Apple Doesn't Deliberately Slow Down Older Devices According to Benchmark Analysis

[wizard]

You mean older devices are just not as fast as new ones? I smell a conspiracy...

people hold too complaining, I'm still running an iPhone 4, talk about slow. A lot of that slowness is fed t in the browser though and that isn't always Apples fault. Some web sites use extremely Javascript heavy pages that simply didn't exist for phone devices back when the iPhone 4 was new. In other words phone centric web pages have grown substantially in complexity over the years.
[doublepost=1507574801][/doublepost]

No conspiracy theory here but...

All those tests do is show the processor is doing what it was designed to do. Does it take into account actual real life experiences? Maybe experiences with a phone that's been updated several OS iterations vs. a flatten/re-build each major OS release. I've always wiped clean with a major update and never restore an iCloud backup. Lightning fast, all the time, even on older hardware.

I suspect the slowdowns affect people who just update iOS 8,9,10,11 and so on. Old code lingers and causes issues IMO. Major OS update: DFU, flatten, go from there. Always smooth afterwards for me.

What this highlights is that they underlying libraries and services are not running any slower which is objectively true. What it isn't testing is individual apps which can and do have glitches and issues from one release to another. This isn't unusual at all and something Apple generally corrects. Of course Apple has no direct influence on third party apps.

I still think part of the problem is people don't understand iPhones operating system and the way some apps behave. by design the system will be slow until all apps and data is regenerated on the new devices and indexing is done. Depending upon the user that can take a few days. The other issue is that people don't delete apps from the app switcher to kill all background processes. One idiot after another will tell you that this isn't needed yet it repeatedly clears up issues on sluggish machines. The new OS is of course better at handling bad apps but the fact remains background apps can in certain situation waste a lot of CPU performance.
[doublepost=1507575391][/doublepost]

This is all absolute nonsense. My iPhone 4s and iPad 3 were eventually rendered virtually useless after upgrading the Os after being encouraged by the promise of no slowdown by Apple. The worst thing is the lag on the keyboard. Press a key and wait three seconds for it to register, not to mention a treacle-like GUI.

I'm still running an iPhone 4 and haven't had an OS update is sometime, years really. The phone has gotten slower even so. Why? Well when it comes to the web and even some E-Mail the data the phone has to process (really Javascript on the web) has gotten rather inflated in the last few years. So in many cases the slow down isn't so much the new OS as it is being served far more Javascript than every before. Many "mobile" centric web sites are as complicated as desktop web sites these days. So what we see is web sites seeing a high performance iPhone web browser and then sending it rather complex pages that it has to digest, thus every bit of new Javascript handling improvements Apple makes are quickly burn't up in supporting Javascript heavy sites.

 

[GoldenJoe]

This is not measuring what people are actually complaining about - real world use with app switching, memory management, etc.

 

[0924487]

I don't think Apple is courageous enough to slow down old devices like, if executed on iPhone 4, hold for 200ms here and there. No, they don't have the balls to do that. That will be a class action lawsuit and a billion-dollar compensation.

However, do you think Apple doesn't have the mean and capacity to optimize newer iOS for older devices so that they run buttery smooth like when they were bought? They deliberately did the bare minimum when it comes to optimizing for old hardware.

This is a simple Economics problem. Much like Airline industry is redundantly providing excess service for first class passengers while doing the bare minimum for the economy cabin. They will keep economy cabin survivable, and they won't intentionally bother you when you stay there, but they won't do much to make you comfortable, let alone having a good experience.

 

[ekwipt]

This story won't play well in the MacRumors.com community--it completely invalidates all the conspiracy theories and complaining.

eh i don't get this, doesn't the article show a slight drop in performance over the different iOS iterations? This coupled with new features would definitely make someones iPhones feel slower, making them likely to upgrade. I think Apple is just doing a great job at slowing the phones at a rate that it can't be proved categorically but can be "felt" by the user never the less. Hats off to Apple, you're basically just refreshing your glasse of cordial...

 

[fairuz]

What about this? I remember seeing this on Reddit a while back. I can't speak for the accuracy of it but it's all over the internet so it basically has to be true.

Could be complaints about slowness right after an update, likely while the OS is indexing or something. But I'm pretty sure that my phone becomes permanently slower after updates. I've done a fresh wipe each time. Whichever iOS added the custom keyboards made the default one lag. Sucks. There's no way a device behaves like that with the original OS.
[doublepost=1507598090][/doublepost]

I highly recommend jailbreaking your old device and installing iOS 7 on it. Everything is so much faster and smoother. My iPad is now a joy to use again.

Not really worth the effort. If I wanted that (ie I weren't concerned about security), I'd rather just buy a new device and literally never update it from there after.
[doublepost=1507598271][/doublepost]

Guys. Give. It. Time.

iOS 11 is just buggy. They are not crippling your devices. The fact that my 12.9 IPad Pro is soooooo slow shows this. In fact, my 6s is faster with UI than my iPad Pro. Just give it time. And in the future, do not upgrade until .1 or even later.

iOS 10 sucks too, and I'm on the latest. Wish I never installed it. The last time I ever updated and saw an equally fast device was iOS 7.
[doublepost=1507598466][/doublepost]

Alot of this has to do with the device itself degrading with time and not simply a software update(s) or more stress on the internals.

Your 2007 car won't work as well in 2017 as it did in 2007.

Nope, nothing on an iPhone degrades like that, even after 10 years. There aren't any moving parts, and SSDs at this point are robust. You're comparing it to a car, one of the clunkiest machines you can buy.
[doublepost=1507598813][/doublepost]

So how these days do you upgrade you Mac OSX?

For the last three, including all the betas, I have been doing it via the internet. I do not have a DVD to roll back my Mac to, so unless there’s a copy on the App Store of an older OSX there will not be any “roll backs.” Your future is nearer than you may think.

You don't have to delete the older installers after you use them. But yeah, I wouldn't be too surprised if Apple prevented macOS downgrades. They already prevent downgrading below what your Mac came with.

 

[amazingrugs]

Oh good grief. Why not expend a little effort figuring out why? And no, I don’t believe it’s iOS 11 as my original iPad Pro is better than new on iOS 11. Do a clean install as a first step.

Anytime I do a major OS upgrade I do a clean install, so please don’t assume I didn’t.

Sure the functionality of the OS is better, the multitasking, drag and drop, etc. BUT performance has taken a hit. I put back 10.3.3, and this is unacceptable on a near brand new device, that was advertised running iOS 11.

My problems include...

1) Much slower response from Spotlight Search. Results are near instant on 10.3.3, and this is one of the main reasons I reverted back from iOS 11.

2) Stuttering animations - even more noticeable after the near constant 120fps(60fps) with the ProMotion display and 10.3.3. Of course no OS is perfect, but again it is frustrating that the 2017 Pro can’t keep up on iOS 11.

3) Visual bugs - somehow a large number of bugs made it into the shipping OS. Swipe to Delete animations in Podcasts glitching, when you close two apps at once in App Switcher it goes wonky, Cover sheet notifications text glitching through its container bubble, the screen going blank during open/close App animations. The list goes on.

I would be happy to share with you videos of these glitches, that I see both on my iPad and 7 Plus, both running clean installs. I assure the problem is real.

 

[Ethosik]

Anytime I do a major OS upgrade I do a clean install, so please don’t assume I didn’t.

Sure the functionality of the OS is better, the multitasking, drag and drop, etc. BUT performance has taken a hit. I put back 10.3.3, and this is unacceptable on a near brand new device, that was advertised running iOS 11.

My problems include...

1) Much slower response from Spotlight Search. Results are near instant on 10.3.3, and this is one of the main reasons I reverted back from iOS 11.

2) Stuttering animations - even more noticeable after the near constant 120fps(60fps) with the ProMotion display and 10.3.3. Of course no OS is perfect, but again it is frustrating that the 2017 Pro can’t keep up on iOS 11.

3) Visual bugs - somehow a large number of bugs made it into the shipping OS. Swipe to Delete animations in Podcasts glitching, when you close two apps at once in App Switcher it goes wonky, Cover sheet notifications text glitching through its container bubble, the screen going blank during open/close App animations. The list goes on.

I would be happy to share with you videos of these glitches, that I see both on my iPad and 7 Plus, both running clean installs. I assure the problem is real.

This exactly. Typing and Siri are also slow. But people just assume they did this only on old devices to force you to upgrade. If the iPad Pro struggles, obviously the iPhone SE will!

I have no idea how my iPhone 6s+ is faster than my iPad Pro.

 

[artfossil]

Anytime I do a major OS upgrade I do a clean install, so please don’t assume I didn’t.

Sure the functionality of the OS is better, the multitasking, drag and drop, etc. BUT performance has taken a hit. I put back 10.3.3, and this is unacceptable on a near brand new device, that was advertised running iOS 11.

My problems include...

1) Much slower response from Spotlight Search. Results are near instant on 10.3.3, and this is one of the main reasons I reverted back from iOS 11.

2) Stuttering animations - even more noticeable after the near constant 120fps(60fps) with the ProMotion display and 10.3.3. Of course no OS is perfect, but again it is frustrating that the 2017 Pro can’t keep up on iOS 11.

3) Visual bugs - somehow a large number of bugs made it into the shipping OS. Swipe to Delete animations in Podcasts glitching, when you close two apps at once in App Switcher it goes wonky, Cover sheet notifications text glitching through its container bubble, the screen going blank during open/close App animations. The list goes on.

I would be happy to share with you videos of these glitches, that I see both on my iPad and 7 Plus, both running clean installs. I assure the problem is real.

I wasn’t trying to give you a hard time. But you’re still under AppleCare! If your new device isn’t functioning get it repaired or replaced!

 

[freezelighter]

These tests are all ********.
My expensive iPad 2 is REALLY unusable after upgrading the firmware.
My wife’s iPhone 4 is partly usable after upgrading the firmware.
My iPhone 3s is partly usable after upgrading the firmware, and I say partly because iOS 7 is not suitable for iPhone 3s.

I proposed Apple to give us the ability to downgrade the firmware if we are not pleased with the new one. No one answered my email. Think of it, a firmware server where you can choose the firmware you want with the company suggesting the best for your model.

So, bye-bye Apple. You killed your products.

Did I just read iPad 2, iPhone 4 and 3GS?
Wow.

 

[NMSUballa]

This is all absolute nonsense. My iPhone 4s and iPad 3 were eventually rendered virtually useless after upgrading the Os after being encouraged by the promise of no slowdown by Apple. The worst thing is the lag on the keyboard. Press a key and wait three seconds for it to register, not to mention a treacle-like GUI.

I'm still using my 4s.

 

[fivenotrump]

This is true on any device, computer, phone, etc. It is always best to wipe and start fresh with a new OS, not exactly the most convenient, but the best.

Unnecessary, the update process works flawlessly for most.

 

[I7guy]

Did I just read iPad 2, iPhone 4 and 3GS?
Wow.

I’m still using my iPad 2. But the phones are 6s and later.

 

[abotsis]

This story won't play well in the MacRumors.com community--it completely invalidates all the conspiracy theories and complaining.

Meh - I used to think this was a perception thing until I started noticing it. Funny part is that only noticed it on major updates when new devices were available. I've gone through iOS updates when no updates were available and been just fine. Now, I'll be the first to acknowledge it might be a placebo effect of sorts.

I think 3dmark is a start, but I'd like to see a series of less-micro benchmarks as well. For instance, "how long does it take to open a file, read 1MB, write 2MB durably, then close it" or "How long does it take to open the phone app from a cold boot". I'd also like to see someone decompile some specific functions that haven't changed much over time to look for instances where different/less compiler optimizations might have been used.

 

[sterlingindigo]

GB's of updates make 'em snappier like eating more calories makes you skinnier.

 

[ducati rider 17]

This story won't play well in the MacRumors.com community--it completely invalidates all the conspiracy theories and complaining.

One flag is the researcher Futuremark isn't completely independent from Apple. Their parent company UL has partnered with Apple on environmental initiatives. https://industries.ul.com/blog/apples-pursuit-of-zero-waste-validation-with-ul-environment

 

[BiggAW]

What about this? I remember seeing this on Reddit a while back. I can't speak for the accuracy of it but it's all over the internet so it basically has to be true.

That data is factually correct, but the conclusions that the article comes to are completely ridiculous.

1. Apple releases iOS updates for everyone all at once, so the fact that searches for "slow this or that" for iOS happen in giant spikes, whereas they are evenly spread out on Android should be no surprise to anyone. There is no conspiracy here, except maybe by Android manufacturers for delaying updates to older devices and piling loads of crap on the phones.

2. Regular software updates for everyone, and long support for old hardware is a strength of Apple's, not a weakness. I'm an Android user, and Android updates are a complete mess. Most Android devices are lucky to last two years.

3. Over time, with each new update, older hardware feels slower. This is due to the creeping bloat in the operating system, not some giant conspiracy by Apple to make older phones feel slower. Apps and the OS has bloated drastically on basically every platform since the beginning of the smartphone. No longer are IPSWs 700MB, they're in the multi-GB range now. Yes, there are new features, higher resolution graphics, etc, and a lot of bloat. This has happened with app files that are often now upwards of 100MB, they used to be mostly under 10MB, since the cellular limit helped to force developers to not let apps bloat up. Now they don't care as much.

4. Compared to Android phones, iPhones still age WAY better in terms of bloat. Android just slows down on it's own, even without updates, iOS tends not to, or at least not to nearly the same degree, and has a much easier reformat/restore process to reinstall a clean copy of the OS and apps, and put all your stuff back on the phone.

5. iOS devices also age more gracefully since they have Apple's OS on them. My Galaxy S7, while I love it's features compared to an iPhone, and on the spec sheet it blows the iPhone 7 out of the water, has a mess of bloat on it that slows things down from day one, even for the hardware. It's got Android that Samsung junked up with Bloatwiz and a bunch of useless and redundant apps, then AT&T bloat on top of that, and then I had to put Google Launcher and Messages and Keyboard back on top of that, which then are redundant to the crap that Samsung installed already. With the iPhone it's just iOS and apps. No Bloatwiz or whatever LG uses, no carrier bloatware (forced by AT&T since they disable VoLTE and VoWiFi on unlocked devices), no Google stuff on top of that to restore it back to normal.

 

[Teammm]

From whom did you buy it? What’s the brand?
[doublepost=1507326922][/doublepost]
Throughout the beta period? Yes. Since GM, it’s gone away for me at least.

Bought it on Amazon, with a 4.6 rating and assurance of functioning from the company itself. The name of the company is Dreamvasion and manufactured by HSMO. It's a good quality cable

 

[saile]

now we have proof that all these rumors about the fact that Apple slows down the old devices are infoded


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
apple iphone 6 prix iphone 7

 

[dysamoria]

That's a 7 year old phone and it's still working fine ? I bow my head to you Apple.

Aside from battery degradation, there's no reason why it shouldn't be working fine. The computer industry has convinced tech people that stuff should stop working after 5-7 years and the rest of society has been buying into it.
[doublepost=1507889403][/doublepost]

RIP critical thinking.

Has anyone ever said that Apple hobble the CPUs and Chips with updates? Lol.

No, because that would be daft. Almost as daft as the article. In fact the lack of critical thinking in the articles saddens me a bit. It's ridiculous.

Apple users say that devices slow down after updates. That has nothing to do with chip performance. Nothing.

It has everything to do with the work the chips have to do. Much the same way that lollypop absolutely murdered the Nexus 7.

And in that respect, the real point users have with updates is not that Apple build in obselesence, but that they don't respect the capabilities of the older hardware when doing updates and that that it ON PURPOSE.

stupid article.

Agreed. But yes, that (your last paragraph) is what planned obsolescence is.
[doublepost=1507890211][/doublepost]

I would love if there would be a restore to the version the phone originally came with.

If you look and the GPU and CPU yearly increases, then 3 years old device is almost a relic and they always put new technologies to take advantage of the new hardware.
Older hardware cannot keep up.

With all honestly, slap a control center and a few newer features on iOS6 and I would take any day over any other iOS

Absolutely. Control Center is the only GUI usability improvement made after ios 6. Everything else is just reaching for sales and marketing excuses for new products. My iPhone 4 is on ios 6 and will STAY on ios 6. Even THAT is notably less fluid and speedy than ios 5 (though the Mail crashes in ios 5 were inexcusable).
[doublepost=1507890347][/doublepost]

Ding, ding, ding! 7 pages of comments and you (based on a search of this thread) are apparently the only one to have mentioned the one place where hardware does slow down with age - the flash storage. It is well known that flash slows down over time, particularly on devices which repeatedly are filled close to maximum, have some things deleted, then re-filled.

Formatting the device may help a little, but is unlikely to restore the exact level of performance of the device when it was brand new. It's one of the (apparently?) lesser-known facts about flash storage.

That doesn't explain why OS upgrade time is when devices suddenly perform worse...
[doublepost=1507891091][/doublepost]

Yeah. This. Why are they able to actually make old macs feel faster, while iOS devices only feel slower with each update? It's a noticeable difference between the two OS update patterns.

This has happened with Mac OS AFTER Snow Leopard?? The fastest Mac OS version I've used is still Snow Leopard. Lion was slower. Mountain Lion was no different. Mavericks was slower, but not by a lot. El Capitan was slower, more than Mavericks but still usable.

but i do agree that IOS updates eventually make the device intolerable while Mac OS updates don't.
[doublepost=1507891406][/doublepost]

I think, this article misses the point.

Someone found out, that the usable CPU (and GPU) speed stayed (almost) the same.
The conclusion is not, that "devices did not become slower". This is ludicrous, because the hardware is still the same. How should it become slower? The conclusion is: the slowness we users experience - which is real - , does not come from the CPUs suddenly running at lower clock rates, but is caused by something else.

So where is the performance lost?

I am a software developer for 10+ years. I started writing software for iOS in early 2010. Let me tell you what changed for me.

I don't remember optimizing for the original iPhone. But I remember optimizing our software for iPhone 3G a lot, when there was iPhone 3GS already and even when there was iPhone 4 around.
What did we need to optimize? A ton of things. ObjC is a slow language, so we went for C wherever necessary (which is easy, because C is (except minor things) a subset of ObjC). So for example clustering pins on a map was taking 30 seconds in ObjC on an iPhone 3G and about 1-2 seconds on the same device, when it was implemented in C. But honestly the bigger challenge was not optimizing the data part of the application, but optimizing the UI. For the table view for example - a very common UI element - we were pre-rendering cell images and putting them in some cache. We were using low quality jpegs, which don't have an alpha layer and thus don't need alpha blending and they have a small file size (with lossy compression) and can be decoded fast enough (faster than pngs) with the old CPUs. We spent a lot of time doing these optimizations.

As the iPhone 4 came, we had the same problem. Yes, the device was faster, but actually the faster CPU did not help us so much. The new problem was, that the images had to be 4x the size now (both dimensions grew by a factor of 2x). So still we had to optimize a lot to get these higher quality images moving on the screen at good speed. The table view (again as example) behaves a little odd here, because it does not simply animate/move a rendered image on screen (which would be fast), but at each step it does need to update the scroll offset, calculate the cell layout and do the drawing [1], which costs a lot of time.

So there we were, still optimizing. I would say, the first phone with "plenty" of power was the iPhone 4s. But if you tried using it today with the latest iOS it supports, it is again super slow. So why is that?

I think, that the developers at Apple (and also the 3rd party developers like me) don't optimize their software at all anymore. The devices are so fast now, that you can get away with almost any crapy code. This means, there is a lot of CPU and GPU power wasted, because of inefficient code. This makes every app slower and oftentimes use more RAM than necessary. Once you update the OS, all the apps from Apple are a litte slower, because they have more features and are less optimized - at least for the new code. With the incoming updates from 3rd party apps it gets worse (but the latter is a more continuous process).

Here are the details:

- The apps use more RAM (more features, less care about wasting ram, more advanced features, that require more RAM, no optimizations that could alleviate the problem): this makes it slow for everyone, because apps stay open less (get terminated earlier as memory is needed), which makes switching between apps slower, especially on older devices, that have less ram. And with a new iOS release, usually all apps are updated. Also these apps have more features which might require more RAM.

- The system libraries grow with the OS updates: As the apps launch, the DYLD loads the libraries, which takes longer with larger libraries (including system libraries and the libraries the apps ship with), which increases all apps launch times. Also the libraries (except from stable base ones) might themselves become slower and use more RAM due to the more features they offer. And nowadays apps make use of have 20 libraries via CocoaPods, because it is always easier to use the code, than writing your own. Do we strip them, to remove the code, we don't use? I know, we strip the binray before releasing, but honestly, I don't know, if we strip the libraries, that we bundle with the apps.

- Developers and Apple make use of more features, thus using more CPU/RAM. E.g. why does it need time for the words (words, not single characters) in the Notes app to appear on screen, when I have already typed them on my iPhone 6? Is it Because the text is now synced with the cloud for every few characters I type? I don't know for sure, but Notes app on my iPod 1st gen (iOS 4) runs much faster than Notes app on iOS 11 on my iPhone 6. Yes, it has more features, that is exactly my point. I am pretty sure, that Apple's really good developers could make the current Notes app really fast on "older" devices like my iPhone 6 also, if some high ranking manger complained about the speed. As a comparison: MS Word on my 16MHz computer in the end of 80ies was fast. But Notes (which has less text formatting features than the MS Word back then) on a dual-core 1.3GHz iPhone is laggy? I think, Apple's developers are more busy adding new cool features, than they have time for making them run fast. They probably have the latest phones and don't invest so much time on older phones. I could tell you some stories about performance at Apple from Ex-Apple employees, but remain silent. Short: they don't optimize everything a lot. And the truth is, a lot of 3rd party developers also don't, because they say: "it is fast on my phone" - which was usually bought within the last two years.

- The OS very slightly gets slower, but only a little bit. [2]

- We have switches to Swift: it was common for apps to increase form 5 MB to 30 MB executable size while remaining the same functionality. This means, that it takes more time to load the apps into RAM and that they take up more RAM, while running. This causes the same issues mentioned above (less apps in RAM at the same time results in more time to switch between them, as they need to be re-launched a lot - which again costs more CPU and drains your battery faster).

There are some things, that I might be wrong about. Also this is not a complete list. I am not perfect. But this is, what my impression is on the topic and I hope, I could give you some helpful information as a developer.

[1] https://download.developer.apple.co...formance_optimization_on_iphone_os_part_1.pdf
[2] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=macos-1013-linux&num=1

This was an EXCELLENT post! Thank you for your time typing this up!
[doublepost=1507892207][/doublepost]

Based on my recent experience nuking and repaving my iPad Air, i’d tend to agree: it’s like software crud accumulates. I regularly updated the Air and my iPad 2 before it for years without a clean reset. The Air was becoming unusable. Took it to an Apple store where they verified that the hardware is fine and then did what I think was a DFU level factory reset firmware/iOS 11 install, and it runs fine. Much easier to set it back up these days after a clean reset, now that all of the app installs are in the App Store and important data is cloud based. All I lost were game settings, and that was no loss at all. Back up in couple of hours. Painless, actually, and the Air feels new.

You aren't forced into an upgrade in this procedure?
[doublepost=1507892507][/doublepost]

Please go find an iPhone 4S running iOS 9 and comeback here and tell us how it goes.

If you think 4S on iOS 9 is a good experience..... wow....just wow...
[doublepost=1507372956][/doublepost]

It’s not actually. Though people don’t look at facts. You may choose to ignore the changes.

https://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2017/09/ios-11-iphone-5s/

If you do research, you will find this “benchmark” is BS, there has always been a history of performance issues with iOS upgrades. Hardware benchmarks are meaningless in relation to os user experience

I'm starting to wonder if all these "i have no problem with slowdown here" people are just... inattentive, or have slower brain "cycles", and therefore slower perceptions...

 

[dysamoria]

And my response to that, yet again, is: no, it's not "just how things go." It's how things go with iOS. The same thing does not happen with macOS, with Windows, or (I'm told) with Android. My 2013 rMBP is as fast or faster on 10.13 as it was on 10.9, which it shipped with, yet a 2013 iPhone (a 5s) performs far worse on iOS 11 than on 7, which it shipped with (documented in a video posted a few pages back comparing iOS 8 to 11 on a 5s).

This idea that slowdowns are inherent to OS upgrades is nonsense, and it needs to die. The basic UI of iOS is a grid of icons. There's absolutely no reason it should be slowing down to this degree, or at all, when the A series chips are now rivaling Intel's Core family in raw power.

+9000!!!!!

That myth is part of the special pleading logical fallacy that has protected the computer industry against reasonable criticism for ages...
[doublepost=1507894945][/doublepost]

No I expect it not to degrade adding a few features here and there.
The OS is the base operating system and I expect it to operate efficiently.
Would you expect your digital camera to degrade if you performed a firmware update?
Its not as if performance testing is a new thing to developers. Especially since there are farms of iPhone devices out there to test against.

Tell me what functionality that is running all the time that is slowing things down?

Apple screwed up once before slowing down devices so much that they improved things with the next release.

Exactly! Apple tells users that it WILL improve if they upgrade. They do this for ios and they do this for Mac OS (i even have a screen shot of a message box popping up on my mac to get me to upgrade past Snow Leopard, the fastest Mac OS ever was). I'm so sick of tech geeks criticizing people for being unaware of tech geek facts!!
[doublepost=1507895116][/doublepost]

Can we please give this “UI Lag on older devices” a rest? I have the newest iPad Pro 12.9. I experience horrible UI lag on iOS 11. It is just bugs on a brand new iOS version. Not because Apple is evil. This is what you get when you update on a .0 release. If you do not want these issues, do not upgrade until .1, .2 or .3 even.
[doublepost=1507431667][/doublepost]

It is just iOS 11. Not because your phone is old. My 2 month old $1299 iPad Pro 12.9 is running very very very very slow with iOS 11. It is just bugs with a .0 release. Give it time people.

Why the everloving FRELL is this acceptable business to people??? These OS updates are CLEARLY not finished! They should NOT be released like this!!
[doublepost=1507895758][/doublepost]

Alot of this has to do with the device itself degrading with time and not simply a software update(s) or more stress on the internals.

Your 2007 car won't work as well in 2017 as it did in 2007.

Incorrect analogy! A car has tons of moving parts that wear with friction, flexing, heating & cooling cycles, chemical changes, etc. STILL, my 1997 Mitsubishi Eclipse worked exactly as well in 2015 when i sold it as it did back in 1997. You know why? NO SOFTWARE was changing its behavior. When parts broke, they were replaced and function was restored. I only got rid of the car because i didn't want to do the reconstruction work on the undercarriage needed for rusted floor panels, nor did i have the resources or expertise to do it myself.

A computer has FAR fewer moving parts. An ios device has near ZERO moving parts. My iPhone 4 performance was degrading every year as i updated ios. That degradation stopped dead because I stopped "upgrading" at ios 6. It's sluggish but entirely usable (and beautiful, unlike ios 7). It has been relegated to iPod/PIM status but still serves me. Most importantly, it's not getting any worse with age. Even the battery is doing very well. The only thing that is wearing out on it is the home button. If i don't change the OS, it will be the home button or a battery failure that stops the device working, not parts wearing out. That will still be years away.

There is ZERO logic to comparing an ios device to a car... unless we are talking about the computer BS in our current generation of cars (running Linux and terrible media center software that feels like it was an open sores project gone bad).
[doublepost=1507897010][/doublepost]

This.

Apple is all about their brand. Longevity of the products is one of the big appeals, and makes the idea of buying an Apple product as an "affordable luxury" more palatable to the non-millionaires. Longevity isn't something they can just excite people about in marketing materials, though - it comes through experience owning previous Apple products, or word-of-mouth if you've never owned an Apple product.

Not only that, but it just shows a good attitude towards your customers. Other companies have a transactional customer relationship - they just want to sell you a product, once, then they don't care about you again. Apple wants to be the company that continues to see you as a customer, continues to make the product you bought even better, and who delivers a continuously-secured platform so you don't have to worry about it.

If Apple stops living up to that, people will notice, longevity and continuously valuing their customers won't be a part of their brand any more, customers will be more reluctant to buy, and the company will suffer.

They HAVE stopped living up to that standard and I HAVE noticed! I didn't convert from Windows PCs to Macs just to watch Apple turn into the same BS as the rest of computer industry!!

 

[artfossil]

I'm starting to wonder if all these "i have no problem with slowdown here" people are just... inattentive, or have slower brain "cycles", and therefore slower perceptions...

Oh dear.

Forgive me if I disregard the pronouncements of someone who refuses to upgrade past Snow Leopard and iOS 6.

I don’t want to squander my slow brain cycles.

 

[dysamoria]

This makes no sense. All of your devices are over 6 years old. That's like complaining about a PS2 that can't run PS4 graphics.

It makes perfect sense. Those products worked fine until an Apple-coerced software "upgrade". It doesn't matter how old the device is if the user is getting satisfactory usage from it. When that is ended by a software update, that's something the company has DONE TO the user that shouldn't be done.
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Isn’t that what I pointed out?

But the answer is no El Capt and Yosemite no longer come up in the App Store when searching after upgrading to High Sierra. And yes it and the last two are in my purchased tab.

But maybe you or others can send a link to where one might downgrade.

This is why i create DVDs or bootable USB devices with prior versions of Mac OS on them. Once Apple removes the bootable aspect of these installers, going backward will end.
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Oh dear.

Forgive me if I disregard the pronouncements of someone who refuses to upgrade past Snow Leopard and iOS 6.

I don’t want to squander my slow brain cycles.

Forgive me if i don't give a damn about your disregard. i have no patience for the arrogant presumption that "old = inferior" and wont be bullied into following someone else's fashion sense. i stick with what works best on each device I have, rather than hobbling those devices with bloated software. I have an iPad Pro (1st gen) and an iPhone 6S that look to be staying on iOS 10.x until iOS 11 is pronounced to be fixed (if ever), as well as a MacBook Pro 2009 and iMac 2011 that dual-boot Snow Leopard and El Capitan (El Cap is pretty slow but usable, but i almost never boot to it unless i need to back up my newer ios devices), and an iPhone 4 that hopefully will never suffer iOS 7.

 

[Kendo]

It makes perfect sense. Those products worked fine until an Apple-coerced software "upgrade". It doesn't matter how old the device is if the user is getting satisfactory usage from it. When that is ended by a software update, that's something the company has DONE TO the user that shouldn't be done.

I disagree. I meant to say that software requirements go up as the years go by. A PS2 cannot run PS4 graphics because it is 2017 software on 2012 hardware. The same goes for new and more complex software on older hardware.

If you own a smart TV from 2012 and try to run Netflix or Vudu from its internal app, you would know what I'm talking about, it is slow and takes forever to load. The old 2012 CPU cannot handle the new software updates. This isn't exclusive to Apple, all technology products are like this.

 

[bjet767]

Forgive me if i don't give a damn about your disregard. i have no patience for the arrogant presumption that "old = inferior" and wont be bullied into following someone else's fashion sense.

Without engaging in the battle of wits going on here, I will commment on the one main reason to upgrade OSs as they become available, internet.

In the days of little to no connectability the operating system was almost all about hardware effiency and program integration, but these days, with all our internet connections, on-line communication and commerce updates are more essential than ever. Just patching the vulnerabilities of an operating system used on line has become a full-time profession for many.

Yes the older versions often work well, but it may be worth it to upgrade for security purposes. The very fact that you are exchanging messages on line means you are exposed to the risks.

 

[Ener Ji]

That doesn't explain why OS upgrade time is when devices suddenly perform worse...

Well that one's pretty obvious. New software releases have more features, new APIs, use more complex graphical animations, and in general are tuned to take advantage of more recently released hardware that contain more memory and more powerful CPUs and GPUs.