I've been telling myself for about eight months that my iPhone 6s is just getting old. Apps take a beat longer to open than they used to, Safari stutters if I've got more than six tabs going, and around November I started keeping a Lightning cable at my desk at all times because the thing would drop from 40% to "please connect to power" in what felt like ten minutes flat. I figured, fine, it's a 2015 phone, its almost three years old, thats just what phones do.
Turns out that's not actually what phones do. Turns out Apple was slowing mine down on purpose.
If you somehow missed this (hard to, given how much of my Twitter timeline was eaten by it this month, right alongside the net neutrality stuff), a guy who runs Primate Labs, the company behind the Geekbench benchmarking app, published some data a couple weeks back showing that iPhones with older, more degraded batteries were getting their processors throttled down. Not randomly. On purpose, buried in an iOS update from back in January. Apple confirmed it, and the internet did the thing the internet does, which is go from zero to "they're doing this to force us to buy new phones" in about four hours.
Apple finally put out a real statement on this on the 28th. I'll give them credit for one thing: they didn't do the usual non-apology. They actually said the sentence "we know that some of you feel Apple has let you down," which is about as close to a real mea culpa as this company gets. And then the part that actually matters if you own one of these phones: starting late next month, they're dropping the price of an out-of-warranty battery replacement from $79 down to $29, for the iPhone 6 and later. That's a real discount, not a rounding error.
So here's what I've actually done, and what I'd tell you to do if you're in the same boat.
Don't buy a new phone yet. If the only symptom you've got is slowness and bad battery life, and the phone is otherwise fine (screen not cracked, no water damage, storage isn't maxed out), a $29 battery is going to feel like a new phone for a fraction of the cost. I was seriously eyeing an iPhone 8 two weeks ago. Glad I waited.
Check your battery condition now, even without waiting on Apple's promised software fix. They've said a future iOS update, sometime early next year, will show battery health right in Settings so you can actually see this stuff instead of guessing. Until then, if you're on a Mac, a little app called coconutBattery will read your iPhone's battery info over a USB cable, cycle count and all, and it's free. Mine's sitting at 87% of original capacity, for reference, which apparently is exactly the kind of degraded battery that triggers the throttling.
Turn off Background App Refresh for anything you don't actually need running. Not because it fixes the throttling, it doesn't, but because it's one of the bigger drains on an already-weak battery and it buys you a little breathing room while you wait for your turn in Apple's replacement queue, which is going to be backed up for months once this actually launches.
Put your name on the list early. Genius Bar appointments for this are going to be brutal in January. I already know this because I called my local Apple Store just to ask, and the guy on the phone laughed at me, not unkindly, just the specific laugh of someone who already knows what the next ten weeks look like for him.
I'll say this much for the timing: it's a weirdly good note to end a year on. 2017 was the year of the CPU that quietly slows down, the FCC vote that quietly changes what your ISP can do to your traffic, and a Bitcoin chart that went from a joke to genuinely terrifying to look at, all inside about six weeks. Feels about right.
I'll post back once my battery swap actually happens. If the Genius Bar guy's laugh was any indication, don't hold your breath.