It Looks Like Apple Is Totally Slowing Down Your Old iPhone, But It's For Your Own Good
No, it's not so you'll upgrade, but so that your device won't shut down on a rapidly depleting battery.
Around a week ago, a Reddit thread gained quite a bit of popularity after it theorised that Apple was purposely slowing down performance on iPhones with older batteries. The reason for that was the original poster said he saw marked improvement in the performance of his iPhone 6s after swapping out its battery with a brand new one.
However, it seems there may be more than one factor at play when it comes to the iPhone slowdown. Geekbench founder John Poole decided to carry out some detailed testing using the iPhone 6s and iPhone 7, running various different versions of iOS. What he found is that it¡¯s not just the batteries age that causes a slowdown, but a piece of code present post iOS 10.2.0.
What¡¯s been happening is that a module of the iOS code called powerd (short for power daemon) limits the maximum clock speed of the CPU and GPU when your battery runs low. It also takes into account whether he iPhone is heating up during current use, to avoid it bursting into flames.
Powerd was first introduced in the iOS 10.2.1 patch, which is where Poole first noticed a stark difference in average performance numbers, despite it only being an incremental patch. ¡°First, it appears the problem is widespread, and will only get worse as phones (and their batteries) continue to age,¡± Poole says in his writeup. ¡°Because degraded batteries last much less and end up with a lower voltage Apple¡¯s solution was to scale down CPU performance, it doesn¡¯t solve anything and is a bad experience¡ but it¡¯s better than having your device shutdown at 40 percent when you need it the most.¡±
Basically, Apple dynamically slows down the processing speed of your phone as the battery runs low, in order to avoid having it shut down completely. As your iPhone battery gets older, it runs out of charge faster and this has to happen more often. Because of this it may seem like your old iPhone is just being intentionally slowed down by Apple, but that¡¯s not really true.
