Back Up and Restore Your iPhone or iPad
If the above tricks aren’t enough, performing a backup and restore can help speed your iPhone or iPad up. Under the hood, this process can fix bugs where a rogue process or some other part of the iOS operating system is using too much CPU power.
Rather than wipe your phone and lose everything, you can back up the contents of your phone, restore it to factory default settings, and then restore your personal data from the backup. This gives you a fresh “system state”, but your iPhone or iPad will still have all your personal data an apps on it.
You’ll use iTunes for this, as it allows you to create and restore a local backup of your device. If you’re using a Windows PC, you’ll need to install iTunes first. If you’re using a Mac, iTunes is already installed.
Once you’ve launched iTunes, connect your iPhone or iPad to your computer with its included USB cable—that’s the same one you use to charge it. If this is the first time you’ve connected your device to this computer, you’ll be prompted to “trust” it. Tap the “Trust” button on your device’s screen and enter your PIN to continue.
In iTunes, click the device icon on the left side of the toolbar to continue. If this device button doesn’t appear, you may need to tap the “Trust” button, unlock your device first, or follow other troubleshooting steps.
Select “Summary” in the left pane under the name of the device if it isn’t already selected.
Click the “Back Up Now” button under Manually Back Up and Restore to back up your iPhone or iPad to the PC or Mac.
iTunes will create the backup for you and you’ll see a “Backing up” message at the top of the window while it’s happening.
Click “Restore Backup” once the backup is complete.
If iTunes tells you you need to turn off Find My iPhone or Find My iPad, you can do it by opening the Settings app, tapping your name at the top of the list, tapping the name of the device you’re using in the list, and then tapping the “Find My iPhone” or “Find My iPad” feature and setting it to “Off”. You will have to enter your Apple ID password to disable it.
If you had to disable Find My iPhone or Find My iPad, click the “Restore Backup” button in iTunes again. You’ll be prompted to choose the backup you want to restore. You can tell which backup is most recent by the “Last Backed Up” time.
Choose the backup you just created and click “Restore”. iTunes will restore the device from the backup you selected, and it will reboot during this process. You’ll have to go through a few setup screens on your iPhone or iPad afterwards, but almost everything—including your PIN and touch ID fingerprints—will be preserved.
If All Else Fails, Just Start Over
If none of the above solutions work, you may have a more serious problem, like data corruption, causing your device to slow down. Sometimes it’s best to just start from a completely clean slate, which means resetting your device and not restoring from a backup. To do this, open the General settings and scroll down to Reset.
Instead of implementing the nuclear option, you can first try to Reset All Settings, which will remove a lot of data like stored Wi-Fi networks, Touch ID, app permissions and more.
But, if that doesn’t work, make sure your important data is backed up, then choose “Erase All Content and Settings”. You’ll have to set your iPhone back up from scratch, but you may find it runs better as a result.
Replace Your iPhone’s Battery
That’s right, your iPhone actually “throttles” its CPU depending on how degraded the battery is, making it run slower than it was originally designed to. All batteries in all electronic devices degrade over time. Even if you take good care of them, they will just degrade slower.You can speed up some slow and old iPhones by replacing their batteries. Apple shocked everyone by admitting that as iPhones grow older, iOS slows down its CPU to avoid random shutdowns.
Unfortunately, your iPhone won’t warn you that its performance is being slowed down, so you won’t necessarily know for sure when it’s time to replace the battery. However, you can see if your phone is affected with an app called Geekbench.
If you’ve tried everything else and you have an iPhone that’s over a year or two old, it may be time to replace the battery. If you have AppleCare+, the battery replacement might be free. If not, an official battery replacement through Apple will cost $79, but that’s a lot cheaper than buying a new iPhone.
No, Closing Open Apps Won’t Help
We think it’s also important to dispel a widespread myth here: contrary to popular belief, “clearing your RAM” and closing open apps won’t do much of anything for general performance (though it can help fix an individual stuck app). In fact, closing all your apps regularly will force all your apps to start from scratch every time you open them, which will make things take longer—and drain more battery—not go faster.
Hopefully these tips will give you some improvements when it comes to giving your old iOS devices a new lease on life. Obviously they won’t be as fast as the latest and greatest, but they will at least give you maybe another year or so before you inevitably have to upgrade.
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