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If Apple just let people hang out on the last nicely-working version of iOS, where their camera still opens fast, then that’d be fine. But they don’t. They bully you into always being on the latest

Also, I remember a while back they did a specific optimised speed-up release of iOS with barely any new features and it _really_ worked. My iPhone 6S went from being basically garbage I was going to replace to like a brand new phone.

They can do it if they want to. It’s what’s needed now. My iPhone 12 Pro has started to feel super slow since I got iOS 17. I have a new battery. Even texting feels painfully slow. There’s no excuse for this. It’s either deliberate and bad, or lazy and bad. Either way it’s bad.

If Apple committed to releasing a full + feature-slim version of each iOS going forward, I'd switch to an iPhone tomorrow.

But that's a lot of maintenance burden, in exchange for slitting their own revenue throat. So hard to expect them to do it for altruism.

I also have an iPhone 12 Pro and it’s just as snappy as ever on iOS 17.

Sounds like you might have some buggy / bad app interactions going on? There’s really no reason for a 12 Pro to be slow at this point even if the OS was getting “heavier.” The 12 Pros have 6GB of RAM, which is now pretty standard across the iPhone lineup even years later. And the A14 SoC in the 12 Pro is effectively the same tech as the M1 processors that are still rock-solid at running full blown macOS, albeit with fewer cores running at somewhat lower clocks.

I can’t really think of much reason for you to be having a slow experience aside from the usual bugs that can accompany any new major release, and usually get ironed out over the course of a month or two.

FWIW you also don’t have to update. Of course they bully you to update. You don’t have to.

It’s just temporary - after you install a new update, every cache has to be regenerated in the background, so for a few days/week it will have a shitton of background tasks running.

Also, ios 17 likely is a bit buggy - I’m on 17.1 beta with a 12 pro max and I can say that the performance is back to how it used to be.

Curiously, I noticed people here mention that camera on older iPhones is taking ages to open. I'm on iPhone7, battery never replaced ("battery health: significantly degraded" as reported by iOS), so goes from 100% to 10% in about 12 hrs with "normal" use. However, camera opens just fine.

No, it's not unfair at all. Apple's gotten busted for this exact thing and had to shell out $500 million in damages.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/apple-to-start-paying-out-5...

> I really have a hard time with a realistic business model that would be significantly better.

Well this one might be good for business, but as you can see, it is extremely bad for the individual.

The consequence of their upgrade was a slow down. But they didn’t slow it down just because they could. It was to prevent a phone with an old shitty battery to shut down in the middle of a task when there was still battery left. Better a slow down than just no phone at all.

And yes they didn’t communicate it, that’s why they got sued. But this problem was real.

Did you even read your own citation? Apple slowed down older phones when the battery degraded because the other choice was the phone would shut off.

That's Apple's claim, yes.

But if they were genuinely just concerned about battery health, and not about their sales numbers, then why do the throttling covertly? Why not tell the user that throttling was happening, that it was related to power issues, and that they should consider a replacement battery?

If they wanted a new sale, why not do nothing and let the phones reboot? Why only target individual handsets with degraded batteries? Why bring the phone back to full speed when the battery was changed? Why does the feature still exist?

The only thing that has changed is they now tell you if it’s happening.

> why not do nothing and let the phones reboot

Assuming for the moment that reboots were a serious concern, and not just a fabricated excuse... it's better for Apple's reputation for old phones to be slow than to be flaky.

With the former, people were assuming that Apple's shiny new OS required state-of-the-art hardware to run smoothly. It just appeared as if technology was advancing rapidly, and one had to buy the latest iPhone every year or two to keep up.

With the latter, there would be noone to blame but Apple, and they would develop a reputation for unreliable hardware, like Samsung or worse.

> Assuming for the moment that reboots were a serious concern

They still are. As a battery ages the internal resistance increases. This leads to brown-outs under high current. This isn’t unique to Apple, it’s just how batteries work.

The whole discussion is incredibly moot, because Apple should be shipping devices with more easily replaced batteries.

The degradation would still happen. You want your car to go into limp home mode even if the part that failed is replaceable.

This issue would still have drastically different framing if the given reason was true and users had the freedom to easily replace batteries in old devices, as well as OS-level warning pop-ups which let the user know that it's time to replace a battery and that their phone will be slower until they do.

Anything less is deceptive and anti-user.

If it was true? All the evidence supports it. My wife’s phone was throttled and mine wasn’t. Replacing degraded batteries brought devices back to full speed. How can you draw any other conclusions?

The only thing they have changed is that they now have the OS level pop ups, the feature still exists.

It's quite easy to draw the conclusion that other alternatives were considered such as an easily-replaced battery, but Apple's management decided on a course of action which was plausible enough to be accepted without much further questioning, and wouldn't give the user back any freedoms, and would ultimately lead to more phone sales.

I don’t subscribe to that at all. I see other manufacturers dropping support for their phones after one or two years and I see apple supporting them for a long time. They want to sell services and they want you to have a working phone to use them.

Apple get phone sales from me because of this stance.

I have refuted that article like 1000 times already, if I ever see it again..

> People on average change their phones every 3 years

People in my circles seem to use their phones for 6-7 years atleast.

This figure sourcing gallup has nearly half of Americans replacing their phone "as soon as their carrier allows it": https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/07/15/how-often-...

Of course - it's not like the monthly bill becomes less if you have a phone taken from a carrier, so you should change it out immediately.

It absolutely does go down if you're not making payments on a phone

That article is from 2018. 2 Year Contracts were still a thing back then. The contract included a hidden fee that covered the cost of the device spread out over the length of the contract.

That is all gone now. Carriers have post-paid plans where the monthly device cost varies based on device. These are 0% interest loans from the carrier. At the same time, people have started holding their phones longer. Renewal periods when to 30 months, then 36 months.

Some people will never be happy but cellphone customers are never happy.

Why can't people just enjoy our pocket computers with their always on connections?

The mistake was giving the general public pocket computers with always on connections and acting like they wouldn't be stupid with them or turn them into status symbols

I worked for a verizon reseller in 2014-2015 and 2 year contracts were not very common by the time I left. 0% loans on 2 year periods were big by then. Functionally I don't think "normal" people really see a big difference.

And those people are the reason that the average is three years, instead of one year like the teenagers do.

Your bubble is showing again — only rich parents’ kids buy a new phone yearly.

This is not Reddit, you do not need to prefix comments with personal attacks. Nor is karma farmed here by insinuating that you are poor, confused about your gender, or had abusive parents.

If by "bubble" you mean my family, nobody but the eight year old has seen a new phone since before the first COVID lockdowns. And the phones that my children use were are purchased with money they earned themselves - including the eight year old. He decided at six that he wants a phone, and saved for two years to buy one - not a grain of which was aquired through his parents.

Genuinely curious - how did your 6-8 year old earn an income that didn't come from his parents?

He walks smaller dogs and sells drinks that he makes at the football field near the house. The neighbour lets him pick lemons to sweeten the drinks. He worked for two years to buy the absolute least expensive phone available. I did buy him a case as a gift for achieving his goal, though: $3 on Aliexpress.

I should mention that he also managed to buy two goldfish during this time - also with his own money. So he learned very well to budget, and that each thing that he buys along the way pushed back his goal.

Really cool!

Maybe having a phone at six is normal now but it sounds crazy to me

He got the phone at eight, but in general I agree with you.

As a father, I see the phone as an opportunity to teach limits from an early age. And wow, does he test those limits! In retrospect, it is better that him and I are going through this testing phase at eight, rather than in the rebellious teenage years.

I'm 15 and I don't even want a phone, this thing is a goddamn headache, portable little advertisement device hurdling me with ads even when I run GrapheneOS and it depresses me mine (pixel 5a) is the last that will ever be made with a headphone jack, which I literally rely on, earbuds don't need a battery. I use it because it's what I can get and I didn't make my financial decision on it.

I don't see that as a personal attack. It is factual. No teenager - except the richest ones - can afford buying a new smartphone every year, neither do their parents.

And most of those that can afford it would still want to buy other things instead when they already have one, which means only the richest of the richest ones really do that.

The "attack" was deciding that I live on a bubble of rich parents. In fact, my own mother wouldn't be hungry during dinner many evenings while we were growing up... only years later did I realize why.

Have you ever heard of financing for things like that? Great way to get people to get stocked up on things they can't actually afford.

There are so many things you can finance at the same time until it isn't sustainable anymore.

When a company is the first to be worth 1 trillion, maybe the business model is exploitative and should be forced to be worse.

They make so much money, why should their business model have to be any better?