The iPhone, for all its excellent practicality and ingenuity, is not without its flaws – and believe me when I say there’s a lot wrong with Apple’s marquee product.
One of the main gripes being their older model is slowing down significantly, which is ironic if you think about it as Apple prides itself on their iPhones not slowing down or lagging like other smartphones, i.e. Samsung devices.
So they’ve become a walking contradiction in that sense, after failing to address slow down and lag times issues of their old iPhone models. In fact, they’ve been relatively silent over the issue until now when they decided to make a statement earlier this week.
Revealing their reason in a recent press statement, a spokesperson for the tech giant said:
Our goal is to deliver the best experience for customers, which includes overall performance and prolonging the life of their devices.
Lithium-ion batteries become less capable of supplying peak current demands when in cold conditions, have a low battery charge or as they age over time, which can result in the device unexpectedly shutting down to protect its electronic components.
While we are highly aware iPhone batteries have the life expectancy of a hamster what we didn’t know was it was that slowing down our handsets as result. As the batteries age, the phones’ ability to main its charge drops and is therefore unable to run the same way it did when it first came out of the packaging.
However, it’s now been revealed Apple was employing some underhanded and rather questionable tactics by intentionally slowing down their phones.
The Verge contacted Apple for comment and received the following:
Last year we released a feature for iPhone 6, iPhone 6s and iPhone SE to smooth out the instantaneous peaks only when needed to prevent the device from unexpectedly shutting down during these conditions.
We’ve now extended that feature to iPhone 7 with iOS 11.2, and plan to add support for other products in the future.
So with Apple slowing down their phones deliberately it means customers are forced to turn in their old handsets and buy updated (and by extension much more expensive) models.
The has led to a class action being brought against the tech firm, CNBC reports. Stefan Bogdanovich and Dakota Speas claim Apple never requested their consent to ‘slow down their iPhones’.
There are a few ways to counteract Apple’s ‘active decay switch’. One Reddit user came up with a solution to replace the old battery for a new one which will lead to a ‘returned performance’, bringing ‘CPU clock speeds back to normal’.
A new battery will cost you £60 to replace, which is much cheaper than the alternative – paying hundreds of pounds for a new iPhone which you’ll only have to replace again when the battery dies out in three years’ time.
