SAN FRANCISCO—As expected, Apple used its WWDC keynote today to take the wraps off of iOS 9, the newest version of its operating system for iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches. While iOS 7 and iOS 8 ushered in big changes, iOS 9 will instead focus on speed and stability. In other words, iOS 9 will be to iOS 8 as OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was to OS X 10.5.
That said, Apple isn't promoting iOS 9 using Snow Leopard's "no new features" label. The new operating system harvests some of iOS 8's lowest-hanging fruit and continues the work of opening the platform up to developers. It also tweaks the aesthetic introduced back in iOS 7, most significantly by replacing the old Helvetica Neue system font with the San Francisco typeface used in the Apple Watch's WatchOS.
iOS 9 is unique among recent iOS releases because it supports all of the same hardware that will run iOS 8—this includes old, out-of-production hardware like the iPhone 4S and the iPad 2 (both of which date back to 2011). Though the number of these devices in the wild will slowly dwindle as they're replaced with new hardware, iPhones and iPads typically retain a high resale value and remain in service for years after they're introduced. We'll need to wait and see how iOS 9 actually runs on this hardware (these early betas aren't going to be indicative of the final version's performance), but for now we're cautiously optimistic.
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