A bad battery usually has not only a lower capacity but also reduced performance (such as a higher resistance) and that could affect the (top)-speed of the phone (not saying that it has to in every case). For your analogy that would equate to a kink in the fuel-line reducing the maximum flow and that certainly can affect its performance.
This is all speculation but if the iPhone reduces its speed instead of performing a brown-out reset due to voltage drop I would consider that good engineering but of course it would be nice to be informed about whats happening.
And I call it sweeping the dust under the carpet. There has been a feature called "power saving mode" on iOS since iOS9. Or was it 8? Anyway, that is not it.
All in all, people claiming that those with throttling issues are crazy conspirationists should issue an apology. I'm thinking about the recent media "crackdown" on the matter of so-called "deluded users", including the New York Times.
Also, the 10.2.X update hasn't fixed the random shutdowns at all, which still occur in my experience.
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I wasn’t going to write anything here! But since there are users here either stating that they don’t believe this story or that if it does exist this is a nice measure by apple... I had to write this:
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These are 2 iphone 6 bought on the same day, the battery life was at 85% and 83% respectively.
I can tell you that the white one was unusable. It would make writing a simple sms or answering a call nearly impossible due to the lag.
So... having an iphone preforming like that is not a good measure if you want it to last a full day. Because you simple cannot use it. And if you say otherwise I am sure you never tried to use it like this.
As for the battery replacement. The white one after this test I had the battery replaced, I suspected this performance was either a faulty chip or a some kind of throttling due to battery life. However I changed a battery in a 3rd party store and the performance was the same.
After this article came out I sent it to the same store again and they are swapping right now the batteries of the white with the black if this results in the white regaining the speed this will prove that it is battery related.
TL;DR, People who claim that this is a conspiracy theory should just shut up and look at the evidence. People who claim this is a good measure to keep the iPhone to last a full day, need to use one with these conditions and see for themselves how stupid those comments are.
Did you buy them new or used? What's the OS version on each? Did the white slower one really have 83% battery at the time of testing? Cause if you confirm, wow that's bad.
[doublepost=1513071301][/doublepost]I don't call this good engineering.
There are 2 ways to look at it.
Either the phone doesn't poop out mid-battery life, and that's clever, but on the other hand they could just include that under "power saving mode", but there is no connection between power saving mode and that "feature", so it's sneaky however you look at it.
Or, another way to look at it is Apple uses the batterie's cycle count as a means to implement planned obsolescence by artificially crippling older phones. "But if the battery fails, the whole phone fails anyway", you'll object. I wouldn't see why breaking the camera lens would cripple the CPU for instance. So why the battery ? And where does the sweet spot lie and how does Apple decide to implement that ?
It sounds like all too literal gaslighting. "Isn't the light dimming? No it's not, you just have newer phone envy!" Seems to me that this way, Apple progressively lets the frustration build up, and unless the user goes to the battery settings, they won't know that there is actually a problem.
Add to that the fact that a battery replacement offers no garantee that Apple won't cripple your phone again whenever they see fit, and of course that Apple will upgrade your phone to the latest OS as a compulsory measure, so you'll lose out on performance anyway.
