Apple admits slowing older iPhones

[V_R]

The company says the practice deals with problems -- like unexpected shutdowns -- caused by aging batteries or cold conditions.

If you think your older iPhone seems to run slower, you're not crazy.

Apple on Wednesday said a software feature released last year makes your phone operate more slowly to offset problems with its aging lithium ion battery. As batteries get older, they don't hold their charges as well as newer batteries, and can have worse problems when the charge is low or the temperature is cold.

The aging battery means your phone could have trouble operating or might unexpectedly shut down, like happened to the iPhone 6 and 6S last year. The processors in those devices wanted to hit faster speeds, but their batteries couldn't handle the demand, prompting some phones to simply switch themselves off.

https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-slows-down-older-iphone-battery-issues/#ftag=CAD-09-10aai5b

Utter bull**** and one of the many reasons I will never own an Apple product.

 

[Ian]

I think they've been doing this for years and years. Both my old iPhone were unusable after a 2/3 years, even with clean installs, etc... Here's a post of mine from 7 years ago!:

The phone has done me well for almost 2 years now, but the latest firmware upgrade caused no end of problems for users of the 3G version. It slowed it down to an almost unusable level after 2 years of working fine.

After this happened twice, I never wanted to buy another one - so reluctantly moved to Android. I'm glad I made the switch now.

I remember someone plotted the spikes in search traffic for "slow iPhone" against new iPhone release dates - surprise surprise, there was a huge correlation (and I don't think it was just down to software improvements):

https://trends.google.co.uk/trends/explore?date=all&q=slow iphone

 

[V_R]

Yeah it wouldn't surprise me one bit, my brother has a 6S and he said its been getting slower and slower.

 

[Frodo]

I have no evidence apart from my own experience but I'm pretty sure Apple do this with the IPad too.

 

[Ian]

I have no evidence apart from my own experience but I'm pretty sure Apple do this with the IPad too.

Long time, no see

Yep, I'm pretty sure they'll do that too - as they claim it's because of battery performance and it uses a similar battery pack.

It's so frustrating, as there have been so many people complaining about this for years - but only now do they reveal that it is true.

 

[Frodo]

Hi Ian,it's not only that mine is an old IPad 2 and since Apple stopped supporting it it's sort of slowly killing it,web pages won't load videos won't play it loses wi if connection for no apparent reason it crashes and restarts all the time,then it will be fine for a week ? I'm now in that limbo where I can't decide whether to buy a new one and buy into Apple again or go android,I love the IPad but Apple and ITunes I can well live without.

 

[Ian]

You could always try a full factory reset and see if that helps things. It may give it a new lease of life, if it's been bogged down with lots of things running in the background - although you'll need to set it all up again, once it's been wiped.

 

[Frodo]

Ive done that on a regular basis Ian,2 weird things today,1 I've sorted a long running printer problem I found there was a piece of torn paper wrapped around half of the roller,the half that you can't see much of inside the machine of course and 2 found this on my local forum today someone who seems to be having the same problems as me,will copy it in,

[iPad 2, latest OS, not jailbroken, I clear my web cache/history daily, and fully restart the iPad 2 or 3 times a week (standard operating procedure for 'best performance', no other reason), performance generally still as good as the first day I got it -new-...except for the below].

I find that this behaviour (web page continually 'crashing' on load and reloading in Safari, with the 'there was a problem so page has been reloaded' message at the top) now happens very regularly with web pages full of e.g. animated GIFs, embedded Youtube vids, animated/video ads <etc.> (of which, I imagine, FB pages and other clickbait sites with slideshows are full).

I genuinely think that, as web pages get ever heavier (in data size), laden with applets and other plug-ins relative to only a few years ago (if that long), older generation i-things gradually can't keep up and so 'look' to have worse performance (with running out of memory or similar tech reason with same effect/outcome).

So, not so much programmed obsolescence, as genuine obsolescence.

I think this person is right Ian its old technology for today's Internet and it can't cope,looks like I will have to make a decision one way or the other.

 

[Ian]

Good job on finding the printer problem .

Yeah it could well be genuine obsolescence - I forget that the iPad 2 is almost 7 years old now, a lifetime in tablet technology! A new iPad would certainly be substantially faster - just take a look at these benchmarks comparing them :

https://browser.geekbench.com/ios-benchmarks