iOS 9 Adoption Rate Stalls at 77% of Active Devices

[vjl323]

Don't get your hopes up. It'll slow down overall. People have differences of opinion. Some say their iPhone 4S works perfectly fine on iOS 8 - and when you try to clarify they will say it is just as snappy as it's ever been. Just saying.

Just to be clear - iPad Air [first one] and iPad mini 2 [which have the same CPU inside; the mini just has it underclocked a bit] both running iOS 8.x - upgrading to iOS 9.x = slow down overall?

I experienced that slow down a lot on my original iPad going from 3.2 to 4 to 5. I still use it for certain things, but the Air and mini 2 get a lot more use due to their speed; I don't want to see a big dip in performance going from iOS 8 to iOS 9 on these 2 devices.

 

[headsh0t95]

Yes. I've even loaded Windows X successfully. But Windows won't sync iPhoto and iCal from a OS X volume. Maybe just maybe the iTunes music folder.

I meant to say that you can install the Windows version of iTunes 12, not that you had to share with the OS X partition!

 

[Vanilla35]

Just to be clear - iPad Air [first one] and iPad mini 2 [which have the same CPU inside; the mini just has it underclocked a bit] both running iOS 8.x - upgrading to iOS 9.x = slow down overall?

I experienced that slow down a lot on my original iPad going from 3.2 to 4 to 5. I still use it for certain things, but the Air and mini 2 get a lot more use due to their speed; I don't want to see a big dip in performance going from iOS 8 to iOS 9 on these 2 devices.

I don't want to be a hard ass, but I also don't want you to make a decision you'll regret. If you noticed a significant slow down on your original iPad by upgrading 1 OS version (iOS 5 to 6, etc) then I would expect the same experience on your current iPad's. The difference may be lessened due to the original iPad potentially having an underpowered CPU/GPU, but I have noticed the difference between devices to be consistent over the years, and with that; meaning that devices don't appear to be able to handle newer OS versions any better than they used to. They all technically work fine, but the sluggishness is still very much present today, from an iPhone 6 (iOS 8, to iOS9) or an iPad Mini 2/3, iOS 7 to 8, or iOS 8 to 9, despite better hardware.

I personally wouldn't risk it, unless there are features you are really missing. Most likely, the device will function very similarly, but will just feel a little slower when going through menu interface and the like.

 

[vjl323]

I personally wouldn't risk it, unless there are features you are really missing. Most likely, the device will function very similarly, but will just feel a little slower when going through menu interface and the like.

Thanks for the insight! There are some serious iCloud related syncing bugs that affect both my iCloud account as well as several popular 3rd party apps [syncing between OS X 10.9, 10.11, and iOS 8 and 9 results in major issues when the iOS 8 device is part of the team; taking that out, things work as they are supposed to]. The bugs were fixed in iOS 9, so that's my main reason I would upgrade [sidenote: if I only had iOS 8 and OS X 10.9 in my device family, the bugs would not spring up].

The original iPad can only go to iOS 5, and perhaps I need to do a wipe/clean install to get the speed back up to what it used to be, but it is very sluggish - simple things like typing on the on screen keyboard - super laggy experience. The Air and Air Jr [what i like to call it ] are both lightning fast for me.

Apple kinda makes this hard - I don't like upgrading right away because early adoption issues, and because it usually takes a bit for an iOS version to become snappier with an older device. But by the time they've introduced a version that has enough snappiess, one can not downgrade to the prior version. It's all or nothing. And I do see the advantages from both a support and security/consistency standpoint. I just wish Apple did a bit better job on optimizing new iOS versions on older hardware. I'm sure their hardware sales teams wouldn't like that though!

Thank you again! I may try and upgrade one and see how it goes. Going to have to make up my mind before the fall though!

 

[gnasher729]

That's what I was wondering, what's the percentage of devices that can't run iOS 9? Or rephrased, what's the percentage of devices running the latest version tgat they can?

iPhone 4 is the latest phone that cannot be upgraded to iOS 8. Everything from iPhone 4s or iPad 2 upwards can be upgraded to iOS 8 and iOS 9. There seem to be no devices that can be upgraded to iOS 8 but not iOS 9.