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Comment by philfreo | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if this is also due to new major iOS versions being released at the same time as new iPhones, and these updates add more intensive features (e.g. apps open in the background) and are designed more with the most modern devices in mind.

I know that my 2011 iPad 2 started feeling much slower after installing iOS 7. (Though luckily I finally tried the "Reset all settings" trick and it made a big difference, which points to a bug.)

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> I wonder if this is also due to new major iOS versions being released at the same time as new iPhones, and these updates add more intensive features (e.g. apps open in the background) and are designed more with the most modern devices in mind.

So you wonder if it's the same theory posited in the article itself..?

The theory in the article is that Apple is intentionally making the older devices slower.

The theory you are responding to is that Apple is intentionally adding new features to iOS, which incidentally makes older devices slower because they're trying to do more work.

Is it a "conspiracy to make your device slower" when Apple adds new features to later versions of iOS? They're not intentionally adding in "slow down a bit here and encourage the user to upgrade to a new phone" code. So there's no conspiracy.

Read the article more carefully. The author explicitly considers both theories.

One of the interesting contradictions in software is that, logically, things are actually supposed to get faster as new versions come out, since there should have been both more time and more data to use for optimization. However, in practice, new versions of software are usually slower than their predecessors, presumably because of the addition of new features. It'd be interesting to see a product developed with a "no slowdowns allowed" policy.

Pretty sure Snow Leopard was a release aimed at doing just that, rewriting a lot of the core system libraries for x86_64 and also clearing house on a lot of old cruft. No new real features were delivered with the release.

Then Lion came along and slowed things down to a crawl. Definitely the slowest OSX release I've had on my old macbook (circa '08). I eventually downgraded back to snow leopard until mountain lion came out, which was noticeably faster than Lion, but still not quite as smooth as snow leopard. But now Mavericks is back to being pretty good.

All-in-all, still not a very straightforward 'improvement' path performance-wise -- at least not from the end consumer's point of view.

Some large websites (I've heard this about Google Search, specifically) have ironclad latency limits. If a feature can't be added without increasing latency above XXms, then it's not shipped.

WebKit has long been known for having a good set of automated performance tests and has a "zero-tolerance policy for performance regressions": http://www.webkit.org/projects/performance/

The websites themselves are what get slower and use more memory over time, not the browser. Try using Tumblr on your phone someday and check the data usage after - it doesn't compress those multi-MB gifs for mobile at all.

It's also possibly people trying to rationalize buying the new iPhone.

Or that their new phone feels slower than promised, and those Googling are the owners of the new models?

The article specifically notes that the spikes happened when the new iPhones are released, not just announced. So, new Iphone envy is less of a reasonable explanation..than the release date usually coinciding with new versions of iOS being deployed.

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