New benchmark confirms that your iPhone performance slows down with time and software updates

It is strange, when Apple announces a brand new iPhone, it crushes the competition in all benchmarking tests and suddenly, the performance is impacted when it gets updated to the latest software that comes out 12 months after its announcement. Previously, an iPhone 6s owner replaced the battery and came to the conclusion that swapping out the old battery will revive your phone’s performance.

John Poole, founder of Geekbench decided to have a go at these benchmarking results himself so he introduced the iPhone 6s and iPhone 7 to his own form of tests, and these are the results that he noted down.

“First, it appears the problem is widespread, and will only get worse as phones (and their batteries) continue to age. See, for example, the difference between the distribution of iPhone 6s scores between 10.2.1 and 11.2.0.

Second, the problem is due, in part, to a change in iOS. The difference between 10.2.0 and 10.2.1 is too abrupt to be just a function of battery condition. I believe (as do others) that Apple introduced a change to limit performance when battery condition decreases past a certain point.”

In short, it is not just the battery aging part, but the software updates that cripple the performance of the iPhone. As you continue to use the smartphone, its battery will age as time goes on. To give you nearly the same battery timing, these software updates might force the iPhone’s processor to reduce its frequency so that it consumes less battery power as a result.

“If the performance drop is due to the “sudden shutdown” fix, users will experience reduced performance without notification. Users expect either full performance, or reduced performance with a notification that their phone is in low-power mode. This fix creates a third, unexpected state. While this state is created to mask a deficiency in battery power, users may believe that the slow down is due to CPU performance, instead of battery performance, which is triggering an Apple introduced CPU slow-down. This fix will also cause users to think, “my phone is slow so I should replace it” not, “my phone is slow so I should replace its battery”. This will likely feed into the “planned obsolecense” narritive.”

This act might encourage users to head out and buy a new iPhone in the shortest time possible, but you can always choose to replace the battery and ignore software updates from here on.

If you want to check out the detailed analysis from Poole’s side, click on the link given below.

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