Apple iPhone Update

Apple iPhone Update: a reader asks…

I have an 3yo iPhone that’s telling me to update iOS. I’ve been putting it off for awhile now, Is it ok to keep putting it off? I’m on iOS version 17.6.1. It wants me to update to iOS 18.

iOS 18 came out awhile back, we’re now on version 18.3.2, so you’ve missed a number of updates. As long as your iPhone is an XS or newer (from 2018), or a 2nd or 3rd generation iPhone SE, then you can update to the current version of iOS. If you’re asking me “should you?” I would say absolutely as soon as you can.

This is going to take awhile to update your iPhone, and if you lack internal storage space it may be a little tricky to do this – you may need to connect it to your Mac (or PC running iTunes) in order to update. Your best bet is to start the update before you go to bed and leave the iPhone plugged into power overnight. By morning it will have completed the update and you can go back to using your iPhone.

So why is this important? All software (including operating systems like iOS) get updates, and a big reason is that the software developers (or someone else) discover bugs, security vulnerabilities, or other issues that need to be corrected. Yes, they also put out new features, but the main reason is for those security vulnerability fixes.

It’s generally ok to put off a major system update for a month or so, but iOS 18 came out in September 2024 – it’s been a good long time now. You can delay it for a few weeks or perhaps a month or two, but any longer and your risk starts to get significant. Folks (like me) will install the updates just as soon as they’re released by the software developer, and we often discover new bugs or issues associated with the new version. We then tell the software developer about these and they issue additional update(s) to correct these bugs. So if you wait to install a new version for a bit, you can bypass most of those initial bugs.

But at this point, six months out, it’s high time for you to update your iPhone to iOS 18.