iPad got slow, missing drive space

Question

I got an iPad 4th gen from 2012 with 16 GB space. It's in use daily.

For a few months now we have seen the iPad becoming more and more slow. Like, the Safari browser doesn't get up in under 10 seconds.

Also, when I start a game the game crashes saying "no space left on device". But in reality, there is more than 1 GB left.

I believe my flash drive is somehow broken. It shows me a total capacity of 13,05 GB instead of 16. I know, you may never see the full size, but missing 3 gigs feels a bit much.

Any ideas what I can do with this iPad to make it work nicely again or at least analyze what is going on?

Answer 1

Part of the 16GB is taken up by iOS. The system usage screen won't show a category for the OS itself because there's nothing you can do about it.

Your device is coming up on about five years old. Modern device will perform much better on a more resource intensive OS. You could try a restore but really I think it's just that the new features and technologies aren't well optimized or are simply too much for it.