I have an iPad model MC954LL/A, which is an iPad 2 without cellular. I use it almost exclusively for web access. But it is gradually becoming unusable. How does this come about?
I keep the software up to date and use Safari. The battery charges just fine and holds the charge a long time. There is 5.2 GB of memory still available. It doesn’t appear broken, per se.
But more and more often it is unable to load a web page, or it seems to load it and then blanks out with a message saying there was a problem with the page so it is being reloaded. It becomes unresponsive and I have to power it down. A couple of times I couldn’t even power it down and had to just leave it lit up for hours until the battery died. It often only accepts text entry very slowly and when I type a word it may take 5 or 10 seconds for the cursor to catch up to the last letter. I have read online guides about improving iPad performance and disabled various features that are said to burden the system.
Is there something specific I am doing wrong? Should I delete every app that isn’t bundled by Apple? Should I disable everything that synchs this with my iPhone and iMac? Is there some part that may need replacing?
I am afraid that as online advertising gets more and more intrusive it creates an unmanageable processor load and I really need to simply throw it away and replace it. I also have a much newer iPhone 6+ and it does not have these problems.
My experience hdas been that at some point, the latest and greatest version of iOS just isn’t any good on older devices (even though Apple lets you install it).
Of course, there could be hardware problems, but I generally stop updating the OS when the iPad or iPhone is 3 years old. After two years I wait until the online forum (like MacRumors) feedback tells me that there are no serious problems.
I am on my third ipad. I had the same problems with my first, and read somewhere that the new operating systems uses more memory, and finally overwhelms the iPad, to put it in terms I can understand. I’m sure someone who knows more will be able to agree or disagree.
In any case, my iPad 1 lasted about eighteen months working well, then I limped along as it kept getting crappier. My next lasted about the same amount of time, maybe a little longer. I have an iPad air now, I don’t update it at all, and it’s still working okay.
I think you almost have to think of them as products that last 2-3 years. Not quite disposable, but not like a laptop.
My iPad 2 (purchased June 2011) still works great. In fact, I use it every day. Sometimes I think screens or apps are a little slow to load, but since I don’t have a new iPad 2 to compare with, I really have no idea if that’s the case or not. I’ve got the latest iOS in it, too.
I have three, of different ages. The oldest one is a 3rd gen iPad (2012), then a 4th gen (late 2012 - first one to have the lightning connector), and an iPad Air (early 2014).
They all behave exactly as described by the OP, right down to the slow typing. The oldest one has almost nothing loaded on it - not even music or other media. It’s just for browsing Facebook and email, and has a few utilities apps. It’s still dirt-slow.
The middle one is a bit better and only the iPad Air is healthy enough to contain all my media and many apps. They definitely seem to slow down when the iOS is updated - so much that I no longer update the iOS on any device that’s out of warranty.
They don’t even wake up as fast as they used to. And when I switch between apps, they don’t resume where I left off - they almost always reload and put me back on their main screen or landing page. Yet Apple still claims to support multitasking.
And as for Apple “letting” the older hardware update with new iOS, they don’t just “let” you, they nag you until you break down and do it. Two or three times a day I get a pop-up notice telling me that the new iOS has already been downloaded (gee, thanks) and is ready to install. There are two options that will get rid of this notification: (1) install now, and (2) nag me again later.
Deleting apps isn’t going to help. Something to keep in mind is that the iPad 2 has 512MB of RAM which even 5 years ago when it was new, was not a lot, and that is going to affect web browsing. Unfortunately, the iPad 2 doesn’t have the ad blocker support of iOS 9. A workaround is to try running Safari with javascript turned off. Depending on the sites you frequent, this could work well, or it just might be a tradeoff between more responsiveness vs. less functionality.
If you haven’t already, you might want to try restoring the iPad to the factory settings to give it a clean install. Just make sure you do a backup first or else you’ll loose what’s on the iPad.
we had an iPad 1, it was fine for what it did & we had no real plans to change. Apple stopped giving ios upgrades - you couldn’t upgrade to 6, even though you could on iPhones!
we had to change when Sonos needed ios6 to work. Wasn’t particularly happy with Apple - pretty much 4 years from brand new to obsolete
Sounds like the answer is probably that Apple doesn’t give a flying f**k about ensuring that their older hardware stays operable with newer apps and/or operating systems.
We had my mother’s iPad (the original kind), and while it didn’t really suffer performance degradation initially, we started noticing that by about late-2012 or thereabouts, a whole lot of the newer apps wouldn’t work with it. Which wasn’t such a big deal- we mostly used it for our children to watch cartoons when we needed some peace and quiet. After about 6-8 months of that, the performance degradation started, and the battery quit holding a charge.
Kind of frustrating to think that a relatively high-dollar piece of equipment would be virtually useless inside of 3 years. Not just outmoded- I’d fully expect that, but almost unusable. That was new- usually stuff like computers, etc… keep on working like they always did, but the world changes around them. But Apple seems to have accelerated and made that process more drastic.
While software is probably the cause (and Apple is infamous for bloatware), there could be a problem with the WiFi hardware.
Is the slow page loading for all types of connections (cell, hardwire) or just WiFi?
A lot of troubles with slow connections with PCs are fixed with better WiFi drivers. But sometimes it’s a result of the aging of the hardware. Pushing the WiFi to the max over time sometimes results in some components wearing out sooner.
The answer is more likely that the original iPads were relatively underpowered and not destined to scale well into the future, but then again everyone knew the specs. It’s wrong to say that Apple doesn’t give a fuck about ensuring older hardware stays operable with iOS in this case, seeing as how every iPad except the very first one is compatible with the current iOS 9. Supporting 5-year-old hardware in what Apple had hoped would evolve into a disposable market segment isn’t too shabby. In fact, it’s more like they are supporting it to a fault, since key features of newer iOS releases are often left out on older hardware.
As for supporting newer apps, that is totally out of Apple’s control. The app developer alone decides what models to support. If newer apps aren’t compatible, contact the developer and complain.
FWIW, the $500 price point of the first iPad was way below what everyone was expecting. Generally speaking, it was not, at the time, considered high-dollar for a tablet. Basically, your mother paid the price for being an early adopter- not a terribly uncommon occurrence with Apple products. The iPads released only a few generations later are still going relatively strong and will probably continue to do so for a bit longer, a reality Apple has had to come to terms with in the big leveling off of iPad sales.
Same here!
Got sick of the thing being so damn unstable. I even went through the whole hard reset and it didn’t help one bit.
I always felt the iOS updates were the culprit. Meant to improve performance on the most recent ipads and slowly make the old ones obsolete.
I finally broke down and traded up to the smaller ipad pro.
We’ll see how many years I get out of this one.
I have 4 iPads (and 5 iPhones, but that’s another discussion). Original iPad, iPad2, original iPad mini, and now an iPad Pro. (Wi-Fi only versions) They all work fine.
The only indication is that the original iPad regularly crashes the browser - meaning the browser closes and I’m back to the main screen. It just did this two minutes ago on opening www.reuters.com - but reopen and it loads fine, I can browse a few news stories. Sometimes pages are a bit slow to load.
As for the iPad 2 - just browsing, I don’t see any problems. Once in a rare while, it will close the browser too, but not often enough to be noticeable. All my iPads are up to date with as late software versions as they allow, and all have a decent amount of free storage.