The Battery Issue: Apple's Secret Plan to Limit Phone Performance

In recent years, there has been a growing concern among iPhone users about the battery life and performance of their devices. It appears that Apple had a secret plan to limit the performance of older iPhones by reducing the speed of the processor when the battery is below a certain threshold. This was done to prevent the phone from shutting down due to low battery levels, but it also resulted in slower performance, which was not ideal for users.

Apple's approach to this issue has been criticized as deceptive and misleading. The company did not inform users about this plan until after the fact, when it became apparent that many older iPhones were experiencing slowdowns. This lack of transparency has led to a sense of frustration among users, who feel that they have been misled by Apple.

One of the main issues with Apple's approach was that it kept the information secret from users. The company did not notify them that their battery was limiting the performance of their phone, or that they were at risk of shutting down if they went above a certain speed. This lack of transparency made it difficult for users to understand what was happening with their device.

In an effort to address this issue, Apple has recently announced plans to inform users when their battery is below good health and whether it might be limiting system performance. While this move may not fully rectify the situation, it is a step in the right direction. The company has also agreed to lower the price of battery replacements from $79 to $29 for devices that are 20-18 years old, which will allow users to continue using their phones with maximum performance.

Despite Apple's efforts to address this issue, many users remain skeptical about the company's motivations. Some have accused Apple of intentionally slowing down older iPhones in order to encourage users to upgrade to newer models. However, it is unlikely that Apple would engage in such a practice, as it would be damaging to their reputation and potentially harmful to customers.

The impact of this issue on users cannot be overstated. Many older iPhone users have reported experiencing slower performance and shutdowns due to low battery levels. This can be frustrating and inconvenient, especially for those who rely on their phones for work or other essential tasks.

In terms of engineering, the problem is largely due to the design of Apple's batteries. The company has been criticized for using small batteries in its devices, which are not optimized for long-term performance. As a result, older iPhones have struggled with battery degradation, leading to reduced performance and shutdowns.

To mitigate this issue, Apple could easily introduce larger batteries into its devices. This would allow the phones to handle larger loads over longer periods of time, reducing the likelihood of shutdowns due to low battery levels. However, it appears that this approach may not be a priority for the company at present.

Overall, the issue with iPhone battery performance is a complex problem that requires a multifaceted solution. While Apple has taken steps to address the situation, many users remain skeptical about the company's motivations and the effectiveness of these measures.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwell it's another year and another controversy involving Apple and this time they're in hot water for supposedly purposefully slowing down older iPhones now this has been suspected by a lot of people over the years but some said well it's just because older phones can't run the newest software as well but actually it came out that Apple is indeed slowing down older iPhones but not necessarily for the reason that you may be thinking and they actually did apologize for this and they're actually facing lawsuits as well for planned obsolescence which is supposedly illegal in some countries like France and that just means that it they plan allegedly to make a phone absolute after certain amount of time possibly forcing people to upgrade now that's not apparently what they were doing and we could get into that and I do actually think this whole thing is overblown sewing in a defend Apple a little bit in this video and explain what they were doing I'm not gonna defend everything they did but we could at least go over and see why they did what they did and let's talk about that now to understand the whole situation you have to have a little bit of background and that is basically about how batteries work in phones so you need to know that they do degrade over time they become less efficient depending on a lot of things such as how long they've been in service how many times they've been recharged that temperature they've been used a lot of stuff but not only is it that a phone will it last as long but also it'll not be able to deliver the same maximum amount of power at any given time so if a processor needs maybe say one amp at a time then an older battery where it might have been able to deliver that one amp at the beginning maybe now it can only do point five amps so it can't deliver the amount of power instantaneously that a processor might need as that battery ages and how this is relevant to iPhones is that it turns out that the older batteries were sometimes actually causing the phone to shut down when the phone needed a certain amount of power and it wasn't able to deliver that so it wasn't just that the batteries weren't lasting as long but like I said it wasn't able to literally give as much power as the phone needed and then it would crash so as a result of this what Apple did and this is the issue a lot of people are having is that they actually introduced in iOS 10 a new function in the background like background software that deals with power management and what this does is reduces the maximum performance of some phones so that it wouldn't require that amount of energy from the battery and therefore the phone wouldn't shut down and if you're wondering no this is not just for really old phones but even up to last year's phone the iPhone 7 with the most recent update to iOS 11 point 2 they actually did introduce the same thing in iPhone 7 as well as the iPhone se the 6 the 6s and all those and you can actually look at some analysis that was done on these different phones by at least one service called Geekbench they have some apps that analyze iPhone performance and they looked at the different iPhone performances and you would expect that each phone from Apple with would have the same performance for each model however this was the case before the update that introduced this new feature you could call it but after you can clearly see that there are additional peaks at lower performance levels meaning that some of those phones were being limited to those lower performance levels not the maximum that you would expect with the newer phone and with the iPhone 6s you can see that it started happening right after they introduced this thing at iOS 10 point 2.1 and it became even more pronounced with eleven point two also at the iPhone 7 last year's model it had the same peak for one for every one but after eleven point two this is when they introduced the throttling for some and you can see the peaks at eleven point two and the only thing I'm kind of curious about is what else haven't they told us is the CPU performance the only thing they're limiting or they may be limiting the screen brightness by a little bit or the memory speed or something like that because they didn't tell us about this until it was found out and then they apologized afterwards but there might be other stuff going on in the background don't even know about and that's kind of sketchy now all that being said I do think this is quite overblown yeah it's pretty sketchy that Apple didn't tell us that they were doing this and I don't like that but the fact that people are suing Apple you know saying oh you're making us upgrade by slowing down older phones I don't think that's true and you can see that by the analysis done by Geekbench it's clear that they weren't slowing down all phones so it's pretty obvious that they were telling the truth that they were doing this for a reason and it seems evident that they were actually doing some analysis on each individual battery that software to determine whether it needed to be downgraded and slowed down or not because different phones did get reduced by certain amounts and most phones did have the same performance as when they were new the same top performance also another reason why this is overblown is Apple had to do something I mean they can't have phones shutting down it's better to slow down the phone than to have them shut down that would be a way worse experience and obviously people are gonna way more notice their phone not working at all if they're in the middle of a call in the middle of doing something that is infinitely worse than it just being a little bit slower and also with these phones that were slowed down it's not like you would be missing anything because presumably it will only reduce it so much so that the phone won't shut down so it's not like you would ever get that higher speed anyway because if it was to get up to that speed it would draw too much power from the battery and therefore shut the phone down so if you have the choice of either getting the lower speed that allows you to never have your phone shut down or risk it's shutting down if you ever go above that speed which would probably be most times with that older battery and just more and more times as it gets older and older but I do agree that Apple did not handle this well at all first of all what I think they should have done is from the beginning tell people what they're doing make a notification at least that says look your battery is limiting the performance if you were to have the higher performance it would shut down your phone all this sort of stuff and maybe tell you look you got grade your battery or this phone is not going to work anymore so they should at least tell people they're doing that the fact they kept it a secret and actually lied and we're actually saying no oh we didn't do anything it's just slowing down by itself that is really scummy and also if these batteries are causing so much of a problem I think that could be an issue that Apple could solve by simply adding bigger batteries we know that Apple inputs in tiny tiny batteries into the phone and yeah the phones are very efficient but look if they are causing just one year old phones to shut down there is no reason a one year old phone should have to be reduced in performance because otherwise it would shut down that's just that is just bad bad engineering and I'm assuming they could just do better by introducing bigger batteries that could handle larger loads over longer amounts of time so come on Apple you're just doing this and you know how you could fix it but instead you're keeping it a secret you're limiting performance it's not nice that being said at least after all this came out and Apple got a ton of crap for it they are doing things to kind of remedy it although after the fact first of all in an upcoming iOS update it will actually tell people when their battery is below good health and whether it might be limiting system performance so that's at least good they should have been doing that from at the beginning and I don't know if it'll still be telling people that their performance is limited but it at least tell you how your battery's doing and also they are over the course of next year I believe all of a 20-18 they will be lowering the price of battery replacements from $79 to $29 so that's not a bad deal so if you have a iPhone 6 or later you can get a brand new battery in your phone for just $29 and then it should run like new or at least if it doesn't run like new it'll run at the maximum performance and it'll last longer too cuz batteries do degrade there's no way around that that happens with all phones and by the way this is the case even if the phone is out of warranty so even if you don't have the Apple care plus it's a really old phone if it's a and later you can still get that really cheap upgrade for the battery and honestly based on what we saw with even one-year old phones kind of having this battery degradation it might be worth it just at the end of the next year if you have an iPhone 8 even the most recent one like I have then I'm probably gonna get that battery replacement just so I know that you know I can have the maximum performance for longer because who knows next year they might introduce another software update that's gonna limit even the iPhone 8 or the iPhone X you never know and who knows if they're even going to tell us so that's the basic whole story of everything if your phone's been slower that could be why especially if it was after one of these updates although it's not super malicious people saying that Oh apples purposefully slowing down phone so you have to upgrade come on don't be ridiculous they wouldn't risk doing that that would be the worst thing they could possibly do I do not genuinely think that they are reducing phone speeds if they don't have to and they're doing that at an individual phone level and we can see that by the different graphs showing that different phones were reduced by different amounts and that would be probably the minimum they had to produce it so you can let me know what you think down the comments if you think Apple is just the devil for doing this if you're siding with them we can all talk about that down there if you want to keep watching I'll put some other videos right here you can just click on those and if you want to subscribe I make new videos every Tuesday Thursday Saturday should be worth it and also enable notifications by clicking that bell or YouTube literally might not even show you new videos even if you do subscribe keep that in mind so I'm looking forward to hearing from you guys thanks so much for watching I'll see you next time have a good onewell it's another year and another controversy involving Apple and this time they're in hot water for supposedly purposefully slowing down older iPhones now this has been suspected by a lot of people over the years but some said well it's just because older phones can't run the newest software as well but actually it came out that Apple is indeed slowing down older iPhones but not necessarily for the reason that you may be thinking and they actually did apologize for this and they're actually facing lawsuits as well for planned obsolescence which is supposedly illegal in some countries like France and that just means that it they plan allegedly to make a phone absolute after certain amount of time possibly forcing people to upgrade now that's not apparently what they were doing and we could get into that and I do actually think this whole thing is overblown sewing in a defend Apple a little bit in this video and explain what they were doing I'm not gonna defend everything they did but we could at least go over and see why they did what they did and let's talk about that now to understand the whole situation you have to have a little bit of background and that is basically about how batteries work in phones so you need to know that they do degrade over time they become less efficient depending on a lot of things such as how long they've been in service how many times they've been recharged that temperature they've been used a lot of stuff but not only is it that a phone will it last as long but also it'll not be able to deliver the same maximum amount of power at any given time so if a processor needs maybe say one amp at a time then an older battery where it might have been able to deliver that one amp at the beginning maybe now it can only do point five amps so it can't deliver the amount of power instantaneously that a processor might need as that battery ages and how this is relevant to iPhones is that it turns out that the older batteries were sometimes actually causing the phone to shut down when the phone needed a certain amount of power and it wasn't able to deliver that so it wasn't just that the batteries weren't lasting as long but like I said it wasn't able to literally give as much power as the phone needed and then it would crash so as a result of this what Apple did and this is the issue a lot of people are having is that they actually introduced in iOS 10 a new function in the background like background software that deals with power management and what this does is reduces the maximum performance of some phones so that it wouldn't require that amount of energy from the battery and therefore the phone wouldn't shut down and if you're wondering no this is not just for really old phones but even up to last year's phone the iPhone 7 with the most recent update to iOS 11 point 2 they actually did introduce the same thing in iPhone 7 as well as the iPhone se the 6 the 6s and all those and you can actually look at some analysis that was done on these different phones by at least one service called Geekbench they have some apps that analyze iPhone performance and they looked at the different iPhone performances and you would expect that each phone from Apple with would have the same performance for each model however this was the case before the update that introduced this new feature you could call it but after you can clearly see that there are additional peaks at lower performance levels meaning that some of those phones were being limited to those lower performance levels not the maximum that you would expect with the newer phone and with the iPhone 6s you can see that it started happening right after they introduced this thing at iOS 10 point 2.1 and it became even more pronounced with eleven point two also at the iPhone 7 last year's model it had the same peak for one for every one but after eleven point two this is when they introduced the throttling for some and you can see the peaks at eleven point two and the only thing I'm kind of curious about is what else haven't they told us is the CPU performance the only thing they're limiting or they may be limiting the screen brightness by a little bit or the memory speed or something like that because they didn't tell us about this until it was found out and then they apologized afterwards but there might be other stuff going on in the background don't even know about and that's kind of sketchy now all that being said I do think this is quite overblown yeah it's pretty sketchy that Apple didn't tell us that they were doing this and I don't like that but the fact that people are suing Apple you know saying oh you're making us upgrade by slowing down older phones I don't think that's true and you can see that by the analysis done by Geekbench it's clear that they weren't slowing down all phones so it's pretty obvious that they were telling the truth that they were doing this for a reason and it seems evident that they were actually doing some analysis on each individual battery that software to determine whether it needed to be downgraded and slowed down or not because different phones did get reduced by certain amounts and most phones did have the same performance as when they were new the same top performance also another reason why this is overblown is Apple had to do something I mean they can't have phones shutting down it's better to slow down the phone than to have them shut down that would be a way worse experience and obviously people are gonna way more notice their phone not working at all if they're in the middle of a call in the middle of doing something that is infinitely worse than it just being a little bit slower and also with these phones that were slowed down it's not like you would be missing anything because presumably it will only reduce it so much so that the phone won't shut down so it's not like you would ever get that higher speed anyway because if it was to get up to that speed it would draw too much power from the battery and therefore shut the phone down so if you have the choice of either getting the lower speed that allows you to never have your phone shut down or risk it's shutting down if you ever go above that speed which would probably be most times with that older battery and just more and more times as it gets older and older but I do agree that Apple did not handle this well at all first of all what I think they should have done is from the beginning tell people what they're doing make a notification at least that says look your battery is limiting the performance if you were to have the higher performance it would shut down your phone all this sort of stuff and maybe tell you look you got grade your battery or this phone is not going to work anymore so they should at least tell people they're doing that the fact they kept it a secret and actually lied and we're actually saying no oh we didn't do anything it's just slowing down by itself that is really scummy and also if these batteries are causing so much of a problem I think that could be an issue that Apple could solve by simply adding bigger batteries we know that Apple inputs in tiny tiny batteries into the phone and yeah the phones are very efficient but look if they are causing just one year old phones to shut down there is no reason a one year old phone should have to be reduced in performance because otherwise it would shut down that's just that is just bad bad engineering and I'm assuming they could just do better by introducing bigger batteries that could handle larger loads over longer amounts of time so come on Apple you're just doing this and you know how you could fix it but instead you're keeping it a secret you're limiting performance it's not nice that being said at least after all this came out and Apple got a ton of crap for it they are doing things to kind of remedy it although after the fact first of all in an upcoming iOS update it will actually tell people when their battery is below good health and whether it might be limiting system performance so that's at least good they should have been doing that from at the beginning and I don't know if it'll still be telling people that their performance is limited but it at least tell you how your battery's doing and also they are over the course of next year I believe all of a 20-18 they will be lowering the price of battery replacements from $79 to $29 so that's not a bad deal so if you have a iPhone 6 or later you can get a brand new battery in your phone for just $29 and then it should run like new or at least if it doesn't run like new it'll run at the maximum performance and it'll last longer too cuz batteries do degrade there's no way around that that happens with all phones and by the way this is the case even if the phone is out of warranty so even if you don't have the Apple care plus it's a really old phone if it's a and later you can still get that really cheap upgrade for the battery and honestly based on what we saw with even one-year old phones kind of having this battery degradation it might be worth it just at the end of the next year if you have an iPhone 8 even the most recent one like I have then I'm probably gonna get that battery replacement just so I know that you know I can have the maximum performance for longer because who knows next year they might introduce another software update that's gonna limit even the iPhone 8 or the iPhone X you never know and who knows if they're even going to tell us so that's the basic whole story of everything if your phone's been slower that could be why especially if it was after one of these updates although it's not super malicious people saying that Oh apples purposefully slowing down phone so you have to upgrade come on don't be ridiculous they wouldn't risk doing that that would be the worst thing they could possibly do I do not genuinely think that they are reducing phone speeds if they don't have to and they're doing that at an individual phone level and we can see that by the different graphs showing that different phones were reduced by different amounts and that would be probably the minimum they had to produce it so you can let me know what you think down the comments if you think Apple is just the devil for doing this if you're siding with them we can all talk about that down there if you want to keep watching I'll put some other videos right here you can just click on those and if you want to subscribe I make new videos every Tuesday Thursday Saturday should be worth it and also enable notifications by clicking that bell or YouTube literally might not even show you new videos even if you do subscribe keep that in mind so I'm looking forward to hearing from you guys thanks so much for watching I'll see you next time have a good one\n"