Slow iPad

[CAMRAMan]

I have a fairly old iPad Air. It's useful for the Scrabble app I use, but veeeerrry slow on any other app. Now. I suspect this is down to Apple choking the life out of it, but I was wondering if there's any way of improving its performance. I'm reluctant to update the iOS in case it makes things even worse.

[Jaded]

Have you 'restarted' it (hold Home button and Power switch until a white apple shows on screen - it will then start up, might take a little time)

Do you ever close running Apps? (double click Home button, then swipe up on all little windows that appear - these are running apps, that sit in the background until you need them again...

How much free space is there on the device - if not much then consider deleting apps you don't use and other stuff.

Do you back it up to a computer?
If so you could try backing it up, wiping it and reinstalling from backup

[PaulF]

All good advice from Jaded, I’d close running apps first as it’s quickest and non destructive. But I suspect it may be a lack of space.

[CAMRAMan]

I was unaware of running apps, so thank you. I had loads going on in the background.

Still hasn't helped a great deal. I'm not even sure it's an iPad Air either. It was bought from someone OTP a few years ago, mainly for its mobile broadband access, so it's probably 6 or 7 or even older.

[grams]

iOS doesn’t run apps in the background*. All but the front one are frozen and all but the most recent handful are terminated. Everything else in the app switcher is a ghost of an app that was once running.

The original iPad Air has the same chip as an iPhone 5S. It may just be that modern apps have outgrown it.

(* with a few pedantic exceptions)

[Feanor]

iOS doesn’t run apps in the background*. All but the front one are frozen and all but the most recent handful are terminated. Everything else in the app switcher is a ghost of an app that was once running.

The original iPad Air has the same chip as an iPhone 5S. It may just be that modern apps have outgrown it.

(* with a few pedantic exceptions)

I know zero about fruity devices.
So how does stuff like mail work, if it's not running in the background to accept notifications?
Do you need to manually do a send/recieve every 5 mins or what?

Or does the OS itself accept the notifications, and then wake the relevant app?

[Mr Larrington]

Something must check e-mail from time to time even if Mail is not running, coz the wee icon displays the number of unread messages provided Thunderbird on the always-on PC hasn’t filed them somewhere other than the Inbox before the fruitslab notices.

[CAMRAMan]

Yebbut even internet searches are slow, and that can't be too processor-intensive, surely?

Haven't Apple deliberately slowed down devices like mine with successive 'upgrades'?

[Lightning Phil]

The met office weather app on iOS also does background notifications  for severe weather

[Jaded]

iOS doesn’t run apps in the background*. All but the front one are frozen and all but the most recent handful are terminated. Everything else in the app switcher is a ghost of an app that was once running.

The original iPad Air has the same chip as an iPhone 5S. It may just be that modern apps have outgrown it.

(* with a few pedantic exceptions)

I know zero about fruity devices.
So how does stuff like mail work, if it's not running in the background to accept notifications?
Do you need to manually do a send/recieve every 5 mins or what?

Or does the OS itself accept the notifications, and then wake the relevant app?

The apps do check things. (not that it matters to an iPad) but if you have something that accesses GPS, for example, unless you set the settings right, it will chunter away when "frozen" and use battery.

[Jaded]

Yebbut even internet searches are slow, and that can't be too processor-intensive, surely?

Haven't Apple deliberately slowed down devices like mine with successive 'upgrades'?

One of the things they did was slow devices down if the battery was low, and I think this might have happened with poor condition batteries, to reduce the power demand on the battery.

[CAMRAMan]

In my case, the state of the battery is irrelevant. The speed's crap whatever...

[grams]

I know zero about fruity devices.
So how does stuff like mail work, if it's not running in the background to accept notifications?

The built-in Mail app is one of the pedantic exceptions. It (or more likely, a separate OS service) does indeed check mail in background.

Or does the OS itself accept the notifications, and then wake the relevant app?

For just about all other apps, pretty much yes. The badge on the icon is put there by a connection to Apple's push notification servers, which are pinged with info by the app developer's servers. The app doesn't need to be relaunched if it's just a badge update or notification arriving.

I believe robotic devices work exactly the same way, with a little more flexibility.

Haven't Apple deliberately slowed down devices like mine with successive 'upgrades'?

There are billions of dollars available through the courts to anyone who can demonstrate they've done any such thing.

[ian]

I have an ancient iPad 2 or 3 from the time when Victoria was queen and everyone wore britches and ate fox for lunch on Sundays. It sits by the bed in case I'm grabbed by the urge to look things up.

It's slow and a lot of modern web pages can kill it dead, but it works for Wikipedia*. Apple haven't deliberately done this, it's the way of things, why are people going to develop services for a device nearly a decade old when newer devices have far faster chips and enough memory to lose an elephant in. It's a bit like arguing that the web was fine when all the pages and grey and the text was times new roman or times new roman italic. Modern browsers, of course, use up far more resources, web pages are just simple HTML, there's document models, scripts, stylesheets and a million other things. Because they can.

*while my wife takes forever in the bathroom, I like to dilute my frustration (and contemplation of finally biting the bullet and getting another bathroom) by learning exciting new facts. Plus it's far too slow for smut.

[grams]

It's very hard to know without thorough looking whether something that looks like a simple search results page is actually that or is an elaborate Javascript web app with many many doodads and trackers and wotsits that presents itself as a simple web page, which is what most things are these days.

This here forum is probably one of the few things that can be used as a constant benchmark of actual old school HTML that hasn't changed in 20 years.

[grams]

It was bit more specific than that.

Someone at Apple noticed that when batteries got old the peak CPU power demand was enough to pull the battery voltage so low that the whole system would suddenly die. They decided the best solution was to silently limit maximum CPU performance under certain overly broad circumstances.

This was not one of their best ideas tbh, and was quickly rumbled and walked back.