They've come a looong way. I often find myself surprised at how long my girlfriend's brand new iphone takes to do basic things. I know Apple's A series processors are leagues ahead of what's in my mid range android phone but honestly it often feels like a wash. Granted I'm not playing mobile games or anything, just using maps and browsing reddit and it may often be network latency that I'm feeling not CPU perf.

>They were so slow they were painful.

I agree, apple make old phones slow on purpose by software update, apple is evil

Not this old canard.

The only time Apple made “an old phone slow” was when the battery was too old and couldn’t operate at peak without causing the phone to shut off.