The iPhone 5 and 5c will both receive iOS 10, making them the lowest supported iPhones in the new iOS version.
Phew! A tense moment for me and many other iPhone 5 and iPhone 5c owners whilst watching the 2016 Worldwide Developer Conference. Tim Cook rattled through the new features of iOS 10 like an excited child who’d had too much cake at a birthday party – and all I could think of was ‘will my phone run it’.
Then the end screen, which listed the supported devices, and there it was – the iPhone 5 and iPhone 5c were on the list. Fantastic. Good-bye iPhone 4s however.
iOS 10 is due for release in fall 2016, and it means I could get a further 18 months out of my phone before it is dropped by Apple, giving the iPhone 5 almost six years of support and the iPhone 5c almost five years.
The iPhone 5 and iPhone 5c are virtually identical in terms of hardware, and with the iPhone 5c still being sold in 2015, it would have been a great surprise for it not to have received a 2016 OS update, so I wasn’t too surprised – but you never can be sure about Apple.
The iPhone 5 and iPhone 5c currently runs iOS 9 beautifully, which is thanks to 1 GB RAM – compared to the iPhone 4s with 512 MB RAM, which is very sluggish. For the first time in a long while, I am not eager to upgrade. My iPhone 5 isn’t annoyingly slow, and it does everything I need – and being a 64 GB model, it has more than enough space.
How iOS 10 will run on it we will have to wait and see. However, I have checked out a few YouTube videos from those already running the developer preview of iOS 10, and it compares very well to iOS 9. Some things lag a little behind, but nothing annoying or major. Keep in mind this is the first beta, and from previous experience, future betas improve everything, handle a lot better, and are more stable.
On first impressions it is looking like iOS 10 could be a good experience even on older iPhones. This is good news for us iPhone 5 and 5c owners, as it seems it isn’t going to cripple your phone.
One extra bonus is that iOS 10 developer preview seems to be a little smaller, freeing up around half a gigabyte of space back to the user.
While I have yet to experience it first hand, this all sounds good to me. It means I can keep my iPhone 5 for a lot longer.
Besides iPhone 5 owners, there are also a lot iPhone 5c users out there who love their coloured iPhones and will be pleased their handsets should run just as well as it does now.
Of course being older handsets it means they may not get all the features of iOS 10 that new iPhones will – due to technical limitations or lack of certain chips, but it has always been like that.
The one remaining question is battery life. No matter how good an OS runs, its pointless if it drains your battery too quickly. I had my iPhone 5 battery changed by Apple about a year ago so it is still pretty fresh and under iOS 9 I easily get a day of average use out of a single charge – so I hope iOS 10 doesn’t change this.
I can’t wait for the Public Beta due to be released in July. Then I can have a hands on look.
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