Has your iPhone been running like shit since iOS 11 came out? Welp, it looks like Apple may have planned that to be the case all along.
According to tech firm, Primate Labs, the updates to your phone slow down older hardware in order to save the battery. After analysing thousands of iPhones, the lab reckons slowness can be solved just by copping a new battery. If you can be arsed paying the $119 Apple charge for it, that is.
This deliberate cutting of power to the processor serves two purposes – it hides the fact your battery is slowly dying, and encourages you to upgrade to a later model.
“Users may believe that the slow down is due to CPU performance, instead of battery performance,” Primate Labs founder John Poole told Geekbench. “[This will cause] users to think, ‘my phone is slow so I should replace it’ not, ‘my phone is slow so I should replace its battery’.”
It’s not just iOS 11 that’s caused the issue, either. According to the massive analysis, the iPhone 6s had its performance stunted four times after each update following iOS 10.2.1.
“The distribution of iPhone 6S scores for iOS 10.2.0 appears unimodal with a peak around the average score,” Poole said.
“However, the distribution of iPhone 6S scores for iOS 10.2.1 appears multimodal, with one large peak around the average and several smaller peaks around lower scores. Under iOS 11.2.0 the effect is even more pronounced.”
So there you go, if your phone has been getting gradually piss-weaker after each update, just know that Apple wanted it to be that way. The company is yet to comment on the research, but it will be interesting to see if this is a necessary adjustment required for older phones, or simply a way of getting users to upgrade.
