Last week we heard that replacing the battery on your older iPhone could actually improve the conformance of your device. This was after rumors that Apple were actually slowing down the processor speed on older handsets where the battery has degraded.
One Redditor showed this by having his battery replaced and performing GeekBench tests before and after the battery was replaced. Now GeekBench has posted about it on their website and it looks like there could be something in it.
According to GeekBench the handsets are running with lower processor speeds when the battery has been degraded. Apple apparently made some changes to the way battery performance was treated in a recent update with degraded batteries.
This was apparently done to fix a bug where handsets with degraded batteries were shutting down randomly.
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.
As yet there does not appear to be any official statement from Apple on this. It looks like Apple has fixed one issue of the handsets shutting down and then created another one.
Source GeekBench