Earlier this year I finally upgraded my iDevices to iOS/iPadOS 17. I’m an overly cautious updater, because my tinkering time is limited.
My iPhone 12 Pro Max had a few initial bobbles with the upgrade, but nothing major, and nothing that survived a few restarts.
My iPad Air 4, on the other hand, really isn’t happy. On iPadOS 16, it ran smooth as silk, no significant issues, restarts needed only occasionally. On 17, I have to reboot it every couple of days, because the entire device gets increasingly sluggish to the point of taking up to a minute or more to respond to anything. I’ve occasionally had to resort to a fully manual restart because it won’t respond to my attempts to swipe the shutdown confirmation control. Even when it doesn’t get sluggish, I get frequent random app crashes within a few days of a restart, which again necessitates a full restart.
I’ve been hoping that the problems would slowly go away over time, but they haven’t. The time between restarts has sometimes stretched to as long as a week, but only sometimes. The 17.6.1 update didn’t help either. (17.7 didn’t show up as available on my iPad until today.)
Has anyone else experienced this kind of problem on an iDevice after a major OS upgrade? Would upgrading to iPadOS 18 now be likely to resolve the problems? Or would it be better to do a full reset of the device and reinstall 17 or 18 from scratch?
I’d definitely do a full erase and restore of the device. I hope iPadOS 17 is still available, and I’d try that if you can, just to see if it makes a difference. Apple will soon require that you upgrade to iPadOS 18 if it hasn’t already.
Did a full erase, OS reinstall, and restore via iMazing. Oddly, I couldn’t find a signed IPSW for 17.7 for the iPad Air 4. 17.6.1 is still signed for it, though, so not a big deal. Just odd. (I don’t intend to move to 18 until at least the .0.1 release if I don’t have to.)
It’s now redownloading all my apps. We’ll see if this takes care of the problems. Thanks for your help, Adam!
Not an M4. iPad Air 4, as in 4th generation. Predates M chips in iPads altogether.
And it’s currently showing 17.7 as available for update. Won’t do it tonight—one OS install per device per day is enough for me. :-) (I never let any of my Apple devices update automatically or unattended.)