The funny thing is that when I tried the iOS 9 beta on my iPhone 5s, it ran extremely fast and smooth, with the caveat that the phone was prone to overheating and rapid battery drain. I wonder if this is why we are not seeing the promised performance improvements in iOS 9, because the use of metal for animations was simply too taxing on the system. So Apple was forced to remove those features.
I'm not talking about inviduval experiences I am talking about on the whole. If people just sit down an accept what corporations do, we would all get stuffed over as *Newsflash* they don't care much about anything other than profit.
To play devil's advocate, I would argue that Apple straddles a fine line between wanting its customers to buy new hardware ever so often, and offering a great user experience and continued support so buyers feel like they are getting their money's worth and that their needs are being looked after by the company.
To be honest, I am not sure why these software updates are slowing the iOS devices down. I don't believe that Apple goes out of its way to screw your hardware over by purposely slowing them down, but I do not deny that the older hardware is struggling under the later ios updates (most notably, iPhone 4 under iOS 7 and iPhone 4s under iOS 9).
After all, this user support is what forms a good opinion in the minds of consumers, and predisposes them to continue to upgrade to another Apple device when the time comes. So I don't believe that Apple is deliberately being malicious here, but I have a hard time excusing recent moves like the iPhone 6+ having only 1gb of ram, or their retina iMacs having smaller SSD caches, lacking dedicated graphics cards and sporting slower 5400 rpm hard drives.
At the end of the day, improved device support is an advantage to many, and not a disadvantage to anyone if done properly.
I agree. I wonder if the simplest, most obvious reason is the right one - that Apple simply doesn't have the time and resources to individually optimise iOS for each and every iOS device permutation out there. So if iOS 9 is optimised for the iPhone 6S (running 2gb of ram and A9 processor), this might suggest that it would struggle on any older device unless Apple also bothers to optimise iOS 9 for 1gb of ram and A8, 1gb of ram with A7 and so on.
So the easier alternative would be to simply pull features to reduce the strain on the device (especially if the device lacks the supporting hardware), but I guess that just isn't enough.
And again, I'm sure people will reply to remind me of Android and all, saying that Apple is already doing better than them, but that doesn't mean that Apple can't improve even more.
I agree. That said, Apple seems extremely taxed in recent days. They are expanding to many new platforms at a breakneck pace (adding TV OS, Watch OS in addition to updating iOS and OSX), as well as spearheading many new initiatives (Apple Music, negotiating music / content deals / support for mobile payments / carplay support / healthkit partnerships / enterprise integration etc). This is in addition to any new projects we haven't heard of yet (like the rumoured Apple Car).
Owning the whole stack pays handsomely when does right, but it seems Apple pays the ultimate price in that they essentially feel obligated to replicate every single new software or service that catches on.
