Comment by rollcat
7 days ago
> [...] this is something that only Apple can do well, because you do need to ensure that hardware can keep up.
Yeah, about that.
When iPhone SE2 was first released (April 2020), it featured the A13 Bionic, which was the most powerful SoC Apple has had at the time (to be succeeded by A14 in iPhone 12 couple months later), and ran iOS 13.
Every succeeding iOS release, the phone felt a little more sluggish. Right now, by iOS 18: it sometimes takes half a minute to open the share sheet; misbehaving apps can make the phone almost too hot to touch, and can freeze the app switcher UI for 10+s; Safari takes 4s to "cold start" into about:blank; and so on. None of these are signs of CPU throttling, it's all just software. I almost can't wait for Apple to drop support for major releases - even if the current release is crap, the next one will be worse.
I pretty much expect last year's devices to start struggling with this new design after 2 releases.
Having lived through the whole iPhone 4 thing, I'm extremely hesitant to upgrade my iPhone 13 Pro here.
To be clear, an irreversible update caused my iPhone 4 to become immediately unusable.
I have to admit that I don't feel that on my old SE 2, but I do see Apple not caring about the device type. Some of the UI elements overlap og doesn't line after the update to iOS 18.