Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Faster than what? Ios 7

Common sense says the version prior to the patch.

Why do so many people have the expectation that new major versions of software will perform the same or better than the previous version? Do people honestly have no comprehension of how much more iOS 8 is doing behind the scenes?
 
Despite what these numbers show, I can honestly say that my iPad 3 is slightly better. It doesn't freeze as much.

I was going to ask if anyone had experience with the iPad 3. Still an A5 device (A5X, to be specific), but has 1 GB of RAM.

I still have mine on 7.1.2 and wondering if I should upgrade.
 
I was going to ask if anyone had experience with the iPad 3. Still an A5 device (A5X, to be specific), but has 1 GB of RAM.

I still have mine on 7.1.2 and wondering if I should upgrade.

I wouldn't. If I could back I would. It's still much slower than ios7, only slightly faster than iOS 8.0
 
Now can you people stop complaining that I didn't update to iOS 8?

----------



You can install whatever OS you want on PCs (Macs included).

OT
Bold, non sense.

This used to be true (concerning OS X) but not anymore.
You can't install for instance 10.5.x or 10.6.x on the newest Macs, the kexts/kernel won't let those boot those versions.

----

I am on 8.1, jailbroken and it's not too bad, I've seen worse, iOS 6 (Or was it iOS 5, can't recall) on a 3GS for instance
 
OT
Bold, non sense.

This used to be true (concerning OS X) but not anymore.
You can't install for instance 10.5.x or 10.6.x on the newest Macs, the kexts/kernel won't let those boot those versions.

You can always go back at least to the OS that came with the machine when you bought it.

Not so with iOS.
 
You can always go back at least to the OS that came with the machine when you bought it.

Not so with iOS.

If you saved your blobs on older iOS/Devices you still can.

Back when I had a Powerbook I could install all OS X versions from 10.0 b to 10.5.x, and I think you could also do this with Intel Macs up until about a year or 2 ago.
 
I have a 5 and after 8.1.1, performance has suffered slightly. 2 examples are:

1. My home screen has 2 pages. 1st page full of apps and the 2nd page full of folders. Previously, opening and closing out of a folder was smooth with no dropped frames. Immediately after the update and since, opening and closing folders makes it jerk and drop frames in the animation.

2. Same issue with jerkiness and dropped frames but in the stock messages app when the keyboard is up and I activate Control Center.

I haven't really bothered to check other instances of dropped frames but this update seems to have made my iPhone 5 on iOS 8 act like how my old 3GS did when it was on iOS 6 - all jerky and disgusting, which shouldn't be the case as the 5 has one more cycle before it is considered the 'last supported' model and my 5 was perfectly smooth on iOS 8 and 8.0.1 (or was it.0.2? I can't remember).

Anyone else with a 5 or earlier with this issue? I wouldn't expect the 5S and above to display these though.

While this thread is about 4S and iPad 2, these issues will appear on all iOS8 devices, its just that the newer ones are faster and the issue is less or not noticeable.

My 5S is fine as is my iPad Air. But I do notice that swiping to/from home screens is often jerky. Swipe back and smooth, so there is a CPU effect (more CPU intensive when not in cache, and CPU+Cache effect, smooth, when in cache. I just turned off the parallax novelty (Reduce Motion to ON), and that has helped make it all smooth again, try that
 
What is this nonsense? iOS 8 is the first OS version the Apple A8 has seen, which means and is that iOS 8 was built on the Apple A8 in mind.

And I never experienced that issue, i Had a 5 on iOS 7 at the time and also iOS 8 and it is and was just as snappy as the first day I bought the phone, it is only very old devices that suffer performance due to hardware lacking (like the 4S/ipad 2) which obviously will happen , because we live in exponential times and hardware and software is growing and developing at a crazy rate

Sorry for not being clear but I was stating that with each iOS upgrade, the performance of the iPhone suffers.
If the pattern hold true for upcoming iOS updates, the A8 will become slow in a couple of years & not be as fast/responsive as it is today.
 
8.1.1 is great on iPad 2

It might be the figures are correct, and the startuptime might be the same of those apps; but compared to 8.1 and 8.0.2 8.1.1 is a massive improvement on the iPas2 I own. The gui is much more fluent, less stuttering and for instance the multitask screen is coming up a lot quicker than in earlier 8.x versions. So I am really happy.
 
Sorry for not being clear but I was stating that with each iOS upgrade, the performance of the iPhone suffers.
If the pattern hold true for upcoming iOS updates, the A8 will become slow in a couple of years & not be as fast/responsive as it is today.

Off course. Do we want, or does anyone want a new OS that reduces features to speed it up? This so called each OS is slower has been going on since computers went mainstream. Software requires more, hardware adds more.

The issue is should Apple have not allowed iOS8 to the 4S and iPad2? Or could they have documented what the CPU/memory hogs are in iOS8 and advised of this. Users can then get the latest features, get an OS that performs similar and choose what new features they will turn on, knowing the performance effect. BUT, from a marketing point of view thats not a good look. But the marketing gurus, do not know the real world, the effect of positive and informative communication means a lot to any user.
 
I find my 4s has better battery life, and has run increasingly cooler from 8.0.2 to 8.1 and again since the 8.1.1 update.

Maybe apple has just optimised, not made things "faster" necessarily
 
My iPad running iOS 6 is remarkably faster than my iPad running iOS 7, and based on these numbers, I won't be upgrading either to iOS 8 soon. I'll save that for when I get the iPhone 6 Plus.

It's amazing how each subsequent release gets slower and slower!
 
The fact that they bother doing something about A5 devices is an excellent news for users. With Samsung smartphone I used to have, you're lucky to have one generation of support where if you're device is a couple years or older, no new OS update expected.
 
My original iPad Mini feels like a whole different device after 8.1.1, compared to 8.1 and specially to 8.0.

For what I need, it performs as good as it was on iOS 7. And that's all I care about, was thinking about upgrading to iPad Mini 2 for Christmas but now it looks like it will last a whole new year before thinking about it.

Just hope iOS 8.2 doesn't change the performance again.
 
The fact that they bother doing something about A5 devices is an excellent news for users. With Samsung smartphone I used to have, you're lucky to have one generation of support where if you're device is a couple years or older, no new OS update expected.

Must have been a cheap one, most get a couple of versions official and its easy to put whatever custom rom you want on it , I only wish apple gave us that choice .
 
Off course. Do we want, or does anyone want a new OS that reduces features to speed it up? This so called each OS is slower has been going on since computers went mainstream. Software requires more, hardware adds more.

The issue is should Apple have not allowed iOS8 to the 4S and iPad2? Or could they have documented what the CPU/memory hogs are in iOS8 and advised of this. Users can then get the latest features, get an OS that performs similar and choose what new features they will turn on, knowing the performance effect. BUT, from a marketing point of view thats not a good look. But the marketing gurus, do not know the real world, the effect of positive and informative communication means a lot to any user.

Jelly Bean and Kit Kat ran faster then their preceding OS, and did more. 7 it's faster then Vista, 8 even faster, and 10 had been faster so far as well. WP 8.1 sped up my Lumia 520 that I had before my current phone. So, no, new software doesn't need to slow down old hardware and neither does it have to have fewer features.
 
My iPad mini 1st gen makes a good doorstop now and I'm sure my iWatch will make a fancy looking Christmas tree decoration after a couple of upgrades. That's continuity for you!!
 
How is it [BS] as you call it? There is very slight improvements to app loading speeds, but overall system stability is actually consistently better, which is great

But this was on the iPhone 4, if you remember back to iOS 6 they had exactly the same chart, upgrading to 7 was performance drop, then going to 7.1 improved slightly.

So going from 6 > 7 > 8 means a big drop in lag

On another note, those talking about ram on iOS vs Android devices isn't comparing Apples to Apples, the memory management on iOS uses reference counting and on Android uses garbage collection which 'could' mean that iOS needs less memory, albeit this doesn't seem to be bourn out in real life...
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Only if you ignore physics tests etc. Sunspider is not the only benchmark.

And neither are physics benchmarks. Physics tests are the only benchmarks in which iOS devices consistently fall short of contemporary SoCs used in Android devices. AnandTech does a great job in their iPhone 6 review of showing how the A8 is at least as fast as competitors, while probably being more power efficient as well due to the 20nm process.
 
The fact that they bother doing something about A5 devices is an excellent news for users. With Samsung smartphone I used to have, you're lucky to have one generation of support where if you're device is a couple years or older, no new OS update expected.

I'm not sure I wouldn't prefer that to an irreversible OS upgrade that renders the device substantially slower. Especially considering they give you un-dismissable red badges and push notifications telling you to upgrade.

iOS fragmentation is a real problem in my house. I have devices running 4 different versions of iOS.

iOS 5: iPad 1
iOS 6: 2 iPhone 4's
iOS 7: wife's iPhone 5 (will eventually upgrade to 8), iPad 3 (on the fence about upgrading to 8)
iOS 8: my iPhone 5, iPad mini 2

That's not to mention the two AppleTVs that are now running 2 different versions of the AppleTV OS.

iPad 1 should never have been allowed to upgrade to iOS 5. It's unusably slow, which it wasn't when I bought it. Same goes for the iPhone 4, which I'm sure glad I never upgraded past 6.

My inlaws all have 4s's and I've advised them not to upgrade to iOS 8.
 
I'm not sure I wouldn't prefer that to an irreversible OS upgrade that renders the device substantially slower. Especially considering they give you un-dismissable red badges and push notifications telling you to upgrade.

iOS fragmentation is a real problem in my house. I have devices running 4 different versions of iOS.

iOS 5: iPad 1
iOS 6: 2 iPhone 4's
iOS 7: wife's iPhone 5 (will eventually upgrade to 8), iPad 3 (on the fence about upgrading to 8)
iOS 8: my iPhone 5, iPad mini 2

That's not to mention the two AppleTVs that are now running 2 different versions of the AppleTV OS.

iPad 1 should never have been allowed to upgrade to iOS 5. It's unusably slow, which it wasn't when I bought it. Same goes for the iPhone 4, which I'm sure glad I never upgraded past 6.

My inlaws all have 4s's and I've advised them not to upgrade to iOS 8.

Thats not fragmentation in the context of smart devices. Does Apple support iOS on:

100 different screen sizes
100 different resolutions
100 different pixel counts
and all their devices use different CPU brands, GPU brands, wifi chips, all the other chips

Thats fragmentation.

Apple has minimal hardware configurations, and more importantly they provide an OS built just for their hardware, so its optimised by default. Thats why you get updates 5 seconds after release, and why your iDevice has less CPU power and less ram but runs better then the competing other brand
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.