Update: Apple has released the following statement: “Our goal is to deliver the best experience for customers, which includes overall performance and prolonging the life of their devices. Best-case scenario, you may find that your phone suddenly has more pep in its step. (I’ve used iCracked in the past and had decent luck.) Worst-case scenario, your battery will hold a charge for longer. It’s $79 if you have Apple do it, or around $70 to $50 if you have a third-party repair shop or service take care of it. If you’re coming in significantly below where you should be, consider replacing the battery. In the meantime, if you’ve got an older iPhone and feel like it’s dragging, you may want to run Geekbench 4 and see how you benchmark. We reached out to Apple for comment, and will update if they respond. It should be said that none of this has been confirmed (or denied) by Apple. 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 obsolecense” narritive. 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 creates a third, unexpected state. Users expect either full performance, or reduced performance with a notification that their phone is in low-power mode. If the performance drop is due to the “sudden shutdown” fix, users will experience reduced performance without notification. This affects more than just the iPhone 6 and 6s Poole analyzed the same benchmark tests on the iPhone 7, and found the same peaks in benchmarking after iOS 11.2.0. Your phone may run slower, but it’s better than it suddenly shutting down with 75 percent battery. So how did they do it? Possibly slowing down the CPU in iPhones with an aging battery to prevent the iPhone from drawing as much power. Apple introduced a fix in iOS 10.2.1 that largely fixed the issue. The running theory for Reddit users and Poole is something like this: The iPhone 6 and 6s both had issues with abruptly shutting down, even with a healthy amount of battery left. I believe (as do others) that Apple introduced a change to limit performance when battery condition decreases past a certain point.” “The difference between 10.2.0 and 10.2.1 is too abrupt to be just a function of battery condition. “The problem is due, in part, to a change in iOS,” writes Poole. Most phones are still benchmarking around 2,287, but a significant number is also coming in at scores below that. What you see in more recent versions of iOS, however, is various peaks in the distribution. You’d expect to see something like the far-left result from iOS 10.2.0: nearly all of the benchmark scores gathering around the average score of 2,287 for the iPhone 6s. What you’re looking at here is the distribution of benchmarking scores. Specifically, Poole compared benchmark tests from iPhone users on iOS 10.2.0 (before the fix was introduced), iOS 10.2.1 (after the fix was introduced), and iOS 11.2.0 (the iOS update put out at the beginning of December 2017). He discovered much the same thing that the original Reddit user reported, except on a larger scale. Geekbench CEO John Poole took an interest, and began digging into all of the information Geekbench had gathered from all of the benchmarking tests it had run for iPhone users. But why had performance suddenly shot up? You’d expect battery life to improve after replacing a battery, obviously. After replacing the battery, Geekbench showed that the scores had nearly doubled. Reddit user TeckFire first posted to the /r/iPhone subreddit, showing two scores from Geekbench: one from before they replaced their battery, and one from after. They think Apple is intentionally throttling the speed of the CPU in older phones with aging batteries in order to prevent them from unexpectedly shutting down. If you’ve ever thought that your aging iPhone got a lot slower after updating iOS, Reddit users and the CEO of benchmarking app Geekbench say it’s not just in your head.
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