Q: How is iPad 2 performance using iOS 9.1?

If you are used to ios8, you might not notice any big change compared to ios9. Check out this article: http://www.itpro.co.uk/smartphones/25320/ios-9-performance-on-iphone-4s-and-ipad -mini It shows that the biggest decrease of performance came with ios8.

"I believe this is NOT an Apple or iOS issue, but issues with individual users' iPad 2 configurations from the getgo."

If this is the case, how can a simple iOS upgrade done via itunes result in a drastic loss in performance bearing in mind no settings were altered before or after...

You can go on being an apologist for the company but you cannot deny upgrading is hardly the easy, thoughtless process that it should be?

Havent had time to implement all of your recommendations as yet, I will do when i get the time and report back. I'm somewhat resentful of the fact that I will need to make that time though, if you get my point.

Thats not to say I dont admire your efforts in attempting to resolve the problem for people, just to clarify...

I would not say "out of the box" performance.  All the woes that the older iPads, especially iPad 2s, are suffering under began with iOS 8.  Their performance has been going from bad to worse with every new iOS update.  Using your update procedure, my iPad's performance didn't degrade too much from going to iOS 9.1 from 8.4.1.  However, your procedure didn't bring my iPad performance to iOS 6 or 7 level.  I still have hesitations when opening apps or new web pages etc.

I am also noticing that battery consumption is a lot more on iOS 9.1 than on 8.4.1.

iOS 9 was touted to increase battery life across ALL iOS devices.

I have noted that battery life on my two iPad 2s and my iPad 3 have either NOT really changed OR it may have gotten a little worse in terms of usage times on a charge.

There is no real way to control this factor.

Especially given the fact that my iPads are 3-4 years old. The lithium ion batteries may just be starting to show their age and maybe not holding a charge as long as a newer iPad with less hours of use on the batteries.

I do a complete battery drain down, at least, once a month to help re-cycle the battery to keep it from failing early in its life span.

I didn't pay attention to battery life yet. But since I have to wait for webpages and apps to load longer, it certainly feels a bit shorter. I see no big drain though. For your interest: You can check some data of your battery via iBackupBot. It's basically a software to manage your itunes backups but also gives a bit more information about your ipad and its battery like number of load cycles and current maximum capacity.

Pardon my ignorance but how do you do the erase step of the erase/restore procedure?

Eject/disconnect your iPad once the backup to iTunes is complete.

From the iPad,

in the Settings App, General setting, in the right column, scroll down until you see the Reset setting.

Tap the Reset setting.

Tap the Reset and erase option to completely erase the entire contents of the iPad.

Then proceed to set the iPad up as a new iPad (do not setup and passcodes or iCloud services for this step).

Once the iPad is setup as new, plug your iPad into your computer via USB cable, if iTunes starts to sync up, cancel the sync by click a small X that is either on the left or right hand side in iTunes center display box.

WIth your iPad icon seleted, in the large right panel look for the restore from backup option and click this to begin the restore from your last and previously created backup and allow the iPad to complete the entire restore and boot back up to its Home screen.

Once the restore is complete, finish setting up the iPad and let it sync back to iTunes you can either cancel the sync, again or let it backup, again.

Then disconnect the iPad.

Do one hard reset of your iPad by holding down both the Home and sleep/wake buttons simultaneously until your iPad goes to black and restarts with Apple logo, then release the buttons.

Once your iPad is back to the Home screen,

In the Settings App under the General tab, to the right under Spotlight sesrch, try disabling the search under apps that really do not need a search, like some games, remotes, apps that really do not need to be searched, etc., to reduce the list for Spotlight to search.

Try turning on Reduced Motion.

This is found in the Settings App in the General tab the left panel.

In the right panel look under Accessibility, the look for Reduce Motion and turn this feature "On".

You should see an appreciable performance increase on all iPad 2, 3 and 4 models.

In the Settings App under the General Tab, in the right column, look for Background App Refresh and turn this setting to "off".

Good Luck!

MIchelPM

Thanks for the detailed instructions, I will try it in a day or so, it won't fix my pop server email problem but hopefully it will generally improve the performanc.

THanks again, much appreciated.

I avoided updating my ipad 2 from 6.1.3 until yesterday,,,there were two reasons that finally compelled me to update:

1) app support on 6.1.3 has become hit or miss; none of my banking apps support it any longer and even things like Waze seem to be self-corrupting.

2) the update Apple made available was to 8.4.1 (yay)!

So now I'm on 8.4.1 and performance generally *****. It is still a useable device, barely, but the performance issues are a fair tradeoff to get current app support. I've read every word of this thread and will definitely not be updating to 9.1 except as a science fair experiment when I replace this device.

After going everything including a backup, wipe and restore (which took four hours) because the iPad kept disconnecting during the restore process - a whole other set of issues - there hasn't been a noticeable improvement. It's still laggy with some apps, scrolling is buggy at times. I might turn the motion control back off and just never update it again. The more they've tried to fix things the worse it's gotten, precisely because I don't think they're coding for the old hardware. If I could go back to 8 I would and be happy.

....yo an add to the list that the music I've purchased from itunes won't work either! #rippedoff.    Please make it possible to revert to iOS 8.,,,

HI Michel

I Had done all of your suggestions and then did the hard reset.  I think now it is usable.  Today for instance Safari has not crashed yet and respnse is better.

I am experimenting with the Mercury and Firefox Browsers.

Thanks so much

I think it's generally interesting that those on this forum explaining how to perform the upgrade and get the most performance out of ios 9.1 on old hardware (and claim to be successfully doing it) are level 5+ users on the forums.

Whereas all the people whining about the update or telling people not to update at all are almost all exclusively level 1 users.

Now I agree that Apple has botched several iOS updates, and I do think that it stinks that there's no way to reverse an update.  But I feel that folks that the majority of the experienced users are saying that the update is not that bad and acceptable, while all the first time posters are almost exclusively here to complain.

In general Apple devices hold their longevity quite well (as I'm writing this on a late-2008 Al macbook, running Yosemite).  People who expect a 4+ year old device to run the latest and greatest version of the OS with perfect performance are kidding themselves.

I recently updated my iPad 2 from 7 to 8 - and to tell you the honest truth; iOS 7  in terms of performance - which is why I thought I'd try the iOS 8 update.  Yes by default it 8 is a poor performer; but with the tweaks described (turn off motion graphics, background refresh, etc - stuff that's really not that important on an iPad in general), I was at least as performant as my device was before I upgraded.

While I have read many of the messages on this thread, one thing that I have discovered that has NOT been well noted is that every version of iOS performs very poorly when very little free space is available.  Many of us with devices that are 4+ years old have devices that are running nearly full with very little free space - and if you hadn't done a full restore; what little space you have is likely fragmented. Don't let anyone fool you - fragmentation happens on flash storage devices too; and with older devices with lower ram - they have to swap into that fragmented storage area - make them extremely slow; hence why those who have reported the best performance did a factory restore and then recovered a backup.  My wife has a nearly full iPhone 6 Plus, and my 5S with only 1 GB of available space runs circles around her 6.

So my suggestion for those who did all the other tweaks and aren't happy with the performance... do some housecleaning first.  Remove those apps you don't use, remove all those useless selfie pics of you holding your iPad in front of a mirror (or back them up to Photos).  If you use a premium music service like Spotify change the amount of offline storage it can use to something smaller (even try removing and downloading the app again). Get about 3 - 5GB of free space available; then perform a tethered full backup to a computer.  When that's done restore the device to factory fresh with the new iOS and then restore your data and apps from your backup - you'll find performance will increase several fold (and this has been true with every iOS update).

Now for those of you that came to this thread to figure out the state of the union of 9.1 on iPad 2's, I'm inclined to take the words from level 5 users over level 1 users.  So I'm in the process starting that update to the latest 9.x - as I trust the experienced users of these forums a whole lot more than those of you that came here for the first time to just whine or say stay away.

For those of you who truly have problems... as others have mentioned, send an message via the official feedback form; Hint: if you want a higher likelihood of a response, use the one on ADC as opposed to dotCom. Apple does indeed monitor and occasionally moderate these boards; they just don't necessarily respond here.

DISCLAIMER: Yes, my user points are low, as I don't usually post here with my personal account; however professionally in the past, I used to help manage these forums for many years with a different account as well I designed and built some of the original software for managing them.

<Edited by Host>

@James: I agree that one can't expect old hardware to run new software in most cases, including iOS. I think the dissatisfaction has come from Apple's pushing of the software onto devices that couldn't handle it without tweaking, and that tweaking coming through digging through support forums, while the end user expects the software to work fine because Apple is pushing it. I've never seen anything put out by Apple before an update that said that it might not run as well as expected on older systems. It's typically been "you need this because it's better" followed by "do you want to upgrade?" I think greater communication from Apple up front would be very helpful so we as users can decide if we want to trade performance and some eye candy for whatever the new upgrade offers, and give a trial period of say 30 days where you can try the software and roll it back if you don't like the performance hit. Help from Apple up front regarding the tweaks you mentioned would also be extremely beneficial.

Compare the problems related here to a typical Windows release that says up front what hardware you will need to run the software effectively. That's because the PC hardware pool is so diverse. Because the hardware pool for Apple products is so much smaller one would expect greater compatibility. After all they're making this for their product.