Apple's Claims of Improved Performance on iPhone 4s and iPad 2 With iOS 8.1.1 Put to the Test

[JonLa]

I don't think the complaints are necessarily unjustified - many of these devices (the iPad Mini and iPad 2) are either still available from Apple or only recently discontinued. Nobody's expecting the new OS to add features to these devices, but I think we can expect it not to give the user a worse experience when using Safari or the built-in apps like Mail.

Works well on my 5S; bit laggy at times on my iPad mini 1, but seems to have improved after the recent update.

 

[kdum8]

iOS 8 is a HUGE improvement in functionality over iOS 7. With a 5S you should upgrade asap.

Is it? Can you give some examples of in what way? I have a 5s and also nervous to upgrade...

 

[dysamoria]

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?

Because these are appliances. Consumer devices. Average consumers aren't tech geeks and should not have to be, nor be judged harshly for not having specialized knowledge.

The computer industry sucks at software efficiency, especially where operating systems are concerned, and more so where new hardware is offered for sale at the same time. Snow Leopard was a fluke because they'd been optimizing the core OS for the iPhone project. My MacBook Pro boots and runs 10.6.x faster than Mavericks, even from an external USB drive.

Yes, there are more system services. Let users of "older" machines optionally turn them off. Better yet, do some damned code optimization!!

 

[dysamoria]

... and I'm still not "upgrading" my iPhone 4 to iOS 7. Getting an iPad Air 2 will be my forced move to the hideousness of iOS 7 / 8, but at least the performance degradation will be masked by a new generation of hardware. Imagine how much faster the new hardware would be if the new software was optimized properly!

Back in Windows 95/98 era, BeOS demonstrations made intel executives remark "I didn't know our hardware could DO that!" ...

 

[furi0usbee]

What iPhone do you have? 4S or 6?

If 4S...
duh, it's a 3yr old phone.

else if 6
No, it's not drastically underpowered. A8 > Snapdragon 805

else
I bet a 3 year old Samsung phone is "drastically" underpowered to a high end iPhone 6.

echo 'Galaxy Note Edge has more RAM and a better display.' ;
exit ( ) ;

 

[\-V-/]

Is it? Can you give some examples of in what way? I have a 5s and also nervous to upgrade...

There's no performance hit on my 5S.

 

[elmaco]

All this complaining about 4 year old devices not being as fast as they were when they were new is absurd.

It's okay for new features to be slow, but not old ones. That's just sloppy programming.

An upgrade should be an improvement or they shouldn't offer it No one wants their phone to be worse than before.

 

[julianps]

My iPad 2 appears to be more stable and responsive since 8.1.1.

Pre 8.1.1 Safari was all-but useless and I had to go to Setting => Safari => Advanced and turn off Java (I'd lose functions but at least pages would load at useable speeds).

Now I'm getting the same responsiveness with SSAJ switched On.

I know ios8 is a stretch for this hardware but in my testing I tried to replicate some of my problems on a demo unit at a major local retailer, and found they weren't entirely hardware specific (ie Air2 suffered delays/artefacts as well). Overall I'm well pleased with this update.

 

[roadbloc]

I think Apple should allow people to downgrade to an older version if they are not happy with the performance....

Boom! That simple move alone would save so much hassle for Apple. And iOS device users.

 

[BuddyRich]

I have a clean ipad3 7.1.2 that I just use for playing music (streaming from LMS via iPeng)... My wife's ipad3 is still on 6.1.2 but she is find more and more apps aren't updating as they require ios7 at a minimum. I don't find 7.1.2 all that bad, at least compared to 7.0 but its definitely not as fast as 6 was on the ipad3. She missed her chance to at least upgrade to ios7, I am wondering what the 8.1.1 consensus is? I could always just give her my ipad and use 6.1.2 and an older version of iPeng that works just fine for my needs.

Are apps requiring ios8 as a minimum now. I know they started to offer old versions in itunes, but it was still only if the app developers made it available.

The sucky part, and maybe they've changed this in ios7, she lost a good 1-2GB of space on her 16gb ipad3 with an update having been downloaded automatically that she can't get rid of. This will definitely be our last year with the iPad 3s (I'll probably keep mine as a music kiosk though), I was hoping to last until the ipad Air 3 or whatever comes next.

 

[crashoverride77]

iOS 6 was awesome - snappy on my 4S, a pleasure to use. iOS 7 was crap (interface, speed, bugs, etc), and adding insult to injury is that I am prohibited from going back. Now iOS 8 adds to the crappiness. Apple has gone off the rails a little on iOS, I think. My next gadget will definitely not be an Apple one.

No it wasn't.
Some people need to stop wearing their nostalgia goggles and face facts. ios 6 also had loads of bugs on release which they tried to fix with 6.0.1 and 6.0.2. It also came with Maps, which we all know sucked donkey balls when first released.
Even 6.1 introduced its own share of problems such as decreased battery life and signal issues.
Stop pretending.

 

[johnnylarue]

While I recognize this will probably make me look like a paranoid eccentric at best, my 2-year-old (refurb) 4S is still running iOS 5.

Seeing how my former 3GS was basically rendered obsolete before its time by iOS upgrades, this time I decided to stick with the iOS the phone was designed for. And guess what? Still getting 2 days battery life, bullet-proof performance, zero issues.

Of course, at this point the UI basically looks like it's from the 1990s, and the bulk of new apps no longer support iOS 5, but hey, the phone ain't broke and I'm not planning on fixing it.

 

[User*09]

Swipe to Close Bug

I hope 8.2 is less buggy. I closed the Facebook app with a four finger close gesture on my iPad Mini 1st gen on 8.1.1 and got this:

 

[Morac]

This is one of the reasons you pretty much have to update to iOS 8. Unless you plan to never surf the web or read email.

http://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/28561/hacking/ios-7_1-exploit-cve-2014-4377.html

 

[CairnsRock]

This is one of the reasons you pretty much have to update to iOS 8. Unless you plan to never surf the web or read email.

http://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/28561/hacking/ios-7_1-exploit-cve-2014-4377.html

If you read it all the way to the last paragraph you will see that Apple confirms it will occur only on down level Apple TV's.

 

[Morac]

If you read it all the way to the last paragraph you will see that Apple confirms it will occur only on down level Apple TV's.

That's just one example. There are others. Simply look at the security update pages for iOS 8 through 8.1.1 and you can see a number of remote exploitable vulnerabilities were fixed.

For what it's worth, I updated a iPhone 4s and iPad 2 from 7.1.2 to 8.1.1. The 4s had barely anything on it as it was a backup device. It runs just as fast as 7.1.2. The iPad 2 has lots of stuff on it and at times it lags (especially when it's doing stuff in the background like updating apps), but all in all it's not that much slower than 7.1.2. Apps load a bit slower, but once loaded there is no difference from 7.1.2 for the most part.

I noticed that iOS 8.1.1 is much more aggressive with memory management. For example in 7.1.2 the Mail app was never unloaded from memory, even if the foreground app was out of memory. In 8.1.1, Mail and presumably other processes built into iOS can be killed to free up memory.

All in all 8.1.1 reminds me of 7.0 before things were sped up in 7.1. It's usable, but things do lag.

 

[MacATDBB]

One thing I've wondered about with the installers for iOS is whether the extent to which they have different optimized binary packages for the different CPU architectures in iOS devices.

While all the recent A series chips likely share the same core instruction set, they are architecturally very different beasts with different core counts, abilities to parallelize various instruction combinations not to mention L1/L2/L3 sizes. In the worst case scenario I guess earlier chips would need to fall back to software emulation of more recent ARM commands that aren't implemented in their older metal.

So do Apple write versions of their iOS code that are specifically optimized for A4, A5, A6 A6x etc etc or are we all running the same binaries optimized for A8 with older CPU architectures increasingly poorly modeled in the code optimization?

 

[Avenged110]

I guess only advantage of 6+ here is...the size...

Speak for yourself haha

-----

No it wasn't.
Some people need to stop wearing their nostalgia goggles and face facts. ios 6 also had loads of bugs on release which they tried to fix with 6.0.1 and 6.0.2. It also came with Maps, which we all know sucked donkey balls when first released.
Even 6.1 introduced its own share of problems such as decreased battery life and signal issues.
Stop pretending.

I feel like when there's points of contention here between those who upgrade software and those who don't, both go overboard in their allegiances. Those who prefer <=iOS 6 who remain on it (myself included) can sometimes act as though it's a shining unicorn here to save us all while those who prefer >=iOS 7 act as though everyone who disagrees is inherently inferior and can't see "reality." Everyone tends to draw extreme conclusions against those who take the other side while in reality each one just prefers the opposite end of the spectrum. Unfortunately, this causes friction among an Apple fan base as Apple only has a single way whether you like it or not; right or wrong is not at play. (That being said, each one has shortcomings in terms of design philosophy that may, in fact, be right or wrong. But that is beside the point) Some people may prefer something in spite of potential "trade-offs" or "inferior traits" as seen by others and there's nothing wrong with that. It's high time people understand this.

 

[aamemo]

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.

I have completely same problem.. Also i have two screen, one is with full of folders and the other is apps.. on the folder screen, i noticed that when leaving a folder or returning back from lock screen, it is jerky and dropped frame.. i also reinstalled clean ios and later put the last backup but all was same.. and i find, not useful but solution as to change wallpaper.. if you chose one of movable ios original wallpapers, then jerky folder screen turns to normal.. but by this way you can't chose what wallpaper you want.. i hope a fast and solver update will be published soon..

 

[sundragon]

It's okay for new features to be slow, but not old ones. That's just sloppy programming.

An upgrade should be an improvement or they shouldn't offer it No one wants their phone to be worse than before.

Sloppy programming? The old features aren't operating in a vacuum... The new features that take CPU cycles along with the old ones are slowing down the device. The UI is also using more resources which is why it slows down. The GPU in a 4 year old iPhone 4 has 1/50th the performance of the iPhone 6... Let's keep the UI old and not update because there are people with 4 year old phones and don't want to update.

Let's take Android, where nothing is supported past 2 years? (unless you're lucky and can afford a Samsung/Google device). For the rest of the zillion Android devices on the face of the planet the only parts of Android that are updated now are the NON OPEN SOURCE apps that Google produces: Play Store, Gmail, Chrome... The base OS is left as is with whatever holes.

 

[kolax]

Sloppy programming? The old features aren't operating in a vacuum... The new features that take CPU cycles along with the old ones are slowing down the device. The UI is also using more resources which is why it slows down. The GPU in a 4 year old iPhone 4 has 1/50th the performance of the iPhone 6... Let's keep the UI old and not update because there are people with 4 year old phones and don't want to update.

Can you prove this through CPU usage logs or just speculating?

We do not expect an iPhone with "1/50th the performance of the iPhone 6" to run games and heavy apps well, but the A5 has got more than enough power to do basic iOS 8 animations smoothly. Apple are doing this intentionally to make their new phones seem really fast and worth upgrading to, or they really are sloppy and lazy with their programming by not supporting devices - that they advertise as supported - properly.

Too many new users on this forum who haven't been iPhone users long enough to experience this year in. Those of us complaining have noticed this trend in Apple, and it's nothing to do with hardware limitations.

 

[TimelessOne]

oh look Apple got caught making up BS yet again. No would should expect anything less here. This is not the first time Apple has been caught telling lies and it will not be the last.

 

[Morac]

Can you prove this through CPU usage logs or just speculating?

We do not expect an iPhone with "1/50th the performance of the iPhone 6" to run games and heavy apps well, but the A5 has got more than enough power to do basic iOS 8 animations smoothly. Apple are doing this intentionally to make their new phones seem really fast and worth upgrading to, or they really are sloppy and lazy with their programming by not supporting devices - that they advertise as supported - properly.

For iOS 8.x, it's almost certainly the lack of memory that's killing performance more than the CPU or GPU. iOS 8 runs more processes than iOS 7 did as seen by running any number of apps that track processes. Also I've found that to get apps to run under iOS 8 on lower memory devices, parts of iOS will actually unload from memory. That slows things down considerably when trying to multitask. If background refresh and/or "always allow" is enabled for apps in location services, things get even worse as that causes apps to run by themselves.

I'm also convinced there's memory leaks in iOS as apps that remain in memory in the background when run shortly after restarting my iPad 2, will actually get dumped from memory when the screen locks after a few days of uptime.

Basically Apple implemented a lot of tricks to get it so that the iPad 2 can do more than just display the home screen under iOS 8 and multitasking took a performance hit.

 

[sundragon]

Can you prove this through CPU usage logs or just speculating?

We do not expect an iPhone with "1/50th the performance of the iPhone 6" to run games and heavy apps well, but the A5 has got more than enough power to do basic iOS 8 animations smoothly. Apple are doing this intentionally to make their new phones seem really fast and worth upgrading to, or they really are sloppy and lazy with their programming by not supporting devices - that they advertise as supported - properly.

Too many new users on this forum who haven't been iPhone users long enough to experience this year in. Those of us complaining have noticed this trend in Apple, and it's nothing to do with hardware limitations.

"They are sloppy and lazy with their programming" - Please prove this?
"the A5 has got more than enough power to do basic iOS8 animations" - Please cite your source? With transparency and Retina UI elements along with parallax, I think thou dost protest too much...

"Too many new users on this forum..."

I have owned the iPhone first gen, 3G, 4, 5, and 6 Plus... I work in IT but you're right, I have no idea what I'm talking about...

 

[oldmacs]

"They are sloppy and lazy with their programming" - Please prove this?
"the A5 has got more than enough power to do basic iOS8 animations" - Please cite your source? With transparency and Retina UI elements along with parallax, I think thou dost protest too much...

"Too many new users on this forum..."

I have owned the iPhone first gen, 3G, 4, 5, and 6 Plus... I work in IT but you're right, I have no idea what I'm talking about...

Lag and Jittery animations on A7 and A8 devices would indicate to me that iOS 8 was a bit of a rush job, because while there is more stuttering and lag on the A5 devices, it is also apparent on newer devices.

I also agree that the A5 should be able to display basic animations like it did with iOS 7. Prior to 8.1.1 my iPad 2 rarely properly animated an application close. With 8.1.1 its probably 60-70 percent properly animated and the other 40-30 percent of the time it lags. This is with just about every resource hogging feature turned off including parallax (but not including motion because I love motion )

However it is correct to say that more is going on in the background (Including encryption, if I'm not wrong) which would take away from the memory needed for graphics processing.