Apple Will Keep Throttling iPhones With Old Batteries. Here's How to Stop It
Last year, controversy stirred as Apple acknowledged that it had, in fact, purposefully inhibited iPhone performance when the battery neared the end of its useful life. The good news: It wasn’t just in your head! The less-good news: Apple will continue the practice with the iPhone 8, 8 Plus, and X.
While reports of the throttling first surfaced last December, Apple said it had started the practice in 2016 as a way to elongate the lives of iPhones. As a lithium-ion battery degrades over time, cold weather or high current demands can lead to a device shutting down altogether. Apple pushed a software update intended to keep iPhones from sporadically turning off, by limiting how much strain they could put on the battery in the first place.
In doing so, though, Apple also forgot the important step of making it extremely clear to tens of millions of iPhone owners that an invisible boot would slam on the brakes as the battery aged. It further neglected to give those iPhone owners the option to turn that throttling off, in the event that they wanted the phone that they bought to work at the speeds they expected, regardless of the tradeoffs. And it apparently hadn’t considered that the solution to an old battery might just be a new one.
