That said, I'm totally unconvinced by this video. There's zero details of how Apple allegedly slows down old phones. Lowered clock rate? Artificially increased system call times? Nothing actually explained in the video.
Of course they could give the user options but then they could also let the user swap batteries. Those are just not things Apple does.
Yes, and yes. Batteries are consumable goods and throttling can make aging, borderline batteries work when otherwise they would cut out and cause unexpected power-offs. It’s the opposite of planned obsolescence because it makes older devices operational for longer.
You can also look at this empirically: Apple support old devices far longer than most of their competitors, and iPhones retain resale value far better than other phones. If Apple actively sabotage older devices, why put in the effort to explicitly support them, and why does the market treat supposedly sabotaged older devices as more valuable than the competition?
Well... old hardware is slow, and I wouldn't be surprised if it shows.
I wouldn't be surprised older phones get slower with updates, in fact, that feels like the most likely scenario for me, based on my experience as a software developer.
But IMO, Hanlon's (maybe Occam's, too?) Razor applies. Most likely, the teams just need to ship features, make fixes, and they mostly test on higher end, recent devices. Sure, at some point, someone tests on a lower end device that everything still works, but they probably either do not notice the issues, or shrug it off, or rationalize it (it might make x worse, but users get y in exchange, so it's fine).
> Hanlon's (maybe Occam's, too?) Razor applies
peak "Leave the multi-trillion corporation alone"
In my own experience, newer products get more love automatically, because the testers, the devs, the team are on newer devices. Perf regressions are also harder to catch than simpler bugs and sometimes require extended usage to notice smaller perf degradation, and devs and QA do not really test like that (often enough).
The way I see it, older products will naturally decline with updates, as they are less of a focus while validating a new release. Sure, they get some "freebie" improvements, but I'm guessing the accidental "decay" outweighs any improvements.
I'm not saying they couldn't make it on purpose. I'm saying that (IMO) it's more likely that it gets worse with every update even without malicious, conniving people trying to get you to upgrade by worsening your OS.
What frustrates me is that the CPUs are so powerful but somehow 5 years down the line are slow in basic UI navigation.
I'd rather the phone be a bit slower than having the phone cut out on me.
There's a simple fix to this, and that's just to have a healthy battery in your phone. No need to buy a new phone.
How great that I can replace my old battery!
https://theweek.com/59708/does-apple-slow-old-iphones-when-a...
Apple claims this is to "keep things stable when the battery ages" and there are tons of suckers out there that belive it. But somehow, it always happens as a new iPhone is being introduced.
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/iphone-slow-do-apple-s-sm...
(I except this comment to be flagged or downvoted heavily)
Does that mean "the notch" goes away, too?
iPhone 4 and 5 are really a different era when smartphone software and hardware was still developing very rapidly. I mean, the iPhone 5s alone introduced: a 64-bit CPU, a secure enclave, Touch ID, the first iPhone with separate co-processor to process motion data. Similarly, the iPhone 5 doubled the RAM compared to the 4s and had roughly twice better CPU and GPU performance than the 4s. Such changes are unheard of nowadays.
The claim isn't that old iPhones run slower on newer OSes - it's that this was done by deliberately inserting malware.
Pretty clear bullshit IMO. Insane that we're discussing it. Did these people do any verification?
