Tech moves fast. It’s taken for granted everyone understands it. It’s okay to feel left behind. These articles will catch you up with the very basic foundations from the very moment that screen lights up before your eyes.
Is it on?
This may feel like a silly question, but the answer isn’t always ‘yes’ or ‘no’. While there can be some variation, virtually every device has three states. Awake, Asleep, and Off. Awake and asleep are both ‘On’ states. The device is using power and performing tasks. ‘Off’ is when your device is no longer drawing power and cannot do anything. Most modern devices are rarely truly ‘Off’.
Asleep.
Until recently it was easy to tell if your device is awake or asleep. If the screen was on, it’s awake. If off, it’s asleep. When a device is asleep, it is no longer responding to your actions. It may show you information like the time or weather, and it may be listening for a ‘wake word’ like ‘Siri’ or ‘Alexa’, but you aren’t actively using it, so it is doing its own thing.
In this state, many devices go into a low-power mode to save energy. They will often use this time to perform maintenance or download new content or updates. The screen may or may not be off, but the device is still on and will ‘wake up’ as soon as you tap it or use its ‘Wake Word’.
Some devices use attention to decide whether or not to enter sleep mode. Most modern iPhones won’t go to sleep if you are looking at it. This feature is called ‘Attention Aware’.
Awake
As soon as you interact with your device it ‘wakes up’, going from asleep to awake. A device is awake any time you interact with it directly including using apps, making calls, or even previewing notifications on the Lock Screen. If you are doing something with your device, it is active. For most devices, going from asleep to awake is virtually instantaneous, but desktops and laptops, especially older ones, may take some time to become ready to receive input.
TLDR: All tech slows over time. The main culprits are usually, built up “cruft” in the software over the years, battery degradation, or simply lack of storage space. Addressing these issues can help breathe new life into an aging phone.
Apple may come out with a new phone every year but that doesn’t mean you need a new one so soon. As technology in smartphones continue to improve, the rate of improvement slows, meaning the phone you bought 2 or even 3 years ago is still perfectly capable of doing everything you want it to. If your phone is starting to feel a little long in the tooth, but you’re not ready to give it up, here are some things to try before biting the bullet and upgrading to a new phone.
1. Make sure you’re on iOS 12.
Make sure you’re on iOS 12. While there are so many reasons to install updates as soon as they come out, iOS 12 has the additional benefit of improving older devices. It’s reported that iOS 12 was initially slated to be a brand new design with major new features. Early-on that plan was shelved in favor of optimizing the software to run faster and more efficiently on existing hardware. According to independent tests by Ars Technica, they succeeded.
2. Check battery health.
Check battery health. Apple slows down the phone’s processor when the battery becomes too worn out to meet the processor’s demands. To check battery health, go to Settings > Battery > Battery Health. On that screen you will see a percentage labeled ‘Maximum Capacity’. As your phone ages, that percentage will decrease. If your phone’s battery degrades to the point of affecting speed and performance, the following message under the heading “Peak Performance” will appear:
This iPhone has experienced an unexpected shutdown because the battery was unable to deliver the necessary peak power. You have manually disabled performance management protections.
Apple offers out of warranty battery replacements for $49 on most models. Once your phone sees it has a fresh battery, it will go back to running the processor at full speed. This is the most expensive fix on the list. Even so, it is much cheaper than upgrading to a new phone, and it’s something you should only ever have to do once in the phone’s life. You can learn more about Apple’s battery management here.
3. Reset the phone and start fresh.
While not as badly as desktop computers of old, phones build up cruft over time. No matter how careful engineers are when designing software, things get left behind, quirks develop, code gets corrupted. There are two options when resetting your phone. You can back up the phone completely, reset the phone, and restore the phone to exactly the way it was before. This is the most convenient way since everything will be as you left it. It also means that some of the quirks may remain as well, but if starting over stresses you out, trying this method is a good place to start as it does give the operating system a chance to reset. It may be all your phone needed. If it doesn’t help, or you’re willing to take the plunge, I will have an article explaining the process step-by-step in the near future.
4. Buy more iCloud storage.
The only other part of this list that costs money, for less than $1 a month, you can get 10x more storage than the anemic 5gb apple gives people for free. Personally I think it’s ridiculous that apple doesn’t give more free storage even as phones get more and more internal storage, nevertheless, I recommend iCloud over other storage providers because of how much the iPhone can do with it. One of the biggest complaints I hear from people with older phones is that they keep running out of space no matter how much they delete. I truly think Apple made a mistake waiting so long to go from 16 gb on the base phone to 32 gb, but if you’re stuck with a full phone there is hope. iOS can now automatically store photos, videos, messages, and even unused apps on iCloud, freeing up space on your device. I will describe this process in greater detail soon. For most people, the 50 Gb plan will be enough to offload all their extra data, and at less than $12 a year, it’s still way cheaper than a new phone.
All devices die eventually, but with a little time and effort, your device can feel like new again. Sometimes, it’s not the device at all that is the issue. A good cleaning, a new case, and a shiny new wallpaper might be all you need to convince your brain what was once old and tired is now new again.
