> My immediate thought was that Apple had liberally sprinkled wait() into the iOS 11 code base so that I'd feel like my ole A9 CPU just wasn't cutting it any more and I'd realize, as they do, it's time to upgrade.

That was actually recently debunked by Futuremark https://www.futuremark.com/pressreleases/is-it-true-that-iph....

Important excerpts found at the bottom of the page:

> Our benchmarking data shows that, rather than intentionally degrading the performance of older models, Apple actually does a good job of supporting its older devices with regular updates that maintain a consistent level of performance across iOS versions.

and

> That said, there are some factors that might affect people's perception of performance after updating an older device with a newer version of iOS. An update might add new features that use more resources or require more processing power. New apps developed for the latest models might not run as smoothly on older devices. Conversely, apps designed for an earlier version of iOS might not take full advantage of optimizations in the latest version. And then there is always the psychological effect of knowing that there is a new and improved model available, which can make your own device seem outdated.

What is debunked? That the CPU has not changed during the upgrade? No shit sherlock. Synthetic benchmarks tell nothing of the end-user experience.

Does Apple sprinkle wait()? No. Does the system become more and more complex and Apple taking less time to optimize because it runs “fine” on the [latest - 1] hardware? Yes.

> What is debunked?

I'll help you a bit.

> > [...] Apple had liberally sprinkled wait() into the iOS 11 code base so that I'd feel like my ole A9 CPU just wasn't cutting it any more

From the article

> Are older iPhones being deliberately slowed? [...] maintain a consistent level of performance across iOS versions

Sure, as you snarkily remark, your CPU/GPU hasn't changed, but neither has the iOS version inherently made your phone slower. Apps on the other hand might be assuming more power nowadays, but that is a whole other question... Or, you could also just have read the end of my comment...

Tired of people bringing up that "article" and the sensationalist media headlines. All that articles shows is that the CPU, given 100% utilization, does the same result as it did on iOS 10. Really surprising for sure. So what was the point of you posting that article? People saying "Apple is slowing my device" don't actually mean "the CPU has become slower". There goes the entire premise that benchmark. The CPU is the same—the software is less optimized for older hardware. The net effect? The software runs slower (and in some cases much slower) than older versions of the OS.

The real rebuttal of "slow" claims should be to look at the added features and security and discuss whether such trade-offs are worth the reduction in performance. For example, to make the user's data much more secure, Apple puts a lot of mechanisms behind XPC, which is inherently slower than mere API calls. These slow the system. Are they worth it, for the security benefit? That's the productive discussion we should be having.

>Tired of people bringing up that "article" and the sensationalist media headlines. All that articles shows is that the CPU, given 100% utilization, does the same result as it did on iOS 10

But that is LITERALLY what people were accusing Apple of doing, actually slowing their devices to make them buy newer models. There might have been less conspiracy-esque claims, but jesting they were "sprinkling wait() calls in the code to make me upgrade" is not in that category - so I disagree with your claim that people weren't meaning that.

Anyways, this discussion has derailed, so I'm just gonna leave it at that.

No—even at face value, "sprinkling wait()" does not slow the CPU, it slows the software running on the CPU; if you then manage to obtain 100% for your thread, that does not disprove that Apple has not added `wait()` anywhere in their code. In their code—software.

Technically the 6s is now [latest - 2] hardware. X/8/8+ have the A11 Bionic; 7/7+ have the A10 Fusion; 6s has the A9.

Exactly what I said. It runs "fine" on 7, while it runs slow(er) on 6S.

iOS 11 runs fine and just as fast as iOS 10 on my SE. It sounds like you are experiencing a bug.

Aren't there, like... 3rd-party chat or emoji apps or something now? I don't use any of that stuff, but if only some people on 6-series iPhones are experiencing a multi-second delay opening the iMessage editor, my first guess would be they have some of those installed and one or more of them have shit the bed.

Ah, my mistake, I was taking the scare quotes to mean you were complaining about it on your hardware.

>>As soon as I upgraded my 6s to 11, I saw performance seriously degrade. It takes -seconds- to bring up the iMessage editor.

THIS! My exact experience and sentiment. The lag frustrates me every time I open almost any app (and then I get frustrated with myself for letting myself succumb to such a first-world-problem)

Is there any recourse? Can we disable some animations or other unnecessary features in settings?

Can we expect 11.0.4 or 11.1 to fix?

Just googled, found this...

"Some reddit users claim that resetting their settings (Settings --> General ---> Reset --> Reset All Settings) fixed all of the app issues, while others have restored their devices and set it up as new to solve the problem. Others have backed up and restored and had better results."

https://www.macrumors.com/2017/09/25/ios-11-app-slowdowns-pe...

I did a backup and complete restore. It went from completely unusable to annoyingly usable. Still considering downgrading to 10.3

Signing window has closed on 10.x.

Not for 6S. It has some issues and Apple still lets users downgrade.

not to mention you can't restore a backup of 11 on 10.x...

is it possible to downgrade to 10.3 ? I thought you can't do that anymore once you upgrade. I upgraded my old iPad to 10 and the experience is horrible. I wanted to downgrade back to iOS 9 but I can't find a way to do it.

I can confirm. Tried the same - wipe and reinstall. Phone is slightly better but still lags for Camera, forwarding images to WhatsApp and to open iMessage.

And this when I have yet to restore from iCloud or restore an entire 25GB Music cache!

What's happening, Apple?

Same problem, tried this and did not work. The only solution for me was to downgrade to 10.

You can disable animations in Accessibility settings along with other things. Check it out!

EDIT: Should probably mention it's called Reduce Motion.

On iOS 10, it does not disable animations but replaces them with fade-ins/fade-outs. I don't know the behaviour on iOS 11, but I suspect it is going to be the same.

It is, but it does feel a bit speedier. Interestingly I’ve had Reduce Motions on for quite some time and just turned it off. Feels kinda newish now, but I guess I sometimes just like change for changes sake.

I had it off. Just turned it on — feels no change on iPhone 5s.

Resetting all settings seems to have done the trick. But I am not 100% sure.

I uninstalled my 3rd party keyboards because the lag to bring it up got much worse with iOS 11.

So why do you update to the latest version? iPhone 6 is quite old by now, and the updates have historically caused reduced performance. I didn't put Windows 7 on my old 1GB Windows XP machine because it's dumb, you should think about the same when updating your phone.

If Apple says you should update then it must be knowing what will work in that hardware.

>>Or... maybe they are running every key stroke through the new Azure-enabled Cray computers to better predict what I am going to type so that overall, my typing is more efficient and I'm actually spending less time typing...

The typing on iOS 11 in all apps is absolutely abysmal. What the hell is going on?

On an iPhone 6, if you type quickly, AUTOCApitalization lags and doesn't switch off until after 4-5 characters, which is absolutely mindboggling. The system obviously knows you've typed more than one char, is this thing multithreaded in the extreme?!

> What the hell is going on?

The same that has happened for every iOS .0 release for YEARS.

They focus on showstoppers (P1) only then focus on usability (P2) during the next year's worth of point releases. Then iOS 12 will come along and the process repeats.

For .0 releases they’re furiously coding against a daunting fixed deadline. For .0.1 warranty releases, lingering showstoppers. The .1 releases get all the care. If I were smart, I’d wait around for dot-ones and eat my broccoli.

The giant is pulling apart at the seams.

It would take an obsessive, aggressive, near manic product personality to stay on top of something that large and keep it running at an extremely high level of quality. Tim Cook isn't that leader (which pretty much everybody understood on day one).

Apple is seeing very serious problems across numerous aspects of their business, from product decisions to supply chain.

This is revisionist drivel.

Every year it's always "Apple is dying" as they continue to siphon money from every industry they touch. They are about to push a tonne of users into a higher price point with the iPhone X. The Apple Watch is an unquestionable success. We are on the precipice of seeing an ARM based MacBook based on their incredible work with A-series chips. They are also strategically very well placed with their Health and AR initiatives.

Anyway look forward to your position in a few weeks when iOS 11.1 is released given the betas are looking pretty good.

Do we even have sales figures for the apple watch. All I see is made up numbers and guesses.

I never noticed anyone anywhere wearing an apple watch.

Not that I spend any time looking at people's wrists, but you'd think if it was a massive success everyone would notice.

Interesting. Where do you live? Here in London they are really commonplace - you see them on people on the tube all the time and I notice them being used fairly regularly by all ages and sexes for contactless payments, running, etc. In fact they seem so widely adopted that it’s not uncommon to see even people with them who you would not necessarily expect to be wearing them.

They are given out for free to anyone signed up to Vitality health care (and stay 'active'). A lot of companies in the city use them as the health care perk.

I wonder how much that has bolstered the amount of people using one.

They're pretty rare in my UK city; I expect being able to use them for the Tube provides a useful rationalisation for the purchase - the are a lot more richer people in the greater London area too.

Plural of anecdote isn't data.

I think they were referring to "I never noticed anyone anywhere wearing an apple watch."

They are very common here in Austin. The woman working at the counter in the Post Office wears one and the last couple of doctors I've visited wear them. How common are they? I'm not sure. The fact that they have a distinctive appearance makes them much easier to identify than other watches since the other watch companies make so many models.

It would be interesting to see the geographic distribution; I was in Delaware a two years ago and used mine to pay for my purchases at a Bookstore and everyone was quite surprised--they were unaware of the active Apple Pay feature on their own point of sales terminals.

I travel to a good number of middle America small towns and consistently see small business / middle manager upper middle class men wearing them. No women, fwiw.

The people wearing them aren't techie types at all which is why I'd guess the sentiment in tech circles is so negative on the watch's success. I think we're used to seeing our colleagues being the earlier adopters of gadgets like these, but the Apple watch early adopters include a diverse set of non-tech people.

> The people wearing them aren't techie types at all

Most of the Apple-using techie types I'm friends with have a Watch.

Although as a counterpoint, at $WORK, most of the techie types don't (but also don't use other Apple stuff.)

I shouldn't have implied adoption is necessarily low in tech circles. What I meant is that I've seen a surprising adoption by non-tech people, making the proportion of the adoption out of the ordinary and harder to jduge using past experience with tech devices.

I think it's one of those things you notice once you're looking for them. I certainly see them fairly regularly, in my smallish MidWestern city.

As a random example, yesterday I bought fast-food fried chicken for lunch. The woman who took my order was wearing an Apple Watch. The barista at my regular coffee shop wears one.

They're definitely showing up on non-tech people. I've also never seen a woman wearing a smartwatch that isn't an Apple Watch.

Apple claims that sales are up 50% since last year with an estimate total of 33 million watches sold. Apple is even calling itself the "nr 1 watchmaker in the world", even though technically I believe Swatch Group is still larger if you include all of its brands.

The last wristwatch I wore regularly was a Swatch. That was back around 1994. After that, I either used stationary clocks, the time display on the computer I was using, or a cheapo toy-quality digital timepiece thrown into a pocket of my backpack--the sort of thing you might get in a cereal box or a Happy Meal.

Starting around 2001, that last one got replaced by my mobile phone.

I'm not really seeing the use case for smart watches. But then again, I was never a fan of purses or fanny packs or any kind of jewelry either, and never understood fashion, so I'm probably never going to see the point of smart watches either. If I'm going to strap anything to my body all day, it has to be clearly useful for the entire duration, to overcome the discomfort and inconvenience. I'm just not seeing that yet in any of the available options. In every case, I'd rather put a wrist strap on my phone.

Apple said they're bigger than Rolex in revenue.

My iPhone 7 - the latest iPhone at the time iOS 11 came out, and with the fastest single threaded mobile CPU for some time - can no longer play locally downloaded audio and be used at the same time without stuttering constantly. Everything is broken on iOS 11. Extremely frustrating. I will buy a new phone, but not an iPhone.

I have an iPhone 7 and I do not experience this at all.

On the other anecdotal hand, I have an iPhone 7 and do experience this - normally through Overcast but sometimes Music will stutter and jank.

HOWEVER I am running the developer preview betas which are notorious for being UX janky and logging insane amounts of crap on every action the OS takes. Which probably explains it for me at least.

I'm on the 6, two years older than that, and experience lag but never a single stutter on anything audio related.

It sounds like an issue that a reset or reinstall may fix.

I'd be similarly pissed off like you if even my much older phone did that.

The worst thing for me is the Camera. If I want to take a photo of something that's just happening I don't even bother anymore since I can expect it to take 10 seconds to wake the phone, get into the camera, and have the shutter button respond and have it actually take a photo (sometimes it looks like it took a photo but it actually didn't save!).

Interesting. Bored before bed so ran a quick test using my iphone7 and Ios 11.x, Google's stopwatch.

The time from wake to photo was ~2seconds (using the lockscreen short cut).

The time from wake to home screen photo app to photo was ~5 seconds.

*

I had to start the timer myself then go back to using the phone so I believe I could cut ~500ms.

Since I have Live Photo enabled, the 2-second shots actually have a few frames that are sub 2 seconds.

Going to the homescreen was accidental. In each attempt, I attempted to use the lock-screen camera shortcut.

As a whole, the experience using the iphone is too unpredictable to be reliable for quick reaction shots (< 3 seconds). A number of times I either: bypassed the lock screen, didnt get passed the lock screen, unlocked my phone to a different app, and on one occasion, the camera app paused for a few seconds before focusing.

If I try it several times in a row it's quick, since presumably everything is cached in memory. If I've been doing other stuff and pick my phone up hours later (exactly when I want that split-second shot of my kid or the license plate of the car that almost ran over me), that's when the phone and camera take ages to get ready.

I really miss Samsung's 'double-click home button to use camera' on the Galaxy S6 and S7. Probably the most convenient implementation of a camera shortcut I've seen.

I like the Motorola double twist for camera gesture, you can start the gesture just as you take it out of your pocket.

I miss my Sony Ericsson that had an actual shutter button you could hold down to activate the camera from sleep.

OnePlus (five here) uses double power button for that and it feels quite fast/is very reliable.

Double-power on the Nexus 6P on Oreo - it's very nice.

Yes! Especially if what I'm wanting to do is take a video of my kid. By the time I get the photo app to respond well enough to swipe over to video and let it readjust itself, I have missed the moment by seconds.

This is one of the major pains that tore me away from Android (where I had several ‘flagship’ phones and kept them free of crap). If iOS keeps heading this way, what’s left?

Back in the 90s I decided we needed a real-time UX - hard real-time guarantees. I had no idea how to even start with this, especially as the only OSes I knew well were UNIX-like, none of which did real-time. There was QNX(?) but I didn’t have access to play with it.

So do we need an effort to make a new real-time phone OS? Kinda like the Firefox phone OS project but built on an OS that allows guarantees?

This. My 6 Plus is barely usable now, to the point where it is annoying the hell out of me. On iOS 10 i was fine with the 6 Plus and thought i could easily use it another year, but right now it's barely usable. I compared loading a banking app on my 6 and my colleagues 7 (closed it before) and the difference is astounding (2-3 seconds slower). Also everything is just laggy including typing and taking photos.

I have the 6 and benefited from uninstalling 3rd party keyboards and doing a settings reset. Might have also done a fresh install.

For a 3 year old phone, it's frustrating but still miles ahead of the last Android phone I kept for 18 months. It's still frustrating that the iOS update is basically forced on us instead of being an optional upgrade like on desktop. (Of course it's technically optionally, but the constant nag annoyance makes it effectively forced, imo.)

Odd, I have a 6s Plus and I haven't had any issues after upgrading. Sounds like it's hit and miss. I wonder if they changed the hardware during the production lifetime.

6S has the A9 processor, the 6 has the A8, maybe that makes enough of a difference for it to not be that bad. I will also try the complete reset though.

It takes 14 sec to open maps and load a screen of tiles, 4 sec to open messenger on a my 6 plus. I’d love to see timings for this on the newer models.

Also, I swear the rear-facing camera has lower color saturation and higher sensoe noise after the upgrade. I’d love to see A-B camera tests for iOS 10 and 11 on old hardware.

5s for maps, 11s for messenger (3s for messages). But, this is on a plain 5, no "S" or any of that fancy stuff new stuff.

My latest annoyance is when I'm using the keyboard and it just visually freezes for several seconds. It appears locked-up, but it's really not. It's silently recording every button you press in anger, and finishes with the throwing of the entire buffer contents at you all at once, which, to add insult to injury, you now have to also delete.

Opening iMessage on a 6s Plus running iOS 11.0.3: Two seconds

This kind of thread generally piles up on rants of frustrated users, so here's another data (counter-)point: both are <1s for sure, possibly even less than 0.5s on my 6S w/ iOS 11, from a cold start. Everything is snappy and responsive, enough that I'd have to film this on slow mo and time it to be sure of any delay metric. Overall iOS 11 has been a solid performer for me ever since the second public beta.

I wasn't complaining at all. I love iOS 11. Just wanted to give some input.

Sorry for the misunderstanding, this wasn't aimed at you at all, I just responded to yours because you mentioned timings on a same gen device as mine and it seems mine is significantly faster. As for the rest, it's just that the sarcastic, conspiracist, passive-aggressive tone of many of the sibling comments is unnerving.

What exactly my tone should be?

I bought a very expensive phone that was unable to launch apps (50% of the time, when it did, it took several seconds) and unable to make calls (the receiving end would be mute and would not hear what I was saying).

The phone was bought on an official apple store and had one day of use. Problems persisted for over a week. Tried all the possible solutions. The only one that worked was downgrading to 10.

Unfortunately, this is a sad but regular scenario now. It doesn't matter whether Apple does it on purpose or simply doesn't care, but new versions of iOS degrade the performance of older devices (an in this case "older" doesn't necessarily mean "very old"). Some people simply choose not to upgrade, but this may have security implications - and in any case sooner or later you'll come across an app you need that doesn't work on an older version of iOS. You will upgrade, the performace will be degraded, and your previously "good enough" device will suddenly feel sluggish and old.

Is there any definitive evidence for this? Has anyone benchmarked devices before and after upgrades to prove it?

Edit: I don't mean CPU benchmarking which has been discussed elsewhere in this thread. More like usability testing, sequences of actions not invoking new OS features where possible, and also a second set of tests using new OS features because that's what most people's experience would be.

It's difficult to achieve because one cannot downgrade a device to some older version. So when 3GS became insanely slow with updates, no one could at random get a device with an old OS version.

This is a weak argument.

It takes literally zero planning to do a test now and then do another after the update.

I've found a few examples here:

https://www.youtube.com/user/kabriolett

These don't support the argument that devices are slower after updates.

Android (along with most Android applications) is profiled and tested on lower spec devices in a given year. If you buy a high-spec device this year, you could reasonably expect the system to become faster with updates rather than slower.

My biggest gripe is the flashlight delay - swipe up for control center, tap flashlight, and the actual light takes easily a third of a second to turn on. I suspect that's also waiting for the stupid animation to complete.

Honestly I feel like the people in charge of iOS have stopped using the devices personally. I have no other explanation for so much annoying crap slipping through (ok, other than some idiot exec being in love with the animations, and shutting down any attempt to correct this behaviour, like what happened with Forstall's obsession with skeuomorphism).

The flashlight behaviour is odd, I just tried it and I got the same delay the first time I turned it on, but no delay after turning it on multiple times. It's almost as if the code was swapped out to a slow disk and you have to wait for it to be swapped back in before the first use. There's still no good reason why it should take such a noticeable time, though.

There's no swapping on iOS. The delay is probably caused by iOS lazily waking up some hardware. The same happens when you use haptic feedbacks:

>Calling the generator’s prepare() method puts the Taptic Engine in a prepared state. To preserve power, the Taptic Engine stays in this state for only a short period of time (on the order of seconds), or until you next trigger feedback.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uifeedbackge...

More annoying than performance is the ever increasing nagging for apple paid services, apple pay, apple icloud, etc. The platform is literally becoming a junk adware platform. It feels like an infected PC that pop ups ads randomly.

This is precisely why I will not buy an iPhone again. Every single time I open my photos to show someone something I have to wait through two popups that are extremely slow to close. Also now I'm getting nagged to upgrade to ios 11 whenever I just want to use the phone. Abysmal.

What's the alternative? Android, especially Samsung infested bloatware, is substantially worse. The touchwiz upgrade prompts are WAY more annoying than ios ones. Plus the constant Samsung login junk. And then there is the heavy google integration that requires a google account for almost everything.

Except it isn't worse. Not anymore anyway. Any and all notifications just go up top and don't prevent you from using the phone -- even if someone calls you. My 3 year old Sony Xperia Z1C that I only use to for testing lets me jump into whatever app I want as soon as it starts immediately even though I can see there's like 50 notifications to go through. But I can do that when it's convenient for me.

My main problem is that if I simply want to do something on any iOS now as soon as I unlock it I'm blocked by pop ups for things like making a back up and buying more iCloud storage and upgrading to iOS 11 -- things I never intend to do. There's no way to switch these off either. And they happen constantly, multiple times a day.

Last time I used my iPad I dismissed a popup, opened up an app and the same pop up came a few minutes later completely interrupting me. I have no tolerance for these annoyances.

Samsung phones were complete trash back in the day with their bloated interface but I've since switched to a Note 8 and the experience has been very good. UI is very clean and the performance/features on the phone are outstanding.

Samsung OS is always slick until a year later when they drop all support for it, and the force installed apps start to install adware. This has happened on every Samsung I’ve owned.

All of those have a free tier and/or no paid levels. I've never not had Apple pay setup, so I don't know what the nags look like though.

The iPhone is a rather one size fits most device. If you don't want to go along with Apple's idea of how to use the device, you will be unhappy with it.

Right now I'm fighting the practically forced upgrading of a particular app for which the update will remove functionality. But in order to not update one app, I'm forced to manually update every other app individually. Which is about 40-50 updates a week that I have to approve.

Using the phone forces me to realize the extent to which I don't really own it. I'm just sort of renting services from it with an all-or-nothing set of features.

Same here. I had bought my 6s after my 6 got stolen, so it was my first time using iOS 11. My two-day old phone was absolutely unusable, freezing for over a minute every once in a while. Apps wouldn't open at all! I couldn't change the volume while the phone was locked. I couldn't listen to musics, or use the lock screen music handler, while the phone was locked.

You have something really wrong when your smartphone can't open apps...

After one week I got tired of this shit and downgraded to iOS 10, which for now is working as expected. I really hope apple won't force me to update to iOS 11. (So here's what I did: I intentionally filled my phone space. Good luck fitting iOS' 1GB here).

Frustrated disappointed and utterly angry at Apple. This is definitely the last iPhone I'll own.

I was using a 6 Plus up until a few weeks ago. Every upgrade caused serious performance decreases and I avoided iOS11 entirely (anticipating an upgrade to a new device). My partner upgrades yearly and I gave up all phone tasks to him when we were out together as my performance was so bad. Unlock? slow. Open chrome? 2-3 seconds. Open safari? 2-3 seconds. Fancy webpage? Forget it. We use google keep a lot, it basically didn't work on the 6 Plus. Sometimes the app would load quickly, sometimes it would take minutes or not load (or maybe if I kept waiting, it would eventually?). Scrolling in the app hardly worked. Screen touches became more hit or miss. Reflexively, I built in a 2-3 tap routine for most screen touches as it took that many for them to register. Scrolling any sort of content was difficult, stutter-y, and inconvenient. Siri didn't work - but I'm not sure if it does now either. I also had all animations off in an attempt to squeeze some performance.

Anyway, whatever apple did or didn't do, worked. I upgraded to an 8 Plus and couldn't be happier.

I run in to others who have version 6 phones and have no problem, so I don't know why I'm an outlier. Part of it is probably my storage habits, I was almost always within 5-10% of capacity. Now I have 256gb version and am hoping I don't get near the limit so that this phone will last me 3 years.

iOS releases typically get a nice performance boost on the x.1 release. I wish it wasn’t that way (I’d like better optimization at launch), but this has been true since at least iOS 4.

Edit: to respond to another comment elsewhere in this thread, Apple also tests on all of the supported hardware when prepping iOS.

Strange, I see little to no difference on my 6S. I was considering getting an X, but since my phone still handles iOS 11 perfectly, I don't see any reason to upgrade.

I'd try restoring my phone if I were you - that fixes these issues for a lot of people.

My first smartphone, an iPhone, slowed to a crawl after some OS update about 2 years in. It's the last piece of Apple hardware I ever bought. The 3 non-Apple smartphones I've bought since then were all perfectly usable after 2 years.

My Samsung started dying unexpectedly at about 10% battery left. I bought another battery, popped the back cover and replaced it. For $10 it's as good as new.

It's unfortunate Samsung removed that option.

You can still buy Galaxy Note 4s. They are pretty good phones.

True - wouldn't the same hold true of the iPhone 6s and SE WRT headphone jack arguments?

> My immediate thought was that Apple had liberally sprinkled wait() into the iOS 11 code base so that I'd feel like my ole A9 CPU just wasn't cutting it any more and I'd realize, as they do, it's time to upgrade.

Which would affect the 2017 iPad also. Why introduce a new iPad with the A9 if you're going to limit the performance. Is it to get people to buy... what exactly? An iPad Pro? Why not simply ONLY make iPad Pros?

This line of reasoning is immature and beneath the type of discourse that should occur on any tech leaning site.

I really hope you're just being sarcastic and mocking everyone who really thinks this.

Edit: I, personally, have a 6S and it's fine. Of course I DFU and set up as new for new OSs. It's even better on 11.1 beta 5.