Apple Slashing Battery Price for Slashing iPhone Speed
Apple in an effort to make amends to disgruntled iPhone users will be reducing the prices of replacement iPhone batteries by $50. This reduction in price will be in effect from January 2018 to December 2018. Also, Apple plans to release an “iOS software update with new features that give users more visibility into the health of their iPhone’s battery, so they can see for themselves if its condition is affecting performance.”
Several news reports have said that Apple released iOS updates that appeared to deliberately slow down iPhone devices. Many have speculated that the slow down was a coy effort on the side of Apple to cause iPhone users to upgrade their devices to newer ones. I a message posted by Apple, the company says that they did intentionally slow down the iPhones and was not trying to reduce the life of the iPhone for any of their users.
Apple has said that the operating system update, iOS 10.2.1, included code that would advert iPhone for unexpectedly shutting down because of low battery charge. Apparently, older iPhones batteries were not keeping their charge as they aged and when they had low charge levels they were shutting down without notice. Users would be in the process of doing tasks like talking on the phone, taking pictures, or other activities and then the device would just shut down. The new update was intended to reduce the depletion of the battery charged, but that ended up slowing down many of the processes that would run on the iPhone. Users noticed a marked reduction in their iPhone performance, for which Apple had to address. The update originally was used in iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus, and iPhone SE. They felt the update produced marked benefits for those users and then decided to roll out the same update for the Phone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus in iOS 11.2.
Apple said that the installation of a new battery will eliminate the poor performance issue that users of the older devices are now experiences. For that reason, they are discounting the replacement batteries from $79 to $29.
Source:https://www.apple.com/iphone-battery-and-performance/