Ex-Apple engineer says Apple deliberately slows older phones via updates
macobserver.com
macobserver.com
https://www.tiktok.com/@honeycoolcat/video/76247432319971361...
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?
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.
Well... old hardware is slow, and I wouldn't be surprised if it shows.
She calls it malware, if she was an Apple engineer, she should be able to give a hint where to look so that interested parties can disassemble the code and investigate. With no specifics, it looks like a former engineer that holds a grudge. Not saying that this is the case, but she would make her position stronger with some specifics.
It seems to me that it's much easier to just not optimize new code paths for older devices, introduce changes that require more performant hardware (cough, Liquid Glass), etc. That together with the natural bloating of applications and websites does enough to slow down older phones. Especially because Apple has always been conservative with the amount of memory in their phones. E.g. even the iPhone 17 still has 8 GiB RAM, while comparably-priced Android phones have 16 GiB RAM.
There is a bunch of HN comments complaining that the new iOS is significantly slower on older devices [0]. It even led to unusually slow adoption [1]. Then, Apple tried to force older devices to upgrade [2]. Previously, Apple deliberately slowed old iPhones down and got fined for that [3]. How can you still give the benefit of the doubt after all this?
> It seems to me that it's much easier to just not optimize new code paths for older devices
The new iOS is much heavier for all devices. There is nothing specific for older devices. It looks like a deliberate attempt to kill older devices though, just like they did before. And it is extremely profitable for Apple to do that.
Deliberately designed software to make your experience worse in order to gain some profit is nothing else than malware, isn't it?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45544181
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46548654
Smartphone CPUs are improving exponentially at 20% per year. A 5 year old processor will have half the performance of the latest generation processor. Smartphones are one of the very few industries improving exponentially. Most people do not comprehend this. For example, mature technologies such as internal combustion engine vehicles really only improve a few percentage points per year. You could buy a car from 10-20 years ago and it would not feel obsolete.
Are you saying that the processor got slower with time? The same, old tasks got slower, not new ones.
> There is no intentional slowing.
There was proven intentional slowing. Why are you so sure it can't happen again, given it's still profitable?
Software is optimized to perform well on current generation hardware, not old hardware. The smartphone industry is the fastest improving industry on the planet, and devices become obsolete faster than most people comprehend. It's a perception issue.
Most other technologies are mature and older devices work fine without issue. A microwave sold 20 years ago performs the same as a modern one, but a 20 year old phone is ancient.
Did you find any actual improvements anywhere after the update?
This is completely untrue.
> Did you find any actual improvements anywhere after the update?
Yes, I prefer when devices I pay for get free software updates that add dozens of features per year that I use. I enjoy getting security updates. I enjoy new features.
False. New features can make all other software slower. A clear example is Apple intelligence, a new feature which runs an LLM on-device and uses 1-2GB of RAM. The large amount of RAM it uses would otherwise be dedicated to apps instead as a cache. Enabling Apple intelligence makes every other app run slower.
The Apple intelligence LLM also takes up 7 GB of storage on device.
> newer versions of Firefox or KDE that do not get as much slower as iOS
Newer versions of Firefox on iOS are approaching 400MB in download size, which is over a 10x increase from a decade ago.
I wonder if people are just too sensitive to a handful of milliseconds of delay and calling it "slowdown" and didn't grow up on an era of metal that took minutes to do simple tasks.
My theory is that the 'malware' is simply heavier updates on older phones that don't really need it. For example the camera app in iOS26 could be significantly slower than in iOS 15 for example. It may do a few extra things but it could do them just as well on the older code base. Now with the new code base, the exact same feature runs slower on an old phone but runs the same on a newer phone with a relative difference noticeable.
This is probably because Apple hardware team is far ahead of the software team. There is a lot of headroom, and instead of doing something innovative with it, apple choses to instead just bloat it to sell more phones.
Apple with this strategy becomes the most environmentally unhealthy company. Of course we need a way to prove this.
What I would do is get an iPhone 12 with iOS 14 to iOS 27 and compare how fluid and snappy the UI is. its probably hard to get an iPhone with iOS 14 because apple cleverly doesnt sign it.
Ehm, talk to all the Android vendors who stopped doing security updates after 1-2 years or are only doing security updates every 3-6 months (which is certainly not safe with the current vulnerability rate). New EU regulations are moving them for long support periods. Funnily enough, some of them think they can do some malicious compliance by never releasing any updates at all:
https://www.androidauthority.com/motorola-eu-software-update...
My mom still has an iPhone 11 or 12 and it's definitely running better than Android phones 2019 or 2020. Not only that, it is also still getting security updates.
(Credits go to Google Pixel and a lesser extend Samsung S-series for showing the way when it comes to Android updates.)
But we are talking about something as simple as opening safari and camera app. How does that glitch and require 2.5x the performance 7 years later with no hardware changes whatsoever to the camera and network/ssd/display etc.
The software is optimized for devices with 2x the performance and 3x the RAM. It's no surprise at all that it's slow.
Newer versions of iOS use significantly more RAM than older versions. I'd estimate that OS RAM usage increased from ~1GB to ~1.5-2GB. This has minimal effect on newer phones with 12GB of RAM, but on older phones such as the iPhone 11 with 4GB of RAM the performance impact is noticeable. Userspace apps spend more time paging and are slower.
Also, webpages have gotten 2-5x heavier over the past decade. App sizes have increased by a similar multiplier.
Firefox on iOS today is far more bloated than the version released a decade ago. It has more features, more bloat, and will run slower than the version released years ago. Claiming "It hasn't happened to Firefox" is a lie and that's why you deflected.
Setting aside the functional implications of disabling JS, can you help me square the two?
> ...webpages have gotten 2-5x heavier over the past decade...
I don't think anyone is arguing that modern browsers can't load old web pages quickly. And HN still loads plenty fast on an old iOS device.
One minute it's "they still work fine on older devices", the next minute it's 'I have to disable JS for the modern web to be usable'.
> Userspace apps spend more time paging and are slower.
This is right in the current thread.
In reality, both local apps and websites do not have to get heavier in order to provide more features. Apple is effectively slowing down everything (as do typical web developers). And yet KDE, Firefox, HN, Mastodon prove that this is not exactly unavoidable.
The developers of Firefox for iOS made the willful choice to bloat their app, not Apple.
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!
Does that mean "the notch" goes away, too?
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)
What frustrates me is that the CPUs are so powerful but somehow 5 years down the line are slow in basic UI navigation.
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?
This is a common pattern seen with so-called "tech" companies
A denial of intent
For example
Accusation: Apple slowed phones with updates
Response: We force updates for valid reasons
where [valid reasons] usually makes some mention of "security"
The companies never deny that the subject of the complaint, e.g., loss of performance, loss of privacy, etc., was forseeable
For example, the company will state something like,
"We force updates for valid reasons"
instead of
"We force updates for valid reasons. We had no idea this would make older phones slower."
Of course the company knew this would make phones slower
The company in its response might state the "main goal" but what were the "other goals" or "incidental benefits" that accrue to the company, e.g., slower phones as a result of "updates" leads to more "upgrades" (sales of new phones)