After initially seeding iOS 9.1 to registered developers and testers before iOS 9.0 was even made officially public, Apple has now pushed the first major update to iOS 9 out for public consumption across the world. The public availability of iOS 9.1 comes after five initial betas that were provided to developers in order to test out the addition of a few new features, as well as report any major bugs or security issues that were discovered. But now that iOS 9.1 is officially with us, does it provide any real-world speed improvements to those users with older hardware?
The videos embedded below pit iOS 9.1 against the previous few versions of iOS on older iPhone models in order to get an understanding of whether or not Apple has made any noticeable performance improvements.
There are four videos in total as part of this little speed experiment. There’s an iPhone 4s running iOS 8.4.1 versus the same device running iOS 9.1. There’s another iPhone 4s video, with the hardware this time running iOS 9.0.2 versus iOS 9.1. There’s also an iPhone 5 with iOS 9.0.2 installed tested against the same hardware running the latest iOS 9.1. And finally, there’s an older iPhone 5 with iOS 9.0.2 running against iOS 9.1. As you can see, all are designed to determine whether or not iOS 9.1 introduces speed improvements against the older firmware versions.
Apple has seemingly made speed improvements during the beta version of iOS 9.1, but it’s interesting to see in one of the videos that the iPhone 4s running iOS 8.4.1 boots up six seconds quicker than the device running iOS 9.1 from a cold power on. Its a similar story for the same phone running iOS 9.0.2 where the device boots up almost three seconds quicker than than its iOS 9.1 powered counterpart. However, as apps begin to pile up in the background, iOS 9.1 seems to load new apps slightly faster than on iOS 9.0.2.
The iPhone 5 running iOS 9.0.2 boots only marginally quicker than the same hardware running iOS 9.1, so it’s unlikely that users will notice a huge performance gap between these two versions of iOS on their iPhone 5 which seem to be neck-to-neck in the video. Finally, the iPhone 5s with the strongest specs of the group, proves that iOS 9.0.2 is just as fast as iOS 9.1, with the phone booting up a second or two faster on version 9.0.2 of iOS compared to the latest offering.
Check out the four videos yourself and have a look at the differences in performance between loading the devices and executing everyday tasks on the device.
iPhone 4s iOS 8.4.1 vs iOS 9.1
iPhone 4s iOS 9.0.2 vs iOS 9.1
iPhone 5 iOS 9.0.2 vs iOS 9.1
iPhone 5s iOS 9.0.2 vs iOS 9.1
(Source: iAppleBytes [YouTube])
You may also like to check out:
You can follow us on Twitter, add us to your circle on Google+ or like our Facebook page to keep yourself updated on all the latest from Microsoft, Google, Apple and the Web.
