The new iPhones are beautiful. But my old is better than ever.

Could this have been a case of planned obsolescence of a harmful kind, the deliberate ruin of a product perfectly good to boost the sales of a new product? I am not convinced that this is the case, although suspicions have been widespread for years, that this type of behavior could be the norm for large technology companies. Faced with many criticisms and lawsuits in California, Apple apologized at the end of last year.

In a statement at the time, the company said it meant good and had just tried to make the phones work longer. Critically, Apple has said it will offer accelerated services at lower prices to owners of old phones who wanted to replace their batteries. In March, the company also made a minor upgrade to the operating system that allowed iPhone users to better understand what was happening in their batteries.

While my new battery was making my phone usable again, I still thought I needed to replace it when Apple introduced the new models, and a new operating system, in September, just about every year. New operating systems generally slow older phones.

But Apple executives said the new system, iOS 12, would be different. The older phones, dating back to the 2013 model year, would work better this time, not worse. "We are focusing our efforts especially on the older devices," said Craig Federighi, senior vice president of software engineering at Apple in June. "Although it is still in its infancy, we are excited about the results we have seen."

Apple is now reporting that, under test conditions, older phones actually work much faster after installing iOS 12. For example, the company says that the camera app opens 70 % faster, the keyboard 50% faster and, when the workload is heavy, multiple applications run up to twice as fast. In a complete review, Ars Technica, Condé Nast's website, has achieved equally impressive results.

I have downloaded the new software and my phone is running dramatically now. Some people who have installed iOS 12 have reported minor issues, but this is not my case. My phone can not do everything the new iPhone X can do, but it seems pretty fast.

Plus, he does things he's never done before. When I connect it to my car, for example, and launch CarPlay, I can now choose to see Google Maps on the dashboard, and not Apple's exclusive and, in my opinion, inferior mapping system. Allow me to make this choice is the mark of a confident company.