Apple is Slowing Down Older iPhones

The Smartphone market is being updated with a new smartphone each year. In some cases, there are two smartphones being released each year, the smaller and the bigger versions. Most of the times there isn’t a significant change in the specifications or an intriguing list of features being added, due to which several people shy out from spending just under $1000 on buying a new phone.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to the customers to state that companies want their customers to switch phones every year. However, it doesn’t stop there for the iPhone manufacturer, Apple. Apple has been reportedly slowing down the previous versions of their smartphones with software updates.

All this started when a user posted on Reddit about the improvement in the performance of his iPhone after replacing the battery with a newer one. Primate Lab’s took this upon themselves to measure the CPU frequency with their Geek bench benchmark which shows a clear distribution of performance after the software updates.

Apple responded to this by blaming the issue on the Lithium Ion batteries and how they age with time resulting in sudden shutdowns of the older iPhones and showing their concern about the performance of the iPhones to the end user. Following is the official statement about the issue from Apple.

“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. Last year we released a feature of the 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”

The issue of the random restarts on the iPhone 6s after the release of the iPhone 7 had been raised earlier this year. However, Apple claimed that the issue had been fixed with a software update. Apple released an official statement in February 2017, which is as follows:

“With iOS 10.2.1, Apple made improvements to reduce occurrences of unexpected shutdowns that a small number of users where experiencing with their iPhone. iOS 10.2.1 has already has over 50% of active iOS devices upgraded and the diagnostic data we’ve received from upgraders shows that for this small percentage of users experience the issue we’re seeing a more than 80% reduction in iPhone 6s and over 70% reduction on iPhone 6 of devices unexpectedly shutting down. – Apple”

The point of concern here is the way Apple has been tackling this issue. Had they known the reason behind the issue they should have been vocal about it instead of taking it upon themselves and lowering the CPU Frequency from 1600 MHz to all the down to 600 MHz without the knowledge of the customer. Moreover, if the issue had been faced by just a “small number” of users than why would it be enforced by the rest of the users?