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This is the world's slowest iPhone, and it's not what we thought it would be at all.

June 22, 2025
This is the world's slowest iPhone, and it's not what we thought it would be at all.

Forget iPhones that boot up in seconds and run 24 apps simultaneously without a hitch. Someone has “made” one with abysmal performance with an unexpected idea.

This is the world's slowest iPhone, and it's not what we thought it would be at all.

In a time not so long ago, there were smartphones that were far from being lightning fast. You sometimes had to wait 1 to 2 minutes when they started up, opening an application wasn't done in the blink of an eye, and it was better to avoid launching several at the same time if you didn't want to crash your phone. This is ancient history today. Even the most modest models are more powerful and responsive than the high-end models of 10 years ago or more.

And just as we can't imagine going back to the time when loading a web page took 30 seconds, no one would want a painfully slow smartphone. So what motivated internet user PatRyk to create the world's slowest "iPhone"? It's simple: the desire to know if what he had in mind was feasible, nothing more. You're probably wondering why we surround the word iPhone with quotation marks. Let's just say this one doesn't really look like Apple devices.

This "iPhone" is so slow it's useless, but fun

After 2 days of hard work, PatRyk managed to get iOS running on... A Nintendo Switch. The first one, not the most recent. A technical feat considering that Apple's operating systems have a lot of trouble running on anything other than a device from the brand with the bitten apple. He or she used QEMU, an emulator capable of simulating hardware architectures in software.

The result: an "iPhone" that takes 20 minutes to boot, unable to open any application (they all "crash" without ever working) and displaying error messages all over the place. Totally unusable, in short, which wasn't the point anyway. If you too want to try running iOS on machines that aren't made for it, you'll find the necessary tools and documentation on the QEMU project's GitHub page.

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