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Comment by jonplackett | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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