Thursday, October 23, 2014

That problem with tablets using a phone operating system

Reason number 1 is essentially what I posted about in 2012.

American telecoms have convinced the public that cell phones should be replaced every two years. Cell phone makers love that idea, so they design their mobile operating systems to work only for recent devices. The problem is that iPads use the same operating system as an iPhone, which means it is subject to the planned obsolescence of iOS.

My iPad 2, for example, is the same one I had when I wrote that 2012 post. (I bought it in 2011). 2011 was two iPhones ago for me. I am currently running iOS 7 on it. I was afraid to upgrade beyond 6, but then did it anyway to get the benefits of a security patch and because I started noticing that apps that I could not run on the older operating system. With iOS 7 my iPad is really maddeningly slow. Because it performs so sluggishly with 7, I have not upgraded to 8.

I find this whole thing to be really annoying. Because my iPad hardware is fine. The device is in really good shape. And yet, it is getting harder and harder to use. I hoping that Apple will notice that people are not replacing their iPads every two years so they will stop ruining perfectly good hardware with their software "improvements," but why would Apple have any incentive to do that? I own a perfectly fine iPad hardware-wise, but I am probably going to replace it in the next few months because it performs so badly.