iOS5 & iPad 1 - BIG Decrease in performance

MAJOR UPDATE: Okay, hopefully this will be of some help to people. I was using iCloud right from the start on my iPad 1, and I had poor performance right out of the gate. Someone, either on this thread or another (I can't remember which, and can't scroll back to check) suggested that turning off iCloud for everything except Documents and Data brought the performance back up to about 95% of what it was before.

Well... Just for kicks and giggles, I thought I'd try turning off iCloud completely, just to see what it would do. Turning all those other items off had done nothing for me, so I turned off Documents and Data as well. As soon as I did, performance returned completely to normal. Literally. Not even a reboot. Ran Angry Birds, and had no problems at all, yet three minutes earlier, Angry Birds crashed continually.

I tested all my other apps that we're having problems: safari, numbers, pages, omni outliner, omni focus, etc. all of them are performing normally now.

So I turned iCloud back on for Documents and Data, and everything is okay now. This is actually back to mostly usable. I'm finding, as I'm typing this, that the occasional mistyped word goes through, but everything else is pretty much okay. I can definitely live with this until Apple can really narrow down the problem and release a fix.

I really hope this solves it for someone else, too!

Hi there.

I've heard this from many people, you're not the only one. However, when Apple releases completely new iOS firmware, the lowest devices supported (in this case, original iPad, iPhone 3GS) often seem to lag and sometimes severely slow in performance. iPhone 4 and iPad 2 actually seemed to have improved nicely with iOS 5, faster and everything.

Luckily, there's hope for you! If you'll remember the release of iOS 4 on iPhone 3G and iPod touch 2? It was horribly slow, laggy, and I expected my iPhone 3G to die of overexhaustion any second. With 4.1, it wasn't as bad, but still terrible. With 4.2, it was improved a lot on the earliest devices. That was, unfortunately, the last version supported by the earlier ones.

I wouldn't count on it continuing to be slow. Just wait for future updates and it will most likely be faster.

May I offer a few tips of improving performance now, even with 5.0?

- Backup regularly (with computer, not iCloud)

- Clean up your stuff. Old music, apps you don't use often, movies, etc.

- Power off iPad every night

- Quit apps you don't need to continue running

And there's more you can do. And you may already be doing all this, but if not, I hope it helps!

Ok so the apple geniouses have a fix and it works!

I have been having all kinds of slow down problems until I was instructed on this fix. I had slow typing, latency etc...here is the fix

Go to settings>general>reset>reset all

This will restore the iPad to its fresh out of the box awsomeness. It won't delete any apps and keeps all your data intact. The only thing I had to do after the reset was re-enter my wifi password. My previous safari session was even intact.

Ohhhh thank heavens I have my iPad back!

Ok so the apple geniouses have a fix and it works!

I have been having all kinds of slow down problems until I was instructed on this fix. I had slow typing, latency etc...here is the fix

Go to settings>general>reset>reset all

This will restore the iPad to its fresh out of the box awsomeness. It won't delete any apps and keeps all your data intact. The only thing I had to do after the reset was re-enter my wifi password. My previous safari session was even intact.

Ohhhh thank heavens I have my iPad back!

I found the reason why our iPads are slow after iOS 5!!!!!!!

What you need to do is this:

1) launch settings, go to mail contacts and calendars, go to fetch new data, advanced, and set iCloud to fetch.

2) go back and set an interval of when to fetch. Mine is set for thirty minutes.

3) make sure on top push is still on, that means that all your emails will still be pushed, but all the iCloud sync (contacts, calendars, reminders, bookmarks) will happen at the interval you choose.

Restart the device. Your performance should be 10x faster! No more keyboard lag, nothing! Doing this puts less stress on the A4 chip, which we know we need every bit we can get with it now!!!

Optional:

1) in the settings, go to safari.

2) clear all history and cookies/data

3) enable private browsing. One of the biggest reasons why devices are slow is because it keeps all the history and cookies in the RAM. You need more RAM to make things faster. By turning on private browsing, it never records it!

As the result of months of web surfing and testing, I could narrow down the issue at is causing performance on all our original iPads! One would say to turn all the iCloud features off, but I have found that there are major performance bugs in contacts and calendars! Turn them off in the iCloud part if the settings. This, alone with disabling spotlight search results in no keyboard lag and no "checkerboard effect" in safari whe pages won't load fast enough! I hope this helps everyone as it did to me!

I disabled the new notification center (no notifications at all), and my performance seems to be right back to where it was before the update. For me the loss of notifications is not a big deal... I've got too many gizmos buzzing, beeping and chirping already. But I can imagine others will be annoyed. Btw, I have about 4 email accounts on my first gen iPad.

Maybe multiple accounts with notifications turned on is part of the problem?

I don't think Apple is "doing it" so to speak. I've been traveling for 10 days with cameras and Ipad and had good results with gen 1 turning off Photostream and turning off Icloud. I have Win 7 without Outlook in Office so much of Icloud doesn't allow me to manage from there so I just decided to do as before and back up necessary things in Dropbox, know that I can reinstall apps from app store and don't really need most other things backed up. I buy books from Kindle for the most part) so they are all available for reinstall also. I have most crucial things in Goodreader and backup in Dropbox from there--or OfficeHD. All my photos will be downloaded from SD cards to main computer for processing anyhow so use Ipad just for review and sharing. Games seem fine also. My Ipad is working much the same as before--gen 1/64GB/wifi. My husband's 32 is still on 4.3 and I don't notice that much difference after turning off notifications and selectively Icloud. (I will say notifications was driving me crazy anyhow the minute I got near wifi LOL),

Amazing. I thought it was just Apple screwing me with a software upgrade again. I was an iPhone 3G iOS4 victim, and was willing to throw in the towel and never upgrade the firmware on any Apple device again. Lion screwed my core2duo iMac as well, so I'm feeling very annoyed with everything.

But, disabling iCloud seems to have done the trick. I've had MobileMe since the start, but to be honest being able to use my ipad is more important than any iCloud feature. Even email, I have my phone for. I'm very relieved.

Still, this doesn't excuse anything. iCloud making devices run slow is a massive failure on Apple's behalf. Plus, my iPhone 4 runs iOS5 perfectly fine, and it has a slower clocked A4 processor! The only difference is that my iPhone is 6 months younger than my iPad.

It's most certainly planned obscelecene on Apple's part. The same thing happened with my iPhone 3G. I bought it when it came out, in July, and my partner got one 4 months later. Fast forward 2 years, and iOS4 screwed his phone as well, but it was nowhere near as slow as mine was.

This is independent of any features or settings. I try wiping the phone (and iPad) and starting from scratch, without any restore, and it's still slow. It's completely deliberate, and totally messed up.

Steve I just turned off Documents and Data from icloud and you're right, performance is now a reallity! Not an 100% but it's significantly different! Thanks for the tip and let's hope that apple solve issues related with ipad1 and ios5 or I have to sell my device ... 😟

Thanks to all for this thread. I followed the advice of turning off iCloud and Photostream. I did notice a remarkable improvement in perf, but still entirely unacceptable. Mail crashes at least once on load every time. It takes 15 seconds (down from 45) to load Safari (with a blank page) ready to type in a URL. I have my iPad set to automatically send crash/usage to Apple - and looking at the Diagnostic and Usage reports, they have gotten a LOT of feedback from my iPad. For example, 8 crash reports over the past 15 minutes. Looking at the crash reports, I know my iPad is telling Apple that things are not well for my device. I STRONGLY encourage everyone to let their device send crash information automatically. That way, the Apple team will get feedback that is useful to them in debugging this problem, and HOPEFULLY address the issues we are all struggling with.

Personally, I share the frustration vented by many on this thread. I would have passed on the iOS 5 upgrade for my iPad if I had any clue it was going to be this (relatively speaking) unstable. This update has marginalized the usefulness of this device CONSIDERABLY.

cmcouto, I think so also. I installed 5.0.1 night before last and mine seems zippy again with all my apps and Safari. I've only had Safari crash once in several days and I use it a lot for blogs and photo forums (where it has long pages to load, sometimes with lots of images) and a lot of other uses. When I access content like big PDFs, etc they open quickly, pages turn quickly, apps load quickly. I've turned Icloud back on, notifications (for those I want) and more and all seems as though its working normally. Worth a try to see how it works.

Yes I agree, I turned off notifications for apps I don't really care about and i noticed a performance increase right away. Ios5 must be using to much ram for ipad1! Disapointing Apple!

I found rebooting the iPad helped noticeably relative to responsiveness as well as games that crashed now run. Hold down power and home button simultaneously ignore the power off swipe and wait for the apple to appear and then release.

I've also been experiencing slowdowns with my iPad 1 32Gb. From the music stuttering when switching apps, to applications taking close to 10 seconds to open up, video not streaming with home sharing and the iPad simply not responding when plugged in via HDMI. Safari has become unusable. Simple pages are taking forever to load. I just loaded HuffPO and it took 17 seconds.

I spent $650 on a device that's now unusable. Since updating it it's been on my shelf since I can't bring myself to use it as it is.

I am beyond annoyed about this. And now I understand the marketing strategy here. 256mb of ram was a purposeful decision to brick this thing in less than 2 years and force upgrades to iPad 2 or iPad 3. iPad 2 only has 512 mb ram (seriously?). I don't mind that being done to an iPod, or even an iPhone, but an iPad is huge investment. iOS 5 made this unusable, does that mean iOS 6 will not be available to iPad 1? If that's the case this will be the last device I buy from apple.