Article: Apple slows old iPhone models on release of new models?

[Herr Kutz]

to me, its pretty obvious apple intentionally cripples their older model so you want the newer model.
remember when iphone 4s came out? it was ridiculously fast. everyone drooled. what does iOS7 have that made that model crawling now? once you update the OS, you cant even downgrade/revert back! ouch.

iphone 4 plural or iphone 4S? I have ios7 on my 4S and it seems just as fast as ios5 was (I skipped ios 6).

 

[rh71]

my original ipad can't even update to iOS7 so it's not that. It's just the suck. It crashes to the homescreen when too many things are open, even though we didn't really see this happen originally. May have been iOS 4 to 5 causing it.

 

[Eug]

Big new versions of iOS come out at the same time as new iPhones. The article doesn't emphasize that point. It's talking about iPhones, but ignores the fact that when iPhones are released, so is the new shiny version of iOS. People install that new version of iOS on their older iPhones, and surprise, surprise, it feels slower.

iOS 5 is nice on the iPhone 4.
iOS 6 is slower but decent on the iPhone 4.
iOS 7 is slow on the iPhone 4, but usable.
iOS 7 is OK on the iPhone 4S.
iOS 7 is good on the iPhone 5.
iOS 7 is good on the iPhone 5s.

Note, iOS 7 is slower on the iPhone 4 than iOS 6.1.3 was, but iOS 6.1.3 isn't any slower than iOS 6.0 on the iPhone 4 (if you ignore web browsing to certain sites - see below).

The other issue is that stuff like websites get more complicated with time. I've occasionally been using the same G4 iBook with the same OS for many years now, but the G4 iBook continues to feel slower with time, mainly because surfing feels slower as time goes on.

Yahoo! Mail is a particularly bad offender. In fact, it's so bad that I can no longer run the latest version of Yahoo! Mail. I have to use an older cut down version.

 

[Mopetar]

I'm with you except that we're going to have to figure out heat dissipation first.
I can count the number of seconds I can run POVRay3.7 benchmark on one hand before it thermally throttles from hitting 85C. Quad core snap800 in Nexus5

It might be as simple as having some kind of docking station that takes care of the heat dissipation when using the higher-power states. A few manufacturers have already experimented with big.LITTLE configurations so I wouldn't be overly surprised if phones in the future have a lot of their power locked away unless it's needed for desktop level applications.

Another possibility is that the SoCs get a lot more custom hardware that makes some compute intensive tasks a lot easier. I remember at one point when one of Apple's new iDevices could encode videos faster than one of their existing workstations because the SoC had dedicated h.264 hardware baked in whereas the workstation had to use the CPU, which although much more powerful, couldn't be as efficient as dedicated hardware.

The other possibility is that the cloud becomes even more prominent and phones are mostly just dumb terminals that serve as interfaces and all of the heavy lifting and computational work is done in a sever farm. We're already seeing a move towards this with office software now that Microsoft is putting most of their stuff online as well.

But on the flip side, you don't have to wait all year for new features, with Android you get those new features and updates throughout the year as soon as they're ready, directly to the apps themselves.

Apple does the same with a lot of their apps now, though they still save some major changes for the OS release, possibly because the changes may require some of the new OS features. For example, they updated the podcast app a while back to get rid of the skeuomorphism.

I'm talking about major changes to the OS itself like the notification system that aren't something that can typically be packaged as individual upgrades. Also, Google only moved to that model because the carriers and manufacturers were so terrible about getting updates out to consumers.

my original ipad can't even update to iOS7 so it's not that. It's just the suck. It crashes to the homescreen when too many things are open, even though we didn't really see this happen originally. May have been iOS 4 to 5 causing it.

That could be, but it could be from web-page bloat as well. A lot of sites keep adding more media, javascript, and other cruft that eat up more and more memory. Safari on iPad seems to barf for no apparent reason a lot of the time even if there is plenty of memory available as I've had it randomly crash to the homescreen even when I don't have any other apps open.

The original only has 256 MB of memory, so I wouldn't be surprised if some websites can take a healthy chunk out of that or that there are some weird errors in the older version of the javascript engines that cause problems. It would be nice if Apple didn't bundle browser updates with OS updates though.

 

[Eug]

My iPhone 3G is nearly unusable for surfing now, even with its ancient iOS 4. Websites are far too complicated these days.

I use it as an iPod with my Bluetooth speaker.

 

[openwheel]

iPhones 3GS, 4, 4S and 5 were cool running phones compared to iPhone 5S. For some reason the 5S runs HOT.

 

[sweenish]

almost every time, the last iOS update kills the two year old model. It just makes the device worthless. Even the 4S crawled on iOS 7. And beside that, it was missing a ton of iOS 7 features.

 

[jiffylube1024]

The article's author's idea, that searches for "slow" iPhones go up tremendously when a new model is released is an interesting one.

His premise, however, that "Apple slows down old iPhones when new ones come out" is faulty.
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Much more likely causes are that:

a.) Apple tends to release new versions of iOS with new phones, and they run slower on older hardware

b.) When people see the new phones in action, by comparison their iPhones run slower

c.) iPhones (like all flash-based devices) tend to slow down over time due to various factors, including the fact that the flash memory isn't the fastest and as you own a phone over time you tend to fill it up, and I don't think Apple or Google's TRIM/garbage collection methods are entirely foolproof yet.

 

[Brian Stirling]

Not sure on Apple, but when a standard Windows load comes in at over 600MB just to get the PC up and running you know they aren't being economical with coding. They get the benefit of each generation being bulkier than the one before so it drives PC's with more RAM etc. The WintEl alliance was very profitable for decades as it took more powerful system to run the newer OS and apps.

Windows has a very purpose built component designed to slow the system down over time and M$ calls it the registry. Yeah, they can claim a whole host of reasons why the registry is needed but in the end it's all about including something that will slow your PC down over time. Back in the day when we had relatively slow HD's there may have been some small value to it but with SSD's there's no reason the OS needs to have a sh*t ton of stuff preloaded.

Back a generation ago the government watchdogs would have put a halt to much of this nonsense, but the last couple decades has seen the power of big business and there money to influence take 100% control of things so there's no one looking after the public -- we don't count...


Brian