What Apple never tells people is that updating the software almost always slows them down — sometimes to the point where they're so
sluggish your only option is to get a new device.
With iOS 12, Apple sort of acknowledged this slowdown on older devices, while simultaneously announcing efforts to speed up performance.
"For iOS 12, we are doubling down on performance," Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, said during WWDC's opening keynote. "We're working top to bottom making improvements to make your device faster and more responsive. We're focusing our efforts especially on the oldest devices."
Federighi then went to demonstrate just how much faster they've been able to improve performance on older devices.
On an iPhone 6 Plus, which was released in 2014, he said apps could launch up to 40 percent faster, the keyboard could appear up to 50 percent faster, and you could slide to open the camera from the lock screen up to 70 percent faster.
IMAGE: SCREENSHOT: APPLE
"Our deepest focus this year is optimizing the system when it's under load; that's when you need performance the most and where iOS 12 really shines," said Federighi.
Under load, Federighi said apps and the share sheet (that's the menu window you bring up to share things via apps, Airdrop, etc.) launch up to 2x faster.
How is this possible? It's Apple's custom chip design, duh. Federighi credits the boost in performance for older devices to iOS's tight integration with its A-series chips that power all of the devices that support iOS 12.
"CPUs traditionally respond to increased demands for performance by slowly ramping up their clock speed," said Federighi. "Now on iOS 12, we're much smarter. When we detect that you need a burst of performance, like when you begin scrolling or launching an app, we ramp up processor performance instantly to its highest state, delivering high performance, and then ramp it down just as fast to preserve battery life."
Though Federighi didn't come and explicitly say the words "iOS updates" and "slow" in the same sentence, he implied as much.
It's a rare admission from Apple. But one that was, perhaps, needed after the company was thrown under the spotlight for poorly communicating performance throttling on iPhones with aging batteries.
On stage, Apple didn't hide the fact that iOS devices become slower after being updated to newer software. It's something you should know about and expect from an older device. But now, at least Apple's doing something about it. This strive for such a high level of customer satisfaction is just one of the many reasons why customers rush out to update their devices, Craig said.
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