How Apple Gets You To Buy New iPhones Over And Over Again
The answer lies in Apple's software, and it's a key part of the company's strategy to keep millions of people buying new iPhones.
Apple releases a new mobile operating system every year, and that keeps a powerful cycle in motion. Each fall for the last few years, people have rushed to download the latest and greatest version of iOS, which is designed for -- and, as a result, works best on -- the newest hardware that is also released around the same time. In the months leading up to the release, many app developers furiously update their apps for the latest operating system.
For many, the solution is simply to buy a new iPhone.
It's highly unlikely Apple deliberately slows down older iPhones just to get you to upgrade. The company declined to comment for this story. Instead, Apple designs the new operating systems, which have more features, take up more space and require more computing power, for the new iPhones. And a consequence of that is they don't work as well on older iPhones.
The system has been pretty successful for Apple. iPhone owners in the U.S. tend to shell out big bucks for a new iPhone about every two years (which, not coincidentally, is also the length of the traditional wireless contract.)
But with its latest update to iOS 8, Apple hit a few bumps.
Last month, the company made the rare move of pulling an update to the operating system after some people reported it left their phones unable to make calls and their fingerprint sensors useless. Although Apple said the bugs only affected a small number of people, and the company soon released a fix, the episode led to a spate of bad publicity. That, along with the whopping five gigabytes of precious storage space needed to download the update wirelessly, seems to have made people shy away from downloading the new OS en masse. Apple fans are adopting the new operating system much more slowly than they adopted iOS 7, the previous version.
Still, a huge number of people rushed to download iOS 8 in the first few days it was available.
Justen Meyer, a 33 year-old who works in the pro sports industry in St. Louis, was one of those people. He regrets updating his iPhone 4S, which he says is now "slow."
"It's horrible. My apps don't work. Twitter won't open," he said in an interview recently.
Before the update, his phone was "perfect," he said. "I was completely happy. Now it's making me wonder if I'm going to go through this the next time I get a new phone."
Meyer isn't alone. People complaining about their iPhones feeling slow after new iPhones and operating systems come out is nothing new. Catherine Rampell wrote in The New York Times last year that her iPhone 4 felt "a lot more sluggish" after the 5S and 5C were released. Sendhil Mullainathan, a professor of economics at Harvard, noted in another Times story this summer that Google searches in the U.S. for "iPhone Slow" spike when each new iPhone is released.
Part of that could be because so many people download the new operating system at the same time, iMore Editor-in-Chief Rene Ritchie pointed out earlier this year. Apple releases its new OS to everyone at the same time, while Android updates hit different phones at different times. (This is one of the reasons why Android's operating system is so fragmented -- only a quarter of Android owners are on the latest version of the operating system.)
iPhone models that are a year old -- the next-to-latest generation -- tend to do fine when they're upgraded to the latest operating system, said Mike Gikas, who as the senior electronics editor at Consumer Reports has reported on the testing of every iPhone that has come out.
It's the older ones that begin to lag, Gikas said.
"We do know as the phone becomes older, the apps seem to become sluggish and some of the capabilities diminish," he said.
Indeed, Twitter is full of people complaining about their phones slowing down after downloading iOS 8.
