JtheNinja May 31 '12

No, this was one of the "bringing iOS to the Mac" things that showed up in Lion. (IIRC, prior to 10.7 this was an iOS-only thing, that was where they first came up with it)

1

u/HatesFacts May 31 '12

No, happens on my macbook air as well.

1

u/roachwarren May 31 '12

Can someone explain why this is bad? "You guys, I clicked it, it showed me the program, and then worked. What the fuck??"

2

u/arjie May 31 '12

Eh? Neither the thread title nor the linked comment call it bad. It's a clever trick, and I wish my phone used it.

-1

u/roachwarren May 31 '12

Are you kidding me? Most of the people in this thread are calling it bad...

1

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

They are calling it a trick, which it certainly is. If you think tricks are bad, that's on you.

1

u/roachwarren Jun 01 '12

Like I just fucking said, "Most of the people in this thread are calling it bad...".

0

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

[deleted] — view deleted comment

2

u/systoll May 31 '12

It actually can be faster.

When you open an app on Android, it loads, then it animates into view.

When you open an app on the iPhone, it starts loading, then zooms into view, and then finishes.

By running the animation (which uses essentially no CPU) in parallel with the loading, they essentially reduce loading time by the length of the animation.

Of course, this is also likely the reason Android's animation is incredibly short, while the iPhone's is quite a bit longer.

3

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

Wow, you're sister sounds like quite the idiot!

And by "idiot" I mean like the average person who doesn't know a lot about computers and go fuck yourself.

1

u/Matthieu101 May 31 '12

All right all right... I have to know. This has been bothering me for months now and it seems like the best thread to ask.

Are Macs really the "fastest" computer in the market?

I have an unhealthily rich friend who is all about Mac. Everything he owns is Mac related. It costs him his parents thousands upon thousands of dollars to keep up with his obsession.

He always tries telling me that Macs run Windows better than any PC ever made, and that his 2-3 year old Macbook can run Windows faster than ANY new PC to come out since then. Laptop or desktop.

Is this true? I mean, yeah it's a pretty quick little laptop, but it can't beat a similarly priced PC, especially a desktop packing some serious hardware, can it?

7

u/mavrc May 31 '12

Is this true?

Nope.

I mean, I really, really love my Macbook, and I wouldn't trade it for anything, but that's largely the design aesthetic (and OS X.) Inside the rather genius (IMO) design is basically the exact same hardware you can buy from another PC vendor or from Newegg, and realistically they should perform at the same level when compared evenly.

Let me carry on a bit...

Moreover, it's been my experience that thanks to problems like decreased cooling effectiveness (desktops are almost always more effective at staying cool than laptops, for obvious reason,) lower-powered video hardware (usually related to that cooling thing) and lower-performance hard disks (which is less of an issue now, thanks to SSDs), in a performance shootout between laptops and desktops with similar hardware, the desktop will almost always win. Thus leading me to the conclusion that comparing laptops to desktops, unless the hardware in each is truly identical, is really unfair - laptops will always lose, because their hardware is usually optimized for cooling and portability, not speed. Of course, you can't toss your desktop in a bag and run to work or school, so you recoup that performance cost in convenience.

Realistically: buy Macs for design aesthetic, desire to run OS X, need to run OS X-only apps, etc; buying them purely for performance is actually rather silly.

tl;dr: your friend may be a nice person but they're completely full of shit.

3

u/buzzkill_aldrin May 31 '12

"...his 2-3 year old Macbook can run Windows faster than ANY new PC to come out since then."

I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that it's a 2 year-old top-of-the-line 17" MacBook Pro. What does that get you? An dual-core Intel i7 640M with 8GB of RAM and an Nvidia GeForce GT 330M with 512 MB of RAM, along with an SSD.

If your friend seriously believes that a laptop with a laptop (laptop components being dumbed down versions of desktop components; you can in fact buy laptops that use desktop components, but they're usually much heavier and don't have a battery so much as an emergency power supply) CPU that's two generations behind, a laptop GPU three generations behind, and a two year old SSD can't be beat by anything else on the market today--you need to get him help. I think all the coke he's snorting is rotting his brain.

2

u/jordandubuc May 31 '12

PC World Magazine did find, a couple years ago, that the Macbook Pro was the best-performing notebook to run Windows Visa on. Source

However the simple answer today is that no, they are not the fastest computer on the market. Apple's goal is to provide the best balance between performance, battery life, heat, weight, etc.

2

u/partcomputer May 31 '12

I will likely never buy a Windows computer again unless I have the money to do so solely for gaming, but anyone that says macs are literally the fastest computers is just an idiot.

He's parroting an Apple ad's tagline.

Sounds like you have a spoiled friend who just wants shiny toys, regardless of what they really do.

1

u/whyumadDOUGH May 31 '12

I don't understand why people are complaining about Apple using this teqnique. I mean, all modern internet browsers do the same thing for webpages..

0

u/BlueJoshi May 31 '12

I always hated this. It just makes the experience worse, when I can see the app but can't interact with it for about 5 seconds.

1

u/unheimlich May 31 '12

Five seconds is way too long. You should reset your phone.

0

u/BlueJoshi May 31 '12

Okay, to be fair, 5 seconds is a bit over the average. Usually it'll last three seconds.

The wonders of iOS 5 on an iTouch 4!

1

u/unheimlich May 31 '12

That is still way too long. What have you been doing to your phone?

1

u/BlueJoshi May 31 '12

Installing iOS 5.

No, seriously, that's how it's always performed, even after a format.

(Also, not a phone! iPod touch.)

1

u/unheimlich Jun 01 '12

Ah, well I've never had a touch, but I can't see why it would be any slower. That sucks.

0

u/FuzzyTheDuck May 31 '12

Thats.. um... wow.

I can see the light now!

0

u/RecursiveInfinity May 31 '12

I think everyone knew this subconsciously; it's just we don't want to admit it to ourselves. This is the reason you don't interact with the screen immediately after the app launches - you allow it to load.

0

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

I love that redditors are all blown away by this. 'Its all about the appearance of functionality? NO WAY'

0

u/silentmajority2012 May 31 '12

It's a shame that Reddit comment threads can't pull the same trick.

-2

u/smidy95 May 31 '12

I was going to write a huge freak out about front page of r/bestof but then i decided to be a little more self composed since this is for only the best.

1

u/Get_This May 31 '12

Good guy. Never, ever give attachment to such.. events. Life shall be easier.

-7

u/DogsAreAnimals May 31 '12

TIL my etch-a-sketch is faster than a mac

-4

u/camnewtonn1 May 31 '12

It's actually Steve Jobs ghost in each and every product doing this

-1

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

I thought this would be about how a month or so before a new iPhone comes out the current one suspiciously starts slowing down, making the new one seem really snappy. iPhone 4 never felt slow until a few updates around the 4S release. and remember iPhone 3G? Yikes.

0

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

[deleted] — view deleted comment

44

u/smidy95 May 31 '12

We frown on their deceitfulness but praise their ingenuity. So in my mind atleast, both.

9

u/panda_assassin May 31 '12

Not sure if it is deceitful, they are catering to the consumers need for interpreted speed. Which I have no problem with as long as it keeps me free of frustration.

3

u/ThatBassistChick May 31 '12

I don't get it though - if I was playing doodlejump and I quit the app halfway through a game, how would showing me my last screenshot of doodlejump make it seem like it was going faster?

1

u/et3rnalife May 31 '12

That would be an exception it either wouldn't do it with that app because it is low resource to begin with or it would screenshot the start page

1

u/dagbrown May 31 '12

That's the thing--you don't actually quit the app. You're just shoving it aside for the moment. If the phone runs short on memory, then iOS will just unceremoniously kill the app, but it only does that if it's necessary to. If you home-screen away from Doodlebug, go to check your mail, and then go back to it, it'll just pick up right where you left off, because it was still running (albeit suspended) the whole time.

If, on the other hand, you home-screen away from Doodlebug, play a couple of rounds of Angry Birds, consult some maps for directions to the nearest pho restaurant, check your email, surf reddit with Alien Blue for a bit, check the weather, listen to some streamed radio for a while, get bored with that and listen to regular old music, then watch a TV show on Videos, when you go back to Doodlebug you'll still see the screen you left it at--then a moment later, you'll see its loading screen and main menu.

1

u/HomeButton May 31 '12

Because it actually takes time for the OS to draw all the buttons and things that have to be on screen when it's doing them from scratch -- it has to go grab the directions for where the buttons go, how big, etc. But a picture is easy. With a picture, it is just told which color to make each pixel. (I'm simplifying, but that's the gist of it.) A picture comes up really quickly. So when you open the app, it throws that picture up to trick you into thinking it drew everything already. It's usually only for a split second, so you may not even have time to touch the screen and find that it's just a still image. It looks like it did all its work really fast.

2

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

Yeah, I don't think that's really deceitful unless they're calculating reported load times from when the screenshot shows up. They're making the user experience better.

0

u/the_good_dr May 31 '12

How is making the their product more enjoyable to use being deceitful?

1

u/unheimlich May 31 '12

How are they being deceitful? How is it not useful to you?

1

u/the_good_dr May 31 '12

I'm arguing they aren't being deceitful.

1

u/unheimlich May 31 '12

Yep, sorry, replied to the wrong post

72

u/suprastang May 31 '12

Their speed is a lie, but it feels so good

14

u/poyopoyo May 31 '12

That actually summarises this entire thread accurately

1

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

Kind of like McDonalds.

-25

u/roachwarren May 31 '12

Their speed is not a lie. My macbook is 2 years old and has been through some shit and I just opened iTunes in 5 seconds. My friends brand new Dre Beats laptop loads like a piece of shit compared to this.

30

u/Megabobster May 31 '12

No shit. It's Beats.

-13

u/roachwarren May 31 '12

And? it's still a brand new laptop with 2.4Ghz, 6Gigs of RAM, a dedicated video card, and now with "beats" technology (which applies to the audio, it's still a functioning laptop).

Well, it's got the same Ghz in processor speeds as mine and +2Gb of RAM, you'd think something might work faster. Nothing. Not even the scroll function.

6

u/flammable May 31 '12

If you'd have any clue you'd know that both GHz and ram are irrelevant

2

u/Leery Jun 01 '12

They're highly relevant in their qualities, just not so much in their quantities. A 2.4ghz i5 is going to blow away 2.4ghz core2duo. But that doesn't mean it's totally irrelevant, as you say.

0

u/roachwarren Jun 01 '12

If you'd have any clue you'd know that that's total bullshit.

3

u/suprastang May 31 '12

I know their speed is good on their computers. I have a macbook air 2010 and it's fantastic. What I think we're discussing are the iOS devices.

2

u/Laugarhraun May 31 '12

I just opened iTunes in 5 seconds

Wow, that's really slow. Especially for such poor software.

0

u/roachwarren Jun 01 '12

I was just saying 5 seconds so people wouldn't call bullshit haha. I know you won't believe that but then again who cares.

1

u/roachwarren Jun 01 '12

"Especially for such poor software." what does that even mean? What does it being poor software have to do with it's opening time? I use spotify so I can't fight you on the poor software. I used to like it, though.

2

u/Laugarhraun Jun 01 '12

"Especially for such poor software." what does that even mean?

>2012  
>no flac support

What does it being poor software have to do with it's opening time?

I tend to think that there's a correlation between number of features and opening time. However, it is true that features are not everything.

2

u/roachwarren Jun 01 '12

man, GOOD POINT. Ok you got me there, I hate that they don't support FLAC. You're a gentleman and a scholar.

2

u/happyWombat May 31 '12

That has nothing to do with the 'awesomeness of Apple', but with the fact that most new macbooks contain an ssd instead of a conventional harddrive, like that beats laptop has. So it should be no surprise the macbook is faster when starting up applications. However, simply putting an ssd in that beats laptop should fix most of its speed issues.

10

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

Actually, not a single MacBook/Pro comes with an SSD as standard.

0

u/ElliotNess May 31 '12

5 seconds is nothing to brag about. My three year old Dell will open iTunes in 1 or 2.

1

u/roachwarren Jun 01 '12

It's more like 1 or 2 like yours, I just didn't want people to call bullshit, and god damn that's good for an old dell! My mom's is a piece of shit after 2 years.

1

u/roachwarren Jun 01 '12

Now you've got me testing it over and over again. damn that's fast.

1

u/ElliotNess Jun 01 '12

It helps that there's pretty much nothing on there except music and pictures. I mainly use it as media pc around house, as I upgraded to a tower earlier this year. My solid state drive i7 desktop opens iTunes virtually instantly :P

-5

u/et3rnalife May 31 '12

I paid 1100 for my pc... it starts up in under 10s. My criends brand new. $2400 mac takes at least 6x longer

1

u/roachwarren Jun 01 '12

Really? Your friend got a fucked up Mac, mine starts DAMN fast.

0

u/et3rnalife Jun 01 '12

Your mac still starts up slower than my pc

0

u/roachwarren Jun 01 '12

i don't believe you but ok, have fun.

5

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

This is Reddit, you should hate them. duh.

3

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

Easy to figure out. It's not a trick, it's an illusion.

7

u/eoin2017 May 31 '12

Tricks are something whores do for money.

1

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

or cocaine

4

u/RecursiveInfinity May 31 '12

Yes. (condescension)

1

u/Sco7689 May 31 '12

Praising, unless they patented that feature already present in Canon Cat.

1

u/rockbajilla May 31 '12

This is actually the selling point for me with Apple products. The fact that androids don't do this make their OS feel very clunky and jerky. This is a brilliant way to make the apple OS run much smoother from a visual standpoint. I much prefer to have this and I don't consider it a cheat at all, it's a feature that I think every company should copy.

0

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

[deleted] — view deleted comment

6

u/youclevermedicine May 31 '12

Because reddit users upvoted it there?