The latest iOS version promises faster speeds and more fluid animations on older iPhones, so I tested it on the oldest compatible model.

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.

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.

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