All-Purpose Guru

As someone who has actually worked with Qualcomm in the past, I can tell you that Qualcomm is a thoroughly evil company to work with.  You even HINT that you're looking at alternatives and they threaten to sue you into oblivion.  

The idea that they are pulling test resources is not even unexpected-- they play MUCH harder ball than this usually, such as cutting off access to support engineers and documentation.  This has been their method of operation since the mid-90s.

At the time, they were the only game in town for CDMA-- luckily there ARE alternatives now and if Apple DOES seek to get rid of Qualcomm there will be lawsuits.  That's just how Qualcomm operates.

Another part of the problem is that the licensing agreement that Qualcomm requires is VERY predatory-- they don't just want a fee to use their chips, their fee is based on the cost of the ENTIRE PRODUCT.  That's one of the reasons why you haven't seen a cellular modem in the Macbooks-- Qualcomm would get a large fee based on the cost of a $2000-$3000 product, which makes even putting the chips in the device cost prohibitive.  This is totally unreasonable and unprecedented in the industry.

This isn't just about money-- Qualcomm is a very difficult company to work with in all areas.

<sarcasm>Ok, wait a minute.  I've been seeing these problems since MAVERICKS and iOS 7.  Are you telling me they made it *worse*?</sarcasm>

Man, if they would stop adding new crap to these applications and maybe fix the problems the applications have had since forever these things would stop getting worse and worse.

I really wish I could find the QA people responsible for this horrific testing and hit them on the side of the head with a board.

Mike, I'm also running a Mini server, but mine's a bit older than yours, unfortunately.  I have a bunch of loose drives, and was admiring the aluminum rack (with a handle on top, no less) next to your Mini on the same shelf. 

What, pray tell, is this aluminum hunk of goodness?

Looking forward to your server article, by the way...

Mike Wuerthele said:

sog35 said:

Bottom line is an iPhone gets slower after each major iOS release. That is a FACT.

It does no such thing. The phone's hardware is identical and not throttled in any way.

Does the software put additional load on the older hardware? Sure. But, that doesn't mean the phone is slower. It moves the bits from register to register just as fast as it always has.

And, for the record, my SE loads apps at the same speed that it did on iOS 11.

Mike, you're splitting hairs.  When sog35 says "the iPhone gets slower after each major iOS release" he is saying the same hardware, running at the same speed, is having to do more because the OS is larger, more complicated, and running more software.  He is NOT saying the hardware is running slower.  As an engineer, I don't even how how you would make it DO that.

The point is that Apple used to trim down releases on older hardware-- remember when transparency was a thing?  Well, you didn't get that on older hardware because the GPU didn't have the shaders involved to make it fast-- so it was locked out.  Same with many of the animation features that were too much for the CPU on older hardware.

Apple doesn't appear to do that anymore-- so the latest OS release for a particular piece of hardware *barely* works, rather than being a useful upgrade.

That, combined with the inability to run older OSes (see my previous comment) means that, yes, after a while, old hardware gets to a point where it is crippled by its own OS and has become virtually useless.

Mike Wuerthele said:

Do you want your phone to be the same as the day you took it out of the box? Never update your software. Problem solved.

Mike, I'd agree with you except for one fact.  Apple revokes code signing for older releases and requires an update to the latest release whenever you have to restore your phone.  

I have an iPhone 4s that is running iOS 7.1.2.  I pray to GOD I never have to restore it (and remember, there are lots of reasons why you might have to restore it, as this is the only way to fix if the memory is corrupted) because if I DO I will have to update to iOS 9, which will brick my phone.  How do I know?  My OTHER iPhone 4s is ON iOS 9 and it is essentially unusable.  Same with my iPad 2 (which is similar hardware to the 4s)

I *wish* this was the good old days when I could option click the restore button and pick which .ipsw file to restore with-- but once Apple revokes the code signing for that release you can't install it any more.

If they would actually TEST the older hardware with the newer releases we might have fewer problems-- for example, if I visit appleInsider.com (just the root homepage) from my iPhone 4s or my iPad 2 running iOS 9 the browser goes into an endless reload loop with an error at the top saying "This website caused an error and was reloaded"  -- as near as i can tell this is caused by running out of memory in Webkit when a page with "infinite scrolling" is accessed.