Does Apple deliberately slow its old iPhones before a new release?

I've noticed this in the past. Subscribing to Hanlon's Razor (never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity) I always assumed it was because users were upgrading to the next major release of iOS, which had additional features, and was optimized for the next generation of iOS devices (not the current).

No. That's entirely simple, and this is gutter journalism (not that you'd expect better from the Daily Mail).

There is no evidence that this is the case, and about a thousand reasons that a correlation might be observed: not least the fact that Apple releases iOS updates at the same time that new phones are released.

Let's not even start on the "APPLE DENIES CREATING AN iOS 'BACKDOOR' FOR GOVERNMENT" boxout in that same article.

I can't stress it enough – don't promote articles published in the Daily Mail. They are uniformly shit.

If suspicion of planned obsolescence is as common as the article presents it to be doesn't that make the search data less compelling? If it's a commonly held belief and I own an Apple product that's being phased out, I'll be more likely to remember rumors and investigate their validity when a new product is being launched. Not saying the rumors are unwarranted, but this is hardly a smoking gun.

I notice this every year. This year there is a noticeable stutter in the IOS animations.

I'll bet the iPhoneX handles this perfectly. Better buy one!

Major iOS versions are simultanepusly released with new iPhones. Such new iOS versions have higher needs on the hardware, makig them appear somewhat slower. So yeah this could be seen as planned obsolescence, you still get a major version update on your ‘old’ device for free, with new features as well.

Betteridge's law of headlines answers this one.

Old devices get slower when they're updated to newer OS's because the newer OS's are designed and tested against newer, faster phones, and try to take advantage of the expected increase in resources. Old devices that are not updated remain just as fast as ever. And not all OS updates slow down old devices anyway (just most of them). On rare occasion, an OS update will actually speed up old devices.