General Does Apple intentionally make iOS glitchy on older devices to force upgrade?

People are getting too spoiled these days.. One should be grateful that ones device gets any updates and software support several years down the line to begin with.

Of course newer software is geared towards and optimised for the newer models thats simply how it works. It has always worked that way, ensuring the latest software is fully utilising the full potential of the new hardware we have at hand and with the rapid development in the ARM world the difference between a brand new iPhone and a three year old one is massive so thinking that a software written with a 2013 model in mind would run perfectly smooth on a three year old version is rather foolish.


Instead of bitching around about how poorly the new software might run on your old device one should really give Apple credit for offering you the opportunity to run the latest and greatest software to begin with. Apple is always very good at optimising their newer software to disable some of the features of the newer software that might simply be too much for the old hardware to handle, as with iOS 7.0 having less fancy animations and whatnot on iPhone 4 devices for instance, thats not about making the iPhone 4 seem less "cool", its all about making the experience as good as it possible can be on all devices but as the hardware on a three year old device is lacking so far behind in ARM world one has to make some sacrifices.



This reminds me of my father in law whom was constantly bitching about how his iPhone 4 no long was able to run X-numbers of applications due to it requiring iOS 6.0, going on and on about how Samsung cost far less but gives you so much more for your money and would at least let you run your applications even though your phone was a few years old.

I just looked at him and told him, you know that if you hook your iPhone 4 to your computer and click the update button you'll get from iOS 4.x to iOS 6.1.3 and you will be able to run all the apps you are talking about? You know that Apple is the one company that actually provide software updates fastest and for the longest period of time for their older models, that Samsung tends to drop support for their devices after 1-2 years, while Apple keeps going for at least three if not even four years? And that your phone might actually be more capable if you start updating it software from time to time.

If the device's hardware can't support the software, then why the software be released on that hardware?

Maybe they do it because they know that you will be more likely to buy a new device.


But that begs the question, why can't hardware from two years ago run software (missing most of the "nice" features) from today?



My PC from 2005 runs programs from today just fine, and I'm still using XP.

The iPhone is a phone. So the phone app should be the fastest stock app.
Ironically, iOS 7 made it very slow:

iOS 6: 0.67 seconds
iOS 7: 2.37 seconds

Graphics has been reduced to a minmum, yet the new loading times break all negative records. IMO this is either intention or incompetence.

Source: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/09/new-lease-on-life-or-death-sentence-ios-7-on-the-iphone-4/

You do realise that the reason why they let older devices run newer versions of iOS is to give people a taste of what they could have if they updated, right?

Then not letting them downgrade is simply a way of telling them that their device is getting old and that they should upgrade.

I've got a 15+ year old computer, 350 MHz Pentium 2 with 160 MB RAM running Win2K in my parents' house, it boots up the Office 1997 suite much, much faster than my early 2011 2.3 GHz i5 MBP with 8 GB RAM does (despite having a faster HDD in the MBP).

Had I upgraded that computer to Windows XP, and the service packs that came after on top of that, and gotten the newer versions of the Office suite - that computer would have been rendered unusable a long time ago. And that's what Apple is after. They don't want people to run iOS 3 or 4 on their older iPhones because it would be as fast today as the day they bought it. The need to upgrade would simply not be there in the same way if they allowed people to install older versions of iOS and use the older versions of apps.

roxxette said:

ios 4 on iphone 3g

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That was by far the worst upgrade for an iPhone to an iOS

If your not satisfied with iOS support on older devices, you probably never heard of android or windows mobile

I wonder, how does the 5C compare to the 5 with iOS7?

roxxette said:

ios 4 on iphone 3g

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Exactly. A great example of Apple's intentionally making an otherwise OK device useless.

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vwnut13 said:

But that begs the question, why can't hardware from two years ago run software (missing most of the "nice" features) from today?

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Because it's not Android, where it's way easier to write code supporting even old OS versions. And it's not almost impossiible to support old ones - unlike in iOS, where it's REALLY hard to add pre-4.3 compatibility to AppStore apps.

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zBoost said:

If your not satisfied with iOS support on older devices, you probably never heard of android or windows mobile

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You don't seem to know much of Android programming, it seems...

I think so, i'm pretty sure they did, probably not intentionally but obviously consciously, letting older devices unattended or un-optimized.

I mean, this is a marketing and business method, and, even if it's really annoying, i can't see it's wrong.

I don't agree apple's way to force you to buy their new fancy-and-very-expensive device at the expense of your 9-month-old-almost-new iPhone.

But i should say it's a clever and clean way to do that.

Does Apple intentionally make iOS glitchy on older devices to force upgrade?

Menneisyys2 said:

You don't seem to know much of Android programming, it seems...

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Well tell me which from all the android phones except nexus 4, s3/4 and htc one can receive more than ONE or best case scenario two updates of the OS? None.

zBoost said:

Well tell me which from all the android phones except nexus 4, s3/4 and htc one can receive more than ONE or best case scenario two updates of the OS?

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My Galaxy Nexus went from 4.0 to 4.1 to 4.2 to 4.3. Still runs like a champ - got better with each update.

My iPad 3 on the other hand was almost ruined by iOS 7. Luckily I was able to restore back to 6.1.3 before Apple decided not to allow that anymore. That did it for me as far as buying iOS devices goes. Forced obsolescence.

^^^^

Jelly Bean 4.1 was were Google Started "Project Butter", this took a toll on the CPU and Batt life on the Galaxy Nexus. To achieve better performance, you gotta sacrifice something else and that is the hardest part, is finding the right balance.


http://youtu.be/YAKk_ffjwC8


Back to the topic:

In general I would say No, but I've caught Apple once with the iPhone 3G on Firmware 4.2.1

Apple didn't allow custom wallpapers on the iPhone 3G, what really made it super unusably slow was was the 6 .png. files in the springboard that were drop shadows and gradients for the icons. Once you removed them by jailbreaking it and SSH'ing into your iPhone, it was running a lot faster and the diff was night & day.

I don't understand why Apple didn't strip those .png files, since the background was black and you can't see them at all.

zBoost said:

Well tell me which from all the android phones except nexus 4, s3/4 and htc one can receive more than ONE or best case scenario two updates of the OS? None.

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1. Well, one has to go for a model that is known to receive several even major upgrades - that is, the Nexus line.

2. Programming-wise, it's WAY easier to code apps running on all versions in Android than in iOS. (I'm a programmer of both.) It's pretty much ridiclulous even now there are iOS7-only apps, also "thanks" to Apple, who make it unnecessarily complicated to write multi-iOS-version apps (again, unlike Google).

ios 7 is slow and buggy on iphone 5 so that should answer your question.

Time

I just don't see Apple being the type of company that would bother taking the time to figure out and implement code that would pro-actively make older devices run worse. I have thought of that scenario before, but I consider it highly unlikely. That's the kind of thing really unscrupulous companies do, and I just can't see Apple stooping to those types of tactics.

A VLSI Ph.D. from one of the top 10 engineering schools here.

First, I would like to clarify that the argument that new iPhones have better hardware, so they are faster is absolute ********. The performance increment is just too small to cause any improvements in user experience. Besides, in pretty much all day-to-day applications the speed bottleneck is not the processor. In many cases the bottleneck is the wireless 3G/4G chip whose performance is strictly fixed by wireless standards. Most of the hardware work apple does from generation to generation is improving power efficiency.

I am not an embedded system designer, but as far as I know, all apple products use ARM cores and extremely similar hardware, so, unless firmware is deliberately changed to work bad on the old versions, there is no other way to justify the fact that my wife's iphone5 opens Safari 8 times faster than my iphone 4.