It’s an exhortaion we all hear every year around September: '' when they release a new iPhone, Apple makes all the old iphones run bad to make you upgrade...
” But thousands of performance tests piloted over the years by Futuremark members/users show that the sedition is largely in your mind.
” But thousands of performance tests piloted over the years by Futuremark members/users show that the sedition is largely in your mind.
In case youdon’t know Futuremark, it’s the company behind the benchmark software 3DMark (among others), which for years has been a fallback for testing how devices work on gaming PCs to phones .
3DMark has the device represent demanding 3D scenes that strain different parts of the hardware, and tracks how fast it calculates, how many frames per sec it represent and so on. At the end, it put together all those metrics into a lone score that’s very simple to compare between cards or devices.
In the case of the iPhone (for which 3DMark is a free download , power users and assessors run it (and other benchmarks like it) to check whether updates or apps affect how their device’s perform. Futuremark stores those scores for similarity like the one released today.
Futuremark’s analysts aggregated the last few years of scores for the iPhone 5s, 6, 6s and 7, to find out whether it was true that iOS releases or new iPhones incli to agree with (or trigger) drops in performance.
It’s obvious from the data that phones don’t seem to reduce in any noteworthy way over time; some do see performance hits with some iOS versions, but others see gains. Even the 5s, rather old at this point, is only a bit slower than it was a year and half and two major iOS versions ago.
That said, people may still be sensing real delay, nor can synthetic benchmarks consistently capture things like little slowdown or input lag that add up to a slow-feeling phone without upsetting its performance score.
One perpetrator could be apps themselves; one does tend to download and install more over time, of course, resulting in more background processes and network calls, less available space and so on. The apps themselves may also be poorly enhanced for new iOS versions when they come out, or iOS could include enhancement for newer phones that just don’t apply to older ones — so your friend’s 6s speeds up while your 6 doesn’t, after all, is a plan we’ve all known about for decades.)
Whereas the performance hit may not be entirely phantasmal, it seems quite obvious that Apple isn’t damaging your device to make you upgrade. And really, the desire to have the latest model is something Apple users don’t need any help with.