Hacker News Reader

Comment by fumar | Hacker News Reader

After all these years, I finally picked up an iPad. It is an iPad Pro 10.5 with the smart keyboard. I like the device, its fast and has good utility for photo editing, like Affinity photo. Should I expect the device to slow down with each iOS update? Does the whole OS slow down or is it specific apps? Is this article accurate? What is the average lifespan of iOS devices, given hardware is taken care of? This is my first iOS device.

Edit:

Has there been a change in how older devices are impacted? For example, iPads before iPad Air are more likely to be impacted by updates. Any iOS device after the A7 chip is now less likely to be impacted.

View on HN

This is a red herring, the real reason why we even get to have this conversation is because Apple provides full OS version updates to devices for much longer than any other mobile platform. Your 6 year old iPad is a bit slow on the latest iOS? Uh, my 6 year old android tablet hasn't seen a new OS in 5 years.

5 years isn't all that long in the world of computers (and Apple is trying really really hard to market iPads as computers).

Any proper computer will be upgradable for way longer than 5 years when running Windows or Linux. iPad won't be because you're not allowed to install your own OS.

Not really a fair comparison when you consider that PCs have been plateau'ing in performance for at least that long, while the tablet/mobile market still delivers large performance gains year-over-year.

I don't know what Apple's iOS feature roadmap is, but I'd say there isn't really a rule of thumb you can apply.

My iPhone 6 struggled mightily with iOS 11 (even with an upgraded battery). It is the only time I have regretted an upgrade (since iOS 3) across 3 devices.

On the other hand, Apple has steadily expanded the number of years they provide updates for their hardware, up to about 5 years now.

I also recently got an iPad Pro 10.5", and I think that the Pro 10.5" in particular will last longer than most iPads.

The only three iOS devices with 4GB of RAM are the iPad Pro 12.3 first gen, iPad Pro 12.3 second gen, and iPad Pro 10.5. Earlier iPads (and iPhones) were often working with much less RAM so a newer device with more RAM coming out would make the older ones obsolete faster.

The original iPad only had 256mb of RAM, and the first iPad with 2GB was the iPad Air, released in 2014.

4GB is going to be the maximum amount you can get in an iPad for a while, I think, and RAM increases matter much less now than they did when it went from 256mb to 512mb.

The processor in the 10.5 inch pro is also the first iPad processor to have 3 high performance and 3 low performance cores, coming up from 2 cores for everything.

This advice is a bit late since you already made your purchase, but if you want your hardware to survive more software updates, usually getting the “S” or “tock” versions of things has been more future proof.

The iPad Pro 10.5" is more or less the "tock" version of the original iPad Pro 9.7", so the OP should be good for a while.

Most of what this article is talking about is people who are using iPads that are 6-8 years old. Those first iPads were very limited in their hardware, such as the amount of memory.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com