The General Usability of Used iPhone vs Brand New iPhone

I decided to test the general usability of our used iPhone to see if there's any immediately noticeable lag or stuttering when scrolling back and forth and navigating the operating system. I'm definitely not seeing any real differences, at least not yet. Let's just go ahead and open up the news app for example and try scrolling through there. So, it does look to be slightly better on iOS 12 compared to iOS 17, perhaps iOS 17 is a little bit slower.

Now that we're actually in scrolling through on both phones, I'm not really noticing any differences between them. They both look extremely fluid. Let's try opening the camera and we'll switch it to the front-facing one take a couple of photos again. Not really seeing any differences here, actually there was just a touch of lag on our used iPhone but that's about it. We are really having to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find any differences. I think we got to run some more formal stress testing to see if there's anything that will show up.

So, we'll run the geekbench 5 CPU Benchmark on both devices and we'll see if there's any differences. Interestingly, our old phone finished first but the new phone is scoring slightly higher, it's about a 1.5% difference, hardly conclusive. I think we got to run the test again this time our new phone finished first and actually huh, the performance is still higher and this time it's actually a bigger Gap that's about a 9% difference between these two devices. We're still seeing about 5% better performance on our new phone versus our used iPhone.

Now let's run the compute Benchmark and we'll see if there's any differences there. Uh, well, this time our old phone is outperforming our new phone and that's an 8% difference which is about what we were seeing in the CPU test. Let's do that again and see if this is a consistent difference. Well now it's actually grown slightly. We like to give it a fair shot and look at that it's grown even further still, so it seems pretty consistent that our old phone is doing better than our new phone in this particular test.

Now we're going to run the 3D Mark SlingShot Extreme Benchmark and I will say I started these at the same time. It seems like our new iPhone is a few frames ahead so our new phone finished way before the old phone and it's actually now scoring higher, so we had better performance for the new phone in this particular test. Huh, so interesting results from our new versus used iPhone comparison and it does in fact seem like there are some minor differences in the speed of these phones.

It's hard to attribute those to age or iOS or battery status but we did notice on average that the new iPhone was slightly faster just a couple of percentage points in our synthetic tests as well as launching applications slightly quicker and booting up slightly quicker. However, the big takeaway here is given that this is a literally brand new phone on iOS 12 compared to a 6-year-old one with 83% battery capacity on the latest version of iOS 17, this is not a difference that you would notice if you didn't have the phone side by side.

But of course, we do have to keep in mind that these are just a few simple tests and after running them I was kind of like okay what else can we do? Should we add a whole bunch of apps on it? Should I use these phones for a couple of weeks and then it dawned on me that is the factor that we can't account for. I don't know about you guys but I don't often reset my phone back to zero reinstall the operating system from scratch and then redownload my apps manually, no, you buy the phone you set it up and you just use it until you get a new one, so any slowdowns that you would notice are probably more likely as a result of what's on the phone as opposed to the phone itself.

If you haven't shut your phone off and turned it back on again in a year that's more likely to cause any feelings of slowness or lagginess than the phone itself being throttled. So, it seems unlikely to me that a modern iPhone is going to feel limited by its processor before it's limited by Apple discontinuing iOS support. There are other factors that could contribute to an older iPhone feeling slow but I don't think the performance is one of them.

If you found this video interesting let me know in the comments down below, I'm very curious to hear you guys thoughts on this and with that, thank you guys so much for watching, I'll see you in the next one.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: entoday I want to address an age-old question that you've probably seen time and time again does an iPhone actually get slower as it gets older every year when a new version of iOS comes out you'll find people talking about how it made their iPhone slower is Apple doing that intentionally to try to get you to upgrade is your phone just getting slower as it gets older there are so many factors but there's only one way to find out if any of it's true and that's to buy an iPhone 10s the oldest phone that Apple still supports under iOS 17 and then find out if it's slower than when it was new but how are we going to do that this phone came out nearly 6 years ago well fortunately I happened to find this that's right a brand new still sealed iPhone 10s this is our perfect control group because now we can compare a 6-year-old iPhone XS on the latest version of iOS 17 with a battery at 83% capacity to what it would have been like straight out of the box nearly 6 years ago and hopefully we can get to the bottom of this conundrum once and for all but first a word from today's video sponsor today's video is sponsored by charge and their new Shar geek 170 power bank probably the coolest looking power bank there is wrapped in this very futuristic transparent prism you'll find 24,000 milliamp hours of battery power that that can deliver up to 140 WTS through a single USBC that's right you can fast charge a 16-in MacBook Pro with this thing actually you can do that and fast charge an iPhone 15 pro at the same time thanks to 170 wat total output yeah this thing is not messing around you can keep tabs on your power output thanks to a built-in display that shows the input and output wattage as well as charge time remaining and you can bring charge geek anywhere you go thanks to to its airplane safe 86.4 W capacity and ip66 water resistance it's the go anywhere do anything charge anything power bank solution check out the link in the description below to learn more a big thanks to them for sponsoring this video and now let's get back to it so I bought this sealed iPhone XS on eBay and honestly I was a little bit nervous that it was going to be fake but now that this thing has arrived I am pretty convinced that it's real first of all the packaging it's appropriately worn for something that's never been opened I also pulled the IMEI off the back and ran it through an apple serial number Checker which showed the device has never been activated so I think we're in the clear for finding a brand new 6-year-old iPhone so let's go ahead and unbox it that sound look at that a good good sign that this is real is you can see a bunch of scratches in the plastic in the outline of where the phone is embossed and that indicates that the packaging has been on the phone the entire time so that's good look at this there's something just kind of weird about unboxing a new old iPhone and this one isn't even that old but oh man it's so shiny the edges haven't had a chance to get scratched yet let's go ahead and peel the mac oh look at that gosh this really was a beautiful phone half the reason to do this was just for the ASMR and look at that remember when Apple used to give you free earbuds with your iPhone those were the days we also have a charging brick here which is wrapped in the period correct uh little paper packaging that they used to do we get a sim eject tool cuz of course we have a SIM trick this isn't an old iPhone so we're all generally pretty familiar with what you get in the Box all right so we got a little battery bank and we're going to find out if this thing is going to boot up or if the battery has survived it's charging it's booting oh we got the charge sound look at that and look at that this phone is 6 years old but I just got a prompt on my iPhone to set it up this is the kind of features that make apple so goated this is a 6-year-old phone that's not even on the current version of iOS and it's still integrated in the ecosystem it's just great however we are going to set this phone up manually because I want these two to be as close to identical as I can get them all right so that's face ID all set up and because this thing is brand new it should be on iOS 12 they really want us to set up a whole bunch of stuff hey Siri oh remember that Siri animation hey Siri apologies if you your day has now been ruined going through this setup process is the type of thing that for some people is going to be incredibly nostalgic cuz there's a lot of people that are really obsessed with previous versions of iOS but some people are just going to say like yeah you're setting up a recent iPhone oh look at that the the wallpaper this is really bringing me back all right let's see what version of iOS we are running General about ooh 12.1.2 you know what that means folks this test is going to work because we now have an original iphone XS on the iOS version that it launched with and we can now see how it has aged over the past 6 years so we're going to get started with some simple usability testing so let's power on both phones at the same time to see if the newer version of iOS takes a bit longer to boot so you can see the Apple logo actually showed up a a little bit quicker but let's see how long it takes in total oh interesting so iOS 12 definitely booted up faster than 17 it was only a couple of seconds but that was definitely a noticeable difference now in the interest of keeping everything comparable I've only installed a couple of apps that are benchmarking tools specifically compatible with iOS 12 and 17 but before we get into any of those I want to test the General usability to see if there's any immediately noticeable lag or stuttering on our used iPhone so straight away when when scrolling back and forth and and navigating the operating system I'm definitely not seeing any real differences let's just go ahead and open up the news app for example and try scrolling through there so it does look to be slightly ahead on iOS 12 perhaps iOS 17 is a little bit slower but now that we're actually in scrolling through on both phones I'm not really noticing any differences between them they both look extremely fluid let's try opening the camera and we'll switch it to the front-facing one take a couple of photos again not really seeing any differences here actually there was just a touch of lag on our used iPhone but man we are really having to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find any differences let's do some more formal stress testing to see if there's anything that will show up there so we'll run the geekbench 5 CPU Benchmark on both devices and we'll see if there's any differences so interestingly our old phone finished first but the the new phone is scoring slightly higher it's about a 1.5% difference hardly conclusive I think we got to run the test again this time our new phone finished first and actually huh the performance is still higher and this time it's actually a bigger Gap that's about 9% difference between these two devices I think we got to do one more test well there you have it the third test result is in and we're still seeing about 5% better performance on our new phone versus our used let's now run the compute Benchmark and we'll see if there's any differ is there uh well this time our old phone is outperforming our new phone and that's an 8% difference which is about what we were seeing in the CPU test let's do that again and see if this is a consistent difference well now it's actually grown slightly let's do one more you know rules of three we like to give it a fair shot and look at that it's grown even further still so it seems pretty consistent that our old phone is doing better than our new phone in this particular test all right so now we're going to run the 3D Mark slingshot extreme Benchmark and I will say I started these at the same time it seems like our new iPhone is a few frames ahead so our new phone finished way before the old phone and it's actually now scoring higher so we had better performance for the new phone in the geekbench CPU better performance on our old phone in geekbench compute and now better performance for the GPU on our new phone huh so interesting results from our new versus used iPhone comparison and it does in fact seem like there are some minor differences in the speed of these phones it's it's hard to attribute those to age or iOS or battery Stu status but we did notice on average that the new iPhone was slightly faster just a couple of percentage points in our synthetic tests as well as launching applications slightly quicker and booting up slightly quicker however the big takeaway here is given that this is a literally brand new phone on iOS 12 compared to a 6-year-old one with 83% battery capacity on the latest version of iOS 17 this is not a difference that you would notice if you didn't have the phone side by side but of course we do have to keep in mind that these are just a few simple tests and after running them I was kind of like okay what else can we do should we add a whole bunch of apps on it should I use these phones for a couple of weeks and then it dawned on me that is the factor that we can't account for I don't know about you guys but I don't often reset my phone back to zero reinstall the operating system from from scratch and then redownload my apps manually no you buy the phone you set it up and you just use it until you get a new one so any slowdowns that you would notice are probably more likely as a result of what's on the phone as opposed to the phone itself if you haven't shut your phone off and turned it back on again in a year that's more likely to cause any feelings of slowness or lagginess than the phone itself being throttled so it's seems unlikely to me that a modern iPhone is going to feel limited by its processor before it's limited by Apple discontinuing iOS support there's other factors that could contribute to an older iPhone feeling slow but I don't think the performance is one of them and if you found this video interesting let me know in the comments down below I'm very curious to hear you guys thoughts on this and with that thank you guys so much for watching I'll see you in the next one hetoday I want to address an age-old question that you've probably seen time and time again does an iPhone actually get slower as it gets older every year when a new version of iOS comes out you'll find people talking about how it made their iPhone slower is Apple doing that intentionally to try to get you to upgrade is your phone just getting slower as it gets older there are so many factors but there's only one way to find out if any of it's true and that's to buy an iPhone 10s the oldest phone that Apple still supports under iOS 17 and then find out if it's slower than when it was new but how are we going to do that this phone came out nearly 6 years ago well fortunately I happened to find this that's right a brand new still sealed iPhone 10s this is our perfect control group because now we can compare a 6-year-old iPhone XS on the latest version of iOS 17 with a battery at 83% capacity to what it would have been like straight out of the box nearly 6 years ago and hopefully we can get to the bottom of this conundrum once and for all but first a word from today's video sponsor today's video is sponsored by charge and their new Shar geek 170 power bank probably the coolest looking power bank there is wrapped in this very futuristic transparent prism you'll find 24,000 milliamp hours of battery power that that can deliver up to 140 WTS through a single USBC that's right you can fast charge a 16-in MacBook Pro with this thing actually you can do that and fast charge an iPhone 15 pro at the same time thanks to 170 wat total output yeah this thing is not messing around you can keep tabs on your power output thanks to a built-in display that shows the input and output wattage as well as charge time remaining and you can bring charge geek anywhere you go thanks to to its airplane safe 86.4 W capacity and ip66 water resistance it's the go anywhere do anything charge anything power bank solution check out the link in the description below to learn more a big thanks to them for sponsoring this video and now let's get back to it so I bought this sealed iPhone XS on eBay and honestly I was a little bit nervous that it was going to be fake but now that this thing has arrived I am pretty convinced that it's real first of all the packaging it's appropriately worn for something that's never been opened I also pulled the IMEI off the back and ran it through an apple serial number Checker which showed the device has never been activated so I think we're in the clear for finding a brand new 6-year-old iPhone so let's go ahead and unbox it that sound look at that a good good sign that this is real is you can see a bunch of scratches in the plastic in the outline of where the phone is embossed and that indicates that the packaging has been on the phone the entire time so that's good look at this there's something just kind of weird about unboxing a new old iPhone and this one isn't even that old but oh man it's so shiny the edges haven't had a chance to get scratched yet let's go ahead and peel the mac oh look at that gosh this really was a beautiful phone half the reason to do this was just for the ASMR and look at that remember when Apple used to give you free earbuds with your iPhone those were the days we also have a charging brick here which is wrapped in the period correct uh little paper packaging that they used to do we get a sim eject tool cuz of course we have a SIM trick this isn't an old iPhone so we're all generally pretty familiar with what you get in the Box all right so we got a little battery bank and we're going to find out if this thing is going to boot up or if the battery has survived it's charging it's booting oh we got the charge sound look at that and look at that this phone is 6 years old but I just got a prompt on my iPhone to set it up this is the kind of features that make apple so goated this is a 6-year-old phone that's not even on the current version of iOS and it's still integrated in the ecosystem it's just great however we are going to set this phone up manually because I want these two to be as close to identical as I can get them all right so that's face ID all set up and because this thing is brand new it should be on iOS 12 they really want us to set up a whole bunch of stuff hey Siri oh remember that Siri animation hey Siri apologies if you your day has now been ruined going through this setup process is the type of thing that for some people is going to be incredibly nostalgic cuz there's a lot of people that are really obsessed with previous versions of iOS but some people are just going to say like yeah you're setting up a recent iPhone oh look at that the the wallpaper this is really bringing me back all right let's see what version of iOS we are running General about ooh 12.1.2 you know what that means folks this test is going to work because we now have an original iphone XS on the iOS version that it launched with and we can now see how it has aged over the past 6 years so we're going to get started with some simple usability testing so let's power on both phones at the same time to see if the newer version of iOS takes a bit longer to boot so you can see the Apple logo actually showed up a a little bit quicker but let's see how long it takes in total oh interesting so iOS 12 definitely booted up faster than 17 it was only a couple of seconds but that was definitely a noticeable difference now in the interest of keeping everything comparable I've only installed a couple of apps that are benchmarking tools specifically compatible with iOS 12 and 17 but before we get into any of those I want to test the General usability to see if there's any immediately noticeable lag or stuttering on our used iPhone so straight away when when scrolling back and forth and and navigating the operating system I'm definitely not seeing any real differences let's just go ahead and open up the news app for example and try scrolling through there so it does look to be slightly ahead on iOS 12 perhaps iOS 17 is a little bit slower but now that we're actually in scrolling through on both phones I'm not really noticing any differences between them they both look extremely fluid let's try opening the camera and we'll switch it to the front-facing one take a couple of photos again not really seeing any differences here actually there was just a touch of lag on our used iPhone but man we are really having to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find any differences let's do some more formal stress testing to see if there's anything that will show up there so we'll run the geekbench 5 CPU Benchmark on both devices and we'll see if there's any differences so interestingly our old phone finished first but the the new phone is scoring slightly higher it's about a 1.5% difference hardly conclusive I think we got to run the test again this time our new phone finished first and actually huh the performance is still higher and this time it's actually a bigger Gap that's about 9% difference between these two devices I think we got to do one more test well there you have it the third test result is in and we're still seeing about 5% better performance on our new phone versus our used let's now run the compute Benchmark and we'll see if there's any differ is there uh well this time our old phone is outperforming our new phone and that's an 8% difference which is about what we were seeing in the CPU test let's do that again and see if this is a consistent difference well now it's actually grown slightly let's do one more you know rules of three we like to give it a fair shot and look at that it's grown even further still so it seems pretty consistent that our old phone is doing better than our new phone in this particular test all right so now we're going to run the 3D Mark slingshot extreme Benchmark and I will say I started these at the same time it seems like our new iPhone is a few frames ahead so our new phone finished way before the old phone and it's actually now scoring higher so we had better performance for the new phone in the geekbench CPU better performance on our old phone in geekbench compute and now better performance for the GPU on our new phone huh so interesting results from our new versus used iPhone comparison and it does in fact seem like there are some minor differences in the speed of these phones it's it's hard to attribute those to age or iOS or battery Stu status but we did notice on average that the new iPhone was slightly faster just a couple of percentage points in our synthetic tests as well as launching applications slightly quicker and booting up slightly quicker however the big takeaway here is given that this is a literally brand new phone on iOS 12 compared to a 6-year-old one with 83% battery capacity on the latest version of iOS 17 this is not a difference that you would notice if you didn't have the phone side by side but of course we do have to keep in mind that these are just a few simple tests and after running them I was kind of like okay what else can we do should we add a whole bunch of apps on it should I use these phones for a couple of weeks and then it dawned on me that is the factor that we can't account for I don't know about you guys but I don't often reset my phone back to zero reinstall the operating system from from scratch and then redownload my apps manually no you buy the phone you set it up and you just use it until you get a new one so any slowdowns that you would notice are probably more likely as a result of what's on the phone as opposed to the phone itself if you haven't shut your phone off and turned it back on again in a year that's more likely to cause any feelings of slowness or lagginess than the phone itself being throttled so it's seems unlikely to me that a modern iPhone is going to feel limited by its processor before it's limited by Apple discontinuing iOS support there's other factors that could contribute to an older iPhone feeling slow but I don't think the performance is one of them and if you found this video interesting let me know in the comments down below I'm very curious to hear you guys thoughts on this and with that thank you guys so much for watching I'll see you in the next one he\n"