Secretly throttling is never okay

Last Tuesday, AnandTech caught OnePlus doing the previously unthinkable — throttling the performance of its new flagship smartphone, the OnePlus 9 Pro. Seeing “inexplicable” slowdown, the publication discovered the phone was diverting a laundry list of popular apps away from its Snapdragon 888’s high-performance cores. The company’s excuse? It was all an attempt to save battery life.

Today, OnePlus is doubling down on that earlier statement with a longer forum post, where the company’s argument sounds downright reasonable. “In recent years, the performance of smartphone SoCs has reached a point where their power is often overkill in certain scenarios,” writes OnePlus, blaming Qualcomm for essentially being too good at its job.

“With...

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