Apple has been receiving a flak from not just the customers but also from the media on the issue of reducing the performance of the phone when the health of the battery worsens, and this being done without the consent of the phone’s owners is the major concern for most of them. To clarify about the issue, Apple has issued a message apologizing to the customers and also talking about what they are offering to make things better.
First and foremost, we have never — and would never — do anything to intentionally shorten the life of any Apple product, or degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades. Our goal has always been to create products that our customers love, and making iPhones last as long as possible is an important part of that.
The company has pushed out a complete understanding of the aging of batteries, and while that happens, the phones also tend to see random shutdowns due to peak loads during the low state of charge. To prevent those shutdowns, about a year ago in iOS 10.2.1, Apple delivered an update that improved the power management to avoid the random shutdowns on iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus, and iPhone SE.
With the update, iOS dynamically manages the maximum performance of some system components when needed to prevent a shutdown. While these changes may go unnoticed, in some cases users may experience longer launch times for apps and other reductions in performance.
The company also said that while this happens, if the user replaces their chemically aged batteries with a new one, the performance of the iPhone returns to normal.
Over the course of this fall, we began to receive feedback from some users who were seeing slower performance in certain situations. Based on our experience, we initially thought this was due to a combination of two factors: a normal, temporary performance impact when upgrading the operating system as iPhone installs new software and updates apps, and minor bugs in the initial release which have since been fixed.
We now believe that another contributor to these user experiences is the continued chemical aging of the batteries in older iPhone 6 and iPhone 6s devices, many of which are still running on their original batteries.
While reducing the performance to prevent random shutdowns is not a bad step, but Apple doing it without the consent of the users and by never letting them know of what is done on the internal side, is what users have been complaining about. Apple is now apologizing for the same and the company says that to address the customers’ concern, Apple is reducing the price of an out-of-warranty iPhone battery replacement by $50 — from $79 to $29 — for anyone with an iPhone 6 or later whose battery needs to be replaced, starting in late January and available worldwide through December 2018.
To add to it, Apple is going to send a software update early in 2018, which will have new features giving users more visibility on the health of the iPhone battery, and then the users can assess whether it is the battery health that is affecting the performance of the phone.
So, the final fact is that the battery replacement can keep your phone’s performance the same and Apple is not going to change the scenario of reducing the performance when the battery is aging.
