There has been a popular conspiracy theory over the years about Apple intentionally slowing down iphones’ performance. And now, Apple just admitted to doing so!
They however claim that cutting back on iphones’ performance is not done so as to encourage customers to upgrade to newer versions of the phone but rather, it is done as a precautionary measure to prevent older iphones from shutting down unexpectedly or breaking down earlier than they should.
Apple told Reuters that: “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 further explained that throttling iphones’ performance is done because of the phone’s battery and not its processor. iphones use lithium –ion batteries, which degrades over time and if the performance is not throttled, there would be a greater risk of the internal components being damaged.
Apple made this admission after Primate Labs founder John Poole analysed the over time performance of iphone 6s and iphone 7. He wrote in a blog post earlier this week that:
“Users expect either full performance, or reduced performance with a notification that their phone is in low-power mode”
“This fix creates a third, unexpected state. While this state is created to mask a deficiency in battery power, users may believe that the slow down is due to CPU performance, instead of battery performance, which is triggering an Apple introduced CPU slow-down.
“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’. This will likely feed into the ‘planned obsolescence’ narrative.”
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