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Comment by szdva | Hacker News Reader

Okay, so upgrade? Why are you still using iOS 9 on an iPhone 6s which supports iOS 15?

Apple discontinued support for 32-bit apps in iOS 11. There are a large number of apps that never got updated to 64-bit. Because Apple controls which iOS versions can be installed on a given phone at a given time, it's impossible to upgrade a phone from the OS version it shipped with to any other version besides the latest.

The crux of Hugh Jeffreys' argument is that sometimes, upgrading reduces the performance of the device. Therefore, a lot of people want to keep old devices on old versions of iOS, so as to maintain the "out-of-box experience" / performance.

I don't know that I have an opinion on this, but that's what Hugh Jeffreys' argument seems to be.

Better poor performance than a brick.

And iOS 15 performance on the 6s is far from abysmal. Sure you don't have the out of the box experience. But you have the 2022 experience.

I don’t care about the “2022 experience”, whatever that is supposed to mean, I care about having an experience as close as possible to the phone that I purchased (I think I bought this last one in 2018 or so).

This is mostly superstition and anecdotes with no real data to back it up.

Yes, a fresh iOS install sometimes causes some slowdown for a day or two maybe when the local-only ML models go through your local-only data and recalculate the new stuff it now knows how to do in the background.

After that it's going to be as smooth as it ever was.

Unless Apple unilaterally decide to throttle performance for their own reasoning: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/16/claim-for...

You mean to keep the phone from shutting off when it had a degraded battery?

No, to prevent serious battery degradation due to overuse from changes in iOS, allegedly. And as if that's an excuse - if that was the real issue, they could have provided it as an option.

If a new update slows down your phone on purpose, for whatever reason, and hides that from you, people understandably might avoid new updates.

The battery was already shutting down when the processor was being overworked as the battery degraded. This is physics. The update tried to alleviate that. Would you rather your phone shut down or slow down?

This part from the first paragraph is important for you to understand:

> slowed down the performance of older iPhones in order to stop them shutting down without warning

This didn’t affect someone whose phone was working perfectly. It changed it so your phone got slow instead of crashing.

The reason some people held off on updates was that a bunch of confidently wrong people went around saying this was planned obsolescence and never went back to apologize for giving false advice.

Upgrading probably does reduce performance slightly, but is it a noticeable difference; or is it something people say because of degraded batteries and go "hurr durr update bad"?

Mostly the latter.

It's somewhat perceptible. The worst, for me, is the search for apps, which visibly lags. My battery has been replaced and shows 99% capacity. This is an iphone 7 with the latest ios upgrade it can get, 15.6.something IIRC.

I think another issue is that apps do tend to get more sluggish, since they probably expect to be running on newer hardware. If you stick to an older ios version, if they're deemed incompatible, they won't update. But as soon as you're on the latest ios, you get the app updates, too, if you've left the default on.

Google maps, for example, is clearly more sluggish than before. Apple maps is practically unusable. Youtube crashes reliably (but works fine in the browser...)

I had a 3rd generation iPad which became borderline unusable after updating to iOS 7 or something like that (they added the custom keyboard function then and after that update the onscreen keyboard took seconds to appear) That was before the battery went bad.

I think there is a psychological aspect here as well due to confirmation bias — all caches will be wiped during an update so even due to that the first few hours/days may be slightly slower. If people make this assumption they can later easily find evidence for that (or its negative as well, if they would try to look for that)

iOS 15 works just fine on the 6s. Can’t say it’s noticeably slower.

Because I have apps that only run on ios9 and won’t run if I upgrade.

What apps are these? Have you considered paying the developers for continued support? They are obsolete! Surely there are alternatives, don’t let stuff drag you back to the past.

It’s a meditation app that works perfectly fine. I keep a device around just to run it.

No, I didn’t consider funding the developers to update the version as that’s a lot of money. Especially for something that completely meets my needs.

It’s not dragging me to the past, it’s a functional tool that I acquired in the past and works into the future. Is my socket set I bought 30 years ago dragging me into the past because it’s obsolete?

I avoid generalizations and extreme thinking when it’s inappropriate.

This. The main reason I'm using iPhones is for the absurdly long time Apple provides iOS updates.

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