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Article snippet: It happens every year: Apple releases new iPhones, and then hordes of people groan about their older iPhones slowing to a crawl. Just look at the recent data. Between September and early November — when Apple made the iPhone 8 available, followed by the iPhone X — Google searches for the keywords “iPhone slow” jumped about 50 percent. The phenomenon of perceived slowdowns is so widespread that many believe tech companies intentionally cripple smartphones and computers to ensure that people buy new ones every few years. Conspiracy theorists call it planned obsolescence. That’s a myth. While slowdowns happen, they take place for a far less nefarious reason. That reason is a software upgrade. [READ NEXT: The iPhone 8 Reviews: What the Critics Say] “There’s no incentive for operating system companies to create planned obsolescence,” said Greg Raiz, a former program manager for Microsoft who worked on Windows XP. “It’s software, and software has various degrees of production bugs and unintended things that happen.” Here’s what happens: When tech giants like Apple, Microsoft and Google introduce new hardware, they often release upgrades for their operating systems. For example, a few days before the iPhone 8 shipped in September, Apple released iOS 11 as a free software update for iPhones, including the four-year-old iPhone 5S. The technical process of upgrading from an old operating system to a new one — migrating your files, apps and settings along the way — is extre... Link to the full article to read more