Apple Confirms: We Are Purposely Slowing Down iPhone With Older Batteries

Update: December 21, 2017

In response to the benchmark tests posted by Geekbench and a discussion on Reddit, Apple has confirmed that it has pushed an update to decrease the performance. In a statement given to TechCrunch, Apple said that this change has been made to prevent some devices with old batteries to smooth peak current demands.

“Last year we released a feature for iPhone 6, iPhone 6s and iPhone SE to smooth out the instantaneous peaks only when needed to prevent the device from unexpectedly shutting down during these conditions. We’ve now extended that feature to iPhone 7 with iOS 11.2, and plan to add support for other products in the future,” Apple said.

Original story continues from here:

From time to time, discussions which claim that Apple slows down old iPhones, intentionally, to boost sales keep on appearing on different online forums and discussion. A new report from Geekbench seems to support his narrative but it has got an important point that you shouldn’t miss.

As per the finding of Geekbench’s John Poole, the iPhone slowdown reports are only going to get more common as phones like iPhone 6s and iPhone 7 continue to age. With time, we expect the battery capacity to decrease but we expect the processor performance to remain same. So, what’s happening here? Pretty confusing, right?

To find the truth behind the reports like “Apple slows down old iPhones,” the benchmarks site has plotted the kernel density of single-core scores for iPhone 6s and 7 running different versions of iOS.

As per the plot of iOS 10.2.0, the plot of iPhone 6s appears to unimodal, with a peak around average score. For iOS 10.2.1 and iOS 11.2.0, there are larger peaks around the lower scores. Same is the case of iPhone 7.

iphone slow down geeekbench score — Click to enlarge

As said above, the users expect their batteries to lose efficiency, but they expect their phones to have the same processing power. However, to prolong battery life and solve issues like the sudden shutdown of iPhone 6 and 6s, Apple might be intentionally slowing the older phones down.

The report also points out that the change between 10.2.0 and 10.2.1 is too abrupt to be just a function of battery life. It proposes that Apple might have introduced some change in iOS versions to limit the performance to solve some other problems.

But, is this ethical? Shouldn’t a user be told about a deliberate performance reduction? “This fix will also cause users to think, “my phone is slow so I should replace it” not, “my phone is slow so I should replace its battery”,” as per the report. So, people shouldn’t be blamed when they claim that Apple employs such tricks to boost its sales.

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