How Apple Ruined the iPhone 4S

Ajouté : 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]We take for granted today just how well smartphones tend to hold up over time.

[00:00:04]You could be watching this right now on an iPhone 12, a near 6-year-old phone, and have absolutely zero intention to upgrade anytime soon. Not because there's no benefit to a newer device.

[00:00:14]Certainly, you might enjoy the better battery life, newer cameras, faster speeds. But when you boil things down, the iPhone 12 is still a really solid smartphone set to receive yet another year of updates. It's simply good enough, at least for the time being.

[00:00:28]Rewind about a decade, however, and smartphones were in a very different state. This is the iPhone 4S, a phone that received five years of major software support. Shipping on iOS 5 in 2011, it would see the updates of iOS 6, 7, 8, and finally iOS 9 in late 2015. 5 years of updates for any smartphone at this point in time was completely unprecedented and blew away even the iPhone 4, which got from only iOS 4 to iOS 7. And that iPhone 4 wasn't exactly fast on iOS 7, particularly struggling early on as Apple rushed to patch out the many bugs and slowdown issues that came with the new fangled transparency heavy facelift. It was a far cry from even how well the 2009 iPhone 3GS aged, which got to iOS 6 and feels incredibly smooth on its final update. While this wasn't typical, it did show that it was technically possible for smartphones to age gracefully, and it's unfortunate that it wouldn't yet be the standard. In the very least, the iPhone 4 wasn't unusable, and the software with time and updates became mainly stable. But it was clear iOS 7 was pushing the A4 chip and its measly 512 megabytes of RAM to its absolute limits, and Apple would need to take extra care in how they handled future updates on their legacy devices.

[00:01:39]Apple would then proceed to absolutely ruin the iPhone 4S.

[00:01:47]The iPhone 4S is a bit of an odd duck within early iPhone history. The iPhone 4 hit storeshelves June 2010, and we would then see the longest ever gap between iPhones as Apple shifted to a fall release schedule.

[00:01:59]>> So, people have been wondering, how do you follow up a hit product like the iPhone 4.

[00:02:05]I'm really pleased to tell you today all about the brand new iPhone 4S. The iPhone 4S would be announced on October 4th, 2011, the day before Steve Jobs passed away. With 15 months between iPhones, you might have expected a major shakeup with the next generation. But this obviously wouldn't be the case, at least from the outside. The iPhone 4S retained an identical design to the iPhone 4, including the 3.5 in display, which was beginning to feel quite small with competitors like Samsung starting to make increasingly larger phones yearover-year. Still, the iPhone 4 design, I mean, just look at it. It was fantastic. and using it another year with an S model was something Apple had already done before with the iPhone 3GS.

[00:02:44]It used the same design as the 3G. So, this wasn't in any way unexpected, just perhaps a bit disappointing to some, especially after such a long break between generations. However, just like with people, what really mattered was what was on the inside. And the 4S would see some dramatic internal upgrades, including a new 8 megapixel camera sensor that took incredibly impressive photos for 2011, as well as 1080p video.

[00:03:07]And of course, perhaps most importantly, the iPhone 4S would receive Apple's A5 chipset, their first dual core mobile processor. This extra processing power and moving to dual core would be imperative for the 4S's lasting longevity, for better or for worse. But what would prove to be a detriment more than anything else was a lack of change in memory. The 4S still had 512 MGB of RAM, same as the iPhone 4. This limited RAM would eventually become the 4S's greatest bottleneck, but for the time being, it was deemed acceptable. The A5 chip was extremely impressive, and that additional power was needed to run the main new gimmick of the iPhone 4S, one that would fundamentally alter the trajectory of technology forever. See, the S and 4S didn't actually stand for speed like it did with the 3GS. It stood for Siri. Because for decades, technologists have teased us with this dream that you're going to be able to talk to technology and it'll do things for us. Ask a simple question. What's the weather going to be like today? And get a response. Siri is your intelligent assistant. It helps you get things done just by asking.

[00:04:16]Siri was the first mainstream personal AI voice assistant and an exigent early catalyst for the AI revolution that would accelerate marketkedly throughout the next decade into eventually what we see today. Siri was extremely limited early on and more effective conceptually than in practice. While there was some real utility in being able to ask your phone to send a text, pull up a song, or make a Google search. This would prove to be a lot more exciting on paper than in practice for users of the time, as it did generate tremendous hype around the 4S's launch. There was a lot of good tech behind Siri, but also a lot of it was just essentially predetermined phrases and answers dependent on keywords, but the voice recognition capabilities, as well as the fun quirks thrown in, like the ability to tell jokes or to tell you the best bridge to jump off, really helped uh boost public perception. Okay, that last thing was patched out pretty quickly, but Siri was the first domino in the personal AI assistant craze that would see the rise of a ridiculous number of competitors like Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Windows Cortana, Samsung Bixby, and so on and so forth, all hitting within the coming years. And what really feels tragic in all this is that Apple had such a huge head start over all these companies and yet kind of did nothing with it. While this video is primarily titled for how poorly the iPhone 4S would age, I do think there's something to be said about how Apple managed to ruin not just the experience on the 4S, but even its overarching legacy. The 4S will always be the first phone people point to in the rise of AI dominance, to be sure, but it also goes to show how brutally Apple fumbled the ball in the realm of artificial intelligence. And I think the major reason for Apple's failure in this area down the road was probably the absence of Steve Jobs and his unwavering vision after his passing.

[00:05:52]They never really made Siri any better.

[00:05:55]Originally, Siri was actually an app made available on the App Store February 2010, and it wouldn't take long for Apple to acquire them for $200 million under Steve Jobs's personal direction.

[00:06:05]Apple would then work on integrating Siri into the iPhone 4S. And again, 2011, Apple was the furthest ahead of anybody when it came to the AI race. But in spite of this, we now live in a world where Apple has completely given up on AI and has opted to utilize Google's Gemini. It's hard to imagine this ever being the case had Jobs lived on to see his vision through. All this being said, none of this would matter for buyers of the iPhone 4S a decade and a half ago who are only really concerned with purchasing a solid, reliable smartphone that would serve them well for years to come. This would not be the fate of the iPhone 4S.

[00:06:39]When iOS 6 hit in 2012, it did so alongside the launch of the iPhone 5, the first iPhone to bring a full gigabyte of RAM as well as a larger display. iOS 6 supported more iPhones at once than any previous version, spanning the iPhone 3GS, 4, 4S, and 5. And what's even more impressive is the fact that the 3GS only had 256 MGB of RAM, a quarter of the iPhone 5's count, not to mention the huge processing improvements that occurred in that time. And yet, as discussed, the 3GS actually runs iOS 6 shockingly well, and it's wildly impressive given the limited hardware on display. The RAM disparity between the 3GS and 5, while great, didn't really seem to matter all that much thanks to how well optimized Apple's platform was.

[00:07:20]But Apple was quickly shifting direction, and a large part of this would be in their design and aesthetic.

[00:07:25]iOS had generally been about function over form. But the reverse would soon be true. The first hint of real problems on the horizon would come with iOS 7 in 2013, a vast overhaul, bringing a bright, more modern user interface and colorful gradients. While it was mainly very wellreceived as users of the time were eager for a fresh experience. Plus, there was essential functionality brought in multitasking improvements in the new control center, there were also many aspects of the software that could be argued as arbitrary and reductive in terms of overall usability. Again, form over function. Side note, we would also see an 8 GB iPhone 4S come out in 2013 as a budget model. And man alive was this ever far too little space even for the time. only 8 gigs was going to suck on iOS 7, never mind in a couple years when it would get iOS 9. But I digress.

[00:08:12]Early iOS 7 was a fascinating beast and focused exclusively on the look and general vibe of the OS rather than practicality or efficiency. It was a complete departure from iOS 6 and its fast, snappy animations. Old iOS had been bare bones in many respects, sure, but it just worked and it worked well.

[00:08:29]iOS 7, in contrast, was 100% honed in on making a beautiful experience and flow.

[00:08:35]It featured almost painfully slow animations and it had transparency absolutely everywhere. You had the parallax effect where the wallpaper would move around as you moved the phone. Again, much of this was very good, very cool, but it needed a ton of refinement, especially on older iPhones that lacked the power and RAM to really run it to its full potential. The iPhone 4, in particular, struggled, especially early on, and while updates did speed things up as the year proceeded, the cracks were really starting to show. It was clear that this new direction for Apple, while visually stimulating and surely beautiful, the old era of Steve Jobs focused on functionality and that it just works attitude, it was being left behind. You will install the fancy new update. It will slow down your phone and you will like it. And hey, in fairness, I did like it as an iPhone 4 owner myself back in 2013. For many of us, we were just happy to receive the update in the first place, especially one that so radically shook up the experience. Android phones in comparison were lucky to get more than even a single year of updates with Samsung typically giving their own flagships about two years of support before leaving them to rot. A frankly shameful practice that lasted far too long. Extra support, even if the phone was a bit slower, meant more years of security updates meant more years of features meant more major app support. Yes, many Android apps would ultimately be downloadable on far older versions than you would see on the iOS side of things, but this is more a consequence of how many users would be consistently years behind Google's latest release. This wasn't at all the case with iOS, where users adopted iOS 7 at an unprecedented rate, reaching 35% of devices within a mere 24 hours of its release and 74% within 3 months. For some perspective here, about 5 months after launch, 74% of users of iPhones released within the last four years are apparently running iOS 26. So, Apple was basically pulling off these same numbers a dozen years prior. I emphasize all of this because it's important to note how reliant iPhone users are on Apple's updates and the immense amount of trust between the customer and company. Apple put in the effort to keep their phones updated for far longer than the competition. And in doing so, they were essentially making an unspoken pack to keep your experience optimized and usable. If they're giving you an update, it should make things better, never worse. And you also kind of don't really have a choice but to update. Apps on the App Store don't give updates for iOS versions more than a couple years old. And Apple is almost obnoxious and pestering you to install their latest release to the point that it's basically forced upon you at some point. While there's some real positive benefits to all this, there is a negative side in that these legacy iPhone users were completely dependent on Apple maintaining their end of the deal by keeping your phone feeling fast and reliable. Furthermore, Apple does not allow users to downgrade their software version. If an update is broken or slows down your phone, there's typically no going back. You're stuck.

[00:11:24]There would always be a certain level of trade-off here, exemplified with the iPhone 4 on iOS 7. Yes, your phone is going to get slower with time. It was inevitable in these early days of mobile technology as everything was improving so rapidly and the software was invariably becoming more demanding. But there's a certain threshold of pain and suffering users can put up with. The iPhone 4 was borderline at best, but the radicality of iOS 7 gave users a lot more tolerance for potential hiccups.

[00:11:50]Because hey, phones aren't perfect.

[00:11:52]Apple's not perfect. So long as they're still putting their user experience at the forefront, everything should be okay, right?

[00:12:01]In 2014, along with the first fabt iPhones would come iOS 8. The iPhone 4 was retired, stuck forever on iOS 7, but the 4S was still fully updatable, as most users expected would be the case.

[00:12:13]And unfortunately, it appeared Apple hadn't learned anything from the debacle of the previous year. Some drawbacks were inevitable. Features like AirDrop were missing out, right? The limited 3.5 in display size was becoming problematic. Apple's software had quickly evolved to fit as much information as possible on these increasingly larger displays, and it left everything feeling very cramped on the 4S, as the UI had clearly not been designed with the older 3x2 aspect ratio in mind. Where things got bad and no longer so acceptable, however, was in performance. iOS 8 on the 4S was slow, very, very slow, excruciating even. On the iPhone 5 and above, it really wasn't a problem, but the lack of RAM in the 4S was rearing its ugly head. iOS 7 had honestly been just fine, though not necessarily fast. But this new update was just painful, and it immediately caused disscent from 4S users of the time. It takes little effort, just a single Google search, to see endless articles and forum posts from 2014 bemoning the significantly downgraded performance, along with tips on how to speed up the experience, such as reducing motion and transparency and accessibility settings, turning off background location updates, and so on.

[00:13:20]Now, how much slower did the 4S actually get? Well, this chart is from an RS Technica article with the 4S's load times of various stock applications in iOS 7 versus iOS 8. And the numbers are staggering. Safari alone would take a near full extra second to open. And while this might not sound all that bad in isolation, in practice, these annoyances add up really fast and bog down the experience dramatically. The vibe I always got from the 4S on iOS 8 back in the day is that while it was pretty painful, the trade-off might have still been worth it because at least you're getting that extra year of support. And I mean, look, Apple obviously wasn't going to retire the 4S at the same time as the iPhone 4.

[00:13:56]Truthfully, if Apple didn't want this phone to be slow, it should have stayed on iOS 7, but then it would have had less updates than the iPhone 4 gods. And I mean, that's not a very good look. The 4S on iOS 8, it was going to be fairly similar to the 4 on iOS 7. Maybe slower in some cases, but ultimately, hey, if this is how the phone is going to end its life, well, it could always be worse, right? And then it got worse.

[00:14:18]September 2015, Apple would shock the tech world by dropping iOS 9 for every single device already running iOS 8, including the iPhone 4S. This was unprecedented for a 2011 smartphone to get 5 years of full major software support, much less one with half a gigabyte of RAM. I mean, this was incredible. The Galaxy S5, a phone released April 2014, 2 and a half years after the iPhone 4S, would see its final major software update, April 2016, with Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow. The iPhone 4S continued to receive consistent updates until settling on iOS 9.3.5 August 2016, eventually getting a minor patch with iOS 9.3.6 a few years later, which is still the most recent available version today. The support history of the iPhone 4S was unmatched, and it in theory extended the lifespan of the phone for Apple's legacy users far further than anybody could have expected. In theory, because the reality is that whatever semblance of an acceptable user experience had still existed with iOS 8 would be utterly annihilated with the hellscape that was iOS 9.

[00:15:26]All right, in fairness, iOS 9 isn't that much slower than iOS 8 on the 4S, but it is still slower. any added latency on top of how bad it already was, it's just making things worse. And if you had the 8 gigabyte model, well, I mean, that's what I've got here. And even just trying to film this phone for some B-roll for this video, I was running into some frequent annoyances. It was a pain. Just trying to show the amount of storage here, it was loading infinitely trying to display how many photos and videos are on the phone. Only doing so when I hit the home button, so then I had to go back to settings to see it. I could replicate this, by the way. This seemed to happen every time, I'm guessing, cuz there's a lot of photos and videos on there that got downloaded from iCloud probably years ago. And you can see how little space I seem to have left and I only have one app on here, Tik Tok.

[00:16:10]Swiping up the control center can take multiple swipes and is way too laggy.

[00:16:14]And much of the software in general is like this. Slow load times, stuttery animations, and just an all round bogged down excruciating experience. Trying to get into the app store just like an infinite loading screen. Though going to the top charts, I could actually see those. Obviously, this phone isn't going to hold up too well considering its software is a decade old. But having recently looked at the iPhone 5S on iOS 12, trust me when I say it could feel a whole lot better than this. Or again, even the iPhone 3GS on iOS 6 is surprisingly spiffy. Much better than the 4S on iOS 9. It's not even comparable. Another article from RS Technica from September 2015 has some more benchmarks to give us an idea of the speed degradation that we saw with iOS 9. just makes a bad situation even worse. But what were you going to do if you owned an iPhone 4S back in the day?

[00:17:01]Not update? Just deal with the constant popups telling you to update day after day? Let's be real, you were going to update. Everyone eventually updates and then you were stuck because Apple never provided an easy way to downgrade.

[00:17:16]Apple in 2022 would agree to a six-year long $20 million class action settlement, claiming that iOS 9 slowed down the iPhone 4S, this constituting planned obsolescence. It's a paradoxical situation. On one hand, you were glad as a 4S owner to still be getting these updates, but on the other hand, the experience was so brutally slow that you would end up feeling crushing pressure to upgrade to a new phone potentially far sooner than you would have had to otherwise. If you were still on iOS 7 and iOS 8, you might be annoyed that you couldn't download the latest version of every app anymore, but at least your phone would be slightly faster than molasses. My real question is how Apple even let this happen in the first place.

[00:17:54]It's not as if they don't have a quality assurance department. They fully knew how slow the 4S would be on iOS 9. That was the entire basis of that class action lawsuit. And yet, they gave people the update anyways. It feels almost insidious. And it's hard to blame anyone who believes Apple does intentionally slow down iPhones with time in order to force you to upgrade.

[00:18:15]If there has ever been any evidence of this, it's with the 4S on iOS 9. For what it's worth, though, we've not seen any iPhone in the years since age anywhere nearly as poorly.

[00:18:27]The iPhone 5 and 5C on iOS 10 would be fine, and the 5S and 6 on iOS 12 actually would get faster compared to iOS 11, as it was an update specifically focused on performance. I'd like to say in the very least, Apple seemed to learn their lesson with the 4S. And whether or not they were intentionally screwing over their customers or were a little bit too ambitious in how long they could support their devices for, I'm not sure.

[00:18:51]But it wasn't just the 4S that got hurt in this. It was the iPod Touch 5, the iPad 2, even the iPad 3 with a full gigabyte of RAM was still very slow on this version. It was just all a mess in general. And iOS 9 has got to be one of the worst iOS versions of all time thanks to this terrible performance.

[00:19:07]iPhone 4S, the most amazing iPhone ever.

[00:19:13]Now with a dual core A5 chip, 1080p HD video recording, an allnew camera with advanced optics, and this amazing thing we call Siri, your own personal assistant. When you think about it, only Apple could make such amazing software, hardware, and services and bring them together into such a powerful yet integrated experience.

[00:19:43]The iPhone 4S was never going to be the best iPhone ever made. It shared the design of its predecessor, brought a gimmick in Siri that peaked at its launch, and it wasn't all that exciting, focusing on internal upgrades and longevity. But there was a solid device here, a remnant of a bygone era. iOS 5 on the iPhone 4S absolutely flies, and it looks gorgeous to boot. Remember that old YouTube app? Yeah, it is an absolute tragedy that Apple killed this phone the way they did, and it was all so utterly pointless. Apple ruined the iPhone 4S.

[00:20:16]And it's important that we never forget, lest it ever happen again one day.

[00:20:20]>> Hey Siri, beatbox for me.

[00:20:24]>> Here's one I've been practicing. Boots and cats and boots and cats and boots and cats and boots and cats and boots. I could do this all day. Cats and boots and cats and boots and cats and boots and cats and boots and cats.

[00:20:36]>> Please hit that like button and consider subscribing for more content just like this. Thank you all so much for watching. I'm Josh from 91 Tech and I will see you all next time. Heat.

[00:20:57]Hey, heat. Hey, heat.