According to French and American Courts expressed in 2018, Apple is software-enforced to slow down iPhones to force users to update more frequently. Since then, the situation has not changed radically: the new iOS 14.5.1 update again led to slowdowns and a drop in performance.
Mistakes caused a reputation crisis – the blogosphere unanimously recalled the old fail. Let’s remember how it was, and understand the current situation.
How did it happen that Apple was caught on forced braking?
This happened for the first time in the winter of 2017. She received the name “Butteringate” – the company did not enter into a clinch and admitted that battery wear causes a slowdown in the smartphone’s fiery motor.
This caused a colossal scandal; users from all over the planet demanded clarifications, and when they were not satisfied with what they received, a chain of lawsuits against the manufacturer followed. They were convinced that the company was thus forcing customers to update the lineup.
Users successfully won the trial first in France and then in the USA. In the spring of 2020, the corporation paid a total of half a billion dollars to iPhone 6 and 7 users in the United States as part of a lost class action. In February 2021, another fine followed – at the suit of the regional bureau for the protection of user rights.
How did Apple respond to the accusations?
MacRumors found on Chinese company portal material, according to which the cause of troubles with the battery was a manufacturing error. A number of batteries were exposed to excessive air exposure, which provoked excessive degradation and a decrease in capacity. Therefore, the corporation, hoping to reduce the negative factors, began to slow down by software.
According to the company, this problem is common to a small number of iPhone 6S versions manufactured in the fall of 2015: the battery cell was exposed to an oxygen environment for too long before being put into the device. As a result, they “die” much faster than their brothers who did not survive close contact with the air.
To avoid dangerous parallels with explosive Samsungs, the corporation hastily declared that its products are completely safe.
The accusers insisted that everything was different. The European consumer protection bureau Euro Consumers said that the mega-corporation is deliberately slowing down older models, and demanded to pay almost two hundred million euros – or $ 320 million – to allegedly affected users.
The chairman of the organization, Als Breugerman, announced that the company had deliberately released a patch that slowed down the device in order to hide an existing problem with the batteries, and noted that this was not a malicious action against the company, it was just that the Europeans wanted to take measures similar to those taken in the United States.
“Apple released updates to mask battery issues knowing it would slow down phones. iPhone owners just want to be treated with the same respect as users in the United States,” said Els Brüggeman, head of policy and enforcement at Euroconsumers.
Is it possible to disable the ill-fated update?
In 2018, Cupertino allowed users to independently determine the degree of performance of devices with a worn out battery: either reducing the power in safe mode, or full use without any guarantees – it will explode, it will explode. True, there were no explosions – only unauthorized shutdowns in the cold.
To change the mode, it was necessary to switch to the “Status” (beta) tab in the battery settings and select the necessary option there.
Another way to get rid of the included “stop tap” was to replace the battery. This solution was available at a solid discount, and those who changed it in advance, without waiting for appropriate measures from Apple, were compensated.
All this was a net loss for the firm.
New smartphones will turn on the braking function a year after leaving the assembly line. In September 2019, “apples” activated throttling – stone slowdown – for all their 2018 models, and the trigger was another software update.
Three years later, a jamb with another update, now versions 11 and 12 of the legendary pipe, again shook the foundations and reduced milk yield: the old XR model, according to the results of the synthetic benchmark, turned out to be much faster and more stress-resistant in terms of load than the new counterparts. A similar drop in performance was shown by gaming tests.
According to an anonymous source, the reason for such “brakes” may be different – it is likely that this is not a feature, but a bug. Possibly related to the options to reduce energy consumption, although for this the observed drop in the performance of the stone looks too solid.
The source says that such indicators may be due to various reasons. Most likely, the problem is the iOS 14.5.1 update, which, for unknown reasons, slows down the work of new iPhone models. Perhaps this is a bug.
Apple recognized the problem and promptly fixed it in the new firmware – both in the technical version and in the software version available for download.