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iPhone 4S with iOS 8

I still haven't upgraded either of our 4s iPhones. At the very least, I'm going to wait until OSX 10 SadKitty comes out for some of the Continuity features. I'm hoping that we get a few more iOS tweak updates by then to resolve some of the problems. Still, I fear others are right, and Apple has no interest in fixing 4s problems.

In the mean time, both my wife and I have noticed our iPhones getting sluggish, less responsive and a bit quirky on responding to home button presses. They just have to hold out until we are able to upgrade in late December or early January...
 
My wife will be moving from her 4s to an iPhone 6, which was delivered yesterday. I've seen some upgrade guides that say she should update the 4s to iOS 8 before doing the final backup for a restore to the new 6, for a cleaner transition (for apps I'm guessing).

But, reading these boards that sounds like a bad idea, especially if we keep the 4s and want to use it as a media player or something. Has anyone been down this path, did they simply leave the 4s on iOS 7? That's the route I think I'll be taking.

(Never mind, found a thread on this elsewhere where the consensus was don't bother updating. Apologies.)
 
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eelpout said:
My wife will be moving from her 4s to an iPhone 6, which was delivered yesterday. I've seen some upgrade guides that say she should update the 4s to iOS 8 before doing the final backup for a restore to the new 6, for a cleaner transition (for apps I'm guessing).

But, reading these boards that sounds like a bad idea, especially if we keep the 4s and want to use it as a media player or something. Has anyone been down this path, did they simply leave the 4s on iOS 7? That's the route I think I'll be taking.

(Never mind, found a thread on this elsewhere where the consensus was don't bother updating. Apologies.)
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My question would be: What information does she specifically need transferred, as opposed to treating it as a fresh device and logging into her iCloud account with it. If her older email is accessible on a computer, you don't need to transition that. Same with photos (which you could manually sync onto it).

When we get our new phones, I will treat them as fresh devices, regardless of the iOS we have on the 4s's that we wipe and use as iPods for the kids.
 
I was happy with my 4S on iOS 8.0.0 until I went on a vacation for a week. The slowness of the camera app (startup time and switching between video and photo) caused me to miss too many shots and I stopped bothering to use it, and made sure to have either my Canon T3i or S110 on me, and used those instead. I have a toddler, so camera performance matters to capture him in action.

The responsiveness of other apps, e.g. Google Maps, Safari, etc become more of a problem when you are on the go and seconds count. I was also experiencing occasional keyboard lag, even with the stock keyboard, which I didn't notice when I first upgraded to iOS 8 (I guess heavier app usage brought this out). In my normal day-to-day, at work and at home, these things are not much of issue, though, but for on-the-go use it's a deal breaker. Camera performance was already bad in iOS 7, but iOS 8 pushed it over the edge.

On the last day of my week long vacation, I decided to order an iPhone 6, and did so the next day. I'm keeping the 64GB 4S, which I can use effectively as an iPod touch (iTunes remote, Airplay, general music playback, etc), replacing my 16GB 3GS that currently serves that role.

I don't regret upgrading to iOS 8, as I wouldn't have wanted to stay on iOS 7 regardless, and I'm planning to keep my 4S so I don't care if iOS 7 makes it worth more. But my opinion now is: if you're planning on sticking with your 4S as your main phone and typically do a lot with it, stay on iOS 7.

Post-vacation, I'm now on 8.0.2, and things are performing reasonably well, but I'm back to my usual lighter usage patterns, and I don't think the update made that difference.
 
bflowers said:
I still haven't upgraded either of our 4s iPhones. At the very least, I'm going to wait until OSX 10 SadKitty comes out for some of the Continuity features. I'm hoping that we get a few more iOS tweak updates by then to resolve some of the problems. Still, I fear others are right, and Apple has no interest in fixing 4s problems.

In the mean time, both my wife and I have noticed our iPhones getting sluggish, less responsive and a bit quirky on responding to home button presses. They just have to hold out until we are able to upgrade in late December or early January...
Click to expand...

iOS usage statistics suggest that 62 percent of iPad users are on A5 devices (29 percent on the iPad 2, 20 percent on the iPad Mini 1 and 13 on the iPad 3) and 21 Percent of iPhone users are on the 4S. That makes up a huge number of A5 based device users, so I think Apple will be very interested in getting these devices running at least reasonably!
 
bflowers said:
I still haven't upgraded either of our 4s iPhones. At the very least, I'm going to wait until OSX 10 SadKitty comes out for some of the Continuity features. I'm hoping that we get a few more iOS tweak updates by then to resolve some of the problems. Still, I fear others are right, and Apple has no interest in fixing 4s problems.

In the mean time, both my wife and I have noticed our iPhones getting sluggish, less responsive and a bit quirky on responding to home button presses. They just have to hold out until we are able to upgrade in late December or early January...
Click to expand...

OS X 10 SadKitty?
 
I have la LOT of bugs in Messages in landscape mode since 8.0, such as :

- black screen
- iPhone start to record an audio message (WTF?)
- keyboard does not work properly

I hope it will be fixed in 8.1 :confused:
 
I updated a family member's iPhone 4s from iOS 7 to iOS 8.0.2 and tinkered quite a bit with it to try and optimize the performance.

1. The first and fairly well known trick to do is to turn the Reduce Motion (Settings -> General -> Accessibility) feature on. This one alone helps quite a lot.

2. Other thing I did was go through all the Location Services (Settings -> Privacy) settings to limit location services only to apps that actually need to have an access to the phone's location and even then limit the access to only when an app is used (where possible). Also notice the System Services at the very bottom of Location Services settings and go through all of those as well and not just the apps list. I did this to try and turn off all unnecessary Location Services using processes and there are plenty of those.

3. The one trick that seemed to speed up the performance of the phone the most (after trick number one) was turning the iCloud completely off. In this case the only iCloud feature in use was the Find My Phone feature. Even so turning off that/iCloud had a major positive impact on the phone's performance. I understand this is not an option everyone is willing to take but it clearly works. iOS 8 was designed to more fully take advantage of the cloud and it would appear that this is the main reason to iOS 8's sluggishness in comparison to iOS 7. If you're not willing to turn iCloud completely off at least try and limit it's use to absolute essentials only.
 
oldmacs said:
iOS usage statistics suggest that 62 percent of iPad users are on A5 devices (29 percent on the iPad 2, 20 percent on the iPad Mini 1 and 13 on the iPad 3) and 21 Percent of iPhone users are on the 4S. That makes up a huge number of A5 based device users, so I think Apple will be very interested in getting these devices running at least reasonably!
Click to expand...

I think the interest is in getting that 21% to give up their three year old devices and buy new ones to be honest. Though, they will probably clean iOS 8 up a bit to make the iPads a little smother, as those are non-contract devices and people probably expect to keep them a little longer than the average two years for phones.


bbfc said:
OS X 10 SadKitty?
Click to expand...

ajay96 said:
What is sadkitty lol
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theapplefanboyj said:
Yosemite I imagine.
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I'm more of a dog person, but I think Apple gave up on the cat names too soon! I did like the Sea Lion joke before they announced Mavericks. What about Tweety Bird's favorite? Mac OSX 10.12 Puddy Tat
 
Came in here to see if my 4S is ready for iOS 8 yet...guess not by reading this last page of posts. I'm encouraged by the look forward to 8.1...but even then...not entirely sure...
 
JuryDuty said:
Came in here to see if my 4S is ready for iOS 8 yet...guess not by reading this last page of posts. I'm encouraged by the look forward to 8.1...but even then...not entirely sure...
Click to expand...
I personally do not hold out high hopes for the 8.1 beta to have performance improvements. My thought is that 8.2 or 8.3 will have the performance optimizations.

Reading the 8.1 beta notes and beta thread discussion it is clear Apple has not addressed the performance issues yet. Plus Apple has not listed any kind of performance improvement as an item in the release notes of the beta. IIRC, they did include those in the 7.1 release. I really hope they do, though.
 
NeoX360 said:
I personally do not hold out high hopes for the 8.1 beta to have performance improvements. My thought is that 8.2 or 8.3 will have the performance optimizations.

Reading the 8.1 beta notes and beta thread discussion it is clear Apple has not addressed the performance issues yet. Plus Apple has not listed any kind of performance improvement as an item in the release notes of the beta. IIRC, they did include those in the 7.1 release. I really hope they do, though.
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Yeah, and that stinks because I really want to try out my 4S with my iPad and Macbook Pro. That's part of the magic of this release, yes? But I don't want a sloooow phone. I'll wait if I have to.
 
oneshotpro said:
8.0.2.

trying to play a video within it is ridiculous, tabs reloading is ridiculous. scrolling websites can be awful as well especially if theres an ad on it.
Click to expand...

Yeah iOS 8 definitely caused issues with Safari for the 4s. From seeing videos of 8.1, Safari does seem improved.
 
JuryDuty said:
Yeah, and that stinks because I really want to try out my 4S with my iPad and Macbook Pro. That's part of the magic of this release, yes? But I don't want a sloooow phone. I'll wait if I have to.
Click to expand...

Yes that is part of the magic, I saw that feature of answering calls on my iPad and couldn't wait to update to it. Glad I didn't as I know many people that have and regret it.

On the positive side though I did update a brand new iPod touch to 8 yesterday. I compared it to my iPod touch that is still fairly new, with 7.1.2 and honestly when I do a side by side comparison it didn't seem noticibly different. There is some lag in the UI but what I didn't realize is that the same lag is on mine with 7.

I heard that startup on iOS 8 on the iPod was horrendous and you know what? I timed a bunch of tasks side by side and the iOS 8 iPod that I updated actually started a second or two faster than mine. Both took about 30 seconds. A far cry from the reports I read on here of a minute plus.

I also tested safari side by side loading the same web page and they are just about even.

All in all it does not "feel" any different than 7. I am very aware of the lag on these devices and I can tell when a UI is not fluid and is jerky. I look for it.

So that being said it seems ok to me so far. Given that the 4s is basically the same hardware I think it may be ok, especially if they optimize it a bit more.
 
bflowers said:
I think the interest is in getting that 21% to give up their three year old devices and buy new ones to be honest. Though, they will probably clean iOS 8 up a bit to make the iPads a little smother, as those are non-contract devices and people probably expect to keep them a little longer than the average two years for phones.


How ridiculous. My parents kept their rotary phone for 60 years. Hard to fathom that technology has gone so backwards that we feel the need to replace our devices every two years. I have a 4s and see no reason why Apple shouldn't support this product for at least ten years, given the amount that people pay for it. Although I love apple products, planned obsolescence seems to be built into all their devices. I'm sticking with OS 7 for now on my iPhone. Apple could make the IOS 8 more compatible with older technology that would work with the 4s, but where's the money in that? Fool the people into thinking they need newer phones to keep up with the technology and their neighbors.
Click to expand...
 
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