If true, this could be verified by keeping a set of phones on older software and comparing that control group against a set of phones that received the update.
That said, I'm totally unconvinced by this video. There's zero details of how Apple allegedly slows down old phones. Lowered clock rate? Artificially increased system call times? Nothing actually explained in the video.
At that point you're stuck proving intent. Apple probably knows that their bloat-filled updates slows down old phones and they're probably thrilled that it annoys their customers enough that many will upgrade, but good luck proving that is the reason they're doing it.
well and where is the line between true intent vs lack of caring. if bloat is a side effect of feature creep and project handoffs, slowing old devices is an "unintended" feature.
> Isn’t their explicit claim that they’re doing this to extend battery life? I thought this was already litigated?
Yes, and yes. Batteries are consumable goods and throttling can make aging, borderline batteries work when otherwise they would cut out and cause unexpected power-offs. It’s the opposite of planned obsolescence because it makes older devices operational for longer.
You can also look at this empirically: Apple support old devices far longer than most of their competitors, and iPhones retain resale value far better than other phones. If Apple actively sabotage older devices, why put in the effort to explicitly support them, and why does the market treat supposedly sabotaged older devices as more valuable than the competition?
It's almost certainly true but not intentional. As time goes on, the requirements of software seem to increase. Especially, these days, GPU-wise. Fancy animations and effects are common and they're usually implemented very suboptimally. They only get away with it because of hardware acceleration.
Well... old hardware is slow, and I wouldn't be surprised if it shows.
Your experiment would not prove that they are deliberately slowing older phones via updates. That's big part of the claim. Your experiment would only show that as you update, your old phones will get slower and slower.
I wouldn't be surprised older phones get slower with updates, in fact, that feels like the most likely scenario for me, based on my experience as a software developer.
But IMO, Hanlon's (maybe Occam's, too?) Razor applies. Most likely, the teams just need to ship features, make fixes, and they mostly test on higher end, recent devices. Sure, at some point, someone tests on a lower end device that everything still works, but they probably either do not notice the issues, or shrug it off, or rationalize it (it might make x worse, but users get y in exchange, so it's fine).
I'm not saying that they definitely did not do it on purpose, it's possible, I am saying that a simple with/without updates check doesn't prove they did it on purpose.
In my own experience, newer products get more love automatically, because the testers, the devs, the team are on newer devices. Perf regressions are also harder to catch than simpler bugs and sometimes require extended usage to notice smaller perf degradation, and devs and QA do not really test like that (often enough).
The way I see it, older products will naturally decline with updates, as they are less of a focus while validating a new release. Sure, they get some "freebie" improvements, but I'm guessing the accidental "decay" outweighs any improvements.
I'm not saying they couldn't make it on purpose. I'm saying that (IMO) it's more likely that it gets worse with every update even without malicious, conniving people trying to get you to upgrade by worsening your OS.
In my personal experience, this is definitely the case. My iPhone 14 Pro Max slowed down a LOT exactly 3 days before the launch of the new iPhone. I thought it was just a coincidence and did upgrade to 15 and it happened again. Someone on reddit a while ago actually graphed Google trends data for "iPhone slow" and found out there were peaks for the search term right around Apple's launches.
That said, I'm totally unconvinced by this video. There's zero details of how Apple allegedly slows down old phones. Lowered clock rate? Artificially increased system call times? Nothing actually explained in the video.