At this point, people don’t need to upgrade their phones every two years. Phones are fast enough and the bump from the last generation A10 fusion chip to the latest A11 bionic really isn’t that important. Apple has even started added some fancy name to the end to uphold the experience of getting a new, more powerful phone. As a result, the deliberate slowdown was seen as user hostile to deceptively increase user delight when upgrading to a new phone and artificially enhancing the “this is so much smoother than my old phone” feeling. If the last iPhone started at 100% performance and degraded to 75%, the jump to 125% feels more significant.
From A Message to Our Customers about iPhone Batteries and Performance
It should go without saying that we think sudden, unexpected shutdowns are unacceptable. We don’t want any of our users to lose a call, miss taking a picture or have any other part of their iPhone experience interrupted if we can avoid it.
Apple mentions there are three contributions to battery life and performance:
- a normal, temporary performance impact when upgrading the operating system as iPhone installs new software and updates apps
- minor bugs in the initial release which have since been fixed
- continued chemical aging of the batteries in older iPhone 6 and iPhone 6s devices, many of which are still running on their original batteries.
As always, our team is working on ways to make the user experience even better, including improving how we manage performance and avoid unexpected shutdowns as batteries age.
As they should. Apple has always been the experience company. The Apple walled garden is carefully designed in the ethos that people don’t know what they want until you show it to them. Maybe we need a little more clarity into how Apple creates people’s preferences.
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