>I have a $3000 1 year old laptop, and sometimes slack gets so slow I have to kill the browser process and start over again. The issue is not hardware.
Keep in mind, the 1st gen iPad was single core and only had 256MB of RAM, which was the same RAM capacity as the then current iPod touch. Compare it to any PC with a single core Intel CPU and the experience will be largely the same, except of course the Intel CPU will require x10 more energy to run.
And yes, it did have a really great CPU for it's time. It's core CPU architecture remained largely unchanged for 2 more generations. The iPad 2 added an extra core (A5), and with the iPad 3rd gen, Apple gave it more GPU power in the SoC (A5X).
The issue is that when the GP's iPad was new, it didn't have many problems browsing the web. I know mine did not. Outside of Flash-using sites or extreme JavaScript beasts the original iPad was a pretty capable web browsing machine.
The web has regressed when an old iPad (or PC) can no longer reliably view it. It's not like words got harder to display in the intervening decade.
A blog post, news article, or a tweet shouldn't require a quad core CPU and gigabytes of RAM to be readable.
Based on what was said, that page had already been loaded once, and it still took that long.
Loading a Google Search took only about two seconds, because of how extremely minimal and optimized the search page was back then.
Loading The NY Times took about 8 to 12 seconds, depending on where you draw the line.
So, at the time, maybe we were used to webpages taking a while to load on mobile devices, and it seemed very reasonable. I’m sure there were some extremely simple websites that loaded quickly, but The NY Times was one that Apple promoted heavily at the time (apparently) as demonstrating what a good experience the iPad browser was.
Nowadays, we hold the web and our devices to much higher performance standards.
It’s not an apples to apples comparison because the content is entirely different, but the context of this thread is that modern websites are significantly harder to load and render.
Even though content is supposedly much more resource intensive today, my 2018 iPad Pro loaded the technobuffalo home page initially in less than 3 seconds, and subsequent page clicks are even faster.
This iPad loads google search results even faster than the original iPad.
This iPad loads the New York Times in under 3 seconds, with subsequent page clicks taking the same or less time.
Based on the numbers, a contemporaneous 2010 iPad was 3x to 5x slower at browsing the 2010 web than my 2018 iPad is when it comes to browsing the 2020 web, and that’s a roughly two year old iPad design, so it should be even more at a disadvantage. My iPad is also rendering more than 5x as many pixels while doing that.
In conclusion, the original iPad was severely underpowered.
> A blog post, news article, or a tweet shouldn't require a quad core CPU and gigabytes of RAM to be readable.
Conceptually, I agree, but every image and video we use for content in websites now is significantly higher resolution and quality than they were back then. If you just want to read text, then you’re correct.
Page load times are a trailing indicator for web performance, they're not really the core issue I'm talking about. The original iPad could render even large HTML documents at a usable speed, including styles and inline images. Once a page was loaded and rendered the scrolling, tapping links, and interacting with forms was all usable fast. Even while the content was loading you could interact with the page.
The video you linked showed this capability. That TechnoBuffalo page was a pathological case for the iPad rendering and it was still interactive fairly quickly even if all of the resources weren't finished loading. I had the original iPad and browsing worked just fine on it. Even when pages took a long (multiple seconds) time to load they were scrollable and interactive. I could read the content as everything loaded.
The issue today is there's no page to start rendering in the bloated JavaScript way of the world. The HTML received from the server is just a reference to load all the JavaScript which needs to parse and execute then fetches and renders the content. A relatively low powered device, like the original iPad, needs to do vastly more work to display even just text content than a static HTML document.
It's not shocking that your modern iPad renders pages faster than the model released a decade prior. Not only does it have far more power and memory but the network (both last mile and far end) is faster. It's also got an extra decade of development on WebKit. The web is more bloated but the modern iPad has ramped up its power to compensate.
Look at Reddit versus old.reddit.com. The "modern" Reddit page has poor interactivity even on my current iPad. The old.reddit.com site, which is similar in complexity to 2010's Reddit, renders damn near instantly and has no interactivity issues.
> Conceptually, I agree, but every image and video we use for content in websites now is significantly higher resolution and quality than they were back then. If you just want to read text, then you’re correct.
Using huge images and video for "content" is part of the problem. Images have been used on the web since Mosaic, older devices can handle inline images just fine. It's the auto playing video ads and tens of megabytes of JavaScript executing to display a dozen paragraphs of text that's problematic.
> It's not shocking that your modern iPad renders pages faster than the model released a decade prior. Not only does it have far more power and memory but the network (both last mile and far end) is faster. It's also got an extra decade of development on WebKit. The web is more bloated but the modern iPad has ramped up its power to compensate.
The main point was that the 2010 iPad was being given the most favorable conditions, and it still lost horribly, because even compared to contemporaneous devices, it was very underpowered, unlike current iPads:
- your claim is that websites are substantially heavier now (which I agree), putting the 2018 iPad at a disadvantage
- the 2010 iPad was browsing early 2010 websites in that video, so we've had 10 years of bloatification since then
- the 2018 iPad Pro is browsing 2020 websites, websites built years after it was released, so surely more "bloated" than they were in 2018
- being 2010 websites, they were probably much simpler to render
- the 2010 iPad's screen had 5x fewer pixels to contend with
Nowhere was I saying that the 2010 iPad was super slow to render 2020 webpages in all their bloaty goodness. That would be an obvious conclusion. If the 2010 iPad's performance was so good at the time, but only became slower as the web became much more bloated, why was it still so much slower at browsing 2010 websites than my 2018 iPad is at browsing 2020 websites?
The 2010 iPad was actually slow from the beginning, as the video proves. Since it was slow back then, it shouldn't be surprising that it's slower and more painful now that websites want to support higher resolution experiences by default. Yes, they could put effort into giving old devices a lower res experience, but why? That old browser is one giant security vulnerability at this point, and no one should be browsing any websites they don't control on that thing.
Even with all those advantages being in the 2010 iPad's court, it was still 3x to 5x slower than a 2018 iPad browsing 2020 websites at 5x the resolution. This is not even a 2020 iPad Pro -- this is a 2018 iPad Pro. Imagine how much worse a 2008 iPad would have been at browsing 2010 websites, if it had existed.
You say that it's "not shocking" that they ramped up the power so it can browse better, but the point is that we're loading substantially heavier websites today significantly faster.
How is that possible? Because the 2010 iPad was severely underpowered. If it had been running on a chip that was equivalent to laptop processors of the era (as my iPad Pro's chip is), then it would likely have loaded the 2010 websites about as quickly as my iPad is loading 2020 websites.
> Once a page was loaded and rendered the scrolling, tapping links, and interacting with forms was all usable fast. Even while the content was loading you could interact with the page.
Yes, it's very impressive how much interactivity Apple was able to give the 2010 iPad with its really terrible processor, once the loading finished.
That interactivity isn't because the chip was any good. I remember very clearly that it was because you were basically scaling a 1024x768 PNG while you zoomed in and out. Once you let go, the iPad would take a second to re-render the page at the new zoom level, but you were stuck staring at a blurry image for a second after zooming in. The GPU was really good at scaling a small image up and down. The CPU was not so good at rendering websites.
It was also very easy at the time to scroll past the end of the pre-rendered image buffer, and you would just stare at a checkerboard while you waited on the iPad to catch up and render the missing content. iOS actually drastically limited the scrolling speed in Safari for many years to make it harder for you to get to the checkerboard, but it was still easy enough.
> Look at Reddit versus old.reddit.com. The "modern" Reddit page has poor interactivity even on my current iPad. The old.reddit.com site, which is similar in complexity to 2010's Reddit, renders damn near instantly and has no interactivity issues.
New Reddit is one of the worst websites on the entire internet right now, if not actually the worst popular website in existence. I really don't understand how that hasn't been scrapped at this point. It's not representative of modern web experiences, except possibly in your mind. YouTube, The NY Times, Facebook, Amazon... these are all modern web experiences that work great on anything approaching reasonable hardware.
Keep in mind, the 1st gen iPad was single core and only had 256MB of RAM, which was the same RAM capacity as the then current iPod touch. Compare it to any PC with a single core Intel CPU and the experience will be largely the same, except of course the Intel CPU will require x10 more energy to run.
And yes, it did have a really great CPU for it's time. It's core CPU architecture remained largely unchanged for 2 more generations. The iPad 2 added an extra core (A5), and with the iPad 3rd gen, Apple gave it more GPU power in the SoC (A5X).