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Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

In my case, I replaced the battery four months ago.

It's not just the battery. Newer OS's are just slower.

I've just bought an iPhone 6S second hand with a new battery. I don't know how fast they used to be, but I've not noticed anything being slow. Animations are silky smooth, and app loading times seem fast too.

> I don't know how fast they used to be.

That's the problem. :)

I'm also on a 6S and Apple has kept it quite speedy! But, I was playing with a 2016 iPhone SE on iOS 9 about a year ago, and I could instantly tell it was snappier than my 6S on iOS 12.

I want to say it's beyond "usable". I am using iPhone SE from 2016 - it works flawlessly imo on iOS 13.5.1

Agreed, I tweaked the wording in my post.

The iPhone SE had the same CPU, GPU and RAM as the 6S but had far fewer pixels to deal with. That was probably more of a contributor to the snappiness than the iOS version.

> Newer OS's are just slower.

In the iOS world, not generally so. Things generally get faster and more optimized (cruft gets removed) in the iOS world (barring some anomalies like iOS 13, but it's gotten back on track).

iOS 7, 11, and 13 are definitely slower than their respective immediate predecessors. iOS 9 and 12 are definitely the opposite.

But while it's hard to prove definitively—largely because highly-out-of-date iOS devices are so rare in the wild—I would posit that even though 12 was faster than 11, 9 and 10 were both faster than 12. That's definitely what I saw in a brief iOS 9 experience I mentioned elsewhere in this thread.

It's the old frog-in-boiling-water analogy. If it happens slowly, you don't notice.

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