Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

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Yes, I think user apathy has to be a big part of it.

I have a 2012 iPhone5 with iOS 6.1.3 still on it. I never upgraded it. When iOS 7 came out, all the news reports said it killed the battery. Same with iOS 8, 9, and finally iOS X.

Yes, I assume that eventually, iOS point release 7.x.x fixed the battery issue but I don't care to keep visiting news websites to figure out which exact version is finally "safe" to upgrade. I don't want to be a slave to the housekeeping of my phone.

Others say the news reports are alarmist -- all one has to do after a new iOS release is to dig into the settings and disable all the new features/polling/etc that eats up the battery. But it's the same situation -- I don't want to put the effort into learning "what's new" that I have to disable.

On the other hand, I'll quickly upgrade major releases of MS Visual Studio from VS2015 to VS2017, or upgrade Webstorm from 2016 to 2017.

I was puzzled over my contradictory approaches to updating software. I think I figured it out: my phone feels like an "appliance" to me instead of a computer and I don't want to mess it up. Another reason is that Apple won't let me pick an exact version to upgrade. I can't pick iOS 7.1.2 -- I'm forced to upgrade to the buggy iOS X or nothing at all.

As a result, I have willingly performed an "IE6" legacy lobotomy on my iPhone.

(As trivia, I also notice that iPhone5s on ebay that still have iOS 6 sell for a slightly higher premium.)

It doesn't help that "upgrading" an iOS device is a one-way ticket.

Religiously updating the original iPad effectively bricked it (not literally, but to all intents and purposes) years ahead of its natural lifetime, due to one particular major release that killed performance, reliability and battery life in one fell swoop.

If there no going back, why would you risk going forward?

Security fixes, new features, etc.?

If you risk losing the old features, that probably doesn't sound too attractive to most people.

My iPad 2 is still actively in use on iOS7 (it was better on iOS6) and I was using iPhone 4S with iOS6 until the end of last year. Many other people reported bad degradation on iOS8/9.

Anecdotally my iPhone6 16gb became way more usable with iOS 11. I went from always running out of room to now having a lot of space. I use https://photos.google.com/ all the time so I rarely have more than 200mb of media on my phone. For me the OS footprint shrunk quite a bit and as a result the phone became a lot more usable.

I wouldn't always believe those "the update made my phone slow" stories you see whenever there is a new OS. Many seem to be pre-written by the haters and always posted regardless of what the truth is.

> (As trivia, I also notice that iPhone5s on ebay that still have iOS 6 sell for a slightly higher premium.)

This is probably because it has a better jailbreak scene around it than newer versions of iOS. Also, just as an FYI, the latest version of iOS is 11, and they're not numbered using roman numerals.

The latest version of iOS for the iPhone 5 is certainly 10. 11 dropped support for 32-bit phones, and the iPhone 5, along with the 5c, were the last 32-bit iPhones.

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