We've got an iPad 2 that is not useless, but much worse after upgrading to ios9. I still play Kingdom Rush games on it but its so slow now its too frustrating to use for internet browsing and other things.
I can't seem to find the link anymore but recently a tool was released which let me downgrade my iPad 2 back to iOS 6 and it's so much faster than it was on iOS 8.
Obviously it's not an official Apple tool.
That is insane. I can load all webpages on any laptop from 5 years ago. A browser doesn't become "slower". Even with bigger pages, they are still web pages, not 3D games.
It means the ipad itself is, for some reason, rendering itself slow. And you can't do anything about it because you can't hack it.
And your idea of the solution to the problem is to buy a new one ?
My god, somebody sell you a self-destructing product in order to force you to buy a new one, and you oblige ?
In the last 5 years, bloat on web pages has increased considerably. Tracking script counts on all pages has gone way up, and I very frequently will find that if I leave some web pages in a background tab, their memory usage will climb into the gigabytes, even for pages that are mostly just text! Since the ram on those older devices is not getting any bigger, of course web pages are going to get slower.
Yes, but it still web pages. Not meteo simulations. And I just tested in on an old asus with a dead battery and a broken screen. It's fine to surf on the web. Watch videos. Listen to music. You could do it 10 years ago already with even older computers. Your ipad is lying to you.
I know Kingdom Rush isn't exactly the latest high-end 3D thing, but I did a double-take at the notion that hardware that's fine for gaming is too slow for internet browsing.
And yet Apple devices have longer software support lifetimes than any Android devices and better resale values for a longer time. That hardly sounds like a set of characteristics you'd associate with products designed to become obsolete.
They are dependent on Apple for updates due to the code signing. Alternative operating systems also cannot be installed once Apple stops supporting them. That ensures obsolensce in the long term, even if it is longer term than their competitors' blob-ridden Android products.
Anyway, plenty of machines sold then and even today are junk, so maybe replacing them is not such a terrible idea. However, I think replacing the software matters more. Linux is an excellent option for these systems in the long term. If Apple made Mac OS X available for them, it would be too.
Is Android the right comparison? Because I don't think Android when I think about my barely useful iPad 2 (because Android tablets are tire fires), I think of the Pentium III Thinkpad that I use for distraction-free writing. They're both about as useful to me, and one is as old as a high school sophomore.
Realistically the early iPhones and iPads were an experiment. Nobody really knew what their useful lifetime would be. The same went for Android devices.
In fact the wisely received wisdom was that Android devices would have longer useful lifespans because open source leads to higher quality software that's maintained and updated for longer, which can be customized by users so it meets their needs better. The reality that many Android devices never see a single software update and are junked up with carrier crapware and poor device drivers hidden in binary blobs still hasn't sunk home for everyone yet.
Even now when I buy a new device I think about how useful it will be and what it's support will be like for 2 to 4 years. Beyond that, there's no way to tell. When my kid's original iPad Minis get replaced, if they still work I'll probably just use them as family photo and video galleries.