But there are plenty of people who don't have battery or other issues and who simply always upgrade or restore from backups too. As I mentioned certainly various situations where thee might be a better choice or at least something good to try for one reason or another, but in general there really isn't a particular way that's the only right way necessarily.
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Apple Releases iOS 7.1 With CarPlay, Touch ID Improvements, Visual Tweaks
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1, does Safari crash / reload tabs even with 7.1? It does. Even after loading only a handful of Web pages. So much for "1GB being sufficient" and "the kernel has amazing RAM compression".
2, Price of an additional 1GB RAM? $3? Not much.
3. And the additional power consumption? 1% less battery in a day (corresponding to, say, 5% on an iPhone), on an iPad, to maintain the content of RAM all the time (also in suspended state)? As I (and a lot of other iOS users) routinely recharge my iDevices daily (or even more often), I don't think it'd be a problem to have an additional 1GB. And not only Safari would be much more useful (far less frequent crashes / tab reloads), but top games like XCOM: Enemy Unknown, which do need 400+ Mbytes of free RAM to properly operate.
An entirely smooth update on my 4s and my wife's new 5s. My phone feels as smooth as it did with iOS 6.x. Very impressed so far.
There's nothing wrong with doing an OTA instead of a restore, because logically it saves time and is more convenient. What ISNT logical is trying an OTA and then bitching and moaning that it didn't go well, instead of accepting that a restore is the next step. That's where the problem with these users lies.
It's the find my friends app, now unless I leave gps running 24/7 no one can track me
You're right.
Nevertheless, the "clean restore" way (the one I recommend) is guaranteed not to cause any side effects like excess battery usage.
come on apple, are you serious?
applerobert - thanks for confirming.
Are you serious? Did you really think a software update would upgrade your RAM? 7.1 is much better at memory management, but it isn't magic!
come on apple, are you serious?
applerobert - thanks for confirming.
As others have pointed out, don't wait for a miracle. 1GB RAM is plain insufficient for multitabbed Web browsing.
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Apple may boast anything and call themselves the best innovators. The sad truth still remains: Safari / UIWebView consumes a lot of memory and not even memory compression can help it.
Have you ever benchmarked Opera Mini? Sure, its JS / AJAX support is almost non-existent but it has some major advantage - even heavy pages (e.g., one of my standard benchmark pages at http://winmobiletech.com/a/1.html ) only consume some hundred kilobytes of RAM when browsed in Opera Mini. The same page makes Safari allocate about 80 Mbytes of RAM - that is, almost two orders of magnitude more.
This is why I could open (and keep in memory!) even 30-40 tabs on a measly iPhone 3G (with 48 Mbytes of free RAM max) in Opera Mini. Now, do it in Safari or any multitabbed 3rd party browser...
As you can see, even alternative browser engines can have waaaay less memory usage than Safari. Even in 7.1 and its significantly improved Safari.
Fanastic update. The animation speeds and overall smoothness is similar to iOS 6. Good work, Apple.
The new power slider and Answer/Decline buttons are a nice touch. I hope Apple adds a lot more of this stuff in iOS 8, and moves away from iOS 7's sterile look.
The new power slider and Answer/Decline buttons are a nice touch. I hope Apple adds a lot more of this stuff in iOS 8, and moves away from iOS 7's sterile look.
After a page finishes loading and I start to scroll up, the page will partially reload causing me to have to start the scroll over. I don't remember having this problem in 7.06. Anyone else notice this? It happens evey time on here. Scratch that. I was observing the blue load bar being finished, without realizing that the loading wheel symbol was still going. False alarm.
Opera Mini renders nothing but text. All website layout and media data is server crunched and sent as compressed images. Safari is actually rendering the website in its entirety without any server assistance. Of course it's going to have much higher RAM usage. That's literally the worst browser comparison you could have made.
It gets better and better. Far from perfect, but way better than 7.0.6.
P.S. CC & NC animations on the lock screen are not as fluid as those on the home screen and I'm pretty sure it's not just me.
P.S. CC & NC animations on the lock screen are not as fluid as those on the home screen and I'm pretty sure it's not just me.
What has happened to Siri's voice? I use the Aussie female office and it's now sounding very robotic.
When you first update you get a low quality Siri voice. If you leave your phone plugged in it will download and update the high quality one automatically.
But THIS high?
1, I did mention in my OP that it's more or less static browser.
2, however, in practice, for static content, the end results are not worse than Safari: Retina support, adjustable JPEG compression etc. If I really suffered from the memory problem because, say, for the need of keeping as many tabs open as possible, I certainly could use it for a lot of Web pages. Including even the current one, which doesn't require (much) scripting. (I bet I could easily send messages from Opera Mini here. I wouldn't have rich text and pop-up menus, of course.)
It still crashes once you ran out of memory, it is just that in iOS 7.1, you run out of memory slower. Apple made improvements to fix the memory leaks caused by Safari and UIWebViews, while at the same improve its memory efficiency.
However, if you load enough web sites to consume all the available memory, it will still crash. Nin.com (I hate using this as an example but it is a consistent site that will cause the crash) is an example of a site where it can easily eat up all of the memory and will likely put you at much higher risk to experience crashes.
If you load up Google's image search to show as many images as you can or Instragam, it'll crash too. It just happens to crash much quicker in iOS 7 compared to iOS 7.1.
Apple have to approach this from at least two sides but I'd say three:
1. Adding more efficient RAM, this will reduce the odds of running out of memory quickly, thus less crashes but on its own, it WILL not fix the crashes
2. Continue the improvements made to Safari and overhaul its use of memory consumption.
3. Probably not feasible right now but they need to keep focusing on upgrading its flash chips for the storage. It's still incredibly slow (~40MBps) but if we could get it up to 200MBps, with low read/write latency, Apple could add a better paging system to iOS. Right now, iOS hates paging and doesn't do much of it, that's why Safari crashes after the RAM is exhausted, instead of OS paging it to the disk, and it's the same reason why tabs are reloading instead of staying still.
Apple changed this in 7.1, it won't kill the background services once the app is killed. So, you need to intentionally go to the Location Services in the Settings to turn them off.
Many app devs (mostly location service based apps) begged Apple to do this, so Apple gave in and changed it in iOS 7.1.
I was just thinking why the shift key is counter-intuitive and one factor that came to mind is the color theme: usually when a button is pressed, it has a darker color than when it's not. iOS 7.1 does the opposite, when shift is pressed, it's white, otherwise when not pressed it's grey. Now, white is a nice color, but lets think about it for a sec.
For 30+ years, in GUI computing we are used to buttons usually being darker when pressed, and lighter when not pressed. This makes sense from real life buttons and has been the usual practice on most OSes and apps.
Now we know iOS 7 is a feast of new UI and non-standard paradigms, and in some cases it works fine not following the 'norm'. But I think the shift button issue is a clear case where messing up with consistency is backfiring. The shift button is just plainly confusing and I believe Apple has made it worse in 7.1.
For 30+ years, in GUI computing we are used to buttons usually being darker when pressed, and lighter when not pressed. This makes sense from real life buttons and has been the usual practice on most OSes and apps.
Now we know iOS 7 is a feast of new UI and non-standard paradigms, and in some cases it works fine not following the 'norm'. But I think the shift button issue is a clear case where messing up with consistency is backfiring. The shift button is just plainly confusing and I believe Apple has made it worse in 7.1.
You don't have the new voice yet. On first install you get a low quality Siri voice, you need to plug your phone in and the new voice will be installed automatically.
The new voice is a HUGE improvement. Very natural.
Yes, that high. There's a reason Opera have a massive server farms to do all of those rendering, so that it can serve them back down to your phones as static content that the app and phone will not have to do any work on. It's like loading a book instead of loading a complex series of methods that have to be run (CSS, HTML, Images, JS code that can be from multiple sites, etc), each method would require the use of memory and they often do not overlap. Don't forget that Safari has a policy in place to render at 60FPS to keep it smooth, which requires the app to render off-screen, which eats up more memory.
Also, remember on iOS, all of the tabs' content are stored in memory, it does not paged to the disk as desktop browsers often take advantage of.
Coming from someone who owns ALL Apple...
Long GOOG, short APPL. Apple has great hardware and always has but their software is...well...going downhill or becoming more replaceable every day.
While this update may very well fix every problem I've been having with iOS 7, its really quite sad that it took a company sitting on so much cash to make a product that was released 4-6 months ago something that it should have been from day one.
My biggest issue has been constant Safari and occasional YouTube crashes. These happen daily and I have restored and started from scratch several times. It was becoming unacceptable. Next biggest issue was touch ID. I gave up on it after 2 months in when it just stopped working and I had to add about 5 different versions of the same fingerprint to get it to consistently recognize.
I really hope this update fixes these problems.
Long GOOG, short APPL. Apple has great hardware and always has but their software is...well...going downhill or becoming more replaceable every day.
While this update may very well fix every problem I've been having with iOS 7, its really quite sad that it took a company sitting on so much cash to make a product that was released 4-6 months ago something that it should have been from day one.
My biggest issue has been constant Safari and occasional YouTube crashes. These happen daily and I have restored and started from scratch several times. It was becoming unacceptable. Next biggest issue was touch ID. I gave up on it after 2 months in when it just stopped working and I had to add about 5 different versions of the same fingerprint to get it to consistently recognize.
I really hope this update fixes these problems.
Is anyone having problems with their Weather app?
I have a 5S and upgraded the iOS this afternoon. Twice the default Apple weather app has crashed on me (it instantly crashes and disappears after opening it.) This has never happened before -- just curious if anyone else is experiencing this.
I have a 5S and upgraded the iOS this afternoon. Twice the default Apple weather app has crashed on me (it instantly crashes and disappears after opening it.) This has never happened before -- just curious if anyone else is experiencing this.