> MOST things actually feel smoother/snappier than iOS 18

I have a feeling the whole smooth animations thing contributes to this a lot. Obsessing about the reaction time and feeling of how stuff comes on the screen. But yeah iPhone 16 pro is probably a bad performance test case

Real test probably iPhone 12 Pro. Anecdotally, I still see a tonnn of those in the wild.

  > It’s in beta so ofc I’m getting a ton of frame hitches, overheating

how is battery-life?

Since overheating was already mentioned, I give you one guess how that affects battery life.

After using it for a couple more days, battery life hasn't really changed from 18. I'm tempted to say that it's better but I don't want to make any claims before I actually track battery life across a week and compare it to my battery life pre-update.

The overheating is a common occurrence, but it doesn't persist. It seems to be certain things (setting the animated backgrounds in iMessage is a good example), but the moment I'm not doing one of those things the temp feels fine. My battery does drop a percent or two during those cases (which sucks), but my typical use of the phone hasn't yielded any noticeable battery life loss compared to 18.5

How can you get overheating and better performance? Is it just using the big cores for basic OS functions now?

My guess- GPU is probably being used a ton for the blurs causing the heat but the CPU is still free allowing for snappy scrolling performance.