Apple Apologizes for Slowing Down iPhones, Will Offer $50 Discount on Battery Replacements in 2018

Last week, Apple came out with an official press release confirming the slowing down of older iPhones. In these few days, there are several lawsuits filed against Apple in several countries. Today, the company once again came out apologizing for limiting the performance of older iPhones. In a detailed post, Apple also mentioned that it would never intentionally slow down the iPhones and want to make their products last as long as possible.

The user can replace their iPhone battery to get the lost performance. Apple is now offering $50 discount for out of warranty iPhone battery replacement, which brings down the cost from $79 to $29. It is applicable only for the iPhones starting from Apple iPhone 6. The $50 discount can be availed worldwide starting late January 2018. The company also mentioned bringing a new update in early 2018 to give more information about the health of the iPhone battery.

Earlier: It’s Confirmed, Apple Deliberately Slows Down Your iPhone When It Gets Old

(December 20th, 2017)

Everyone knows that many Android smartphones get slower and laggy after using them for more than a year. Recently, there are few posts on Reddit mentioning the iPhones get the performance downgrade when their batteries get degraded. Now, the benchmark data from Geekbench unofficially confirm that the older iPhones get slower when updated to the latest iOS. Geekbench published a detail report where it tested the iPhone 6s and iPhone 7 with different iOS versions.

When compared to the iPhones 6s running on iOS 10.2, the iPhones 6s with iOS 10.2.1 falls below the average point and also the score clusters at multiple points. With the iOS 11.2.0 powered iPhone 6s, we can see even more variations in the average score. When the same tests are conducted on last year’s iPhone 7, the variations in the average score was observed from the iOS 11.2.0. There isn’t much change in the Geekbench score between the iPhone 7 running on iOS 10.2.0 and iOS 10.2.1.

However, Apple has never revealed that the performance on iPhones will be downgraded when the battery condition decreases past a certain point. Earlier this year, Apple acknowledged a weird issue on iPhone 6 and iPhones 6s, where the device gets suddenly shutdown even with some remaining battery percentage. The company fixed the sudden shutdown issue by deliberately limiting the performance of the older iPhones.

The decrease in performance can be seen in the iPhones, even when the Low Power mode is not enabled. Based on the Geekbench report, the iPhone 7 and iPhone 8 devices might also see the performance issues when their batteries get older. Instead of buying a new iPhone for the better performance, you can actually get that by just replacing the older battery on your current iPhone. There are also reports that the companies make the older devices slower so that the users can upgrade their devices more frequently.