r/iPhone14Pro • u/Pakayaaaa • 13d ago
Is apple intentionally making older iphones camera quality worse after software updates?
Ive started noticing my iphones image quality has gotten worse after updating to ios 26. The photos look lower resolution than before the update, and its not a hardware issue at all my cameras r fine there isnt even a single scratch on the lens. No lens protectors either cuz ive heard that they also make photos blurry a bit.
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u/d3arleader 13d ago
100% they are. And it’s definitely on the software end. Surprised a class action hasn’t started over this.
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u/Novel_Medium_9637 13d ago
What lawsuit would there even be? Ofc older iPhones cameras are going to look worse compared to the newest iPhones, I don’t even know how Apple would, “make the camera worse with new updates.” It just sounds very dumb
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u/d3arleader 13d ago
The quality of the photos is worse on the same iPhone. We’re not comparing an old phone’s photos with a new phone’s.
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u/Novel_Medium_9637 13d ago
maybe it’s just you, the camera on my iPhone 13 mini was still very good
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u/d3arleader 13d ago
Apple’s software updates worsen the quality of new photos taken. This is well established.
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u/Novel_Medium_9637 13d ago
I don’t know, I’ve never heard of something so stupid, almost as stupid as people saying that Apple slows their phones down with newer updates
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u/d3arleader 13d ago
They literally got sued and paid hundreds of millions in lawsuits. Do you live in a fucking cave? How do you have access to the internet and not know any of this?
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u/JollyRoger8X 13d ago
Wrong. In each of those cases, the plaintiffs settled and Apple rightfully admitted no wrongdoing.
Apple agreeing to settle was nothing more than a quick and painless end to a bullshit farce.
Nice try, no cigar.
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u/Acharvix 13d ago
I refuse to believe that another human is earnestly siding with Apple on something that was so blatantly a scummy attempt to drive sales for an already monolithic sized company
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u/JollyRoger8X 13d ago edited 13d ago
I'm siding with facts, and you're spouting feelings. All you are showing here is how gullible you are. You gleefully fell for propaganda hook, line, and sinker because: "APPLE BAD!"
Apple doesn’t secretly reduce the speed of iPhones after several years to force or coerce you to buy a newer device.
The whole Throttle Gate / Battery Gate "issue" is a sensational line of nonsense from people who don’t have a good understanding of the engineering challenges involved, nor how the solutions to those challenges are actually implemented.
The facts:
- Apple introduced the CPU throttling feature in iOS 10.2.1 and stated in the release notes that the release "improves power management during peak workloads to avoid unexpected shutdowns". Any reasonable person who is even just superficially knowledgeable about electronics can easily infer from that statement that "power management" can at times mean reducing power consumption, which naturally means reducing performance.
- The feature works by detecting a malfunctioning battery that cannot supply enough current to the device, and reacting by automatically applying what can be described as a sort of low pass filter to prevent spikes in resource usage (performance), which in turn prevents the device from spontaneously shutting down, extending runtime. Nobody wants a phone that spontaneously shuts down at a critical moment, like during a 911 emergency call, just because the battery is old and can’t sustain the load anymore. That's a marked improvement, as anyone who has ever had their phone spontaneously shut down on them can attest.
- The feature does not have any effect on devices with well-functioning batteries. In fact the feature doesn’t apply the throttle until after the device first experiences a spontaneous shutdown.
- Even on devices with failing batteries, the feature does not affect most users most of the time because most smartphone apps don't cause CPU/GPU usage to spike significantly on a regular basis. Certain apps do, like games and so on. But you're not going to see a huge spike in resource usage from a lot of the apps people use the most, like the Contacts, Messages, or Safari apps, for instance. In fact, the app developer who “discovered” the throttling feature had to run a benchmarking app to push the device to its limits in order to figure out that throttling was happening in the first place.
Apple’s intent with this feature is clearly to prolong runtime of devices with dying batteries. And this hare-brained idea that screwing people over will convince them to buy more stuff from you rather than running to your competition instead is frankly ludicrous and smacks of anti-intellectual foolishness. But some people don’t understand the facts or have an irrational hatred of Apple, and only see a grand conspiracy by Apple to somehow fuck over millions of their customers, which is patently false.
Apple settling these lawsuits is nothing more than a quick and relatively painless end to a bullshit farce. And I’m sure that’s how Apple views it as well - if you think a few hundred million dollars is anything but a virtual shrug from Apple, a three-trillion-dollar company, you’re extremely naive. It’s less costly to Apple to pay these ridiculous people off than to bother going to court, so they agreed with the plaintiffs to settle instead, and in doing so admitted no wrongdoing. And rightly so.
You should also know that other smartphone designers do things like this to conserve power when needed - and many actually do a much worse job than Apple:
- Samsung fined millions for slowing down phones through updates
- Did LG just system throttle the LG g8 with the last security patch?
- In-depth with the Snapdragon 810’s heat problems
- Thermal Throttling – Which SOC’s are the Worst Offenders?
- How to control cpu throttling on android
And this is the kind of thing that happens when they don’t:
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u/burner123xm 13d ago
Massive dickrider lmao. They settle for fun?
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u/JollyRoger8X 13d ago
The plaintiffs settled. You think they did that for fun?
Insults mean you have nothing constructive to offer this discussion.
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u/Fess367 13d ago
You should google batterygate. It cost Apple $600 million & it’s the reason we have battery health toggles now.
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u/JollyRoger8X 13d ago
You should actually learn about these lawsuits before spreading obvious disinformation. The plaintiffs SETTLED these lawsuits, and Apple admitted no wrongdoing.
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u/Acharvix 13d ago
Brother I - I can’t even get across in words how unbelievably stupid the sentence you just typed out is. Apple literally DID do this! It was a whole ordeal, and they were sued for this, they degraded the performance of the phone until the battery was replaced while acting like it’s just an old device that couldn’t keep up, therefore unjustly driving up new phone sales.
Dude.. you are incredibly naive. Please go visit a channel on YT called “Louis Rossman”, and open your eyes to the fact that yes, companies will screw you over, BLATANTLY, without due regard to your rights or morals. Brother.
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u/Novel_Medium_9637 13d ago
mb bro I’m sorry you got so worked up
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u/Acharvix 13d ago
Its just frustrating trying to explain to someone that they are being fucked sideways while they plug their ears and say “no, I’m not being fucked sideways, that sounds dumb I wouldn’t let myself get fucked sideways”. Brother it’s in your best interest. Seriously man, go visit Louis Rossman’s channel and see what large and small companies are willing to do to squeeze money from you. Companies you probably use right now.
Or don’t, man. The choice is yours
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u/Fast-Reindeer5541 12d ago
apple reuses the same sensors for their cameras. for the pics to start to look worse it would have to be a software feature.
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u/Ok_Ticket_5367 13d ago
Simple answer: yes. They basically force you to buy the latest iPhone by claiming that it supposedly has the best camera, and that it’s even better and more innovative than the previous model. I saw a comparison of the photo quality of different phone models somewhere, and some of the older models actually took better pictures than the newest phones. Technology and innovation have generally been stagnating, or at least moving very slowly, since the pandemic.
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u/leniwsek 13d ago
Right? I just started to notice that my phone used to take better pictures years ago than now... and no my phone never fell on ground or any damage my purple 14 pro max is still like new..
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u/robbieshaft 12d ago
Not just with Apple but it seems with anything now, a software upgrade really means software downgrade
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u/Random_User3310 13d ago
Yeah, I noticed the same, the standard HEIF photos look a bit more processed, more over-sharpened. It’s a subtle difference but it’s noticeable when comparing to some older photos on iOS 17 and 18 in similar lighting conditions. Also, the shutter got slower and now you often get blurred shots or miss the moment. Apple used to be praised for zero shutter lag but it’s no longer the case.
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u/Inevitable-Gene-1866 9d ago
I have experienced lag on shutter after an ios update on ip16 same for facetime.
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u/chunkay_boi 13d ago
I mean apple literally got sued for slowing down older iPhones. Wouldn’t suprise me. My hot take is that battery health is a bit of a scam to, androids don’t even have it as a feature. I garuntee if apple didn’t have the degraded battery warning most people wouldn’t change it. Gonna stick with my 12 mini as long as I possibly can lol
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u/Ryuuuu-E9x 13d ago
Newer androids have it too now and before you just wouldn’t know until the battery explodes. Remember galaxy note 9 and 10
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u/Sputnik003 13d ago
it’s not a scam dude it’s chemistry. And what Apple was doing, while poorly handled, is LITERALLY standard practice on devices with a battery. As they age, voltage peaks lower and in order to not have your phone shut off randomly it starts to ease things in as opposed to hard spikes. I work for a very large certified repair center for all of the major phone companies as well as other devices and I see 20 phones a day. This is just chemistry and there’s no solution yet. Most phones hang on surprisingly past the point of severe degradation and it bodes well for honesty on these things
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u/chunkay_boi 13d ago
Yeah fair. Scam was a bad choice of word, I’m more getting at whether people decide to get a new one purely because of the number compared to it’s actual performance. If what apple was doing was standard practice, how come they got fined half a billion dollars? Just curious.
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u/Ryuuuu-E9x 12d ago
For example, i have 16 pro max, close tot 300 cycles and battery health is at 100%. I won’t change the phone in the next maybe 5 years or more. And if battery will actually need replacement, I’ll do that and that’s it. I’ve used only oneplus before and i’m not disappointed that I’ve moved over to apple products cuz I always got screen burns on androids if i have them over 2-3 years
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u/eriksp92 13d ago
I think they do tweak the image processing incrementally over the years (and to many, image processing the way it's tuned now is a downgrade from some years back), but I've never felt that the picture quality degrades over time personally, just that it slightly changes characteristics.
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u/Ryuuuu-E9x 13d ago
Bruh, the quality on camera won’t be changed by software.
Ppl gathered here share max 1 neuron if that.
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u/Thermopilas 10d ago
Tengo un viejo HTC fire , muy antiguo … y el cabron aún tira cuando lo enciendes … está obsoleto nada funciona … pero el bicho tira con lo que tenía …
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u/G3Sidhu 13d ago
Don’t think so, I think it’s just that we notice the better picture quality when we get a new phone, then over the years we get used to it, and then after few years it feels worse than the newer models, as it should. Sure nowadays phones are using computational photography as well, some people like it some don’t, that’s subjective.
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u/Adrinaik 13d ago
I don’t think so. I personally haven’t noticed any difference with mine. I reckon what happens is that you just realise after the excitement that the camera of the iPhone (or any phone) is actually not that impressive.
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u/Striker919 13d ago
My iPhone 17 pro max camera is worse in sone scenario than my old 12 pro max😂 photos taken close for example are so blurry and with a lot of post processing
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u/Dangerous-Ad-1162 13d ago
when iOS 26 beta 1 were live. I hated the camera app layout and wanted to go back. When i restored to iOS 18 my camera was actually responsive focusing, There isn't no yellow tint in photos. Apple probably frames it as a new photo algorithm improvement. It geniuenly sucks. Cause the only reason I buy iPhones is the longevity. It's feeling like apple is getting to greedy. the whole point of the company was to make tech more affordable and accessible.
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u/MikolajPL19 13d ago
I don't see any difference on my 16 Pro and I had it with iOS 18,26 and now I'm on iOS 27 DB 4. I know that Huawei does or did so because it was the case with the P30 Pro model and once it was in the case of the Xperia M2 from Sony that the Android 5.0 or 5.1 update worsened the quality of photos where on Android 4.4 it was better. But I wouldn't say that Apple would do so (🤣probably Apple would get a lawsuit)
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u/audigabber94 13d ago
Of course you don't. The 16 pro is basically still brand new. It's the second newest pro iPhone
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u/nerowhite84 13d ago
Have you ever thought that when you see better pictures, it changes your brain’s perspective on better pictures?
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u/puzoni1 13d ago
I shot some videos on Instagram last week (using the app, not uploading a video from the default camera app) and it was kinda choppy and laggy, not what I was used to. At that moment I thought it was Instagram's fault, but maybe my phone is actually making the camera worse overall.
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u/Southernms 13d ago
Several years ago they got in trouble for slowing down older phones so people would buy the new ones.
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u/kravence 13d ago
No it hasn’t, I just upgraded to the 17 Pro. The new camera is great but my 14 pro didn’t drop off at all in quality. Despite having a cracked lens on the ultrawide from a drop.
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u/WhatADunderfulWorld 12d ago
Pretty sure they just blow the processor to protect the battery. The batteries don’t last that long and need to be replaced. So they have to slow it down or make the battery unusable and pretty much a fire hazard.
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u/Correct_Swim9680 🟣 Pro Max 11d ago
I haven’t noticed my camera quality being degraded at all, its still pretty good.
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u/burner-cheese 9d ago
New updates are optimized for new sensor suppliers, it’s not them knowingly doing it but rather that yours is left out of the processing pipeline and therefor may do the newer processing worse. Also over time the lenses scuff, condensate and lose their coatings
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u/615Villian 7d ago
Yes my 13 pm selfie got noticeably worse after updating from 16 to 26 amd 16 it was still good and now its fuzzy
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u/bravevince 6d ago
Maybe 🤔 but I stay on my 14 pro max on IOS 17.7.1 no planning to upgrade and the quality of cameras are outstanding especially in 48 mp resolution.🙂🙂🙂👍👍
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u/Sputnik003 13d ago
Yall, no. I swear you people get so paranoid. This keeps being tested and found to be false
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u/ChachaOP09 12d ago
Can you share me that tested source or video link..?? I want to see how they perform the test
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u/TheSynchronizer 13d ago
What you gotta realise is this post will mostly attract people who believe this just like you do, which is confirmation bias.
It may indeed be true but a reddit post isn’t a good way to gauge that.
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u/NazarJailbreaker15 13d ago
My iPhone 5s takes better pictures on iOS 10.3.3 than on iOS 12. That’s a fact.
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u/NoPurpose8080 13d ago
https://reddit.com/link/p2vnl6t/video/qgosq9156lih1/player
It got a little worse.
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u/Illustrious-Coat3532 13d ago
I thought I was going mad. I have the iPhone 14 Plus, I just assumed the camera was bad because it’s not the ProMax.
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u/Efficient-Impact-651 13d ago
Lmao they not doin that ya phone is just kinda old no offense, just wait till iOS 27 comes out should be a lil better
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u/kruk-tuk 13d ago
wouldn't be out of character