Update now or wait?

There will be bugs, but should you update now or wait a while. Jason Cross reports

Every time Apple drops a major new operating system update – whether macOS or iOS – there’s the question of whether or not you should upgrade right away or wait a while. Certainly, there’s a case to be made either way and plenty of variables at play. What are your needs? How willing are you to live with a few problems? How stable was the final beta release? What features are you going to gain? Now that iOS 15 is here, the question is: should you mash that update button right away, or wait? Here’s the case for and against.

WHY YOU SHOULD UPDATE

Obviously, the biggest reason to update right away to iOS 15 is to get all those cool new features. There’s a lot of new stuff in FaceTime including different microphone focus modes, a new layout, and links for others to join your FaceTime conversation from the web on other devices. There are new ‘Shared with You’ sections in apps to show content that people

send you in Messages, Focus modes to limit distracting notifications, Safari improvements, the ability to scan text and translate text almost anywhere…the list goes on and on.

Perhaps one of the biggest improvements is that Safari will process many requests entirely offline. If you don’t need an Internet connection for the function (such as getting a sports score or weather forecast), Siri processes the request entirely on-device. This makes it a lot faster and more secure.

Depending on how you use your iPhone, any one of these features could completely change your smartphone life. Combine that with all the under-the-hood improvements to security that Apple makes with every release, and it’s pretty hard to argue against upgrading. There’s a heap of improvements to your phone, they’re totally free, and you’re just not going to take them?

Of course, some iOS releases have been riddled with bugs in their first release. We’ve seen everything from frequent crashes to battery drain problems in earlier iOS releases.

Fortunately, Apple has a better testing system in place these days, and as we approached the finish line we found the iOS 15 beta to be stable and pleasant. There are never any guarantees, but the early signs point to iOS 15 being a relatively trouble-free release.

WHY YOU SHOULD WAIT

As great as it may be to get a bunch of free new features for your iPhone, it could also make sense to wait a few weeks, even a few months, before you update to iOS 15.

For starters, there are all the delayed features. Sure, iOS 15 will bring with it a host of welcome changes and improvements, but several of them won’t be part of the initial release. If you just want the whole iOS 15 experience, you can update your phone four or five times between now and the end of the year, or you can just wait and update it once.

If you have an older iPhone, iOS 15 is still an improvement, but some of its cooler features are exclusive to newer hardware. If you have an iPhone XS or later, you’re good to go. But those with an iPhone 8/X or earlier will miss out on stuff like spatial audio and portrait mode in FaceTime, live text in photos, and offline Siri processing.

Then there’s the ever-present worry about serious bugs. Apple’s internal testing and beta processes

are a lot better than they used to be, but new bugs are almost always discovered when the latest software gets pushed out to a few hundred million users. Case in point: an iOS 15 bug initially prevented the Unlock with Apple Watch feature from working. Apple has already released an iOS 15 update solely for the iPhone 13.

Then there’s the issue of apps. It’s not like new iOS releases break apps very often, but apps do need an update in order to take advantage of new frameworks, APIs, and OS features. Depending on how you use your iPhone, the latest iOS update may not do a whole lot for you until your favourite apps are updated, too. For many popular apps, that happens within a week or two.

VERDICT

If you have an iPhone XS or newer, we think the added features you get are worth updating immediately. Bugs in the final beta releases have been rare, and we think most users won’t really run into any significant problems – certainly nothing that would outweigh the new features you’ll get.

If you have an iPhone 8/X or older, you might consider waiting until iOS 15.1 or 15.2. You’ll be missing out on several features anyway, and combined with the features that are delayed until a later release, and the inevitable bug fix releases, you just don’t get quite as much for the trouble of updating several times. If you’re an enthusiast that likes to have the very latest, feel free to ignore this advice, but if your iPhone is more than three years old you might save yourself a little headache just waiting until November to update to the latest version of iOS.