I think it's probably for the best, the hyperconsumerism around electronics was getting out of hand. Computers are fast and have been fast for a while now. An iPhone 12 is probably more than fine to do iPhone things, if Apple didn't sabotage their old phones with poorly-written poor-performance software.
Can you provide evidence for your claim? Most people take this statement at face value and I don’t understand why. I do some volunteer work supporting elderly people that have issues adapting to a digital only world and I am always pleasantly surprised by the performance of their old iPhones all the way down to the 8 (old phones they get from their kids)
Also the coming iOS 27 release supposedly has some big performance improvements for all supported models that people have verified in the beta releases even with the iPhone 11: https://www.macworld.com/article/3160623/apple-finally-figur...
Apple is still paying out the 500 million dollars they lost in a lawsuit about this exact practice.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67911517
Apple admitted to slowing down iPhones to keep the batteries from failing, and agreed to stop doing it and created a new battery replacement plan. I’ve personally experienced the benefit of getting the battery on Apple devices replaced which made them behave like new again. There’s a reason old Apple devices hold their value a lot better than competing manufacturers.
It was a pretty terrible controversy at the time but I think the battery health settings pane we got out of it was a good compromise and a net positive. What would be even better would be fully user-replaceable batteries.
To be more precise, the phones weren’t slowed down to keep the batteries from failing, they were slowed down to maintain stability and stop random crashes. As batteries age they lose their peak voltage capability, so you’re basically undervolting your components unless you slow them down.
Every time I upgrade iOS past a few major versions there is significant slow down. I don’t think it’s done on purpose, it’s just that software grows more demanding over time.
> software grows more demanding over time.
Nah. Adding more features to software doesn’t make software run slower. The problem is that software developers only optimise enough to make it run fast on our own computers. Because we keep getting new computers, we get lazier over time and software gets slower.
Electron is the most obvious example of this sort of thing, but examples are everywhere once you start looking.
That may be true but it did get slower. Maybe new fancy UI effects, etc.
Apple also seems hellbent on fully utilizing all available space on the low end model. IOS+ System Data is about 30GB.
The original iPhone had a 4GB model and had space left over for the user to use!
> That may be true but it did get slower.
Yes. Microsoft is scrambling at the moment because the macbook neo only has 8gb of ram and runs great. Windows 11 can't compete on that hardware because it's so bloated.
I find it strange given microsoft made windows 3.11, which ran fine on computers with just 4mb of ram. Windows 11 is of course more complex than windows 3.11. But not so much that it should need literally 2000 times as much ram.
In some ways, the memory apocalypse is a great thing. The windows start menu should never have been made in javascript and react. I'm hoping our industry uses this as a push to make our software small and fast again. If ram is 5x more expensive, we should aim to make 2gb of ram be more than enough for regular computing tasks.
TIL that the Recommended section of the Start menu uses React Native. What a world. Why...??
I agree, it’s not a natural phenomenon per-se and it is getting worse. I think this consumer hardware problem will actually help get us back on track, to a degree.
Apple is known to slow older devices intentionally. They have admitted it.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67911517
That’s the literal truth, but the subtlety behind it was that CPU spikes combined with low voltage batteries were causing phones to shut off. Apple’s slowing down the phone down was nominally because customers prefer slightly slower phones to phones that shut off unexpectedly. Should they have announced this as a feature and had a toggle switch to allow users that preferred the option to disable it? Of course. But I don’t necessarily think they did the wrong thing.
The devices were slowed because aging batteries creates unstable performance. It wasn't done to intentionally make them obsolete.
You say that like what they were doing was a bad thing. It was a feature.
And Apple will continue to because they have to sell more devices to keep customers interested.
See this is what I don't get. This effects big organizations like this, there should be a class action lawsuit for these criminals LLM and Memory companies.
> Computers are fast and have been fast for a while now.
Absolutely. The only reason I want to upgrade to an iPhone 18 next year is because the 16 doesn't have MIE (Memory Integrity Enforcement) and it feels ridiculous to upgrade so quickly to the 17, which does have MIE. Same thing with a Neo 2. But mostly I buy surplus gear. I've saved a small fortune this way and 8% compounding returns (VT and chill) will help me retire early.
Personally I have zero reasons to upgrade from IPhone 13 until the software stops working. I hope it will last me several years more. Beautiful hardware.
Apple could release a new on-device LLM model every year and keep the hyperconsumerism going...
it is difficult to motivate hyperconsumers with the narrow band of improvements that can be made with new LLM models and also are specific to smartphone OS integration and not superseded years in advance by datacentres
It's still faster than Android?
I have a MacBook M1 and I recently had to downgrade from Tahoe to Sequoia. Why? First of all they force you to download 7 GB of AI training when you’re not even using their AI. And secondly on Tahoe just watching a video with nothing else running off-line my MacBook was asking for 7 W of power. On Sequoia that drops down to 2 W maybe three.
It’s sad to think they think of themselves as an environmental company, I don’t know if they do, but this update to Sequoia literally doubled the amount of M1 max that are running on the planet in terms of power use.
Thanks for the honest review. I’m still on Sonoma and will be holding out until the machine dies.
It’s telling the software cycle is a scam, when new major software versions slow perfectly fine machines with zero value added features.
They don’t force you to download Apple Intelligence, disabling it deletes the model files
I have disabled it many many months ago and storage still shows 9 gb of Apple intelligence.
Did more research and apparently it’s a bug Apple never fixed that causes the deletion to only work sometimes. To fix it you need to run this Terminal command in recovery mode:
sudo rm -rf /System/Library/AssetsV2/com_apple_MobileAsset_UAF_FM_GenerativeModels
How I love modern software lol