If the rumor that programmers and even executives had to carry and use iPhone 6 Plus devices for a while so that everyone felt the pain of slowness, then I'm in awe. This is exactly what needed to be done.
This is a great release and I hope Apple continues in that vein. We don't always need "NEW FEATURES", but we do always need fast, responsive and stable systems.
At a previous company we periodically flipped a feature switch on our dogfood builds that would throttle all network requests to simulate speeds in developing countries with slower cell networks, and it was really cool to see what stuff worked and what was awful when, for example, pictures could barely load or assets wouldn't show up.
iPhone 4S doesn't support iOS 12–it stopped at iOS 9. iPhone 6 Plus is slow because it had to drive large display after downsampling, and it just wasn't all that much more powerful than iPhone 5S.
Snow Leopard and Windows 2000 I believe will long be fondly remembered by some, for being stable releases that barely introduced new features, but focused instead on stability.
This is a great release and I hope Apple continues in that vein. We don't always need "NEW FEATURES", but we do always need fast, responsive and stable systems.