No, IOS 17 Won’t Kill Your IPhone

Are you afraid to update your iPhone to iOS 17 ? You are not alone. There’s a genuine concern that installing Apple’s latest update will condemn your old iPhone to early retirement, slow it down, and generally make it perform worse. Good news? Not true.

At first glance, I see the logic here. Apple wants people to buy their iPhones. If a new update makes their old iPhones feel slow and useless, people may decide to spend hundreds (or thousands) on a new phone instead. I understand why skeptics of giant billion-dollar companies think that these companies want profit above all else.

But while Apple would happily sell you a new iPhone any day, there’s simply no basis to this conspiracy theory. Apple doesn’t design iOS updates to slow down older iPhones, and it’s not a given that simply updating to the latest software will make your iPhone perform worse. Will the iPhone XS run as fast as the iPhone 15 Pro on iOS 17? Of course not. But that doesn’t mean your XS has to stay on iOS 16 forever. In fact, it’s terrible advice to advise people to avoid updating their iPhones or any outdated technology altogether.

iOS 17 works great on all compatible iPhones

This year’s update is especially strange to blame for iPhone slowdowns: iOS 17 is not a major overhaul update. There are plenty of cool new features worth exploring, but this isn’t some feature-rich, power-hungry update that turns the iPhone experience on its head. The transition from iOS 16.7 to iOS 17 will not be like the transition from iOS 6 to iOS 7 – that’s for sure.

iOS 17 is also not the same on all compatible iPhones. While most of the upgrade features are available on iPhone 12 and later, phones like the iPhone XS, XR, 11, and 11 Pro are missing a lot of options. For example, these phones don’t respond to gestures for FaceTime calls, Smart AutoCorrect updates, or AutoFill. Apple likely limits some of these features on older devices because it knows it can’t handle them, or because they’re difficult to develop for older hardware.

Apple is also ending support for iPhones it no longer wants to support. This doesn’t give you the opportunity to complain about how slow your iPhone X is on iOS 17 because you can’t install iOS 17 on your iPhone X. Honestly, I’m confident that Apple will be able to make iOS 17 (or at least) run smoothly. at least at an acceptable level). speed) on the 2017 iPhone, but that’s the line they decided to draw. These phones have been receiving software updates for five years and will continue to receive security updates, so it wasn’t a bad result either way.

There have been times in the past where iOS updates actually improved the performance of my old device. iOS 12, for example, saved my iPad Air 2. For some reason, the thing didn’t work on iOS 11, so I decided it was time to upgrade to a new iPad. But that year, iOS 12 was focused on improving stability and performance, and the difference was night and day. I still have that iPad Air 2 and used it as my primary iPad until Apple stopped supporting it ahead of iOS 16.

I’m not saying iOS 17 will treat your iPhone XS the same way iOS 12 treated my iPad Air 2, but I do encourage you to update your phones if you can. If you don’t believe me, search the Internet for other people’s experiences. Find the relevant update, as well as the specific iPhone model: This Reddit thread , for example, features iPhone XS users who are happy with how iOS 17 runs on their devices, and this post states that iOS 17 has slightly improved the performance of that user’s iPhone. 12. As far as I can tell, iOS 17 currently works well on all supported devices.

If your iPhone is running too slow, it may be a battery issue.

Apple may not be behind the massive conspiracy it’s being accused of here, but the theory could be the company itself to blame anyway, as Marques Brownlee points out in this TikTok .

Here’s the thing: Apple does slow down iPhones, but only when the batteries reach a certain age. They do this to prevent your iPhone from shutting down unexpectedly. If your iPhone is running at full speed on a dead battery, this power supply may not be up to the task and may simply shut down randomly. Therefore, the decision was made to reduce the clock speed of the iPhone in this situation, while maintaining overall stability at the expense of performance.

The problem was that Apple didn’t tell anyone they were doing this, so when they publicly confirmed it back in 2017 , it seemed suspicious. iPhone users felt justified in their suspicions that Apple was slowing down their perfectly good iPhones in an attempt to force them to buy a new one. Their suspicions were half right, but it didn’t matter: the damage was done and a conspiracy theory was born.

After the fiasco, Apple gave users a choice: they could slow down their iPhones when the batteries reached a certain age, as Apple has traditionally done, or they could keep their iPhones running at peak performance and risk unexpected shutdowns. However, the company still slows things down by default after encountering one of these unexpected stops. You can turn off throttling, but I recommend replacing the battery . Not only will you be able to work at peak performance without worrying about interruptions, but your overall battery life will also improve. A win-win!

However, remember: any new update, especially a larger one like iOS 17, will first drain system resources. You may notice a decrease in overall battery life as your iPhone works through the post-update process, but most of this will stabilize after a while.

You should always install security patches at a minimum.

If you absolutely refuse to update to iOS 17, or if your iPhone doesn’t support iOS 17 at all, at least install security patches. These security fixes are built into all iOS 17 updates, but Apple is also releasing fixes for devices running iOS 16, iOS 15, and iOS 12. These updates will only contain fixes for security vulnerabilities, without any new features or changes that you’ll find avoid.