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iOS 7 is the first Apple system where I felt royally screwed. My iPhone 4 became so slow as to be nearly unusable. Everything now takes seconds, swipes are bein
by jwr 13y ago
iOS 7 is the first Apple system where I felt royally screwed. My iPhone 4 became so slow as to be nearly unusable. Everything now takes seconds, swipes are being missed, even audio gets chopped up when I play back podcasts over bluetooth.
There are two reasons for me to be angry about this:
* Apple should never have released iOS 7 for iPhone 4 devices. iPhone 4 should have been listed as "unsupported". But had they done that, they would have ended up with a fragmented ecosystem, and unable to brag about how so-and-so-many percent of users upgraded to the latest iOS.
* There is no good reason for iOS 7 to be slower than iOS 6. The "it requires more processing power for animations" reason is bogus, because there are very few animated effects, and I switched off whatever I could anyway. The only reason every iOS release is slower than the previous one is because Apple does not care about optimizations. They can afford not to care because every new hardware device is much faster than the previous one. But that means some users get royally screwed.
I should have stayed with iOS 6 (there is no going back now), but more importantly, Apple should not have claimed that iOS 7 is supported on my device. For all practical purposes, it isn't — the experience is really bad. I've just compared it to an iPhone 3G running iOS 4.2.1, it's more responsive than iOS 7 on iPhone 4.
So, this forced migration to iOS 7 is something that makes me angry, because I'm that part of the userbase than is being dragged into it kicking and screaming.
- jbrooksuk 13y agoHave you tried http://downgradeios7.com/ http://downgradeios7.com/? I don't know if it really works, but I've heard that people have had luck going backwards — not sure how though.
- nwh 13y agoWhat you've linked to is a scam. You can't unless you have an A4 device with an exploitable bootrom or SHSH blobs saved. You can't "downgrade" in a browser like that, it's completely impossible.
- jbrooksuk 13y agoThought so. Wasn't there a Jailbreak that was available via Safari?
- nwh 13y agoThat was Star - http://theiphonewiki.com/wiki/Star http://theiphonewiki.com/wiki/Star It's a completely different process to a restore. Star used a PDF exploit to work it's way up to a kernel exploit allowing for the patching out of various protections which allowed for a jailbreak. You could not have used this exploit kit to restore an iPhone in the way this video claims to.
- jbrooksuk 13y agoAh thanks!
- jbrooksuk 13y agoSorry, I didn't know this was a scam. Stop with the downvotes.
- nwh 13y agoIf it's any consolation, it's bad on an iPhone 5s too. I get constant crashes, animation glitches that need a reboot to fix, it's just unusable and there's no way back to iOS6. I've used it on an iPhone 4, and I don't know how anybody copes. It feels like my 3G was on 4.2.1.
- awj 13y agoI've had it on the iPhone 5 since iOS7 released and have seen none of these issues. Not sure it's appropriate to claim that your experience is representative, especially since hardware-wise the 5 and 5c are practically identical.
- Jare 13y agoMy iPhone 5 reboots spontaneously at least once a week, and often misbehaves in other ways similar to what the GP describes.
- nwh 13y agoWake up your iPhone, go to slide to unlock, the screen times out and goes to black as you're typing your passcode. Happens to me and everybody I know, even after four OS updates. There's a heap of little bugs like that.
- dragonwriter 13y agoGPs claim was about the 5s, not the 5 or 5c, so I'm not how your reference to your experience on the 5 or the similarity between the 5 and 5c is supposed to rebut it.
- awj 13y agoI took the "there's no way back to iOS6" to mean that they'd run it on the phone before, which would mean they were on a 5. Thanks, Apple, for these wonderfully ambiguous names.
- xuki 13y agoDefinitely something to do with 64 bit software. It has been rock solid on iPhone 5/4s. I heard similar crashing problems on iPad Air/retina mini.
- rootinier 13y agoWait for iOS 7.1, which should be released in the coming weeks. It fixes most of your problems and will hugely improve performance. iOS 7.1 beta 2 feels like what iOS 7 should have been from the beginning.
- threeseed 13y agoThis is what I don't understand. Apple has been following a consistent pattern for iOS releases since the beginning. Why are people complaining about performance before waiting until the X.1 update ?
- jacalata 13y agoBecause apple is still spending billions of dollars, and relying on existing brainwashed users, to tell them that "it just works"?
- dak1 13y agoAs an iPhone 4 owner and longtime Apple owner (owned a Mac since 1988 when I was 5 years old and typing this on a 15" rMBP) I wholeheartedly agree. It's really beyond shocking how badly the iPhone 4 works with iOS7 as compared to iOS6. I'm not sure it can really be adequately explained - you just have to try it for yourself. Even switching to the camera from the lock screen is nearly impossible at times. I've recently been looking into downgrading the OS back to 6, but I'm probably out of luck since I don't have the SHSH blobs and APTickets for the older firmware. Apple really needs to fix the performance issues for iPhone 4 owners or provide a supported way to downgrade to iOS6 (Note: Sibling noted that iOS7.1 fixes the issue... I really hope that's the case).
- lostlogin 13y agoI'm not a heavy app user - stock apps and one or 2 others I only. With this in mind, there was very little wrong with my ios7 experience. Sure, it wasn't as fast as I wanted, but it wasn't a particular concern. I wonder if this is a higher tolerance from me, or a difference in how our devices were working.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- conradev 13y agoIt's funny you mention this because that debate was fierce inside Apple itself, from what I have heard. They knew it ran like crap on an iPhone 4.
- potatolicious 13y agoAgreed, with reservations. iPhone 4 itself was a grossly mis-executed product, though it wasn't obvious at the time. The core issue is that the iPhone 4's CPU and GPU performance are only marginally better than the 3GS it replaced, but it pushes 4x the number of pixels around. At the time we weren't really pushing the performance envelope, so everything appeared fine. Now we are - it's trivially easy to hit the upper bound of iPhone 4's performance envelope, whereas the 4S (and the 5, 5S) have a lot more wiggle room. More critically for app and OS developers, the GPU performance on iPhone 4 was woefully inadequate for the number of pixels it's tasked to render. IIRC the iPhone 4's GPU has a fillrate (i.e., max pixels rendered per second) that's about 13% higher than the total number of pixels it has. This is to say, if you draw even a trivial amount of stuff in the background, you're going to start dropping frames. For the 4S, 5, and 5S, the lack of CPU performance can often be made up by moving things to the GPU judiciously. On the 4 we don't even have that. Here's where I disagree: > "There is no good reason for iOS 7 to be slower than iOS 6. The "it requires more processing power for animations" reason is bogus" Of course it is, but no one stated that the slowness is due to animations. A large part of the slowness comes from the "blur everything!" design of iOS7, which is inherently GPU-heavy, and thus performs very poorly on the iPhone 4 and its shittastic GPU. The blur is everywhere, even (especially?) the stock apps where every tool bar and navigation bar blurs items behind itself. You may want to try turning the blur off: http://www.redmondpie.com/how-to-turn-off-ios-7-blur-effects/ http://www.redmondpie.com/how-to-turn-off-ios-7-blur-effects... This really has little to do with optimization - iOS is on the whole a pretty performant OS and platform. This has everything to do with Apple deciding to include features that are beyond the performance envelope of a targeted device (or conversely, failing to drop support for a device when features move past its performance envelope).
- pilsetnieks 13y agoBlur is off by default on the iPhone 4 already, as well as a number of other resource intensive features and effects: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/09/new-lease-on-life-or-death-sentence-ios-7-on-the-iphone-4/ http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/09/new-lease-on-life-or-de...
- 13y ago
- loceng 13y agoPretty sure they purposely did it so it would slow down your "old" technology. I had the first iPhone that came out. As updates increased, the device's speed slowed.
- HCIdivision17 13y agoI'll second you opinions. What shocked me was the number of simply broken things. The keyboard is unreliable, which is unforgivable; it would hang and catch up, or just miss key presses. Worse, the unlock screen would have a landscape keyboard sometimes, despite it never leaving portrait. I literally just rotate the phone while hitting the lock button until it straightens out. It's like resetting an Etch-A-Sketch. And don't get me started on the home button's behavior. The face has a //single button// and it's unpredictable. No idea if it's alt-tabbing or showing desktop. I suspect there's subtle and clever timing going on, but with the system overloaded/out of memory (apps are constantly resetting), I suspect iOS 7 can't manage (yet).
- rbritton 13y agoThe keyboard is the same on the iPad 4, which at the time of the iOS 7 release was the newest model iPad. I get typos all of the time due to it missing key presses or hanging.
- thatthatis 13y agoI'm still on iOS 5 so I can keep diving directions from google. Based on what you're saying, I never want to upgrade.
- jkubicek 13y agoHave you tried Google Maps for iOS? It's fantastic and more than makes up for any regressions in the stock app.
- thatthatis 13y agoYes, I have it installed, I don't like it.
- wvenable 13y agoGoogle maps run on iOS6 and iOS7. It's probably quite a bit better than the iOS 5 version. I'm on iOS 6 (jailbroken) but my whole family is on iOS 7 -- and so far I'm happy I haven't upgraded. Because of iOS 7, I'm considering making the switch to Android for my next phone.
- dragonwriter 13y ago> I'm still on iOS 5 so I can keep diving directions from google. Google maps on iOS6+ is far better, IMO, than the Google-powered Maps app on iOS5- or the Apple Maps app on iOS6+ (the last of which has literally never given me correct directions the handful of times I've used it.)
- awjr 13y agoIn Europe I think your consumer rights would be affected by this. I think it may be within your rights to demand a phone from them that worked with iOS 7. Class action suit?
- MBCook 13y agoRemember they were still selling the iPhone 4 up until the day the released the 5s and 5c. It would be very un-Apple-y for an OS to drop support for a product you were selling 2 days ago. I'm sure that's why it was done. You're probably right that the 4 didn't have the GPU to support it and that from a technical perspective it didn't make much sense.
- josephlord 13y agoAre you sure? The 4S was selling but I don't think that the 4 was.
- MBCook 13y agoThe iPhone 5 was the newest, at $200. The 4s was the 'one year back' and was $99. The lowest end was the iPhone 4, which was free on contract. I found an article on CNet from March 21st that mentioned the deal: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57575621-94/should-i-take-that-sweet-deal-on-the-iphone-4-or-not/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57575621-94/should-i-take-t...
- josephlord 13y agoI stand corrected, have an upvote.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- wnevets 13y agoThe same exact thing happened with the 3GS. Its a great ploy to force users to upgrade to the newest hardware.