...from:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/09/ios-8-on-the-iphone-4s-performance-isnt-the-only-problem/

iOS 8 on the iPhone 4S: Performance isn’t the (only) problem

New OS wants screen space and processing power that the old phone doesn't have.

by  - Sept 17 2014, 8:26am CDT
 129
Enlarge / The iPhone 4S. I remember when this was the one that made my old phone feel slow.
Andrew Cunningham

iPhones have about a year to be top-of-the-line. Then they have a year to be the modest-but-capable midrange model. After that, they become the free-with-contract choice. And then, in their last year, they enter that no-man's-land where they're still getting software updates but are no longer being sold.

2014 is the year the iPhone 4S was told to pack up its things and move to the retirement home. As a going away present, Apple gave it iOS 8, which in all likelihood will be the last major version upgrade it gets.

For the last two years, we've taken the oldest phone supported by each new iOS update and looked at what you stand to gain (and lose) by installing the update. We were impressed by iOS 6 on the iPhone 3GS, but iOS 7 on the iPhone 4 came with some serious compromises. The 4S has stayed pretty speedy over the years, but how does iOS 8 treat it?

Missing features

The iPhone 4S gets many of iOS 8's biggest additions, including support for extensions and most of the improvements to Apple's built-in applications. That said, it's missing out on several features that depend on newer hardware:

  • AirDrop
  • TouchID
  • Handoff for applications, though iPhone call forwarding to other devices works fine
  • Support for OpenGL ES 3.0, the Metal graphics API, and 64-bit ARMv8 apps

In addition to that list, keep in mind that the iPhone 4S is much slower than any other iPhone Apple currently sells. It uses 2.4GHz-only 802.11n Wi-Fi, lacks LTE, and uses an Apple A5 chip that only offers about a quarter the raw performance of the Apple A7 in the iPhone 5S (the A8 in the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus widens this gap yet further). iOS 8 doesn't leave the iPhone 4S behind, but you'll pick up quite a few features by moving to something newer.

3.5 inches is not that many

Andrew Cunningham

Spotlight suggestions can fit one or two results at best.


The iPhone 4S was Apple's last to use the original 3.5-inch iPhone screen size, which is now the smallest of four different phone screens that Apple supports. iOS 8's new stuff is all about fitting more information on those larger screens, whether we're talking about predictive typing, new Mail sorting options, Notification Center widgets, or Spotlight suggestions. The 4S' screen has always been small, but iOS 8 can make it feel cramped.

Look at the Mail app, for example: you give up one strip of horizontal screen space to fit the typing suggestions and another strip at the top to show that Mail compose "windows" can be minimized to let you dig through the rest of your inbox. Both features work on the iPhone 4S, but they also leave you with only a very small bit of screen for what you're writing.

If you don't mind (or actively prefer) your 4S' screen size, by all means, continue to enjoy it. You'll just have to do more scrolling than you do on and iPhone 5 or an iPhone 6.

Needs more speed

We want to open this section by saying that iOS 8 on the iPhone 4S is nowhere near as bad as iOS 7 on the iPhone 4. That OS ran so slowly and looked so different on the iPhone 4 than it did on any other device that it was obvious the hardware was struggling to keep up.

The iPhone 4S made the jump to iOS 7 relatively gracefully, though, and it's fine with rendering all of the fancy transparency and translucency effects. We were expecting speed to stay roughly the same in the jump from iOS 7 to iOS 8, more or less as it did when we moved from iOS 5 to iOS 6 on the 3GS. Testing some application launch times under both operating systems reset those expectations.

 APPLICATION IOS 7.1.2 IOS 8.0 GM
Safari 1.25 seconds 2.16 seconds
Camera 1.5 seconds 1.8 seconds
Settings 0.95 seconds 1.25 seconds
Mail 0.91 seconds 1.30 seconds
Messages 1.73 seconds 1.83 seconds
Calendar 0.8 seconds 1.25 seconds
Cold boot 36.4 seconds 39.8 seconds

Each app was launched, timed with a stopwatch until it was ready for user input, then force-closed and opened again two more times; the speeds above are averages of those times. Again, we're not looking at an iPhone 4-level situation here, but iOS 8 can add as much as 50 percent more time to the same task compared to iOS 7. As you can read in our main iOS 8 review, browser benchmarks are a little bit faster and battery life is about the same, but speed does take a hit.

The other problem is something that's not so easily measurable: animations on the Apple A5 SoC are markedly more choppy and inconsistent in iOS 8 than they ever were in iOS 7, something we confirmed by jumping back and forth between OSes a couple of times to make sure we weren't imagining things. Ars Culture Editor Casey Johnston confirmed that she was seeing the same kind of behavior on her iPad 2, and the non-Retina iPad Mini I have for testing was also choppy. It's odd, because although the applications themselves have added features, the GPU shouldn't really be working harder to render stuff in iOS 8 than it had to in iOS 7.

The most common problem is dropped frames during animations, which doesn't create slowness so much as it gives the impression of slowness. You'll see these whether you're looking at big sweeping animations (opening a new tab in Safari) or smaller, more subtle ones (hitting "send" on a text in Messages). Occasionally, though, a hitch in animation would actually slow the whole device down, and it would sometimes hesitate to respond to input in a way that it didn't before. The iPhone 4's severe performance problems were addressed to some degree by the iOS 7.1 update, and we're hoping to see the same done for older devices under iOS 8.

Should you upgrade?

Enlarge
Andrew Cunningham

Despite the problems we ran into, we think the answer for most people will still be "yes." And if you happen to be using an iPhone 5 or iPhone 5C, the next-newest iOS 8 devices, go ahead and upgrade without fear; we didn't notice any of the same speed problems on those phones that we did on the 4S.

iOS 8 is a big update, and it comes with a lot of big features. Although the iPhone 4S misses out on Handoff, it can still run extensions like widgets and third-party keyboards, two things iOS users have been awaiting for a long time now. By holding off on iOS 7, you were mostly just missing out on a redesign, but with iOS 8 there's good stuff here that you're going to want if you can get it. Ideally you wouldn't have to trade features for performance, but in our opinion getting the new stuff is worth putting up with the small slowdowns you'll experience.

If you'd prefer to play it safe and wait for a future 8.0.1 or 8.1 update to improve performance on older devices, that's fine too—we hope that Apple makes it a priority as it continues to work on iOS 8.





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...from:

INFINITE LOOP / THE APPLE ECOSYSTEM

A slide into obsolescence: iOS 8 on the iPad 2

It didn't seem like 6 could be worse than 7, but 7 to 8 is a different story.

by  - Sept 17 2014, 8:29am CDT
 98
iOS 8 doesn't make a huge difference, visually, save a few small points.

In case you've been so content with your iPad 2 over the last few years that you've drifted away from paying attention to the Apple product cycle, here is some six-month-old news: Apple finally stopped selling the iPad 2 model back in March. After it hung on at the bottom of the tablet product line for a couple of years to be a rock for the education and corporate markets, Apple kicked the iPad 2 out and resurrected the iPad 4 as the new full-size budget model.

But for now, Apple is continuing to update the iPad 2, in part because it has so much in common with the non-retina iPad mini, including the Apple A5 processor and 1024x768 display. But the iPad 2 hung around so long because it's also a legacy device. There are students depending on updates, as well as companies who used the iPad as a default device, like Square.

iOS 7 didn't do a whole lot of damage to the iPad 2, and even improved it in some aspects, like how fast the browser could load webpages. But this time around, the new version of iOS 8 appears to make the start of a much bigger decline, not only in performance, but in appearance.

Where we miss out, and what goes wrong


There were some features added to iOS 7 that were not available on the iPad 2, and iOS 8 adds to this list:

  • Apple Health
  • Handoff features in Continuity
  • TouchID
  • Support for OpenGL ES 3.0, the Metal graphics API, and 64-bit ARMv8 apps.

The last time we wrote about an iOS transition, we noted that the bolder version of the OS-wide font helped everything look slightly better on the iPad 2's non-retina screen. With the font changes in iOS 8, though, this is no longer good advice—the bold font looks fat and unwieldy, especially on the everpresent clock time at the top of the screen and on the keyboard. Fortunately, Apple seems to have beefed up the standard font a bit in places where it needs it, so switching to bold is no longer necessary.

Bold text on iOS 7.1.2...

In addition to font problems, the iPad 2 also still doesn't get any of the watercolor translucency effects Apple introduced iOS 7.

Generally, iOS 8 is noticeably slower and choppier than iOS 7, in everything from opening apps to typing. Back when we switched from iOS 6, we complained about how we could get 10 characters into typing something before the keyboard realized what was happening. This problem has returned with a force in iOS 8, especially on first opening an app. Screen rotation is stuttery, and any time some part of the OS needs to slide into place (text centering, apps minimizing), it can't do it smoothly.

To quantify the difference in performance, we tried opening several stock apps on each version of the OS, as well as cold-booting to the lock screen.

 APPLICATION IOS 7.1.2 IOS 8.0 GM
Safari 1.07 seconds 1.81 seconds
Camera 1.01 seconds 1.04 seconds
Settings 1.16 seconds 1.63 seconds
Mail 1.60 seconds 2.61 seconds
Messages 0.92 seconds 1.19 seconds
Calendar 0.97 seconds 1.48 seconds
Cold boot 29.12 seconds 31.53 seconds

IOS 7 was overall slower at opening apps than iOS 6 last year, but a lot of the difference could be attributed to the sweeping and slow animations that Apple introduced between the two versions. Even after Apple expedited the animations in newer versions of iOS 7, iOS 8 is still one half to a full second slower to complete certain tasks than iOS 7 on the iPad 2. Cold boots take a couple seconds longer, too.

None of these opening times are huge roadblocks, but they add up to a noticeable poky feeling that wasn't there (or wasn't as strong) coming from iOS 7.

Surprisingly, the browser performance on iOS 8 is marginally better than on iOS 7 according to benchmarks. iOS 8 barely edges out 7 in Kraken, but it loses out in running SunSpider. The iPad 2 could not run Google Octane v2 on iOS 8 without crashing, but when we ran v1 on both versions, iOS 8 beat iOS 7 by a solid margin.


Experientially, though, iOS 8 feels like it reloads tabs and reacts to input slower than iOS 7 did. Because of all the reloads, browsing is a disjointed experience with either version.

Do I upgrade, or not?

Last year our attitude toward the iOS 6-to-7 upgrade was "how much worse can things get," and it turns out we'd never find out. iOS 7 stayed roughly on par with 6 in terms of performance. After that experience, we could advocate for an upgrade with few reservations.

But now, iOS 8 has convinced us that things can, in fact, be worse. Not a whole lot worse, and not all the time, but it's enough of a regression with few enough upsides that acquiescing to the "download software update" prompts may actually be a bad idea.


With that course of action comes some caveats: opting out of software updates can be risky from a security standpoint. There is also the possibility that later versions will become more stable, so closing your device off permanently may not be the best decision in the long run. It is possible, though not strictly sanctioned, to roll back to iOS 7 from 8 if you do want to give it a try but are worried you'll find it lacking.

Ultimately, the iPad 2 is still our couch Internet-surfing device, occasionally a night-reading device. We don't demand much at all from it in terms of performance and expect it's the same for others who are still using this model a full three and a half years after it came out. This means that upgrading to iOS 8 won't ruin the experience; then again, neither would just staying on iOS 7.