Apple is allegedly downgrading the performance of older iPhone models to make degraded batteries last longer instead of fully addressing a sudden shutdown issue.
Apple may be trying to make older iPhones last longer, but some owners might not appreciate the fact that the trade-off is the performance of their devices.
Replacing Batteries Improves iPhone Performance
A Reddit thread has generated a significant amount of interest after a user named TeckFire said that the performance of his iPhone 6s improved considerably after he had the smartphone's battery replaced.
Before the battery replacement, his iPhone 6s registered a single-core score of 1466 and a multi-core score of 2512. After the installation of a new battery, however, the same device registered a single-core score of 2526 and a multi-core score of 4456.
Several other Redditors confirmed that their older iPhones received performance boosts after a battery replacement.
Apple Throttles Performance To Extend Battery Life?
About a year ago, Apple addressed a bug with certain iPhone 6s units that were randomly shutting down even while their battery levels were still at about 30 percent. A free battery replacement program was launched for qualified users, though Apple later admitted that the issue was more widespread than initially thought.
Two months later, Apple released iOS 10.2.1, which promised to reduce unexpected shutdowns in the iPhone 6s by 80 percent and in the iPhone 6 by 70 percent. Apple, however, said that the fix in the operating system update did not deal with the problem that resulted in the free battery replacement program but rather another issue that caused older batteries to deliver power unevenly.
The Reddit thread generated theories that the two incidents are indeed related and that the fix that Apple applied was to downgrade the performance of older iPhone models relative to the voltage output of their batteries. This would have prevented the smartphones from drawing too much power from the degraded batteries, which would result in a sudden shutdown.
The possibility has generated controversy, as owners of older iPhones prefer the batteries themselves to be fixed instead of having their previous-generation devices run slower. However, it is important to understand that there are no defects here, as iPhone batteries are designed to only last about two years.
It has already been over two years since the release of the iPhone 6s, so a battery replacement is necessary. Apple is trying to make the degraded batteries of older iPhone models last longer, though some customers do not like the idea of software updates purposely slowing down the performance of their devices.
The theories, however, remain as theories until Apple officially confirms that it is throttling the performance of previous-generation iPhones. So far, the company has not yet issued a comment on the matter.
