Some iPhone owners say Apple’s iOS 4 tossed some sand in the gears of their older iPhones, and at least one angry customer thinks it was all part of Apple’s plan to make iPhone owners sour on their devices and upgrade to the iPhone 4.
Ars Technica reports a California woman has sued Apple in Superior Court over the issue and hopes to turn her complaint into a class action suit. Her beef is not only that the iOS 4 makes the older iPhones run slower and suffer from bugs, but that it takes the ability of a hacker to revert back to a previous operating system.
iPhone owners who stuck with a 3GS or older phone, how is iOS 4 working out for you?
Lawsuit: Apple turned iPhone 3Gs into “iBricks” to boost iPhone 4 [Ars Technica via GeekSugar]
More From Consumerist
-
Lawsuit Aims To Call BS On Microsoft Surface Memory Size Claims
-
Apple’s Gaming World Just Grew With Addition Of Macs To Its Game Center
-
4 Years After Launch, Sims 3 For Mac Still Sucks And EA Doesn’t Care
-
Worst Company In America Round 1: Apple Vs. Microsoft
-
Apple Shells Out $60 Million To Get Rid Of Pesky iPad Trademark Dispute In China
My Motorola StarTac is so damn slow these days, wonder if I should sue them??
iOS 4 is a steaming pile of garbage.
I was recently required to update the firmware on my 3G iPod Touch, because iTunes wouldn’t sync newly-purchased songs over to it anymore. Even though these are DRM-free, it decided I needed to use the new firmware in order to listen to them. Now, updating the firmware on an iPod is like training a monkey to repeatedly hit a nuclear bomb with a hammer; you know that it’s going to blow up eventually, you’re just not quite sure when.
Version 4.0 sucked. It included all this new multi-tasking code that I don’t care about, because I mainly do one thing with my iPod: play music with it. 4.0 slowed my iPod down to Apple II speeds; searching for an artist or a song used to be instant, it’d start returning results as you were typing in the name. With 4.0, I typed in the name, and then had to hit ‘Search,’ and then had to sit there and wait 15 seconds for it to produce results. Just trying to get a list of playlists, select one, and hit ‘Shuffle’ would take at least 30 seconds.
I was just about to blow 4.0 away and reset the thing to the factory defaults, when Apple released 4.1. Keeping in mind the popular definition of ‘insanity’ as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, I flashed it to 4.1.
Okay, seems like it fixed the slowdown. But know what it doesn’t do now?
Play music.
http://www.macnn.com/articles/10/09/13/usb.output.affected.across.makes.models/
http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/15/did-ios-4-1-introduce-in-car-usb-playback-problems-for-you/
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=12243522
It’s amazing. They’ve managed to take the digital output from a digital music player and inject static, crackling, hissing, dropouts, and pops into it. It sounds like listening to a cassette tape that you dropped in a puddle and then left sitting in your car in Phoenix all summer long. And they managed this by means of software, without changing the physical circuitry at all! That’s some Ph.D level stuff right there, it is.
Planned obsolescence. It sucks and it’s built into everything we own. They just didn’t hide it very well with iOS4.
So did it intentionally slow down as the headline states, or is this just an OS having trouble running on obsolete hardware and a customer who doesn’t understand the problem?
When I upgraded to 4.0 on my 3G 8GB, the phone was ungodly slow and not even functional. I still have to keep the iPhone 3g because of work (iPhone development) and a contract w/ AT&T, but I completely agree with the lawsuit. The developer version of the iOS (4.0/4.1) was a lot better than the release version, and even now, the OS still has some issues. I hope this goes well.