I'm a long long time user of apple products, and regarding your post, which I agree with:
iamnew2this wrote:
"It seems to me that a phone with all the horsepower the 4s has should be able to search calendar information that it has in its memory without resorting to have to use someone else’s program to do that. What is Apple thinking? My Palm unit with nowhere near the horsepower did it with no problem! It seems that Apple is NOT SERIOUS about providing a really useful PDA function for its owners."
end quote.
My answer was to switch to Android.
I posted on apple suggestions site many times, asking them to fix this issue, from the very first iPhone to the iPhone 4s which was my last apple phone.
I believe the problem is due to the fact that they have the search system set up to start a search as soon as you start typing the first letter of a word. The same on the desktop Apple.
This is supposed to make it faster or easier to find things.
But, on an iPhone, if you have 14 years of notes in CALENDAR or on the phone like you and I have, it WOULD slow down to a crawl IF it's trying to search data that large on a phone. Especially if you type slowly where it starts searching for 'Arthur' at 'Ar' it starts the search, freezing the phone.
They also don't highlight the search string we are looking for, instead (up to the time I quit using iPhones) they take you to the DOCUMENT the strings are in, but don't show them to you IN those documents. Palm PDA did MUCH better.
They don't seem to be willing to change this 'feature'. So, we are stuck with their unilateral choices, if we stick with Apple phones.
BTW I also used Palm PDA's. I bought an apple II computer when it first came out, a Mac when it first became available, STILL have a Mac (but can't upgrade my 2009 Mac Desktop Pro, since they don't make it any longer. Instead they make a limited super expensive Mac Pro designed for a narrow user group of potential buyers.
It is not right that we have to try to find 'work arounds' to these limits on such basic search features.
PDA makers competed with each other to increase power and features and USABILITY, of their devices.
But since the iPhone they are all gone. and the direction now is for distracting ENTERTAINMENT, gaming, reading or watching gossip.
So where is the word processor, spread sheet, database ability?
and SEARCH ability?
iPhones are toys now, and unfortunately their direction is copied by the competition.
At least in Android there are easy work arounds to the search back one year limit, that Android also adopted.
Fortunately they didn't adopt the instant search 'feature' . 🙂