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Performance on iPad Air and iPhone 5S?

Silly John Fatty

Silly John Fatty

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Nov 6, 2012
1,819
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What is iOS 8 like on the iPad Air? Is it slower than 7? I read that on the iPad 3 and iPhone 5 it is laggy, especially Safari. (what a rhyme!)

I ask because I'm planning to get the 5S and the Air soon. Still waiting for prices to go down a little.

Also I'm not sure if it makes a difference, but I'll be going with the 128 GB Air. I heard that the higher the storage of SSDs, the faster they are. But for the 5S I'll probably be going for a small, perhaps the smallest model.
 
iPhone 5: overall positive so far. The Swype keyboard cost me a dollar or so, but has revolutionized typing on my phone; for the first time, I can enter text quickly and accurately without having to correct every other word. That alone was worth upgrading. Safari is slow loading pages.

iPad Air: what a mess. Safari is slow and laggy, with numerous poorly thought out UI changes (pages shrink glitchily in a sort of preview when Bookmarks tab is open, Safari shows all your recent sites on startup to whoever might be looking over your shoulder, you have to manually close the bookmarks tab). SMS handoff in messages isn't activated yet, and I'm not sure iCloud Drive is fully up. Photos is a mess; photo roll is gone and you have to go back and manually flag photos you want to use as, say, wallpaper. At least they've fixed (or at least improved) setting wallpapers. All in all, on my Air, iOS8 feels like some sort of beta, with slow performance and half-baked UI changes all over the place. I'll be sorely disappointed if Apple doesn't fix Safari.
 
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Agent-J said:
iPhone 5: overall positive so far. The Swype keyboard cost me a dollar or so, but has revolutionized typing on my phone; for the first time, I can enter text quickly and accurately without having to correct every other word. That alone was worth upgrading. Safari is slow loading pages.

iPad Air: what a mess. Safari is slow and laggy, with numerous poorly thought out UI changes (pages shrink glitchily in a sort of preview when Bookmarks tab is open, Safari shows all your recent sites on startup to whoever might be looking over your shoulder, you have to manually close the bookmarks tab). SMS handoff in messages isn't activated yet, and I'm not sure iCloud Drive is fully up. Photos is a mess; photo roll is gone and you have to go back and manually flag photos you want to use as, say, wallpaper. At least they've fixed (or at least improved) setting wallpapers. All in all, on my Air, iOS8 feels like some sort of beta, with slow performance and half-baked UI changes all over the place. I'll be sorely disappointed if Apple doesn't fix Safari.
Click to expand...

Don't hold your breath. It took them 6 months to release 7.1 to finally make the ipad feel anywhere near smooth performance. Very happy I went back after using the debacle that is ios 8'on my iPad Air.
 
Hudzilla said:
Running iOS 8 on both devices, nothing but solid performance for me
Click to expand...

That is absolutely false. Safari on iPad Air lags and stutters while bringing up keyboard and other places.

Confirmed on 3 different Airs.
 
sanke1 said:
That is absolutely false. Safari on iPad Air lags and stutters while bringing up keyboard and other places.

Confirmed on 3 different Airs.
Click to expand...

Here also, pitty performance on freshly installed iOS 8 iPad air. Not so bad with 5S but could be better
 
Ipad Air and 5S owner, who moved to ios 8 yesterday.

1. Updated via itunes connected to laptop.
2. Updated all apps, transferred purchases to itunes, and did a backup before installing new ios.
2a. Removed some junk files caches etc with battery doctor app on both devices.
3. Updated and Everything works fine, especially safari.
 
sanke1 said:
That is absolutely false. Safari on iPad Air lags and stutters while bringing up keyboard and other places.



Confirmed on 3 different Airs.
Click to expand...


How can you say 'this is absolutely false'? i said solid performance FOR ME this is not false, it's a fact, If you're having problems it doesn't mean everyone is.
 
Btw my iPad Air auto rebooted while using Safari.

Diagnostic logs show kernel panic. WDT Timeout.

Very bad.:mad:
 
Upgraded iPad air first ota. Was a little laggy in Safari at first, but did what others on the forums did: hard resets and reset network settings. Now the iPad air feels similar if not better to iOS 7. Used it for a few hours on different apps and alls well.

Was more cautious with my 5s. Did a reset contents and settings to wipe the phone and set up the iPhone as new. Then installed ios8 via iTunes ( which failed halfway for me) but ota took over and completed the download. After iOS installed, I did another reset all contents and settings and setup as new iPhone. To make sure the new clean ios 8 had no issues, I begin to test the functions of the phone before I restored it and everything worked well. Finally I restored backup via iCloud. Did the usual hard reset and reset network settings. Used it for about 2 -3 hours now and performs as well or better than ios 7.
 
Hudzilla said:
How can you say 'this is absolutely false'? i said solid performance FOR ME this is not false, it's a fact, If you're having problems it doesn't mean everyone is.
Click to expand...

While this is true for things like battery life, or app crashing; animation smoothness is pretty much the same for every iPad Air (running the same version of software, in this case iOS 8.0), unless there is a hardware issue.
 
Installed on my iPad Air last night and it's running as smooth as 7.1.2, I did a clean install and setup as new.
 
Really glad I'm keeping 7.1.2 on my Air. Just a pity Apple (of all companies) released this half baked update.
 
Installed on my air yesterday and it was laggy and WiFi was almost unusable. Big mistake I thought and was ready to head to the Apple store today for help.
Not sure what changed but I powered it off and did the same with the router and this morning all appears okay. No more problems. Very strange!
 
Well there seems to be two different opinions here, people who find it unstable and laggy and others for who it works without any problems.

Would be interesting to find out what makes this difference. Since the size of SSDs affect the speed (the larger the SSD, the faster the drive) perhaps every one could tell us which storage their device has? Or how full it is perhaps? I'm really wondering why for some iOS 8 works, and for others it doesn't really.
 
My Air crashed while web brow in a moment ago. I checked the logs and ther was some kind of kernel panic? Considering this never happened before, not good. I suspect ios 8 might be buggier on iPads.
 
Running fine on my 5s. Some juddering with Facebook, but that's because FB reverted the videos back to auto-play when it updated. Otherwise, the phone runs faster and more reliably than it did out-of-the-box with iOS 7.0.

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sanke1 said:
That is absolutely false. Safari on iPad Air lags and stutters while bringing up keyboard and other places.

Confirmed on 3 different Airs.
Click to expand...

Wow, so you also confirmed this on Hudzilla's iPad?
 
Woochifer said:
Running fine on my 5s. Some juddering with Facebook, but that's because FB reverted the videos back to auto-play when it updated. Otherwise, the phone runs faster and more reliably than it did out-of-the-box with iOS 7.0.

----------



Wow, so you also confirmed this on Hudzilla's iPad?
Click to expand...

The core animations will be stuttery/laggy on all iPads. Unless Hudzilla's iPad is running on some different faster magical hardware. If you have an iPad Air yourself, open Safari and tap on Address bar. Then see how keyboard stutters badly while coming up. Then in accessibility settings, disable transparency. Then try bringing up Keyboard in Safari and notice how smoothly it comes up. This is universal across all iPads.

Apple can make serious mistakes pushing out releases in hurry.
But as Apple fans, we don't want to be like horses with blinders

human-blinkers.jpg


I have created a separate topic for iPad Air crashing here. I have also attached crash logs. The problem is very real and besides many people are reporting spontaneous reboots.
 
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