Apple's iPhone 5s takes comparatively mild speed hit from iOS 11 upgrade

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Apps are only marginally slower to load under iOS 11 than iOS 10.3.3 in most cases, usually fractions of a second, ArsTechnica said. Indeed the Camera app is just as quick, although some apps — namely Mail, Notes, and Maps — are visibly slower, and cold boot times jump from 26.6 seconds to 38.6. The phone is also said to drag more when running background downloads and app installs.

App load times can be improved anywhere from 0.1 to 0.9 seconds by turning on "Reduce Motion" in iOS's Accessbility settings, which kills some animated transitions.

Safari benchmarks are slightly improved with iOS 11, even ifArs remarked that the phone's 1 gigabyte of RAM leads to tabs refreshing on a regular basis. Modern iPhones typically have 2 or 3 gigabytes.

The main things the iPhone 5s are missing are now largely hardware-limited, such as Apple Pay, 3D Touch, ARKit, and Siri upgrades such as proactive search. The device also won't work with LTE models of the Apple Watch Series 3.

iOS 11 is set to launch for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch later today, available via iTunes or as an over-the-air update.