Apple has released a statement addressing “Battery Gate,” the company’s controversial decision to slow down older phones in order to protect battery stability.
The statement included the following, as reported by CNBC: “We know that some of you feel Apple has let you down. We apologize. There’s been a lot of misunderstanding about this issue, so we would like to clarify and let you know about some changes we’re making. First and foremost, we have never — and would never — do anything to intentionally shorten the life of any Apple product, or degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades. Our goal has always been to create products that our customers love, and making iPhones last as long as possible is an important part of that.”
As a result, the company is slashing $50 off the out-of-warranty iPhone battery replacement for the next year. A new software update will also launch early next year, giving users more insight into battery life.
Earlier this month, John Poole, founder of software company Primate Labs, found that iPhone 6s models running iOS versions 10.2 and 11.2, and iPhone 7 phones running iOS 11.2, were more likely to have instances of slower processing speed.
Apple confirmed Poole’s findings, noting on Dec. 20 that the tech company was trying to “smooth out the instantaneous peaks only when needed to prevent the device from unexpectedly shutting down” when conditions were cold or as batteries aged.
The news caused a social media backlash, as customers expressed outrage that they had not been informed of the change or given the option to replace the battery. It has also resulted in a class-action suit against the Cupertino, California company.
Two California residents, Stefan Bogdanovich and Dakota Speas, filed a suit stating that Apple never got their consent to slow down their iPhones. The two claimed they experienced interference in usage of their iPhone 7 smartphones because of the intentional slowdowns. Both are also claiming damages in the lawsuit, contending that the slowdowns hurt them economically and that they are entitled to compensation from Apple.
While it’s rare for Apple to comment on critical news stories, this isn’t the first time the company has released an apology for a product. Apple shifted its stance on App Store guidelines in 2010, and also issued an extensive apology for issues with the iPhone 4.
For years, there has been a conspiracy theory that Apple deliberately slows down the older iPhones when it launches new models to get you to upgrade. An analysis by Futuremark has proved that an older iPhone with a fully functioning battery is no slower than it was at the time of launch. A Reddit thread emerged over the weekend that offers some interesting details on why your older iPhone is slowing down and how you could speed it up.
Image Credit: Apple.com (screenshot)
Replacing the battery will boost the performance of your older iPhone
The Reddit thread has attracted more than 500 comments. Reddit user TeckFire pointed out that their iPhone 6S had been “very slow these past few weeks.” It was running slow despite “updating multiple times.” After comparing their iPhone 6S’ speed with their brother’s iPhone 6 Plus, TeckFire did some research with benchmarking and battery life apps. The user ended up replacing their iPhone’s battery.
It improved the older iPhone’s speed significantly. Before the battery replacement, their iPhone 6S scored 1466 in single-core and 2512 points in multi-core tests on GeekBench. The speed went up to 2526 in single-core and 4456 in multi-core tests after the battery replacement. TeckFire speculates that Apple intentionally slows down older handsets to offer a full day of battery life even when the battery has degraded over time.
Last year, a large number of iPhone 6S owners complained that their phone was shutting down unexpectedly. Apple said it was due to a manufacturing issue that affected a “very small” number of iPhone 6S devices. The company launched a repair program, offering free battery replacement for affected users. A couple of months later, the tech giant rolled out the iOS 10.2.1 to fix the shutdown issue.
Reddit users said Apple had realized that the iPhone 6S shutdown problem was far more common than it initially estimated. Instead of coming clean about it, Apple throttled the speed via the software update to “solve” the problem. Apple had claimed that the iOS 10.2.1 had reduced the shutdowns by 80% on iPhone 6S and more than 70% on iPhone 6 handsets.
One Reddit user added that the iOS 10.2.1 was dynamically changing the clock speed “relative to the voltage that the battery was outputting.” It ensured that the phone doesn’t draw too much power. According to Reddit users, the same routine also exists in the iOS 11. The dynamic throttling of an older iPhone’s maximum speed ensures that users get a full day of battery life even as the battery wears and tears.
If you have an older iPhone that suffers from this problem, you can use apps like CpuDasherX to check your phone’s clock speed. Many affected users have reported that the clock speed shown by CpuDasherX is far less than what it should be. It indicates that Apple is deliberating throttling older devices. Consider replacing your iPhone’s battery to experience a performance boost. Do not use third-party batteries from unknown vendors. A battery replacement through Apple Store costs $79.
Apple Insider reached out to their sources at Apple. The sources told the publication that Apple does “not have a replace battery step as a rectification step for user-reported slow iPhones.” The tech giant says the iPhone batteries are supposed to last about two years worth of charge cycles. It means most of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6S series devices are past their peak performance.
Will your iPhone 7 also slow down?
It isn’t the first time Apple is throttling the speed to deliver a decent battery life on older devices. The tech giant does the same thing with MacBooks. Performance of a Mac is related to the battery wear and usage. The macOS optimizes the battery life and performance as the battery wears and tears.
Will the iPhone 7 and later devices also suffer from similar problems in the future? That’s unlikely. The A10 and A11 processors consist of some high-performance cores to handle tasks that require more processing power, and some high-efficiency cores that take care of the low-power tasks. It should offset the issues related to performance and battery life.
However, there is one factor that could still slow your older iPhone down: the new iOS versions. Each new iOS version brings new features that may consume more processing power. As a result, many users could see their old iPhones slowing.
iPhone X shipping time comes down to just two days
Apple has ramped up the supply of the iPhone X, its hottest product in years. If you want to get the iPhone X before the holidays, now could be the right time to buy it. The shipping times have come down from 5-6 weeks in early November to just two days now. If you order the phone from Apple’s online store, you could get it by the end of this week.
Apple’s manufacturing partners are now producing 450,000 to 550,000 iPhone X handsets per day. The device costs $999 for the 64GB model and $1,149 for the 256GB version. The iPhone X comes with Face ID facial scanner, Animoji, Portrait Lighting, augmented reality, and many other new features.
With the release of the iPhone 8 and iPhone X, a lot of tech nerds, collectors and Apple cultists are upgrading ASAP. Whether they’re interested in the iPhone X’s edge-to-edge display, the iPhone 8’s snappy new a11 chip or simply to enjoy the tingling feeling they’ll get when someone sees they have the latest and greatest from Apple, they’re making sure they’re the first to get their hands on it. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with any of that.
But not everyone will be looking to upgrade. Some critics don’t see a large enough difference between the 7 and 8 to care, and others don’t see the justification of dropping a thousand buckaroos to cop the X. Trust me, I get it.
Just because you’re not looking to make the leap and upgrade yet doesn’t mean your current phone is trash. In fact, there’s a lot you could be doing to make sure you’re squeezing every ounce of sauce out of your old iPhone.
1. Disable Push Notifications
Power Clean
When you get push notifications delivered to your phone — from apps, game updates, the stock market, news, weather, emails, etc. — it makes your phone light up. It might not sound like that big a deal, but every email, every text message, every snap, every fucking Groupon deal (seriously Groupon, cut the shit), means energy is getting drained from your battery — even when you’re not using it.
If you go to Settings > Notifications, you can control exactly which apps have the ability to send you push notifications. Turn off the non-essentials, and keep as much of your battery life as possible.
2. Take a Look at Your Hard Drive Space
Your apps use a lot of space on your phone. And the “bulkier” and more bloated those apps become, they not only take up more physical storage on your hard drive, but they also take up more RAM and gum everything up. Some podcast apps save entire podcasts, even after you’re finished listening to them. Photo apps like Instagram will save duplicate photos to your Camera Roll, even if you don’t post the photo. Even Tinder takes increasingly more hard drive space with every match you get and conversation you start. Don’t even get me started on those bloated-ass games we all play for a week and then forget about. Of course, every single text message you send and receive is also stored on your iPhone’s hard drive.
All that crap takes up hard drive space and processing power that’s slowing your phone down and it’s all worth having a look at — and, potentially, deleting. Settings>General>iPhone Storage.
3. Disable Unnecessary Location Services
One of the coolest (and creepiest) features of your iPhone (and most smart phones, these days) is that it is always keeping tabs on where you are. Whether it’s to use the phone’s Find My Phone or Compass features, or whether it’s to grab a Lyft home from the bar, your phone always knows where you are. The problem is that certain apps request access to your location even when they’re not in direct use, and the more apps you have doing that at the same time, the more battery you’re going to use.
If you go to Settings > Privacy > Location Services, you can turn Location Services off completely, or you can go through each individual app on your phone and decide whether or not you want it to have access to your location. Some apps, like Uber, require users to have location services on at all times (regardless of whether they’re looking for a ride), while others, like Lyft, only require users’ locations when they’re actually using the app.
4. Give It a Makeover
Most of the stuff listed here are easy things you could do to make your older iPhone run and operate like new again, so I wanted to include at least one little bit about what you can do to make it appear different. The obvious answer is to buy a new case. Even though the 8 and X are out hogging the spotlight, developers are still putting out some pretty wild and creative cases for the older models. You can also fiddle with your background and lock images, give it a good cleaning, etc. Take pride in your stuff.
5. Turn off That Bullshit Background App Refresh
Your apps are always refreshing themselves in order to update the content in your respective feed. The idea is that when you launch them, you’re getting the most recent information. It sounds great in theory, but in practice, it means that some of these apps — Facebook, in particular — suck up a lot of battery in the background. If you notice your phone’s battery is getting weaker from prolonged use and charging periods (a side effect for every Lithium-ion battery, by the way), turning off Background App Refresh (Settings > General > Background App Refresh) will help ensure that apps are only consuming your precious battery life when you’re actually using them.
6. Close All Non-Essential Apps
This is an old one, but it’s still good as gold. If you were to look at how many apps are open on your phone right now, I bet you’d be shocked and perhaps even a little horrified at what you’d find. I did it just for the sake of proving my own point just now and found 42 apps open. Forty-fucking-two. Every single one of those apps is running in the background, sucking up tons of valuable battery life. Double tap Home to bring up the multi-tasking view, and then just swipe up on every app you want to exit. It’s that simple.
7. Lower Your Brightness
Apple iOS
Of course, there’s always the old “lower your brightness” trick. If you’re trying to conserve as much battery as possible, there’s absolutely zero reason to keep your screen brightness maxed out. The simple answer is: be smart. If you’re editing photos or reading an article, obviously up the brightness. But, when you’re done and don’t really need to use your home screen as a flashlight, toggle it down a bit. I keep my brightness at around 25% and I’ve never had a single problem with it.
8. Clear Your Safari Cache
Your Safari browser stores every single pieces of information you access from your phone on your phone’s hard drive. On one obvious end of the spectrum it’s convenient because pages will sometimes load faster, logins to your favorite sites are saved and your overall experience is generally pretty smooth. But when your phone gets to a point where it’s simply storing too much web data, it can make it things run sluggishly — particularly while web browsing. Sometimes you have to clear your history and free up the pipes a little bit. You can do that by going to Settings > Safari > Clear History and Website Data. You’ll have to log back into all your favorite sites, but you’ll see an immediate difference.
9. Give It a Soft Reset
I’ll be the first person to tell you that technology can be a big pain in the ass a lot of the time. While we’re seeing new advancements every day, nothing is perfect — including the iPhone. Sometimes your phone will get caught up; certain apps won’t work right, things get buggy, apps stop responding completely, text functions don’t work, etc. Anything could go wrong at any time. If your iPhone is acting up and giving you grief, a soft reset will usually do the trick.
All you have to do is hold down the home and sleep buttonssimultaneously until the white Apple logo appears. It won’t delete any of your data and won’t revert back to factory settings, but it will completely reboot the phone, close out all apps and fire back up with a clean slate. A lot of the time, it’s exactly what the doctor ordered.
10. There’s an App for That
Power Clean
Of course, if all of that stuff sounds too good to be true (or too difficult for the not-so-technologically savvy out there), there are a ton of apps to help you get the most out of your phone. Apps like Power Clean-Remove, Battery Doctor and Battery Saver are just a few of the most popular apps out there.
The most frustrating thing about a phone addiction is that unlike actual substance abuse, the solution is not to stop using it completely. Instead, we have to find ways to use this technology responsibly, fighting apps overtly designed to steal our time.
Marketer Josh Spector wrote about ten habits that help him control his phone use. Acquiring these habits is hard, so we’re adding some tricks and apps that will enforce your self-control.
If Google Assistant isn’t enough, download Drivemode for Android for a “no-look” interface that automatically launches when you start driving.
2-3. Move your phone elsewhere when you watch TV or read.
When you’re out and about, it makes sense to keep your phone in your pocket. But when you get home, take it out. Leave it to charge, and try treating it like a home phone. The less often you check your phone for “just one thing,” the less often you get sucked into an hour of Twitter.
When you get up and check your phone, try leaving it plugged in, and/or standing right over the outlet. That’ll make it harder to accidentally pocket it and break the habit.
4. Turn off notifications.
Specifically, turn off all notifications that don’t require immediate action. You can probably leave calls and texts on, but turn off everything from Twitter, Facebook, and every app with a “follow” function.
Turn off your email notifications too. It’s not as if you don’t check your email every 20 minutes anyway. If you need, establish a “call/text if it’s an emergency” policy.
When you download a new app, disable notifications (or just never enable them). Let the app earn your attention.
If some notifications kind of matter, make them silent and hide them from your lock screen. They still might suck you in once you open your phone, but at least they won’t trigger a new browsing session.
5. Choose an end point for your browsing session.
Put your clock app on your home screen. When you open your phone, before anything else, set a timer for how long you want to spend on your phone.
Android offers some more automatic solutions. Use QualityTime to limit the time you spend on specific apps.
Try turning your phone off—like, really off—when you’re done using it. For most of us, this will prove a little too drastic. But try it just for a day and see what you gain. Everyone’s phone needs are different, so it’s normal to try a few tricks that don’t work out. That’s not failure, it’s just experimentation.
6. Stop checking your phone when in line.
For most of us, this is exactly what mobile phones are for. But if you really want to lean into the boredom that’s essential for creativity and reflection, then stop checking your phone just because you’re not doing anything for a minute.
Establish a no-phone time in the morning and evening. To enforce it—or to only block the less essential functions—use Freedom (iOS) or Offtime(iOS/Android) to turn off all access to domains like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. That way you can pick up your phone to check for actually important updates, while shielding yourself from drifting on over to your social feeds.
This may sound too stringent if your job occasionally involves social media. But even as a blogger, I’ve kept Freedom on, blocking Twitter between 9:30 PM and 7:30 AM. If I ever actually need to tweet at night, I could always go to my computer. At least five times a week I check my phone in bed, realize Twitter is blocked, and go back to my book.
8-9. Break the “checking” cycle.
Once you’ve checked your email, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and so on, it’s tempting to start the loop all over again. Instead check just one app at a time. Train yourself to put your phone down after your intended action.
It’s pretty hard to break the “what’s next” habit, so do anything you can to make switching apps less automatic. Close apps as soon as you use them, so you’d have to boot them up again. And hide all your distracting apps off of the home screen, putting them in folders so you have to dig for them or type their names to open.
Try deleting one social app at a time, for just a day or a week, to see whether you really need it. If you end up keeping one distracting app off your phone, it’ll be worth it.
10. Don’t expect a quick fix.
It’s difficult to find the right balance. Most of us really appreciate the advantages of a smart phone, and most of us also use it more than we want to. Most of these tricks only work as long as you’re paying attention to them, and apps keep finding new ways to invade your space, so you need to keep finding fresh ways to trick your brain out of bad behavior.
As Spector points out, the answer isn’t a one-time “digital detox.” It’s learning to live with, and earn the privilege of (as contributor Jake Knapp put it) “infinity in your pocket.” When you realize how big that obstacle is, it makes sense that there’s no quick fix—just regular habits, trial and error, and ups and downs.
