Comment by meroes
13 hours ago
My god I cancelled my isp because I’m moving. Thought hot spot would be fine for a few months. Every single day I have to restart my MacBook Air for hot spot to work. Multiple times every day I have to turn hot spot off and on even though it’s in discoverable but won’t connect. Multiple times every day hot spot is just off and can’t be turned on in control center. And this is with iPhone 17 and m2 on most recent updates. I can’t imagine on older hardware.
With older hardware the trick is to not upgrade the OS.
Apple's strategy is actually to make people auto-upgrade to make their work of maintaining older OS/software cheaper and make people who don't have recent enough hardware suffer.
It's funny that one argument for Apple was that you got updates for free. But in practice, Android doesn't need to upgrade the OS to access recent apps and ship security updates for old versions of Android. You just lose access to new OS functionalities, but it has been a while since there was much to care about.
iOS 26 has been really hard on my 13 mini. Most menus lag, you have to wait sometimes 5 seconds for the control center menu to pop up sometimes. I dug my old Samsung S20 FE out of the drawer, applied the last few security patches, and it still runs more smoothly than the newer iPhone.
I've had this experience too. One thing I've found that can sometimes help with laptops failing to connect is renaming your iPhone in the settings (which in turn renames the hotspot name)
I agree having to work around this is ridiculous, but maybe consider a little MiFi router? Those are cool to have anyway.