Tuesday, November 17, 2020

The Cheap Android CPU limiting conspiracy

Around 2014 or so I bought a cheap $100 Samsung android.  I was impressed by how fast and snappy it was.  I remember thinking, "why bother with an expensive phone when this $100 is so fast?".  Eventually the screen broke and the phone got replaced.

Since then I've had about 4 or 5 cheap androids and they felt much slower and laggy.  Most of them start off feeling fast at first, but over the months get slower and slower.  Simple thing like waiting for the top pull down menu, or waiting on the keyboard to pop up.  Stuff that was never a problem on my $100 phone from 2014.

"Why bother buying an expensive phone when the $100 is fast?"

I think the phone makers figured out this was a problem for them.  So they fixed it to make the CPU's run slow so you will buy a new expensive phone.

Some facts to go with the conspiracy

On your Android the CPU is not always running at full power.  The CPU will slow down to save power, then will speed up when you are doing stuff and need the extra CPU power.  This is a total normal thing.

Well on one of these cheap androids I installed a CPU monitor and it revealed that the CPU was almost always being kept at the much slower speeds - below 50% almost all the time.  So even when I'm using the phone and it's struggling to keep up the CPU is not using max power.

Basically the CPU speed was being reduced by 60% most of the time.

Please note during this time I was on my phone A LOT so it should have been spending much more time in the higher CPU speeds.

412hr stuck at 546 mhz but the phone max CPU power is 1.43 ghz

546 mhz is a very very slow speed.  No one would buy a phone like this on purpose.  These cheap phones advertise they have fast CPU speeds , but then the phone makers lock the CPU speed to be slow so you will want to upgrade later.


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