Developer accuses Apple of slowing down old iPhones to save battery life

Apple may be deliberately slowing down older iPhones with degraded batteries to preserve battery life, a developer has learned.

After studying how some iPhone models were performing when using publicly available benchmarks, developer John Poole found that the phones' performance could vary wildly, depending on what software it was running, with many individual phones performing much worse than the "standard" benchmark established when the phone was brand new.

The lithium-ion batteries in smartphones and other devices degrade a little every time they are charged and discharged. Day to day, the degradation is negligible, but after a year or longer, users tend to notice the device no longer holds a charge as long as it used to, and particularly processor-heavy tasks (like playing graphically challenging video games) can sometimes cause a smartphone battery to discharge rapidly. Read more...