Addition: iOS 12 makes iPhone 5s slightly faster while preserving battery life
Many readers noticed: when we published an article with test results on how various iPhones perform under iOS 12, it was missing the oldest supported iPhone: the 5s. Thanks to a tweaker we were able to test this classic.
If you don’t have a 2013 phone in your collection, don’t assume it’s ever going to be a problem when writing new articles. Still, we missed it when we got started with iOS 12; we had iPhones of every generation except the 5s.
And that’s a shame, because the promise of iOS 12 is that it makes old phones much faster. Tweaker Roelant got in touch, because his 5s is a backup device and he could easily miss it for a few weeks. A few days later, a taped envelope flopped onto the mat containing this classic smartphone. Thanks for the loan, Roland!
The 5s is the first iPhone with a 64-bit processor – the first smartphone with a 64-bit processor anyway. It is also the first iPhone with Touch ID, the fingerprint scanner that Apple has already phased out in favor of 3D facial recognition with Face ID.
We got busy with the 5s and we did the same tests that we subjected the other iPhones to. The results can now be found in the iOS 12 article. What turned out? The battery life remained about the same.
It’s faster too: all the apps we used start a few tenths of a second faster than before. It’s not much, but if you don’t honor the small, you don’t keep the big, right? We also found the user experience to be improved on a subjective level: the number of frame drops seems to be much lower, which makes using the 5s a lot nicer.
- Battery life
- Launch apps
Our results therefore support what many users have already said in comments: iOS 12 has made the iPhone 5s a significantly better phone. So if you don’t want to spend at least 1159 euros on the latest high-end models from Apple, you may be able to do even longer with this old smartphone, which, thanks to the upgrade to iOS 12, may feel a bit ‘newer’ for many people.