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Level 1

10 points

iPad Air and iOS 7 - Poor Performance - slow, sluggish, jerky, choppy

HI all, this is a question as well as a statement because as I know others are suffering it's worth considering more opinions too.

I bought an iPad Air two weeks ago or so and have been using it extensively while away on holiday and at home. With iOS 7.0.4 the device is slow, somewhat unresponsive, shows lag throughout the OS and many apps and this is all from a new device touted as the latest and greatest iPad yet. The iPad Air simply just doesn't feel new, certainly not optimised anyway on iOS 7.

The following things are getting to me most:

Using gestures to return to home screen is laggy and causes strange graphical anomolies.
Tapping on the screen, for example to choose another e-mail or link often fails and needs another go.
Opening or selecting another tab in Safari can be slow and tedious.
When entering an app it often takes a second to a second and a half to be ready even though the controls have appeared.
After screen unlock the animations take a while to "sit" before the screen is ready to be scrolled or used
Tapping the Home button is ocassionaly unresponsive.
Unlocking the phone leads to missed audio clicks on the PIN code screen (Minor, however an example of slow keep up).

It should be remembered that this device got an upgraded chip, the A7 running faster than the iPhone 5S and new graphics chips too.

For those who will point out the obvious, I have restored the device back to factory image and what's more set it up as a new iPad and there are no differences, so it seems to relate directly to iOS 7. I'm wondering if the rest of you have been experiencing something similar with iOS and iPad Air.

I feel the pain of others as I had an iPhone 5 on iOS 6 and that was truly a joy to behold. The Phone and OS were simply waiting eagerly for your next move and you could not do something faster than them. The same was true with an iPad 4 I used on iOS 6 - it was truly a joy, an OS matched to a device.

While I understand iOS 7 is new and it's a lot to expect perfection from something new, this argument wears thin in numerous ways. Apple match their hardware to their software and have got a tiny amount of platforms to optimise for. iOS 7 has done away with the textures and gradients of the past - iOS 6 was constanly called the flashy pre-cursor to iOS 7. The new OS is now solid colours, mostly whites with some lines, no shine, some opaque effects but even when these are turned off (Increase Contrast setting) the difference is neglibible.

I understand iOS 7.1 will be on it's way soon and I'm really hoping for some optimisations that will make this OS / device a joy to use.

Let me know what you all think?

iPad Air Wi-Fi, Cellular, iOS 7.0.4, 32GB

Posted on Dec 18, 2013 12:17 PM

29 replies

Blah222

Level 1

0 points

Dec 18, 2013 1:54 PM in response to johnmacward

If your problem persists, try closing out your background apps, then shutting down your iPad. I hope this helps!

Dec 18, 2013 2:27 PM in response to johnmacward

iOS 7 runs beautifully on my iPad Air (and my iPhone 5S, the iPhone 5 before that and on my iPad 3), as it does for most people. If you're having trouble running iOS 7 on the newest iPad, the problem is most likely either the hardware or something 3rd party you've loaded on to it. If you want to believe it's an iOS 7 problem, and want to wait for an update, you're free to do so. In that case, there's not much more we can do for you.

Best of luck.

ckuan

Level 10

120,692 points

Dec 18, 2013 2:31 PM in response to johnmacward

Hilarious ckuan, I've followed most iOS new features from beta versions of the software being discussed on forum sites or by BIG Apple sites like MacRumors or 9to5mac.

MacRumors don't care about the NDA as they openly talk about new features on their homepage:

NDA's don't stop anybody from talking here on the hopeful performance increases:

And ironically the next post is about the exact same thing:

Anyway what other websites does is irrelevant in this discussion, here you are using Apple hosted forum and you've agreed when using this forum.

Read TOU: https://discussions.apple.com/static/apple/tutorial/tou.html

johnmacward wrote:

HI Ckuan, have you read the endless articles on slow animations on iOS 7 from the exact same reviewers? Search for that and you'll get many pages of results, it's the one of main discussed issues around iOS 7, not the individual devices.

http://osxdaily.com/2013/09/23/ios-7-slow-speed-it-up/

When the device is reviewed the review is in regards the device, not iOS 7 which they leave for a different review. So for example there's a lot said about the very thin and lightweight design, the cases, the Wifi performance, LTE and so on...

You came here talking abour your iPad and now you want to talk about IOS 7? Look, if that's the case, you are in the wrong forum then. Furthermore the link you've provided is for older devices not your iPad Air.

Did you read the anandtech article I've provided.

Anyway, have a good day. I think I've enough. End of Line.

Jan 15, 2014 12:56 AM in response to ckuan

Hi there,

I feel like the OP is right. Mine (one day old) behaves in a similiar way. An example: after browsing for a while in one tab, no other tabs open. I press the home button twice, to switch to another app, say Preferences or even just the home screen. The animation starts and fades in to the homescreen. It looks done, so I try to scroll to screen 2 to start an app from there. But the first swipe/scroll attemp is always unresponsive. I always have to wait a fraction of a second after it has zoomed in to the app or homescreen, whichever you like, before I can actually scroll or start using it. This is a major slowdown for me, cause it happens after every switch in every app.

I'll try an ipad in the store today and see if that has the same problems as mine.

johnmacward Author

Level 1

10 points

Jan 15, 2014 1:52 AM in response to Jonatanprins

Hi Jonatanprins, thanks for the feedback on this one. I felt somewhat alone here and I know that I am not.

See this forum post for those who report similar issues - it's not just us: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1665137&goto=newpost

It's as if iOS 7 is simply not optimised for iPad Air just yet, although similar issues with animation speed can be seen on iPhone too so some of this is pure iOS 7, some of it is unique to the iPad. For example like the post above I find my iPhone 5 is in fact faster than my Air - that's just not right considering the CPU and GPU performance is 2X better and the device is much, much newer.

I hear iOS 7.1 should improve this greatly according to those who are already using the betas so we shall wait until then.

Jan 22, 2014 11:46 AM in response to johnmacward

An update, things are not better, a week of ownership with a full error log from low memory warnings till memory address errors. Choppy gameplay on eg asphalt and other games. Light backlight bleeding and the ipad air is sometimes completely unresponsive. Errors like:

Incident Identifier: 31CF7CAE-DFBE-4C89-A20E-2117F4405F77

CrashReporter Key: f5b460ed54b468853cb6f3fdca6b3a765a5339cf

Hardware Model: iPad4,1

Process: awdd [1349]

Path: /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/WirelessDiagnostics.framework/Support/awdd

Identifier: awdd

Version: ???

Code Type: ARM-64 (Native)

Parent Process: launchd [1]

Date/Time: 2014-01-21 10:02:04.993 +0100

OS Version: iOS 7.0.4 (11B554a)

Report Version: 104

Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)

Exception Subtype: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0xf000000000000008

Triggered by Thread: 2

It does not feel like a premium device.

johnmacward Author

Level 1

10 points

Jan 23, 2014 5:51 AM in response to Jonatanprins

These are my precise issues, even the small amount left side backlight bleed. I think I'll send it back based on this when I get a little bit of time.

Jan 23, 2014 6:00 AM in response to johnmacward

Got myself a new one today. Same low memory warnings... one safari crash. This one's screen does feel a little more responsive. Haven't tested the backlight bleeding yet since I've only used this one in broad daylight. I guess with this one I'll wait it out till the update. Supposedly they will fix a some of the faults we are experiencing.

http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/01/22/apple-says-fix-in-the-works-for-random -ios-7-crashing-issue

Hope they will!

johnmacward Author

Level 1

10 points

Jan 23, 2014 6:41 AM in response to Jonatanprins

That was my worry. I wonder if some screens / digitizors are better than others and I have a bad one leading to a poor sense of interaction speed.

Let me know Jonatanprins if there's a really noticeable difference in your device over the next few days - I'd love to hear from you regarding this. Maybe this is the main problem from everyone suffering performance issues.

Jan 25, 2014 3:34 PM in response to johnmacward

I do still have the feeling this ipad is more responsive, however I started closing apps after using them which could contribute to the responsiveness. Some part of it could be the digitizer / screen. Hard to tell for certain since I never tried them side by side. I do feel better about my purchase now. The occasional safari crash still happens, have accepted them for now (none today) and am confident they will be fixed. So far no spontaneous reboots.

johnmacward Author

Level 1

10 points

Jan 26, 2014 9:26 AM in response to Jonatanprins

Thanks for your response all in all, I'll wait for iOS 7.1 and see what happens. There are times also when mine feels fine and other times where I see the slowdown. Even in writing this response there were times that the keyboard was perfect and other times where lag came from nowhere. This has to be the OS and less so the hardware.

Jun 21, 2014 3:12 PM in response to johnmacward

I find it sad that nothing changes here. People come with the truth and the army comes to say that the user is seeing things, that THEIR devices work perfectly and to go to the Apple store. When I was having my battery drain iOS 6.0.1 problems they told me the same thing.

1) performance problems with ios7 were huge news. Actually apple released 7.1 specifically to address the performance issues.

2) I spent some time at the apple store yesterday as I'm replacing my laptop with an iPad. I experienced the exact same thing. IOS 7 is dropping frames left and right. Jerky all the way throughout.

This issue doesn't make the tablet unusable by any means, but it isn't like Apple to release something that lags in that way. We would like to see a smooth experience.

I feel confident that A8+iOS8 will fix most if not all of these issues and that's why I'm waiting for the iPad Air 2.

All that being said the Air is a great tablet, just the overall jerkiness of the OS is annoying and very noticeable.

I started noticing it in the App Store where I was just browsing for Apps and opening the screenshots. Stutter stutter, opens. Going from landscape to portrait, stutter stutter. Sometimes smooth sometimes stutter. Scrolling stutter. Just overall it doesn't feel like a finished OS. Seems like you can NEVER get an apple product if it is the first year of something totally new. Give them 1 year to fix the kinks.

See iPhone 4 vs 4s.

Overall my experience using the iPad Air was good. The jerkiness was obviously the software. The tablet is fast, iOS is having issues. So things closed and opened fast, typing was great, and overall iOS7 looks great and clean.

The screen is bright and sharp with really nice vivid colors.

The device is light and super thin.

Most users won't give a rats behind about dropped frames here and there, but it is noticeable and I'm sure once iOS matures this will go away.

I also like to disable motion. That parallax boloney drives me nuts.

johnmacward Author

Level 1

10 points

Jun 24, 2014 9:56 AM in response to thai_iphone4

I agree with you Thai_iphone, still the same problems up here at 7.1.1. And it's just disappointing that when you go to get the latest and greatest that it doesn't perform like the latest and greatest.

I agree also with first generation devices like the iPad Air and iPhone 5. iOS 6 with my iPhone 5 was the happiest relationship in the world. It was genuinely the most fun and slickest OS I had ever used. Incredible snappy and fluid. Same with a work iPad 4 retina, the OS just ran so well. As you became more comfortable with the OS and you sped up your actions it would be willing and able to fly along at your speed.

MY experience with Apple is when they bring out new devices and OS's their old devices suffer big time. My sisters iPhone 3 and my iPhone 4 both ran appallingly after upgrading them to their latest supported OS's and I didn't understand this. Surely Apple test on all supported devices before they release.

My iPhone 5 on iOS 7 isn't bad but I can just tell when iOS 8 comes out that it will take another hit, same possibly with my iPad Air. And that's when the iPad Air 2 will be a flyer for a while.

Jun 24, 2014 12:41 PM in response to johnmacward

iPad running slow? How to speed up a slow iPad

http://appletoolbox.com/2012/07/ipad-running-slow-how-to-speed-up-a-slow-ipad/

If You Think iOS 7 Feels Slow Here’s How to Speed It Up

http://osxdaily.com/2013/09/23/ios-7-slow-speed-it-up/

You may have many apps open which can possibly cause the slowdown and possibly the loss of wifi. In iOS 4-6 double tap your Home button & at the bottom of the screen you will see the icons of all open apps. Close those you are not using by pressing on an icon until all icons wiggle - then tap the minus sign. For iOS 7 users, there’s an easy way to see which apps are open in order to close them. By double-tapping the home button on your iPhone or iPad, the new multitasking feature in iOS 7 shows full page previews of all your open apps. Simply scroll horizontally to see all your apps, and close the apps with a simple flick towards the top of the screen.

 Cheers, Tom 😉

iPad Air and iOS 7 - Poor Performance - slow, sluggish, jerky, choppy