A few weeks ago, my dad asked me if I had an older phone he could trade in toward an iPhone 18 Pro. T-Mobile wouldn’t accept his defective iPhone 13, but the carrier was ready to offer the latest model for close to nothing, so long as my dad turned in another model and agreed to three more years of service.
It was then that I rediscovered my iPhone 11 from 2019, with its yellow finish that harkened back to the days of more adventurously colored handsets. As I prepared to reset the phone, a thought came to mind: How well would this phone run with the latest software?
After all, one of the most important promises with iOS 27 is the faster performance on older models. My iPhone 11 just made the cutoff, so I could see if downloading the update might give this older iPhone a brief second life.
What’s the catch?
However, updating a 7-year-old iPhone was not as straightforward as tapping through the settings. We’re trying to run modern software on aging hardware here, which is like putting a twin-turbo V8 engine into a 1980s hatchback.
First, I had to hunt down a Lightning cable just to charge the iPhone 11 enough to comfortably download the update package. It also turned out that the iPhone 11’s 128GB of storage – which was a lot compared to the 64GB of base storage at the time – was nearly full, so I played my favorite game of deleting photos and installing apps I didn’t know existed.
What iOS 27 on the iPhone 11 is truly about
Instead of fancy AI features, Apple prioritizes speed in the latest iOS software, from opening and closing apps to swipe and scroll animations to how far and fast you can AirDrop photos and videos.
I noticed the difference almost immediately when I expanded the Control Center and repositioned the icons to match my primary phone. While there were noticeable stutters and frame drops on older software (as recent as iOS 26), animations are much smoother on iOS 27. The iPhone 11’s 60Hz display actually felt stable.
I also timed various activities of the iPhone 11 running on iOS 26 and iOS 27. In every case, the phone was either milliseconds or one or two seconds faster. For example, photos I captured appeared a split second sooner in the camera app preview on iOS 27. My MacBook also received videos over AirDrop faster. I may be putting the speed difference under a microscope here, but the efficiency gains add up.
Lastly, I benchmarked the CPU performance of the iPhone 11 on iOS 26 and iOS 27 and found both single-core and multicore scores higher on iOS 27. On iOS 26, the iPhone 11 received a 1,721 single-core score and a 3,499 multicore score. On iOS 27, the iPhone 11 received a 1,750 single-core score and a 3,838 multicore score.
While the results are not fully representative of how we use our phones, they show that Apple’s behind-the-scenes technical changes deliver noticeable gains.
Keep or upgrade?
If the performance optimizations in iOS 27 are this promising on the iPhone 11, I can only imagine they’re even more beneficial on newer models like the iPhone 13 and iPhone 14 series.
