Benchmark showed that Apple does not underestimate the performance of old smartphones

Many companies are not always honest with their customers. In particular, such companies in some way limit the life of gadgets, electronic components, and any other devices or ordinary things. Proving this is very difficult, if not impossible, but discussions have been going on for a long time.



There is also an opinion that Apple is doing the same - for example, it deliberately understates the performance of phones of previous generations. What for? Well, for example, in order for buyers to more actively acquire new devices, rather than use old ones for years. More sales - more money, it's simple. However, not everyone agrees with this opinion. Recently, the company Futuremark tried to find out whether Apple uses such methods.



The research conducted by this company lasted over a year. During this time, Futuremark was able to hold more than 100,000 benchmarks of seven different iPhone models with three different versions of the iOS operating system. This data was used to chart the performance of the corporation’s smartphones. In particular, the company's specialists tried to find out whether there is a difference in the performance of the same iPhone models with OS 9, iOS 10 and iOS 11.



Of course, not all iPhone models were involved in this study, but only more or less modern ones, starting with the iPhone 5S model. This phone was released in 2013, so it can be considered obsolete. He was the first Apple smartphone with a 64-bit A7 chip. Looking ahead, it's worth noting that iOS 11 can only work on devices with a 64-bit processor.



In their work, the digging experts used the 3DMark Sling Shot Extreme Graphics test, then plotting the performance graphs of 5S phones with different iOS versions. On the graph of the performance of the GPU, shown below, there is not much difference.







Despite the fact that Apple’s underperformance of the 5S performance has many supporters, nothing has been noticed. There is no particular difference in performance between 5S phones with different versions of the operating system.



Especially do not differ and CPU performance indicators of the same phones with the same versions of the iOS operating system. Here the difference is more significant, but still, nothing critical.







The benchmarks of the phones of other models, including 6, 6S and 7, showed the same thing. In some cases, the iOS update even gave a significant increase in GPU performance. This is especially noticeable in the “six” and “seven”.







As for processors, there is a noticeable drop, but it is too weak for the user to fix it. Neither in applications, nor in games can a user notice such a small performance drop. Perhaps in some cases this will be seen, but cases of this type are extremely rare.



As a result, the specialists of the company that conducted the tests make the following conclusion: “The results of our benchmarks showed that instead of deliberately understating the performance of the phones of previous models, Apple actually does a good job, providing technical support for old devices, which allows them to maintain satisfactory performance” .



Of course, the study of the company does not give the whole picture of the performance dynamics of these models of devices. But if Apple really did what it was credited with, then the Futuremark tests would definitely reveal it. Some drop, noticeable in the graphs, can be explained by the addition of new features in iOS, which, without a doubt, "eat off" some of the phone resources. But, as mentioned above, users are unlikely to be able to notice this, since the drop is too insignificant.



In addition, in some cases, the decrease in the efficiency of the phone can be explained by bugs in the operating system itself, which, however, are quickly eliminated by the developers. So, after upgrading to iOS 11, many users began to complain about all sorts of problems. With the release of updates of these problems usually becomes less.