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It seems that Geekbench’s accusation that Apple purposefully slows down iPhone performance wasn’t all that wrong, as the company has now responded. Admitting that his is, in fact, the case, Apple went on to confirm that the reasoning is to ensure device performance after battery degradation.
“Our goal is to deliver the best experience for customers, which includes overall performance and prolonging the life of their devices. Lithium-ion batteries become less capable of supplying peak current demands when in cold conditions, have a low battery charge or as they age over time, which can result in the device unexpectedly shutting down to protect its electronic components,” said the firm in a statement.
“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.”
Geekbench has criticised the lack of warning on the practice before it happens, stating that while it is better than losing your phone’s power completely while at 40 percent battery, it’s a practice that feeds into the notion that Apple is doing this solely to drive the sales of its newer models. This is something that Apple adamantly denies.
Changing the battery is seemingly a solution for some, who have gone on to report an increase in both battery life and performance after doing so. This is an expensive process at $79 over in the US and isn’t even covered by the device’s warranty.
KitGuru Says: While it seems like a decent temporary solution, to know that this is the indefinite fix is a little jarring. At the very least, it would be nice to give the users’ a heads up or chance to opt-in. What do you think about the solution?
nice solution, I have an old phone that has degraded battery and turns itself off sometimes even on 60% so I know how it feels
This is total lame BS from Apple. If they know their phones are designed in such a way that this will happen then either fix the phone design or install a better battery that is desined to handle the power requirements of the device. Designing a super slim device is nice & all but if it hampers the phones performance or the size of the battery to the point that when it starts to degrade a little the phone actually shuts down then your designers really need to rethink their design choices.
If I was a iPhone user I would be very pissed to find out that Apple hampers your performance because of their bad design choices & I the end user have to live with their bad choices or go in & get a upgraded device just so I do not want to throw my phone across the room every time I want to use it.
I have a 3.5 year old Samsung S5 & it performs the same now as when I got it I know I just did a performance test on it and it got the same exact bench score as it did 3 years ago. I still only charge it once every 4-5 days just like when it was a new phone. I have not yet changed the battery and it is still listed as being 89% health. So either Apple uses crappy parts in their phones or they are getting hosed by their suppliers either way the right solution to the problem is to fix the issue & not to hose the end users like this.
This is a crappy move Apple either get a better place to build your phones (get rid of Foxxconn) or fire your designers and hire some that will design better phones.
Let me tell you why this is crap – I’m using an android device and it was good initially. After some time i had the same problem with the phone turning off at 30-40% battery and i thought it’s exactly because of the battery degradation and life coming to its end. Well it wasn’t – when i updated the OS to the latest version, officially unsuported by the manufacturer, the problem was fixed… I don’t know if this is by design or unintentionally, but it was fixed without hardware modifications and performance degradation – my device is running as fast as ever.
Err… Clearly fanboyism here.
1st. I’m not agreeing to what Apple is doing, I personally think it’s BS and anyone with any sense would know that it’s more or less a marketing ploy to make you upgrade your phone sooner rather than later.
2nd. You can’t stop battery degradation, it happens in all batteries as you’ve even admitted in your post with your batter being at 89% health. It’s not a case of finding better parts or even getting a higher quality battery to stop/reduce the degradation, it will happen.
So now we go back to the article, Apple have implemented a “feature” to essentially cripple the phone. (insert any reason known to man that can be made sense of for this feature)
Sorry to break it to you, but things don’t work that way.