I’ve always been fascinated by how long computer equipment can run without needing to be rebooted. I current have one very old PC running Windows 2000 (circa 1999) that has not been rebooted in over 700 days or about two years that is doing some small tasks.
With my previous iPhone (6 Plus,128GB) the most I could go without restarting the iPhone was about 12 days. At that point my iPhone would start to showing anomalies, including being unable to even answer the phone. It almost always happened at 12 days.
The limit I had seen on my wife’s iPhone 6s Plus was 57 days, at which point there was an iOS update. I think much of the difference is how hard I push the phone and test new software, whereas she mainly just uses her phone, and many hours a day during work she does not even check it.
I now have the iPhone 7 Plus/ 256GB model and was interested in how long this iPhone could go without a reboot before any anomalies showed up. I figured with the 3GB of ram the phone should go much further.
Last night I passed a new milestone for me. The iPhone has not been rebooted in over 30 days — as shown from the screenshot below. The System Status app gives this data. How is the iPhone running? Well, it’s a mixed bag. About five days ago I noted I didn’t hear a reminder sound. After much testing, reminders are no longer working. They show up on the Mac if entered on my iPhone, but the phone itself will never sound or show them in notification.
I also cannot update some apps from the App Store. Handoff will no longer work from my iPhone to my iPad for incoming calls. While looking at the smartphone, I saw a small spinning white circle. The system logs showed a springboard restart at that time, but that no longer restarts the time the iPhone has been running.
Oddly, I see no speed degradation whatsoever. The iPhone is as snappy as ever which makes this somewhat of an issue for people that might be unaware they should restart their iPhones periodically. People who just use it and never reboot it between iOS updates might start missing out on alarms, reminders, calls etc.
I recently used, along with my iPhone, a Galaxy S7. One feature it had that I feel would help iPhone users is automatic scheduled reboots. I could set the S7 to reboot nightly or weekly at the hour I specified, which would normally be during the very early morning hours.
I’m certainly not a software or hardware engineer and don’t know why the iPhone starts malfunctioning after such a relatively short time. Perhaps there is much memory leaking going on, etc. A reboot does take care of the issue but many people will never do this until a software update. Apple does need some way to do this basic maintenance for those who are unaware to do it themselves.
I’m now slightly over 30 days and plan on not rebooting until Apple releases the new version of iOS. If I don’t respond to you, I will after the reboot.
