This was mostly apocryphal, with one basis in reality. Spotlight reindexing could use a lot of CPU if you had a large photo library, but that was also a background task so it meant lower battery life for the day or two.
What happens in almost all cases is that people attribute things to the biggest visible change they know about, which is usually a major OS release. Facebook used to use like 30% of an iPhone’s battery life but because it was in the background people would say the iOS release did it because they remembered installing that and it changed the UI palpably, whereas the Facebook update automatically installed in the background.
I used to see this with people saying an OS release killed their hard drive: when pressed, they’d remember that they’d had things get slow or files corrupted before but hadn’t recognized that as a sign of imminent failure, whereas that OS upgrade was a really visible change which caused a ton of I/O activity.
What happens in almost all cases is that people attribute things to the biggest visible change they know about, which is usually a major OS release. Facebook used to use like 30% of an iPhone’s battery life but because it was in the background people would say the iOS release did it because they remembered installing that and it changed the UI palpably, whereas the Facebook update automatically installed in the background.
I used to see this with people saying an OS release killed their hard drive: when pressed, they’d remember that they’d had things get slow or files corrupted before but hadn’t recognized that as a sign of imminent failure, whereas that OS upgrade was a really visible change which caused a ton of I/O activity.