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Comment by wlesieutre | Hacker News Reader

I'm in that remaining 53%. I still have an iPhone 4S, which works fine, and the new features in iOS 8 aren't enough for me to justify the performance hits.

Safari launch goes from 1.25 to 2.16 seconds, and I use that all the time. Not worth it, as much as I'd like 3rd party keyboards and 1password integration.

Plus there's the fact that everything is being designed for iPhone 5 and iPhone 6 screens now, so it gets terribly cramped without the extra height. Integrated apps like Music have already been crammed into the 3.5" screen on iOS 7, but 8 only takes more steps toward needing a bigger screen.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/09/ios-8-on-the-iphone-4s-...

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Most of the performance claims are exaggerated – unless you're obsessively stop-watching or switching apps all the time, the difference in Safari startup isn't significant and the newer WebKit means that Safari is actually faster once you actually use it, noticeably so on JavaScript-heavy sites. A fraction of a second startup time is lost in network overhead or render on the first page you visit.

In general, it feels like iOS 7 - slower than 6 but still usable, particularly if you disable background apps to reduce memory pressure.

What is a big deal is screen real-estate: it's not just the apps but also the new predictive text entry. In an app like Tweetbot, the full keyboard now leaves only 3 lines of text visible. Some of the custom keyboards are shorter but you can definitely tell that most developers are now assuming at least the larger iPhone 5 screen height.

I'm past the edit window on my previous reply, but I should also point out that the 4S has 512 MB of RAM, while the 5 and up have twice that.

So given some consistent amount for OS overhead on every model, the 4S has well under half of the RAM available for running applications. Background apps are killed much more frequently as a result.

Launch time might not matter for newer phones, but it's a huge deal for us. I actually had an experience (on iOS 7) where I couldn't log in to a Google app because switching to Google Authenticator and back caused the first app to unload, and I couldn't get back to the login page before the TOTP code expired.

I'll note that when I say it's not a big deal, I've been running iOS 8 on a 4S since it was released. With background app refresh disabled, it feels about like iOS 7.1.2 – periodic annoyance rather than frequent occurrence.

Hm, maybe it was bugginess on Google's end causing that particular headache for me then

It's entirely possible for it to be both – I think iOS 7 pushed the base memory usage up to the point where any minor increase in an app starts requiring other things to be pushed out of memory

Oh my. I don't even want to imagine what Google Voice looks like with the full keyboard.

On iOS 7 it's already down to two lines of text messages, because it's more important that they tell me the name of who I'm talking to three goddamn times. If Google's trying to help Apple sell more new phones, they're doing a pretty good job of it.

http://i.imgur.com/QHL8FeN.png

Does anybody have GV on iOS 8 with a 4S for comparison? I'm genuinely curious what it does.

Regular:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/sbvsh037htjbq1m/2014-10-07%2014.42...

With word predictions collapsed:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/efvxfw7laib8adl/2014-10-07%2014.42...

It looks like what you were expecting http://imgur.com/Bsq4gYT

Ouch, yeah. Thanks for posting it.

Totally. I have a 4S but I did upgrade to iOS 8. I wish I had stuck with iOS7. Everything got pretty sluggish.

On the bright side, the 4S is 3 years old now, so with updates through iOS 7 I'm still doing better than the majority of smartphones.

Anyone running iOS8 on a 4S should change some settings: Settings->General->Accessibility->Increase Contrast Set to On

Settings->General->Accessibility->Reduce Motion Set to On

Honestly, it doesn't hurt to do that on iOS 7 either.

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