Is Apple deliberately slowing the old iphone to force consumers to buy a new generation of iphones?

First, a group of images from Google trends. (Google Trends records the number of searches for a certain time period.) ）

If you do data, then you should feel something. In particular, the first picture, it seems that the law is more obvious than the second, the second picture is just a normal linear growth, mixed with some noise, and the first picture, there are several Gu Feng, obviously and some events closely correspond.

What would you guess if you guessed that the two images related to the search keywords?

If you have this experience, Apple introduced a new generation of iphone and iOS, you update your old iphone's operating system, suddenly found that your iphone is a lot slower, you may also search the first picture of the keywords. "Iphone is slow" (iphone slow). The second picture is "Samsung Galaxy Slow" (Samsung Galaxy Slow) search volume. This intriguing phenomenon was discovered by Laura Trucco, a professor of economics at Harvard University, Sendhil Mullainathan and Economics PhD.

So how do you explain these two pictures? The following photos may give you more information:

These two pictures of the iphone and GS of the major updates are also marked out, the law at a glance.

The first image of the Gu Feng period "coincides with" several major upgrades to the iphone, and from the second picture we can see that each time the update of Samsung Galaxy S has not caused a significant increase in search volume.

The specific conclusions and analyses that they have come to see are in the original text of NYT. But overall, this is a very doubtful question, whether Apple deliberately let the iphone run slowly deliberately slow, and prompted consumers to buy a new generation of the iphone?

Some people may feel that this is just a psychological role, to see a new generation of the more powerful iphone, will feel that their hands on the old iphone suddenly slowed down. But this phenomenon should also be reflected in the Samsung Galaxy, but we can see that the Samsung GS new model of the advent, and did not make people feel their old GS slowed down.

And Samsung actually does not have the ability to let the old GS to slow, because the Android operating system Google developed, the new GS sell better, Google also do not make money, Google has no reason to do such a thing.

So simply saying that the psychological effect may not explain this phenomenon.

On the other hand, the hardware itself does not adapt to the new operating system may also be a cause. Apple is a "carrot" company, software and hardware compatibility optimizations tend to do better than Android and GS, so in order to maximize the use of the next generation of hardware and iOS features, may sacrifice the new iOS on the old iphone compatibility and optimization.

And an important feature of iOS is the inability to downgrade (or downgrade without official means), so once you upgrade, you'll find that your phone is slowing down and there's no way to re-use the old iOS. This feature has actually been criticized, and many people believe that Apple's approach is to force consumers to eliminate the old iphone.

On the other hand, Apple is able to push new system updates to the iphone, and every generation of hardware updates is often accompanied by updates to the new system, which generally means that Apple users are more likely to update to the latest iOS, while the latest iOS devices are always much higher than the Android data. Neither Samsung nor Google has the ability to influence the version of the operating system that users use.

Of course, there is the possibility that GS users will always feel their phone slowed for a variety of reasons, such as software, plug-ins and so on ... This problem is not outstanding on the iphone, so in contrast, the impact of the GS user search "Samsung Galaxy slow" too many factors, too much noise, masking the possible due to operating system updates caused by the performance degradation of the related search.

If we compare the following sets of data:

Blue-"iphone 4 is Slow" (iphone 4 slow), red-"iphone 4s is slow" (iphone 4s slow) and yellow-"iphone 5 is Slow" (iphone 5 Slow):

Similarly, blue-"Samsung Galaxy S2 Slow" (Samsung Galaxy S2 Slow), red-"Samsung Galaxy S3 Slow" (Samsung Galaxy S3 slow) and yellow-"Samsung Galaxy S4 Slow" (Samsung Galaxy S4 Slow).

Can be found that the law of GS is far less obvious than the iphone, but the iphone 5 (iphone 4S) before the release of the relevant model is very slow search volume, this from a side is not able to reflect some problems, in the iphone release time period, The key words associated with the iphone will have an upward trend, is that why?

So what about Apple's other iOS device and ipad data? ：

Although the rules are not obvious, every major update to iOS (around September) will cause a slight rise.

In terms of economic and corporate profitability, this seems to be good for Apple and is consistent with the personal experience of some of our users. But Apple has a lot of risk to do this, including legal issues (infringement of consumer rights) and the resistance of developers, and so on, even though Apple has been verging more than once, but it is estimated that Apple will think carefully about the signs.

From this data, it is not contended Apple intentionally reduces the fluency of iOS on the old iphone. Will the IPhone 6 and iOS 8 be released this fall, and will there be more evidence to convict Apple?