Enlarge / The iPhone 5 running iOS 10. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

I’ve been tracking the performance of new iOS versions on the slowest supported hardware for four years now, and I don’t think my findings have been positive since I wrote about iOS 6 on the iPhone 3GS. iOS 7 was a bad fit for the iPhone 4, and iOS 7.1 was only an improvement in a relative sense. iOS 8 and iOS 9 were tolerable on the iPhone 4S, but they were still significant slowdowns compared to iOS 6 and 7.

But we have some reason to be optimistic about iOS 10 on the iPhone 5. The phone is more than twice as fast as the 4S and has double the RAM. Its screen is the same size and resolution as the one in the just-launched iPhone SE, so you know that Apple and all other app developers are still fine-tuning their apps for it.

So how enthusiastic should iPhone 5 and 5C owners be about iOS 10? Can you get the new features without worrying about a slowdown, or should you give Apple some more time to optimize (or more money for another phone)?