iPhone X – Not Yet | Hacker News Reader

iPhone X – Not Yet

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28 pointsjandll55 comments

> If removing apps won’t get my phone to better behave, I’m going to do a hard reset. That will downgrade me to iOS 10 (or even 9), which I hope will be more usable.

Not true. Apple's servers are no longer signing iOS 10.3.3, it's impossible to downgrade through any means. http://api.ineal.me/tss/status https://www.macrumors.com/2017/10/04/apple-stops-signing-ios...

As an Android user I am not sure whether to believe this tired story about how new iOS releases slow down the phone and make you 'have to' upgrade to a new device. I am sure there have been historical precedents where Apple have moved e.g. from 32 to 64 bit and made a tranche of older devices practically unusable. But is this really the situation today?

I think that there will always be those that grumble about progress, e.g. people that complained 'Win 7 slower than Vista', so it is hard to tell. But have Apple upgraded things so that the iphone 6 feels slow and users of the device feel compelled to upgrade? Not wishing to start an opinion based flamewar but, as an Android user seeing all as well in Apple land, I would like to know if there really is a performance issue on iOS 11 / iphone 6.

I'd argue that the bigger issue is worn out flash memory. Even with TRIM (4.3+), the chips grinds to a halt after a few years of constant writing.

These days it's not as big of an issue due to most higher end phones having bigger memories (with more cells to wear out).

It could also be unintentionally full flash memory. I have an iPhone 4 that was unbearably slow, and eventually started claiming there was not enough room to sync music, despite supposedly having 2 - 3GB spare. (The 'other' section had somehow grown to 8GB, and after attempting a factory reset & resync, Other grew to 16GB instead of disappearing.)

I fixed it by deleted all the music, syncing, and then manually selecting the music I wanted again. That got me back my free space and cleared the 'other' space. The device is now remarkably zippy again.

[Obviously I have other phones, but I still use the iPhone 4 as an iPod & podcast device.]

On Windows Phone the story was the same. Upgrade from 8 to 8.1 made the phone noticeably slower, another upgrade to 10 made it almost unusable. So this is not exclusive to Apple.

It is probably that Android users usually do not receive updates, so they can't complain that updates made their phones slower.

> It is probably that Android users usually do not receive updates

I don’t know if that’s true - I use a Nexus and it’s well supported in terms of updates - but I actually think it might be the way to go anyway. I would quite like a situation whereby my phone gets minor and patch releases, but I have to upgrade my phone to get the next major. That way, I can have some confidence I’ll get vital security fixes and minor features without huge performance penalties, and each major release can be very highly optimised for the latest hardware.

I don’t know if that’s true - I use a Nexus and it’s well supported

It is absolutely true. Outside of a few model lines which get directly supported by Google, software updates for Android phones are rare. This is one of the biggest causes of Android fragmentation -- for most people who have an Android phone, the version that came preinstalled is the only version that phone will ever have installed.

I recently switched to Android from iOS, and actually don't find this to be too big of a deal now that mobile OSs have matured somewhat. I was excited to finally be able to upgrade to Nougat a couple of months ago, but there were precisely zero user-facing differences, apart from a few inconsequential aesthetic tweaks. I can see that it is more of a problem for developers, who can't use new APIs without drastically limiting their audience.

I upgraded my HTC 10 from Android 7.0 to LineageOS 14.1. Instead of 24 hours I got over 48 hours of battery life and the phone is noticeably faster. I get a new update once per week now and I'm quite happy with my phone, which started to lag a bit too much with the stock ROM. And this also fixed the KRACK issue.

I've seen dozens of people online complaining about it, so there is probably a bug that effects some percentage of users. I personally didn't notice any slowdown.

I can attest first hand that iOS11 slowed my iPhone to a crawl. We're talking multiple tens of seconds lag with basic operations like opening the camera, opening the keyboard, etc. The same is true for everyone I know personally who has used iOS11 (a head-count of about seven so far).

This really isn't progress. iOS11 introduced practically nothing in the way of improvements or new features, but instead has made a lot of devices practically unusable.

Multiple tens of seconds to open the camera??? I'm on a 6S and have had no issues with it.

My old iPad Air slowed a bit, but never into multiple tens of seconds. Maybe 3-4 seconds to enter multitasking view (which is bad enough, don't get me wrong).

What phone are you on? Have you tried a factory reset?

I also find it difficult to believe that 8/8 people have a 20+ second delay opening the keyboard - that just sounds nigh-on impossible.

>We're talking multiple tens of seconds lag

Do you mean multiple tenths of a second? Waiting 20-30 seconds for the camera app to open seems inconceivable.

I can corroborate this MASSIVE lag on both a 6S+ and a 6 here, and additionally my friends 7+

I've done a complete restore/set up new/bla bla bla... didn't do much. I have to either reboot or hard reset my phone almost every day because apps(even system apps, like messages) will either lock the entire phone up or just all start freezing signalling that's about to occur.

My phone is in perfect condition hardware wise, with great battery health etc(like over 90%). The battery runs down as fast as my 6 that had a defective battery apple replaced under that recall program. I was seriously debating keeping this phone for another six months at least, but if 11.1 doesn't fix it it's going on craigslist.

This is just hilariously inexcusable, it's almost ios 4 on the iphone 3G bad. Like my phone is pretty bad, but my roommates 6 will literally sit for yea, 10+ seconds waiting for the camera to actually be "ready". There's also random ENORMOUS lag when shooting photos/before tap to focus works/etc.

> I would like to know if there really is a performance issue on iOS 11 / iphone 6.

My wife's anecdotal experience says: yes, definitely. Yesterday we went and bought her the 8. We were going to do it anyways, but we made haste because of her phone woes (I myself don't use Apple products for other principalled reasons).

I am not a conspiracy theorist and I will not claim planned obsolescence, but her reliance/preference towards iPhone coupled with Apple's approach that leaves little consumer choice left us with that same little choice. And Apple got paid. I suppose their quality in general has earned them this leverage.

I can attest to being it true, at least partially. Some new major iOS versions do slow down some previous models. I had an iPhone 4S that was fast when I bought it. I kept updating until Apple stopped releasing new iOS versions for it (I think I went from iOS 6 up to iOS 9.3.5). Everything was just slower and using the phone felt almost like a chore.

Same for my iPad 3. It runs iOS 9.3.5, too, and is barely usable. I only ever watch YouTube on it now. Apps load so slowly. The onscreen keyboard takes several seconds to pop up after tapping a text field.

I bought the iPhone 4S for 700€, the iPad 3 for 400€. And Apple simply decides to fuck people over by basically breaking their devices with a software update. Yes, the device still works, all functionality is still there, but using the device is an exercise in patience.

I don’t think Apple makes previous devices slower on purpose. But I think they do not care to keep them fast either … to help sales. They love to claim the majority of devices runs the latest iOS version. Great. But at the same time they made millions of devices obsolete by nagging users to install it.

My observation is that Apple is extremely stingy with the amount of RAM they put in their devices, throughout the range; I had to buy a top of the line Macbook Air back in the day just to get moderately future-proof 4G, which I would have considered insufficient at the time in a PC laptop. I wouldn't be surprised if there's cliff-edge effects on performance when they start optimizing later software for hardware that has more RAM than the previous generation.

I also wonder what happens if I now buy a new Windows 10 machine and put Windows XP on it. Will it be faster? If that is the case, it can be expected that putting Windows 10 on a Vista or XP machine will be much slower.

The people want more features and fancy stuff, and that requires more compute power. I don't think Apple should be optimizing for their oldest phones, business wise. (I would not mind personally, using an iPhone 6 myself but have not updated to iOS 11)

We are talking about the recommended OS on a 2 year old computing device here. Please don't muddy the waters with poor analogies of decade old hardware or terms like "oldest phone". People would be similarly upset if any other company did this. By excusing the company with these poor comparisons, you appear to have vendor bias.

I think 6 to 7 was really difficult, but everything that shipped with 7 would go up easily to 10. Many people were still repeating the same “my iPhone 4 became slow so planned obsolence” mantra.

iOS 11 on the other hand is just garbage. It doesn’t run like shit only on older devicee, it runs like shit on a brand new iPhone 8 as well. Battery tests were abysmal. I woke up this morning because of an alarm on my iPad that was planned only on weekdays. WTF!! SUNDAY!!!

11.1 solves a lot of problems. Installing dev certs on all of my devices infected with 11 just so I can run the 11.1 beta.

The most plausible explanation I've seen is that Apple isn't being purposefully malicious and releasing updates to make older phones slower, but that they don't actively test the older phones with the updates and add features that take more computational power, causing the issues. I do think that iOS 11 has been significantly less tested (or built by less experienced engineers) due to the glitches and issues that have happened, but again I don't think this is malicious, just poor QA processes or major changes due to the release of iPhone X.

Here is a video of a guy testing ALL iPhones supporting iOS 11 (5s upwards): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMAcZFNq0bI

There seems to be a small regression on older devices.

It's really hard to fathom how Apple fucked up iOS 11 so badly. I feel exactly the same as this guy, but I have an iPhone 6s.

It's slow, the battery drains, the text is big and ugly (Messages, Inbox, Chats), the goddamn Calculator app is broken. And somehow the usual retort to this is "Have you tried disabling blah blah blah or doing so so so". I don't _want_ to dick around with my phone. It worked fine, now it's broke.

Literally the only reason for me to upgrade would be so I can have a phone that's exactly the same as this one, except it's missing a headphone jack and costs more. That's hardly a value proposition.

Jesus, Apple. WTF?

Yeah, I saw the update and especially enlarged and ugly fonts stand out. Damn, what are they thinking. What a mad presumption that every update needs to do UI design change or otherwise it would feel stale to someone(?).

I chosen Apple only due to design and attention to detail and it's incredibly sad to see it shatter.

The one regression I've been experiencing is the wifi. I have pretty much unlimited 4G, but a very bad wifi connection in my bedroom.

Because of Apple's silly disabled-but-not-really wifi and bluetooth, my wifi keeps switching to on, seemingly randomly, but probably whenever it loses and then reacquires my home wifi.

As a result I have to keep turning wifi off in settings, which is a bit too rigorous, or I have to keep remembering to turn off wifi in the bedroom.

I can't help but feel there's a use-case myopia at Apple that, for whatever reason, is starting to become problematic. For me, at least, and I think I'm pretty much their ideal customer (aside from not having a wife and kids).

I use a iOS VPN app called Speedify, that simultaneously bonds wifi/cellular channels into a single channel, ostensibly for speed sake. It seems to handle situations where either wifi or cellular is flakey, and even has a redundant mode, where all traffic is sent via both channels simultaneously. Redundant mode is not fast, but it is rock solid reliable. I use it if I want to make sure I don't drop a VOIP call.

My iPhone 6s suffered similarly on iOS 11.0, but is back to normal iOS 10 level performance with 11.1 Beta 5.

I would try the beta if you're impatient, or just wait for iOS 11.1 to come out, which will probably be released within the next 1 to 3 weeks.

You can sign up for the public beta at beta.apple.com, which involves installing a beta profile on your phone, rebooting, and visiting Settings/General/SoftwareUpdate and starting the install. You can later unenroll your phone from the beta train by deleting the beta profile in Settings/General/Profiles.

Generally, early iOS betas, even public betas, are awful. I wait until at least beta 3 or 4, as showstoppers and most minor bugs will have been fixed. If you still have your 6s next year, I'd skip 12.0, and wait until 12.1.

I’ve created an account on HN just to talk about how bad iOS 11 has been.

I’ve tried iOS 11 on - a 6s plus, 7 plus (mine and a friend’s), 8 plus, an iPad Air 2. I have to experiment with quite a few devices for work related reasons. The 7 plus had the Intel variant.

The battery has been just bad, just horribly bad on all but one 8 plus.

I’ve never experienced such a poor quality update from Apple.

Apple is quite stubborn when it comes to UX choices, but the Wifi and Bluetooth toggle issue is just inexcusable. I have a great LTE plan but poor Wifi in the bedroom. One night, I forgot to turn off the Wifi from the settings app. I was habituated to toggling it on or off from control centre. I woke up in the morning and saw the battery had gone down by 30%. The device was at full charge at night. The phone kept trying to reconnect to the Wifi all night and ended up draining 30%.

I live with Apple’s design/UX choices which they force upon the users because it usually just works out in the end. But this is just stupid! I have never been this aggravated with an iOS update.

It’s silly changes for the sake of change. That’s it.

I’m so hopping mad right now with the update that I’m considering Android again. I do not want to pay premium prices for such horrible software quality.

I’ve no intention of buying any high end Android as they loose value quite fast. Maybe a cheap, sub 300 USD phone. I don’t care for updates at that price. I’ll just swap the phone every year if I want the update.

No matter what Apple says: battery life on my iPhone plummeted after I installed iOS 11. Speed went down a bit, but that was you be expected. Hoping 11.1 will address the battery issue.

As far as I know, a factory reset won't downgrade you to a previous version and it's nearly impossible to do so.

Obviously yes, you don't need the fanciest, latest iPhone in most cases. Mine is a 5s, and I may upgrade to SE eventually.

Edit: typo

I have both Oneplus 3 and iPhone 8 of recent, the OP3 have more than double the battery time so I'm really hoping that it is a system issue.

I had a similar problem after installing iOS 11 on my iPhone (7 Plus). The battery life was so bad, I was having to charge multiple times per day.

I installed the public beta of 11.1 out of frustration, and I'm pleased to say it's fixed the problem. At this point I feel like the battery life is back to "normal" (iOS 10 levels).

Glad to hear that, i hope it get released publicly soon.

I also own an iPhone 7 Plus and iOS 11 had no discernible impact on my battery life. I'm consistently between 30% and 50% at the end of the day depending how much I use it.

iOS11 has been bad enough that I've moved over to a Galaxy S8. The difference in stability and smoothness is night-and-day.

For a counterpoint, iOS 11 has been completely smooth sailing for me, absolutely no problems or performance impact.

I know at least a dozen people with iPhones (of various generations) and none of them had a bad thing to say about the update.

iOS 11 has been such a disaster for my iPhone 7 that I'm moving away from Apple altogether. The phone is full of UI glitches, unreliable, has horrible battery life, Bluetooth connections fail constantly, and it's so generally slow it can't even reliably play a pre-downloaded podcast while opening an app without it stuttering badly. They've put out some bad software updates in the past, but this one is pretty inexcusable especially when you consider it took away as many useful features from the iPhone (3D Touch app switching, Notification Centre from Reachability) as it added.

Yep, same here. It's a dumpster fire. I just ordered a Pixel 2 XL. Fingers crossed...

Make sure not to turn it on until december with the first Oreo update: Google will be supplying software updates recalibrating the screen and 'fixing' the burn-in, reports say.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/10/google-addresses-pix...

Same here. I've got Apple phones, iPads, MacBook and iMac. Have had Apple phones since the 3G. This update is the final straw, my phone has gone from good to unusable. Siri takes so long to process commands now that I've stopped using it. Everything is so slooow. I just preordered a Pixel 2 XL as well.

I usually quite like Google's flagships, but I can't justify the price any more. My Nexus 6P's battery only lasts two hours nowadays, as it dies at 40 or 50%. I don't want a phone that costs a small fortune and barely lasts two years, especially one that doesn't have a headphone jack.

Immediate updates are nice, but the downsides are too big. I'm looking for another phone model I can switch to, maybe the LG V30 or some Xiaomi phone.

Similar situation here, I just upgraded after my Nexus 5 finally started dying (random reboots and only a few hours battery life). I considered the Pixel & Pixel 2, but the price made me think twice. More importantly, I wanted a headphone jack & wireless charging, which my Nexus 5 both had.

I ended up getting a Galaxy S8, since it has both the headphone jack & wireless & also a microSD slot. I love the hardware, and I'm mostly happy, though Bixby & the Samsung Apps are infuriating (protip: don't create a Samsung account!) Switching to Google Launcher has helped, but I wish the phone was pure Android.

At the old Nexus price points, the Samsung A5 [1] looks really nice. If it had wireless charging I probably would have bought it instead.

[1] http://www.samsung.com/au/smartphones/galaxy-a5-a520f/SM-A52...

Hmm, interesting, thank you. My main problem with Samsung is the crapware, which pretty much guarantees that the phone will always be way behind on updates. Maybe Android One is a good alternative?

Force Touch app switching is back in a newer version of iOS.

> 3D Touch app switching

3D Touch app switching is back in 11.1 at least

The 11.1 beta also has noticeably better performance on my 6s. It's still too buggy (as a beta) for me to recommend though.

I wonder if the performance and battery issues that some people have been having and others have not can be explained in part by different chipsets and/or modems and iOS having to deal with both: https://www.repeaterstore.com/blogs/main/for-better-cell-sig...

That article mentions that the iPhone 7 was the first one to have both Intel (non-CDMA) and Qualcomm (CDMA) versions.

quite possible. I also noticed my battery usage is way higher in some countries than in others...

I was also convinced that iOS 11 caused my battery life to plummet. But it turned out my battery was just broken.

You‘d think that batteries should last longer than a year, but it‘s a question of statistics: Some batteries last longer, some deteriorate quickly. I was unlucky with my battery.

Tips:

1. Check your battery health. Coconut Battery lets you check your battery health. If it is under 80%, consider swapping it.

2. 3rd party repair shops are faster and a lot cheaper than Apple.

Of the iOS updates I’ve used, iOS 11 has been the worst one by far. I know some of the issues are due to my phone, but there are visual glitches, broken components (playing music won’t actually show in the Control Center until restarting phone), messed up keyboard inputs, poor battery life, and poor performance in general that seemingly are software only. I’m almost certain that they took more experienced engineers away to other projects and left the less experienced ones with iOS, and possibly downsized the team, based on the seemingly obvious issues. I’m also sure they were testing so hard for iPhone X that they didn’t test for older devices so much.

At least the 10th anniversary has passed, so I’m hopeful for next year actually being a good iOS update again.

For the people who down voted me, why?

I've been using the 5s since it came out(love the form factor), and always update iOS immediately. Have never had any problems. IDK where this need to buy a new phone comes from. If you like your phone, you can surely stick with it

Battery life on iPhone 8 is awesome. THe speed and overall smoothness of how the phone runs is great too.

The iPhone 8 isn't a huge leap in innovation but in UX its a marked improvement even over from my iPHone 7.

Factory reset to iOS 11. Apple’s update system is like lottery. I factory reset when updating on Mac and iPhone.

It takes me hours to revert all my app logins and even wallet takes days to re add some of my cards. This is simply not feasible

For a lot of people, including my own experience with multiple devices i have, this didn't help. If it did, it maybe made a 10% difference.

> I don’t like the conditioning of buying a new iPhone just because mine is 2 years old, and want out of the Apple marketing machine.

Amen. Stay strong.

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