7 ms·

The outrage doesn't seem overblown to me. For years I knew that my iphones were becoming obsolete not entirely from the passage of time but instead from upgradi

• enraged_camel 9y ago
  >>My experience has been that upgrading the OS results in degraded performance 100% of the time. Well yeah, since more features mean slower performance. I saw a noticeable performance decrease when I went from Windows 7 to Windows 8. That doesn't mean Microsoft started throttling the CPU.
  • X86BSD 9y ago
    Yeah I don’t understand that at all. Old hardware running new software always degrades performance. Always. Name one instance where that didn’t happen? Newer versions of windows. Newer iOS or Android. On old hardware always runs slower. That’s not deliberate it’s the progression of technology. Hardware is static software is not. You can’t upgrade the hardware in embedded spaces for the most part so you have to accept it can’t run the newer software as fast as a new piece of embedded hardware. It has slower IO, memory, CPU etc. This argument that someone is surprised old hardware is slower with new software is such a disingenuous statement. Either that or you clearly do not understand technology.
  • RayVR 9y ago
    I’m not saying I wouldn’t expect some slowdown but Apple essentially forces you to upgrade with no path to downgrade the os. After upgrading my iPhone 6 to iOS 11 I could not launch Lyft, uber took minutes to open, and even the built in message app would have multi-second lag on key press. If you are destroying what was a perfectly fine phone with a software release it should simply not be supported. I would have been content with an old version of iOS that had reasonable performance and did not result in my phone shutting down at 30%, which was a problem introduced with iOS 11.
    • drukenemo 9y ago
      I fully agree with you that not being able to downgrade is one of the biggest issues at play.
    • zaroth 9y ago
      I wish someone would take the time to benchmark how stark the performance difference is between Day 0, Day 365, Day 730, etc. of doing the same exact tasks on a factory reset device with whatever is the latest software version at that time. It's not hard to roll out new features behind flags for devices which can't reasonably support them. But your experience of ridiculous lag trying to open basic apps which have no particularly high resource requirement has been my experience exactly. There's more going on than simply, "we added new features!" Devices which on Day 0 are blazingly fast and incredibly responsive because literally unusable in a few years doing exactly the same tasks.
    • saagarjha 9y ago
      > I could not launch Lyft, uber took minutes to open That’s something that’s wrong with your phone, not iOS.
• Karunamon 9y ago
  Does this include running the new OS after a factory reset? I find that even on Android, you drop some performance after a full system upgrade and it doesn't come back until a full reset is performed with the new OS. It's stupid that this is required, but that can be explained as a technical problem rather than planned obsolescence. On top of that, there's the variable of increased system resources to consider, which will account for some of it, and is a no-win scenario from the manufacturer standpoint no matter what they choose.
  • rootw0rm 9y ago
    Shouldn't be necessary after a proper upgrade. Maybe wipe the Dalvik partition yourself afterwards if your vendor is incompetent?
  • mtone 9y ago
    Yes, the "upgrade" to ios 11 slowed down app load/switch times on my ipad by several seconds, even after a full reset (made no difference). It's nonsense that I am now stuck with it.
    • macintux 9y ago
      Define "full reset". Did you wipe and re-install via iTunes? I seem to recall reading recently that can make a big difference.
      • newscracker 9y ago
        Maybe it's from this link on Daring Fireball? [1] A wipe and reinstall via iTunes is also an extremely painful process. Since the ability to transfer apps from iOS to iTunes was removed long ago (for reasons — like App Thinning — that don't make any sense to me), once the reinstall and restore of the data (alone) from iTunes is done, one would have to wait a long time for all the apps to download via WiFi from the App Store. For people with many apps and games (that are quite large), this wipe and reinstall would cost them several GBs in download traffic and several minutes to several hours (depending on where one lives and the Internet connection). [1]: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/12/22/glenn-iphone-slow https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/12/22/glenn-iphone-sl...
• jsz0 9y ago
  > For years I knew that my iphones were becoming obsolete The clock down feature is new so your past experiences are very likely unrelated.
  • kodablah 9y ago
    Sure, for this specific issue. But the culture of increasing hardware requirements beyond the reasonable point of not-that-old phones coupled with the opacity surrounding what is done to support them is systemic (and not Apple-specific of course).
    • scoot 9y ago
      There's a trade-off. Either your device becomes obsolete because it doesn't have the hardware capacity to support the requirements of a newer OS so you are stuck at an older version, or it becomes obsolete because the vendor allowed an upgrade that was detrimental to performance. For the vendor: damned if you do, damned if you don't.
      • kodablah 9y ago
        Unless the vendor also makes the OS and can choose the minimum hardware requirements they target.
        • scoot 9y ago
          Which was exactly the point.
        • deleted 9y ago
          [deleted]
      • phamilton 9y ago
        Or a third option: invest in software that doesn't have strict absolute hardware requirements. A lot of the hardware requirement inflation is due to unoptimized software. Which is not a quality failing as much as a deliberate choice. Apple could absolutely include older device performance in their QA testing.
• sixothree 9y ago
  Battery performance is just one of the ways your phone becomes useless. Apple is notorious for pushing iOS updates that basically make a phone useless. Apple has been trying to trick me into upgrading to iOS 11 which will make my phone useless junk.
  • Fnoord 9y ago
    Is iOS 10 still receiving security and reliability updates?
    • saagarjha 9y ago
      No.
• polack 9y ago
  What people are missing here is that while Apple now confess that they did slowdown the iPhone 6 and 6s when they released the 7, they are not saying anything about earlier models. They are however lowering the price to exchange batteries even for older models. Why would they do that if they where not affected? Why don't they say this practice started with the IOS 10 update? They just say they did it in the 10 update. For me it's obvious this is just a PR "puff piece" and looks like a majority here is buying it... So well played Apple.
  • mthoms 9y ago
    This was a perfect opportunity for Apple to come out and explicitly state they have never slowed phones down other than in this instance. That would certainly go a long way to restoring confidence. Instead they came out with a weasely-worded statement that is designed to give the impression that they only recently starting doing this. But... they don't actually make that claim. Apple lawyers are very good at what they do. Well played Apple indeed.
    • hateduser2 9y ago
      Give me a break please. From the post: >First and foremost, we have never — and would never — do anything to intentionally shorten the life of any Apple product, or degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades. Our goal has always been to create products that our customers love, and making iPhones last as long as possible is an important part of that. I see 0 weasel words or dodging here. Give me a break hacker news. Thanks.
      • mthoms 9y ago
        Notice all the qualifiers? Notice that the above statement, while technically truthful does not tell the whole story? This is not a time for vague promises IMHO, it's time for specific and clear statements. Why not just say you don't slow phones full stop?
        • hateduser2 9y ago
• rplnt 9y ago
  > My experience has been that upgrading the OS results in degraded performance 100% of the time. I have the same experience on Android. Of course I rarely received OS updates, but even that's better than Google making the device practically unusable. Be it a marketing ploy, a conscious decision trying to protect me, or just a mistake, I don't care. It's bad.
  • bufferoverflow 9y ago
    I have the opposite experience with Android. My Nexus 5X now went from version 6 to 7 to 8, and that's not including the minor version updates. It hasn't gotten any slower. Looks like it will last a few more years easily. Storage degradation is the only thing that worries me, I wish more companies made phones with microSD slots. Modern microSD cards are cheap and fast. My old Apple devices, for comparison, are useless bricks.
    • rplnt 9y ago
      My Samsung is definitely slower than it was few OS upgrades ago. It's becoming an annoyance. My at-the-time-google-owned-Motorola did't receive any updates. My Google Nexus tablet became completely unusable (like, really, really unusable, not just slow). With older devices, Android 2.x was horrible from the go, so I don't know if it could get worse (and there were only minor updates anyway). A very small sample, I know. But part of my post was to point out that Apple users can consider themselves lucky at least in the regard that they do receive updates.
      • bufferoverflow 9y ago
        You're confusing the slowness caused by the updates (which doesn't exist on Android) with the slowness caused by the flash storage degradation (which absolutely does exist). I too have an old Nexus 10, which died from that cause, a common problem. That's exactly why I think microSD support is so important. Your old card got slow? Buy a new one for $20, copy the files over, done.
        • 9y ago
• vas123 9y ago
  That has been my experience as well. Perhaps with each upgrade, Apple can let us know how much of a performance hit we will be taking. That way I can weigh the benefit of the new/improved features of the new OS vs the performance penalty.
  • pentae 9y ago
    Hell will freeze over before that happens.