iPhone slowing down due to battery wear is confirmed

Last week we wrote an article about how it can a dying battery can cause your iPhone to slow down. The whole topic was originally sparked by a discussion on reddit, where one user boasted that his iPhone 6 was significantly faster after the battery was replaced. The discussion has gained considerable popularity and it seems that it still keeps some interested parties awake. It was on the basis of this discussion that the original developer of the Geekbench benchmark put together a little research, and based on this data, it is clearly visible since when the performance of the phones has been deteriorating.

According to data from Geekbench, the turning point occurred after the release of iOS 10.2.1, an update that was supposed to "solve" battery problems with the iPhone 6 and especially the 6S. Since then, iPhones with suspiciously reduced performance have started appearing in Geekbench databases. To top it all off, the same trend has been seen with iOS 11 and iPhone 7. Since the release of iOS 11.2, iPhone 7 has also seen cases of significantly reduced performance - see graphs below.

Based on this data, one could conclude that Apple has integrated special code into iOS that underclocks the CPU and GPU in cases where the battery life is reduced below a specific level. This hypothesis was subsequently confirmed by a developer using the Twitter account of Guilherme Rambo, who in the code really found mentions of instruction, which reduces processor performance. This is a script called powerd (short for power daemon) that first appeared in iOS 10.2.1.

Based on this information, it can be confirmed that Apple is indeed slowing down older devices as users have accused it of doing this summer. However, this slowdown is not so drastic that Apple suddenly decides to slow down this and that model, because these models are already outdated and deserve to be replaced. Apple slows them down if their battery health drops below a specific value that triggers a new power state. Instead of replacing the device, which may seem like the only possible answer to this slowdown, simply replacing the battery could be enough in most cases. Perhaps it would be a good idea if Apple issued an official statement regarding this issue. Affected customers (who were buying a new phone because of this problem) would certainly deserve it. If the whole case blows up even more, Apple will have to respond.

Source: 9to5mac