It was good on iOS 11. But with iOS 12, the SE feels like twice the phone. I never imagined it would run this well and smooth. Very impressed.
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iPhone SE (2016) iPhone SE feels like the latest phone after update
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Apple promised faster performance on iOS 12. It seems that they delivered.
This won't stop people from coming up with more planned obsolesence-throttling-gouging conspiracy theories. Someone's going to see this as proof that the problems that were seen in the past were intentional all along because now that the heroic hall of Internet experts have caught them in their act, they're on their best behavior.
Yep runs really well I’ve decided to stay with my 128gb SE for at least another year
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That's exactly what I have. I got it several weeks ago. I ditched my X in favor of the 8, which I then ditched in favor of the SE. Best decision I ever made.
Which is true, why would they optimize the OS this time only right after they got tons of lawsuits and media coverage about the Battery Throttle and performance slowdowns in older iPhones?
Yeah, I rest my case.
Engineering is hard. Very hard. It's entirely possible that they decided to prioritize efforts to make iOS more efficient after the bad press they got, but I have a hard time believing that it was an effort that began as the result of public pressure. It would have already been in the pipeline. You just don't decide to do things like this "just because" because half the time it backfires and you actually make everything worse. Why? Engineering is hard. Very hard.
It was already rumored that iOS 12 was going to feature a complete overhaul of the whole UI and it was delayed to iOS13 to focus on performance and stability which the older versions of iOS weren’t delivering, especially iOS11 and exactly when the bad press of Apple’s performance started to rise. There’s no defense over this. Apple messed up and they fixed it but it was due to the media and not for its users. Engineering is hard I don’t doubt but Apple is supposed to have some of the best engineers working for the company, if they let issues like root access in macOS escape then that shows their lack of interest in the whole platform experience. Not to mention how the iPhone X suffered from the weirdest UI bugs I have ever seen, like safari search bar hiding behind the notch near the clock, text notifications on the lock screen not being aligned with the texture, spotlight search behind the widgets page... and so on... There’s no need to defend when Apple screw up because if you do that they’ll never care to give us a stellar experience like their promise in their marketing, and it will just make them keep milking our money every single year for new products. When there’s issues they should be spoken out loud so it reaches Apple’s ears and they fix their stuff and not hide the problem, like “there’s always issues in every OS” and then proceed to compare iOS with the competition saying iOS has a superior experience and no bugs.
Maybe apple should clarify that this faster performance applies mostly to their own native apps as I did notice a difference when it comes to the camera app, but on other 3rd party apps like twitter, it's still the same as before where it would take a while for the animations to appear and the app launches. Heavy games apps still take as long as before.
got the iphone SE today but i got the 32GB. It's taking up 25 gb after apps transferred over. I have all music and photos/videos in cloud. Why is a big chunk of memory all of a sudden occupied by something called MEDIA. how do i delete this media?
^ I'd be curious to know what that "media and documents" is too given I have basically nothing on the phone. Unless media now means photos because I do have some of those stored on the phone.
Oh God hearing that scares me. Apple got so much correct out the the gate, using obvious and time-tested easy to use UIx techniques until iOS7’s unnecessarily revamped UIx. Now another change for the sake of change UIx? That used to be only Microsoft Windows’ calling card. I miss Steve’s understanding of Good Design and reign over Jony.
Well isn’t it up to the developers of those apps to update and optimize them for the new OS edition?
I had a similar issue until I installed iOS 12, now it's down to just 1.64 GB. Did you install iOS 12? If so, try restarting your phone. Not sure why that happens, but the new OS fixed it for me.
If some of the best engineers in the world allowed this to happen, it completely underscores that engineering is hard. It is very hard. Only people who have had to deal with engineering from a systems standpoint are going to understand just how hard it is. Systems are increasingly bloated and complex. You'll likely find some of the code that goes into Apple products in Microsoft products. No, they're not literally copying each other, but there are low level libraries to handle processes that have been around for years that they might have adopted a decade ago and is still in use today. One day something happens that unlocks a vulnerability in a long forgotten 10 year old code library.
It doesn't mean we can excuse them for screwing up, but people should understand that they're not omnipotent. Penalize them for being incompetent, but don't penalize them for hating their customers. The idea that they could do anything they wanted to if they only cared about it is very easy to believe if you've never had to deal with mountains of code that sit on other mountains of code. There isn't a single person in Apple who understands everything that's in any of their OSes. It's just not possible. It's way too vast and is only getting more vast.
This is one reason why I'm never in a rush to upgrade. Nothing is ever released before the bugs are ironed out anymore which is a problem plaguing everyone. That's probably the fault of there being too much pressure to release something on a shortened timeline combined with growing acceptance of letting the early adopters do some light beta testing and the simple fact that the potential outcomes of any configuration have become too vast to fully test for anyway. Apple has it easier than other developers too since they control the hardware and software, but they're still screwing up.
Hopefully this rough period will pass. We see this again and again in the history of OSes. There are periods when expansion of the OSes outpaces the developers' ability to keep the stable and secure and they tumble through a number of years of hell for everyone. OS 9 was a complete wreck by the time it was dumped for OS X. The clean start begot many years of uncommon stability, but that eventually hit turbulence too, calmed down, and is probably entering a new stage of turbulence again.
iOS will ride through these ups and downs too.
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My SE is updating to iOS 12 as I type. I know it did wonders for an old 5s I have so I am excited for it on my SE. Great little phone!
That's a personal preference.
I actually prefer the newer iOS 11+ card and flat UI to pre iOS 7 skeuomorphism style, it makes stuff pop out of the screen while looking super sharp and vibrant, it's actually way cleaner and simple to use.
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"It doesn't mean we can excuse them for screwing up, but people should understand that they're not omnipotent. Penalize them for being incompetent, but don't penalize them for hating their customers."
Considering that we pay $1500 for their phones and $4000 for their Macs we should expect better attention to detail like it used to be a long time ago. There's no excuse for Apple's lack of proper testing before releasing something, such as MacBook Pro's i9 throttling, keyboard and speaker crackling issues, iPhone 6 bending issues, iOS 11 terrible performance and glitches and so on.
"Hopefully this rough period will pass. We see this again and again in the history of OSes."
We shall see, I'm not 100% confident we are going to have a stable iOS 13 release because if the rumors of the UI overhaul turn out to be true, we are going to go back to iOS 7 days and they'll need 5 more iOS versions to "optimize" it.
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The A9 is still a very much capable processor. I’m really glad that Apple didn’t venture on to use the A8 in the SE, which they likely could have done, but the fact that they paired it with the same processor as the iPhone 6s, really prolonged this phone with two GB of RAM.
That wasn’t my point as much as it is: completely re-doing a UIx Is giving into amateurism and fashion. iOS 7 arrived and, as you say, they polished things to get to be good, where they are now. How much sense does it make to completely reinvent the UIx after 4 years of refining ios 7’s (turd of a, imho) redesigned UIx? In a situation where software can be refined so easily, a UIx reinvention makes zero sense other than to appease immature short attention span teenage consumers and Jony Ive.