iPhone Performance Degrades as Battery Ages

I feel like more transparency would have been welcomed, but aside from that this is a &quot;no win&quot; situation, since you have to pick a winner:<p>- Do you degrade performance but leave screen-on time relatively unchanged?<p>- Do you degrade screen-on time but leave performance relatively unchanged?<p>Most Android devices seem to do the opposite (lose screen-on time, but keep performance relatively unchanged). Different people will have a different perspective on what the &quot;right&quot; strategy is for this, but I think we can all agree that better transparency and maybe even leaving it to the consumer to make the choice would be welcome.<p>PS - &quot;Planned obsolescence&quot; only applies if Apple was doing this <i>artificially</i>. It seems like if they didn&#x27;t degrade performance you&#x27;d lose screen-on time instead, so you&#x27;d still likely replace the handset and perhaps even sooner (since core services e.g. calling, texting, etc, work even with lower performance but not on a phone out of juice).

The problem here isn’t that iOS throttles the CPU when your battery can no longer properly power the phone.<p>(This is a really nice feature, compared to, e.g., sudden shutdown when voltage drops too low to run the CPU at normal speed.)<p>The problem is that iOS doesn’t alert you about what’s happening. If it said something like, “Your battery needs to be replaced. Until it is, your phone will run with reduced speed.” Then you would have the information you need to make an intelligent choice.<p>You have to suspect Apple doesn’t do this because if you don’t know what’s going on you’re likely to assume your phone is just old and needs to be replaced.

Seems like everyone is forgetting the #1 failure in older phones. With today&#x27;s technology phones are very power efficient, the manage a rather amazing number of circuits with different functionality. Things like CPU, GPU, display, backlight, battery monitor, accelerometer, gps, compass, bluetooth, wifi, wan, camera, NFC, microphone, dsp, light senors, proximity sensors, etc.<p>The vast majority of those circuits are sleeping pretty much all the time. However as you get older your battery keeps up.. except those challenging times when you activate too many things. Like say nav (that runs the GPS, GPU, 3D chip, CPU, radio, compass, etc). Then the phone just turns off because there&#x27;s not enough voltage.<p>Many people complain about &quot;crashing&quot; phones, claiming less reliability over time. Seems like often it&#x27;s just the battery that can&#x27;t manage the needed number of volts under load. You can witness this when ever less intensive things crash, but they all work if you are plugged in.<p>The sad thing is that these new top of the line smart phones could be useful for 5-10 years. Fit&#x2F;finish with glass&#x2F;aluminum, top spec CPU&#x2F;RAM, expandable storage, etc. Sadly the epoxied battery reduces the practical life to 2-3 years.<p>In what world would a modular&#x2F;expandable phone (like has been attempted several times) decide you might want to add fancy speakers, fancy camera, 3d vision, etc. But <i>STILL</i> expoxy in the battery? WTF?<p>I wish the government would stem in and just mandate that phones have user replaceable batteries to keep them from just filling the landfills after a few years.

Why does this correlate so well with iOS version increments?<p>My iPhone 6 was faultless prior to the upgrade to iOS 11, and immediately after it battery life was greatly reduced and it now shuts down automatically when the battery hits 10%.<p>Apparently I am now supposed to accept that the battery has degraded not gradually but all at once and on the same day as I upgraded iOS, and this is now being managed for my benefit by the OS. Hmmm...

&gt; This will likely feed into the “planned obsolescence” narrative.<p>well, non-replaceable battery and all...

I wouldn&#x27;t say &quot;degrades,&quot; will confuse non-tech readers. Makes it sound like the old battery also causes the CPU to age.<p>Something like &quot;is intentionally reduced&quot; may be more accurate.

How do non-apple devices cope as they age ? Any word on what Nexus, Galaxy or Pixel devices of a similar vintage do? does the performance stay the same but the battery life becomes shorter?

Still does not really explain why my 4S suffered from both after an iOS update: Reduced screen-on time and degraded performance at the same time, that was a couple of years ago tho. As a user, it&#x27;s just utterly baffling how apps that used to work fine suddenly became near impossible to use, like messaging apps taking ages to type a word, the phone felt like a computer with too much bloatware running in the background, struggling with the most mundane tasks.<p>Since that happened I&#x27;ve been putting off installing the iOS updates because this degradation in performance, after an iOS update, has been way too common of a theme over the years.

Wow, I thought Apple did this to make people buy newer iPhone. But Apple did it not only for that but also to hide the battery issue. Well done Tim :&#x2F;

Related: If you have a Mac, you can check the health of an iPhone battery via the Console app when the phone is connected via USB. Search for the string &quot;BatteryHealth&quot;, logged by the phone&#x27;s Springboard process.

Interesting that the battery aged extremely fast when iOS 11 got installed and took the performance down to the „really unpleasant“ level.

I think that if iPhone performance remains degraded while plugged into an outlet, there can be no other explanation aside from planned obsolescence. I haven’t seen any benchmarks to that end, however.

Relevant recent discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=15889519" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=15889519</a>

Can someone explain to me why (outside of this one issue) phones get so slow over time? As a professional programmer I though I understood computers but I clearly don&#x27;t.<p>What&#x27;s going on my phone that it grinds to a halt? Why does a factory reset sometimes help, but sometimes not?<p>It can&#x27;t just be that the workloads are more resource intensive. If I go get an old tablet it will take 5x as long to load google.com as the day I bought it.

Nitpicking about an otherwise well written post: why show a kernel density estimate instead of a simple histogram? It can be normalized if you don’t want reveal the exact number of samples.<p>Calculating a kernel density estimate just seems to add an unneccesary step between raw data and the visualization. It can hide some shortcomings in the data (e.g. low number of samples), but doesn’t add anything.

&gt; Under iOS 11.2.0 the effect is even more pronounced.<p>No, the effect is exactly the same as you can see from the charts since they peak at the same benchmark scores. It is the distribution of those effects that is different, with the performance being negatively affected for more phones. But keep in mind that under iOS 11.2.0, most iPhone 6S&#x27;s that are tested are probably about 2 years old. Under iOS 10.x, most iPhone 6S&#x27;s probably about 1 year old. I&#x27;d like to know the distribution of the <i>times</i> that these Geekbench benchmarks were run. If scores for one phone model in one month are one average score under iOS (x) but is substantially lower the next month under iOS (x+1), then I would consider that to be a significant act of &quot;planned obsolescence&quot;.<p>But really Apple should probably be more transparent about this. And the bottom line for users is that if you notice any kind of significant performance degradation, whether it is fast battery drainage or sluggish performance, you should consider taking the phone in.

Finally the data to prove what I’ve always felt. I knew my phones were getting slower even on the same iOS versions. I always assumed flash, but suspected that there was a time-based clock slowing... lo and behold! Fucking Apple, I’ll be happy to join the coming class action!

I feel the same applies to Macbook as well. I&#x27;ve a Macbook Pro Retina 13 inch, early 2015 at a battery cycle count of 1001. From the last few weeks, the system is terribly slow. I randomly see the fan speed going berserk. :&#x2F;

I had suspected that one of my iphone&#x27;s RAM chips had gone bad, because the slow speed was as if it was swapping a lot<p>when I saw the reddit post I was like GTFO

Wow I was, wondering what the heck was happening with my Iphone 6 plus. I new it had something to do with the software update, but it makes sense now, they had to make a choice, so they limited the CPU based on battery...<p>At least it wasn&#x27;t because they are trying to force us to upgrade. I&#x27;m going to try an update the battery and see if it makes a difference.

I have an iPhone 7. Run a test &quot;Antutu benchmark&quot; (The phone was connected to power) and it got &quot;127823&quot;, according to their ranking, it should have &quot;160864&quot;. 20% less. I would like to know, if this is the case or just coincidence.

iPhone performance degrades when new iPhones hit the market. xD

Is probably same for Android unless they operate at a lower voltage than the peak so no performance is degraded over a bigger, but at the expense overall lower performance.

looking at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;david-smith.org&#x2F;iosversionstats&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;david-smith.org&#x2F;iosversionstats&#x2F;</a> and apparently still ±50% of currently active iPhones seem to be a 6(S)(+). Which is a LOT more than I expected. I don&#x27;t see how Apple is going to ignore this one.

The point is that older batteries don&#x27;t produce as much current as new ones do. So the CPU has to be speed-stepped down in order that the system doesn&#x27;t brown out.<p>Not that this will stop the conspiracy loons foaming at the mouth in their apple hate, obviously.

Why isn’t this an issue with laptops as well as phones?

Has anybody sued already? That seems like a huge issue.

If truly necessary it should be a user option.

I smell an antitrust ...

I have a question. Didn&#x27;t read the article. Does the phones performance pick back up if you plug it in, regardless of the battery?

This screams &quot;planned obsolescence&quot;.<p>If battery scaling is a feature, then why isn&#x27;t it mentioned by Apple? Why do we need a Reddit thread and a third party benchmarking tool to figure it out?<p>Also, why does the google search for &quot;iphone slow&quot; peak every time a new iPhone is released (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trends.google.com&#x2F;trends&#x2F;explore?date=all&amp;q=iphone%20slow" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trends.google.com&#x2F;trends&#x2F;explore?date=all&amp;q=iphone%2...</a>)? Is it purely psychological? I can&#x27;t find there are no similar spikes for &quot;android slow&quot; or &quot;samsung slow&quot; or similar searches.