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Geekbench Results Visualize Possible Link Between iPhone Slowdowns and Degraded Batteries
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Well shucks. I just ran Geekbench 4 on my iPhone 5S and it scored 1302 and 2250, higher than Geekbench reports as the baseline for that phone. And here I was hoping to get longer battery life and more power on the side. Oh well, at least this comment got me to 100 on the forums. MacRumors Regular, baby!!
People complain that Apple slows things down to get people to buy new devices, but in every case of slowdowns that I'm aware of, or case where support for older devices is dropped, there have been legitimate engineering reasons.
Now a bunch of people are complaining about this CPU throttling but how else do you expect Apple to fix unexpected shutdowns due to high CPU power demands? Their only option was to reduce CPU power, i.e., throttle. (They also did a battery recall BTW, but for people who didn't feel like going in to get a free new battery, there's this software fix.)
Same with dropping iOS support for older iPhones, every time they've dropped support it's been linked to an engineering reason. Lack of 64-bit support, lack of various GPU abilities (shaders, texture resolutions, etc.) that were necessary for graphical effects in the UI, etc.
So to my knowledge, Apple has never made a device slower or dropped support for a device for literally no reason other than that they want their customer base to buy new devices. If you have evidence otherwise I'd be interested to hear it.
What are you talking about?
The phone doesn't all of a sudden have a higher cpu power demand?
You dont make any sense. Unexpected shutdowns were due to faulty batteries, not because the CPU all of a sudden a year later started drawing more power.
The battery recall they did was done for a very small percent of 6S models and millions of them didnt qualify for a replacement. Same thing for many iphone 6 models that had the same issue were not qualifying because Apple was telling them their battery is fine even though it clearly was not.
Stop trying to justify shady and deceiving behavior. They duped, lied and took advantage of their customers.
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I agree. I think more transparency is definitely needed as you say. My iPhone 6 was randomly shutting off at around the 40% battery mark. When I saw that there was an iOS update that fixed this, I assumed the issue must have been caused by a software bug introduced in a prior update whereby some system process inadvertently burned up too much CPU. I did not expect that my phone's performance was simply being reduced--seems like a bandaid rather than an actual fix. This is also pretty disappointing since one of the huge advantages of the iPhone often touted by Apple is their processor power and efficiency, but what good is that if the processor speed will be throttled due to an unrelated battery issue. And yes, I'd rather have a usable phone than no phone at all, but this solution to a battery issue without an indication to users comes across the wrong way to me. Apologies for the car analogy, but if your car was overheating whenever it was driven over 50 mph and the mechanic's fix (without telling you when returning the car) was to somehow throttle the engine so the car could never be driven over that speed, I don't think you'd accept that as an acceptable fix or have much trust in that mechanic.
The core concept of throttling performance to compensate for battery wear is pretty good. I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes standard practice in the industry within the next year.
I am not trying to justify anything. I just don’t think Apple is deliberately doing this to force obsolescence or make people upgrade their iPhones any earlier than they have to, as what many users here seem to be insinuating.
The only reason people are upset about it right now is because it's not how they thought things worked.
You cannot be serious.
You really believe that Apple was not doing this for years so people can upgrade sooner?
I have a nice bridge for sale for you since you're buying everything
You cannot be serious.
You really believe that Apple was not doing this for years so people can upgrade sooner?
I have a nice bridge for sale for you since you're buying everything
Like I said, I believe these slowdowns are all rooted in legitimate engineering issues. Everyone is saying this is a cover up for a defective battery, but the defective batteries are on the 6 and 6S, but this throttling was found in the iPhone 7 (and maybe the 8?). Instead of some nefarious plot to avoid replacing parts due to defective design, maybe this is just mitigation for normal behaviour of an aging battery? Occam's Razor and all.
Take iOS 4.0 for example. A ton of people complained at this update made their phones slower, but Apple had to rework their entire graphics stack to support Retina displays. No kidding it got slower, it was necessarily much more complicated.
Or iOS 7.0. A ton of people also complained about this one, but this was more than just a new coat of paint. Apple introduced new UI libraries (new visual theme) and new 64-bit libraries. Of course everything got slower, the phones had to do much more stuff to maintain compatibility with 32-bit apps and older apps designed for iOS 6 and earlier.
Same with dropping iOS support for older iPhones, every time they've dropped support, it's been linked to an engineering reason. Lack of 64-bit support, lack of various GPU abilities (shaders, texture resolutions, etc.) that were necessary for graphical effects in the UI and so on.
That users feel compelled to upgrade their devices is an unfortunate side-effect, but I don’t think that is Apple’s primary intent here.
This forum has garnered a lot of resentment in recent years for Apple’s perceived shortcomings, such as neglect of the Mac and Tim Cook’s alleged penny-pinching ways. I guess we are just watching different movies here. I see the good in Apple, while you all see the worst in them, and maybe we are all just seeing what we wish to see here?
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Don’t put words in my mouth. Stop ranting long enough to read what I write. I’ll simplify it as much as I can.
As I said, it is absolutely amazing how fast an iPhone 6S running at half speed is. I know this because I have a 6S and I put my phone in power saving mode where it runs very, very well at half speed (911MHz).
It still runs quite normally when my 2+ year old battery causes my iPhone to downclock to 600MHz. No issue whatsoever with input lag or words taking 30 seconds to pop up. Word suggestions appear immediately as I type. Amazingly smooth animations when I scroll through dozens of Safari tabs, considering I’m running at 1/3 of my maximum speed.
I only referenced an X because you said you bought an X to replace your 6 Plus. I’ll do so again: When you put your X on low power mode, you were amazed at how well it runs, weren’t you? I’ll bet you couldn’t even tell the difference most of the time, could you?
Well, my 6S at 600MHz is very fast too. Sure, not as fast as your X, but I have none of the slowness issues like input lag or words taking 30 seconds to appear, which you complain about—because those issues are unrelated to CPU downclocking.
That’s not hard to understand.
As I said, it is absolutely amazing how fast an iPhone 6S running at half speed is. I know this because I have a 6S and I put my phone in power saving mode where it runs very, very well at half speed (911MHz).
It still runs quite normally when my 2+ year old battery causes my iPhone to downclock to 600MHz. No issue whatsoever with input lag or words taking 30 seconds to pop up. Word suggestions appear immediately as I type. Amazingly smooth animations when I scroll through dozens of Safari tabs, considering I’m running at 1/3 of my maximum speed.
I only referenced an X because you said you bought an X to replace your 6 Plus. I’ll do so again: When you put your X on low power mode, you were amazed at how well it runs, weren’t you? I’ll bet you couldn’t even tell the difference most of the time, could you?
Well, my 6S at 600MHz is very fast too. Sure, not as fast as your X, but I have none of the slowness issues like input lag or words taking 30 seconds to appear, which you complain about—because those issues are unrelated to CPU downclocking.
That’s not hard to understand.
Is that kind of like a nice moon landing movie set for sale for those who like conspiracies?You cannot be serious.
You really believe that Apple was not doing this for years so people can upgrade sooner?
I have a nice bridge for sale for you since you're buying everything
Well we both agree here that we have different views.
Im a realist so I see the reality of it.
You seem to think that they did us all a favor to throttle our devices in order to help us.
[doublepost=1513744566][/doublepost]
Is that kind of like a nice moon landing movie set for sale for those who like conspiracies?
I dont know, you take your pic with what you believe.
Now we’re getting somewhere. New battery, normal geekbench, slow as molasses phone.
[[Nothing at all to do with CPU downclocking. @nerdAFK—Now do you understand what I’ve been trying to tell you, while you spend hours ranting about batteries?]]
It sounds like you have a corrupt OS backup that you keep restoring onto the phone.
Instead of doing a restore from iCloud or restore from iTunes, do a setup as new iPhone.
Do an erase all content and settings. Then set up your iPhone as new. I’m not sure of the exact steps but I’m sure someone can help you with that if you need it.
Once you get a clean version of iOS 11.2 on the phone and confirm you’re not having these 5-20 second lag issues, you can start re-downloading apps.
Whatever you do, don’t restore from any backup. You need to start fresh.
I think you make several good points on why this was not necessarily defective by design. Further, I'll add that if this was the behavior all along, then it wouldn't have made sense for there to be a 10.2.1 bug fix where we could see this before-and-after behavior as that would've been the behavior all along and devices wouldn't have ever restarted at low battery. My guess is that iPhones (and smartphones in general) reached a certain level of saturation after the release of iPhone 6 as it was powerful enough with a large enough screen that people would actually want to hang onto their device for 2 years and beyond (I know I did), making battery degradation issues much more prolific. I still think there was a certain failure of communication regarding this issue.
I do feel that throttling to limit battery wear is a fair trade-off. Won't be surprised if we see more smartphones OEMs start to do this next year, now that Apple are apparently set the precedent.
Besides, what would you rather have Apple do? I see the various suggestions mentioned here and I don't think they are all that feasible.
At any given one time, the processor speed of your phone (or any computer for that matter) is going to vary dynamically depending on what you are doing with it anyways. A-series processors are designed with this in mind - short bursts of speed, followed by throttling when the phone's thermals can no longer sustain it), which is more or less in line with how most users use their phones.
How would you go about telling a person when the throttling is normal and when it is something they should be concerned about? If you were looking for some sort of public service announcement like "optimize for battery life by reducing CPU performance incrementally with battery capacity", I just don't think this is realistic. And if you can’t do those things, then flashing some obscure message on the screen about cpu performance to the average person is just going to cause mass panic and misdiagnosis.
If there is a huge enough uproar, Apple might issue a statement on this, but I won't go so far as to claim that this is all one giant cover-up, especially since it is becoming increasing clear that this throttling isn't solely limited to the small batch of faulty iPhone 6s/6s+, or if throttling is even the main reason behind why your iPhones are running as slow as they did.
CPU Frequency: 1400MHz
Geekbench Single: 1568 (stock is 1450)
Geekbench Multi: 2670 (stock is 2444)
Battery Capacity: 2500mAh (stock is 2915mAh)
Then your issues likely aren't due to throttling (but do update us on whether your phone's performance improves after the battery replacement).
When people talk about throttling, I am looking at an app taking a second or two longer to open, or processes taking a little longer to finish (like applying a filter to a photo). Most people won't notice, and it shouldn't have that great an impact on the end user experience, considering that A-series processors these days should have plenty of spare processing power to bulldoze their way through any throttling if need be.
If you are talking about the camera taking 5 seconds to open when it was previously near-instantaneous, then that likely is some other problem and not throttling.
Having reread the article, I am starting to think that the writers may be conflating two separate issues (processor throttling due to aging battery, OS slowing down the phone's performance significantly). They may not be entirely unrelated (one or both occurring might be a symptom that something else is very wrong with your phone).
I think a lot of people's indignation about this issue is because they think throttling is responsible for some massive slowdown that they may have experienced, when throttling almost certainly isn't the problem.
I, too, believe there are legitimate engineering reasons.
BUT, just answer my one and only simple question. Many people were forced to upgrade because of unusable or much slower devices, why don't they tell customers about the throttling??
Read my post above yours (just made some edits). I suspect the slower performance isn’t due to throttling but rather some other problem with their iPhones.
First, what do you want Apple to say that wouldn’t be taken out of context or misinterpreted a hundred different ways?
And even if Apple told their customers about this, what would you as a customer have done? Apple can’t conceivably disable the throttling; that’s baked into the OS itself. It could be some other issue slowing down your phone other than the throttling itself. There are just too many variables.
I don’t see any ill intent or malice on Apple’s part, so a class lawsuit seems unlikely. It’s just Apple being Apple and taking it upon themselves to make the tough decisions for their customers so they don’t need to.
Let me tell you, I experienced most of the scenarios people mentioned: camera lag, keyboard input lag, phone calls not showing up on iPhone but my Apple Watch rings, blah blah, it was misery.
I have since replaced my battery and performance is back to normal.
The throttled CPU is the ONE AND ONLY reason causing all the lag.
It is understandable though very sad that all you Apple believers just can't accept the fact that Apple lied.
It's not like we are making things up and trying to blame Apple for what it didn't do. I love Apple products and do hope they keep making better stuff and I believe most of the people who are criticizing Apple do have the same wish.
Replied to you just now.
And it's not just me that get the normal performance and usability after replacing the degraded battery.
The first Reddit post said it loud and clear.
The geekbench blogpost also showed large scale of performance drop.
So it's not just random variation.
Did you read these posts?
Don't forget - this iPhone 6 was flawless after the new battery and other repairs, and while on iOS 10.3.3 but ever since the 11.0.2 update and newer it's been a whole different animal.
Long story so the TL;DR version is, if I can't have all 9 years of my iMessages history and all my call logs (or other data not on the cloud) then I don't want to use this on one of my 2 iPhone lines. So I ended up buying an X to replace it. My backup restored to the X just fine and has no trouble.
The problem is that a good fresh backup from my working 6, 7+, and X won't work properly on this particular 6. These same backups have worked fine going back onto the 7+ when I had to wipe and restore for an iOS issue, and for migrating to my X, just not on the 6.
So, if I have to wipe it and set up as new I might prefer to sell it, now that I have both the X and 7+ as my 2 active phones. It would take hours and hours, and then some more, to recreate my setup from scratch. If wiping and setting it up as new works then great, it's worth selling; but if not, then I'd have wasted even more of my time getting it back to where it is now.
It's still useful to me as is, being used as a 128GB iPod in my car via USB without a SIM card. It's nice that while it's in my garage it's downloading my mail and iMessages over WiFi and keeping up to date. Being a clone of my current iPhone 7+ and X, in the event that I leave the house and forget my phone and all I have is my LTE Apple Watch, this 6 becomes a mobile archive of data that I might need to have with me.
For those reasons, it's worth more to me "slow but with all of my data and settings intact" than "wiped, slow, and set up as new". But once Apple gets iMessage in the iCloud then I'll explore that option.
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It seems agreeable that one of the main reasons people replace their phones is when they feel slow, no? New features would be another one, but we're getting into a time period where the hardware is quite matured and not changing all too much.
The combination of an iOS that demands more resources, apps that are less optimized on 'old' hardware, and a CPU that throttles down even below half of what it should be running at make a recipe for the phone running rather slowly.
The last thing people with slow phones would think to do is [pay to] replace their seemingly fine battery (both experienced and as reported by the device itself).
Hey there, just so you know all know.... I had posted previously about my phone being slow... reporting 600-839 Mhz (iPhone 6 should be 1400)... and I ordered a new battery and just installed. CPU reported 1400 Mhz immediately. Reran Geekbench and pulled numbers slightly higher than the average numbers reported by Geekbench, and nearly double what they were.
The change was immediate, and I'd had no previous variations in this range... changing the battery was an immediate improvement.