Should I Update My Old IPhone to the Latest OS Version?
Hey! In this week’s Tech 911 – a column that attempts to answer all your questions by email (send us your questions by email ) – we’ll tackle an issue that affects more people than you might first think: updates. Specifically, should you really update your device to the latest and greatest software or operating system? What if the update makes things worse?
Lifehacker reader Mike writes:
“My wife and I jumped off the upgrade train. You see, we are young professionals with a lot of student debt. My wife and I both have iPhone 5s, and the numbers on our computers are about to hit double digits.
My wife decided yesterday to upgrade her iPhone 5s to iOS 12.0.1 without backing up her phone. Part of the reason for this is likely because she was using Mavericks until recently – her computer wouldn’t let her sync. When she told me, I had a slight attack of internal panic. Her phone has been up and running for 24 hours since the update, but I’m waiting for another boot to fall.
My question is, is iOS 12 safe for our legacy phones? I saw the update was almost 2GB, which takes up a lot of space on our 16GB phones. Apple says forward, but iOS 11 was a little risky. “
Great question, Mike. It seems to me that a lot of people, especially those with older devices, are a little nervous about installing major updates. Upgrade to Windows 10 on an older desktop, macOS Mojave on an outdated MacBook Air, or, in your case, iOS 12 on an older iPhone, and you may be worse off than before. And this kind of thinking is not contrived. There have been many examples of software updates slowing down scanning of older systems and devices .
Usually, I would recommend installing whatever software updates you can get, because that is the best way to make sure your device has the latest features (and more importantly, security updates). However, if your device is pretty old, say a few years ago, it might be worth waiting a bit before you take the plunge.
What then is to be done? I would recommend searching the Internet for anecdotes so you can get a sense of the experiences of others before installing a major update on your device. In other words, find test subjects. In your case, I’m sure there are tons of forum posts detailing what iOS 12 is like on the iPhone 5S, if not benchmarks, benchmarks, and other details that can help you decide if performance will drop – if so exists – it’s worth it.
Specifically, here are a few mentions I found:
“The biggest highlight in iOS 12 has a lot to do with animations and transitions. When you transition from one state to another, for example opening or closing applications, waiting for the keyboard to appear, when you open a text field, open Control Center, then the improvements really amazed you. Apple has tightened up many of these processes so that it doesn’t feel like you’re waiting for something to happen, or when they do, they just don’t stutter on screen.
It seems to be more flexible and responsive, and now you can jump from one activity to another much faster, and the animation doesn’t seem to get in your way as much as it did with iOS 11.
This is one of those things that cannot be demonstrated with tests. In fact, I ran Geekbench before and after just for fun, and the results were identical, or at least close enough to be within margin of error. “
“Launching apps like Safari and Mail was noticeably faster in the iOS 12 beta, but the difference in others, including Weather and Maps, was barely noticeable.
Apple said during the keynote that the shared sheet opens twice as fast when the system is under load. We found that the shared sheet appeared much faster than it did on iOS 11, even when there were no other apps open. However, this result was not always stable – after launching several times in a row, iOS 11.4 mostly caught up with the beta version.
Launch time was a category in which the iOS 12 beta clearly lagged behind. iOS 11.4 loaded much faster and was up and running 9 seconds before iOS 12. “
“Moving from iOS 10.3.3 to iOS 11.0 resulted in slight performance degradations that improved slightly in iOS 11.4.1, but for the most part, iOS 11 performance remained the same. By comparison, iOS 12 performs almost as well as iOS 10, whether you’re running a lighter app like Settings, a heavier one like Maps, or cold boot your phone. This is an impressive, noticeable increase and a huge improvement for anyone not yet using 5S. “
I think it’s safe to upgrade to iOS 12 update – performance seems good as the update doesn’t seem to slow down scanning older iPhones. As far as the space issues you mentioned, this is true. Try connecting your iPhone to your computer and using an updated version of iTunes to install iOS 12 on your device. Do not update over the air. This should save you as much space as you intend to get. You can also go and do some surgery with what’s stored on your device, and I’ve previously given some tips on freeing up space on iOS.
If you want to go crazy – for example, because your device shows a lot of space reserved for some cryptic “other” category, you can also try the tougher upgrade option. Create a fresh backup of your iPhone, connect it to your computer, open iTunes and use the Restore function to install iOS 12 and start from scratch, which I have enclosed in quotes, as you will ultimately be restoring your iPhone from a backup the copy you made.
Let me know if you need further help or advice! And once you have installed iOS 12, take a look at all that you can with it to do .