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Comment by cocktailpeanuts | Hacker News Reader

One of my biggest fear nowadays is I will someday mistakenly press "OK" to the annoying "Update to iOS 11" popup without thinking, and my iPad will be practically bricked.

My iPad is a relatively recent iPad mini which I bought a couple of years ago, but I know from my iPhone 6, I know upgrading to iOS 11 will slow down everything, for example each app taking about 10 seconds to launch--including Apple's own apps like Mail.app and Messages app.

Is there a way to completely block that upgrade to iOS 11 popup so I don't make the mistake?

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http://www.idownloadblog.com/2017/12/11/block-ios-updates/

Also, I marvel at how watered down the term "bricked" has become. From 'my thing shows absolutely no signs of life' to 'my thing is a little bit laggy'.

Thanks, but I wouldn't say "a little big laggy". I am not exaggerating when I say every app takes ten seconds to load.

I actually measured them and that's the average time it took for all apps to load after I updated to iOS 11 (Before iOS11 it loaded immediately).

If you can sympathize with me because you have more recent phones, please try to close your eyes and count to ten and imagine, hopefully that may give you an idea of how frustrating it is for peasants like us.

My first smartphone was like that, pretty much out of the box. It would often hang on calls, applications took forever to start, and I had to keep syncing off because otherwise if I turned on Wi-Fi, I would have to remove and reinsert the battery to get the device to work again.

That experience made me never again buy a cheap phone. I now aim for the high-end, and can live for 2-3 years in relative comfort (though even expensive phones slow down quite visibly over time).

Then there's something broken with your iphone 6, because until the 8 came out I was using a 5S and it was observably slower but not '10 seconds for every app' slow as you apparently describe without exaggeration. I had upgraded it to iOS 11 before moving to the 8, too.

iPhone 5S isn’t subject to the battery-related CPU throttling.

My iPhone 6 took 10 seconds to load apps, but after a battery replacement it takes me about 4 seconds. Also, I noticed that apps stay in memory longer which means that I don’t have to do a fresh app load that takes 4 seconds.

isnt 4 seconds still slow though?

when i say it takes 10 seconds i mean the screen is blank white for 10 seconds.

I think it's not as ridiculous as 10 secs but 4 seconds of blank white screen is not so much better...

My kid plays games on an iPad mini 2 which I occasionally borrow it for reading, and I haven't experienced apps taking anything like that long to load under iOS 11. Are there any particular ones you'd want me to try out?

Maybe it is different in other circles but as a software engineer, bricked still means you unplugged it while flashing the ROM, literally unrecoverable.

It should not take apps 10 seconds to launch on an iPhone 6 running iOS 11. Something probably went wrong with your upgrade, which does happen. Have you tried taking a local backup, doing a factory reset of the phone, and then restoring the backup?

See for example: http://mglenn.com/blog/2017/12/22/apples-bungled-battery-fea...

Is that how you upgrade Apple devices now?

On every computer I own and every non-cloud server I manage windows update has broken at some point in their life-time (often silently). 5 out of 5. So it's not just Apple. And quite a few of them it's happened more than once.

One server I noticed the other day because of Meltdown. My laptop got stuck on the creators update. Before that I'd noticed the laptop had got stuck trying to upgrade a driver because it's fan kept going mental every day if I left it unattended for 5 minutes because windows update is so poorly written. I had to hack the .Net optimization service to stop it running the 32-bit version because it would constantly fail and then try and re-run itself. I use .Net framework every day and the optimization service seems to be entirely devoid of purpose.

I swear more CPU and electricity has been spent on windows update and badly written maintenance tasks on that laptop than any of my programming, building, compiling, etc. The fan is moderately noisy and whenever it spins up, it's always a windows update or maintenance task. Or skype. What on earth they've done to that program I do not know, but it's rubbish.

/rant, TLDR; not just Apple.

My refurb X220 came with Win10, and it would just sit there, burning 25-30% CPU for apparently no reason, doing something probably update related. The battery isn't exactly new, but it's a 6-cell with about 40Wh capacity remaining. That should be good for more than just 1 measly hour.

Apparently Win10 sometimes needs to sit like that for a couple of days after installing, for reasons.

So I ditched it and installed Linux Mint. And whattayaknow, it installed faster, it didn't need any additional drivers and it doesn't idle at 30%. Everything Just Works™.

A 2011-vintage laptop with an i3 (plus 8GB RAM and an SSD) is still a perfectly usable machine today, if you pick the right OS.

I'm still getting that 9-cell battery of course, because you can still get brand new ones.

Yeah, if you investigate, which admittedly takes a lot of effort, one of your maintenance tasks will be erroring. The memory one seems to be one of the worst and a lot of people see bug reductions in the tasks runtime when they do.

That doesn't surprise me at all. I was going to install Linux on it eventually, so it wasn't worth the effort digging through the oddities of Win10.

I guess what I am trying to say is, "Now, Apple, too?"

As someone who tested this extensively, it really needs to be treated like a major OS upgrade on a computer. Back up important info(pictures, etc) without using icloud, do a full format(DFU restore), and reinstall from scratch.

I have an iphone 6 and 6s here that are still flying along great on ios 11. And i had previously had so many problems with the 6S that i thought this upgrade really was awful. It took until 11.1 or so to truly be ok, but the performance increase from doing a true "clean install" like i would with windows or OSX was really night and day.

You mean you have an iPhone 6 and it's working fine on iOS 11 with a clean install?

That's a good news then, maybe I should reset everything and reinstall to see if that works.

Combine that with a cheap battery replacement from your local Apple Store and your 6 should be great for another couple of years, I'd predict at least through iOS 12.

Historically speaking, we would expect the 6 to be supported by iOS 12, possibly by iOS 13 and unlikely by iOS 14.

The current trend for current iOS devices is five generations of software support with the iPhone 4S, 5 and 5S all getting five years.[1] The only recent exceptions are non-flagship models that used "old" parts at the time of release (iPhone 5C and iPad mini 1) which only got four years.

[1] http://iossupportmatrix.com/

Yep, it's my backup/testing device. It actually runs surprisingly great, i'd say it's still a better experience than an equivalent-aged android phone honestly, even like a nexus 6

Bingo. You think that’s bad? Try running an android tablet from 5-6 years ago.

Yes, you can block it by installing the TVOS 11 public beta profile on your phone or ipad. I had to do this with a broken iphone 6 which would literally be bricked by an update due to a baseband fault. Works perfectly, the kids can play games on it without the risk of updating it by mistake.

It is ridiculous that there isn't a setting to disable update nagging though!

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