1.) Why is Apple Throttling My iPhone?
This is a contentious point, but basically, Apple's stance is that it's throttling your iPhone's performance for its own good. On the surface, that sounds like a load of bull. And taken at surface-level, it is. But dig deeper, and we find that it may not be the hot air you think it is.
As users, we judge our phones largely by how smooth the experience is. Once we start to notice that a phone is "lagging", freezing, or losing battery life more rapidly, we generally make the mental note that its days are numbered.
The most common case is when a new version of iOS or Android is released, and the increased demands of the new operating system send our aging phone to a screeching halt.
So let's talk tech for a second. Everything your phone does is driven by it's processor (CPU). That piece of hardware works harder the more you ask it to do (i.e. play music while browsing the net and taking a phone call). The more the CPU works, the more battery power is needed to keep the processor running so that you don't notice any dip in performance. The harder the battery and CPU have to work, the hotter the phone gets. And if Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 has taught us anything: hot phones are bad. Very bad.
Fortunately no iPhones have reportedly exploded due to high performance demands. However, many of them were caught randomly rebooting while users were in the middle of using them. Why? Because the battery was getting too hot and rebooting the phone was the quickest way to cool things down. Terribly inconvenient and sloppy, but at least your phone wasn't exploding in the middle of your YouTube or Netflix binge.
This became a huge issue as thousands of users reported to Apple that their phones were constantly rebooting in the middle of the day. So what did Apple do? They released a fix.
What does the fix do? In short, it limits how fast and hot the CPU can run, thus limiting how much power it consumes, thus limiting how hot the battery could get, thus eliminating up to 80% of the random reboots users were experiencing.
The trade-off? Users began to see drastic changes in performance. Since their CPU's can no longer run as fast as they used to, their phones began to struggle to do a multitude of tasks that used to be common and breezy.
2.) Which Phones are Affected?
This is another piece to the puzzle. Many people have taken to holding onto their smartphones for years, since we no longer have the obligation of 2-year contracts expiring and telling us it's time to upgrade. So people are still out there rocking their iPhone 6, 6s, and 7. And that's great. Those are great phones.
The 6 and 6s, specifically, are the devices most affected by these updates. That's no coincidence.
As a brief look at Lithium-Ion Batteries (the kind of batteries inside most smartphones, tablets, and laptops) will tell you, the average battery will lose 2% of it's longevity every month: so after 50 months (or just over 2 years), most batteries cannot be expected to perform as well as they did out of the box. Even more of those batteries will begin experiencing performance issues long before that.
The rate at which a battery discharges is influenced by many factors, one of which is--you guessed it--temperature. Another reason to keep things running as cool as possible. Remember how your dad used to shove batteries in the fridge when he wasn't using them? That was to keep them from discharging as quickly as they might have if they were left at room temperature. It's a small difference, but it compounds the hotter things get.
The batteries in the iPhone 6 and 6s are long past the 2 year mark. In fact, most professionals would recommend paying for a full battery replacement or buying a new phone altogether. Instead, Apple is doing its best to prolong the life of your phone. Again, the trade-off is, it won't play as nicely with the newest software as we now have to balance performance with temperature and power consumption.
The good news is, if you have a newer phone (iPhone 7/7 Plus, 8/8Plus, or X), you are unaffected by these updates.
3.) Is Apple Doing This to Force Me to Buy a New Phone?
I won't speak for Apple, but I will direct you to the words of Matthew Panzarino, Editor-in-Chief at TechCrunch:
It would be beyond stupid and incredibly shortsighted for Apple to do this and, if it was actually true, would likely lead to tangles of a governmental and legal nature that no company like Apple would ever want to happen.
Instead, Apple is focusing attention on smoothing out the very high and quick peaks of power draw that can cause problems with older batteries.
So, no. Apple is not forcing you to buy a new phone. It is trying to keep your aging device running. And that's pretty nice of them, even if it means taking a bit longer to call up your latest playlist.
There's a reason fewer people are using an iPhone 4. By the time I traded in my iPhone 4 for a 5s (it was 3 years old at the time), it was slow, clunky, and had to be charged multiple times a day. It's 2017 and very few things have changed as far as the logistics of how a phone operates or how long it's expected to hold a charge. 3 years is an eternity in the smartphone business, even if consumers wish it weren't.
As Panzarino said above, it would be incredibly poor of Apple to openly force its users to buy new devices when they don't want to. If nothing else, it damages the good faith between Apple and it's customers, and at worse, it drives them to other products. Apple is smarter than that. Consumers should be, too.
4.) How Can I Get Around The Performance Bottleneck?
So far there are only two ways to get around these performance restrictions: pay to have your phone's battery replaced, or buy a new phone.
5.) Why Doesn't Apple Offer Free Battery Replacements?
Let's pretend it's 2015 and I went a bought a Dell XPS 13. A fine machine! But after two years, the battery just doesn't hold a charge. Do I go to Dell and ask them to replace the battery of my 2 year-old laptop for free?
I could. But they'll laugh at me. They'll then tell me it will cost money to have battery installed. Because that's how business works.
These are not phones that just rolled off the factory line. These are phones that have been in circulation for 2-3 years. They are aging, and they will never perform as they did on Day 1. That doesn't make them worthless.
Think of your car: it requires constant upkeep to keep it running over its lifespan, but after a certain point the cost of maintaining the vehicle outweighs the expected longevity, and you start contemplating buying a new car.
It's the same with technology.
6.) What Can I Blame Apple For?
You can blame Apple for not being upfront about this issue and explaining it customers before rolling out the updates. However, as Panzarino puts it:
If you give a user enough rope they will hang themselves, so to speak, by replacing batteries too early or replacing phones that don’t need replacing.
Apple is in a no-win situation. If it sits back and does nothing, its customers will think Apple doesn't care about their problem and wants them to upgrade to a new phone to solve it.
If Apple releases an update and that fixes the issue by slowing down users' devices, users will say Apple is deliberately throttling them because they want to force their customers to buy new phones.
See how it's a Catch 22?
Whichever side of the fence you lie on is up to you, but please don't abandon Apple based on what you think you know or what the headlines say. Understand your technology. You use it every day. You owe it to yourself.
