When Apple first released iOS 8 to the general public, more than a few people with older devices such as the iPhone 4S, iPad 2, and iPad mini noticed that it slowed their devices down to a crawl.
When Apple released iOS 8.1.1, they promised that the update would fix some of the speed issues that iOS 8 had on older devices.
So how’d it work out? iOS 8.1.1 is sometimes an improvement. Sometimes, but not always. And even then, it’s not a huge leap.
Over at Ars Technica, they put the iOS 8.1.1 firmware to the test against the iPhone 4S and iPad 2, comparing it to iOS 7, and iOS 7.1.2. Here was their testing process:
We loaded some apps on the phone three times each, manually closing them between runs and timing them with a stopwatch. We averaged the three times to get our final result. On this count, iOS 8.1.1 changes little for users with Apple A5-based devices. App load times are basically the same as they’ve been since the iOS 8 update, and they’re still longer than they were under iOS 7.1—Safari is the only one that shows any sign of change that can’t be explained by the margin of error, and it’s still not a big one.
Knowing that the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 only have 512MB of RAM, Ars also tested how fast they could reload tabs after they’d been purged from memory. In this test, there were some improvements, but Ars ultimately decided that the update didn’t really help past the margin of error for app launches, UI sluggishness, or light multitasking loads.
So the takeaway? If you have an iPhone 4S or iPad 2, you are still going to radically degrade performance if you upgrade from iOS 7 to iOS 8.1.1. So don’t do it unless you have a seriously good reason to.
Source: Ars Technica
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
