If you have an iPhone 4S or an iPad 2, you probably shouldn’t have upgraded to iOS 8. But in case you did and are stuck with subpar performance on your device, you should definitely install iOS 8.1.1 to at least get some marginal improvements on your older Apple devices. Ars Technica has done a thorough look at how iOS 8.1.1 performs on the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 and it says that while both devices do perform better with the newest update, some critical issues remain.
RELATED: Don’t install iOS 8 on your iPad 2 or iPhone 4S yet
“iOS 8.1.1 improves performance in a few specific places, ones that may well be important to heavy users,” Ars explains. “However, it doesn’t improve responsiveness or consistency, two of the problems you’ll notice the most if you upgrade from iOS 7.”
So, what are the issues that iOS 8.1.1 has failed to fix? According to Ars, apps are still loading as slowly as they did before and there’s still noticeable lag and choppiness in the basic UI. And while iOS 8.1.1 has added more stability under some circumstances, the platform on older devices still isn’t as stable as iOS 7 was.
That said, we are talking about some pretty old hardware at this point — iOS 8 was made for devices that have more than 512MB of RAM as all devices that use Apple’s A5 chip do. If you own an old device, your best option at this point is to either buy a newer one or just not upgrade to the newest software.
Ars‘ full breakdown of iOS 8.1.1 on older iOS devices is very thorough and can be found at the source link below.
