Apple Is Forcing Customers To Upgrade By Sabotaging Older Devices, Investigations Found

The smartphone community has been throwing accusations and insinuations about companies intentionally crippling older devices in order to force users to upgrade to new ones for years. However, new data was just revealed that seem to confirm this fact. According to separate investigations, it seems Apple is sabotaging older iOS devices by making them slower and their batteries worse.

One of the people to make this discovery and report on it is John Poole, a researcher at Primate Labs. In a recent article, he noted how his iPhone 6s had gotten worse with the newest iOS update. He argues that it is unlikely that the problems with his device are simply due to the wear on his battery.

“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,” the article reads.

Poole also referred to the complaints of other iPhone users with regards to the decreased performance of their devices, specifically those on Reddit. Many users have noticed just how badly their devices were performing after a while, with some iPhone 6 units shutting down randomly even though their batteries were still at 40 percent.

After learning of the problem, one Guilherme Rambo also looked into the matter and found that deep in the iOS code is something called “Powerd.” Rambo revealed his findings via Tweets, indicating how the code affected processor performance, effectively slowing down iPhones as the batteries get older.

Now, it’s worth pointing out that there are actually some really good reasons for the existence of such a limitation. “Powerd” essentially prevents iPhones from catching on fire, as the Samsung Galaxy Note 7s did. Unfortunately, Apple chose to keep this particular fact from its users, which left them feeling puzzled when they notice their smartphones getting slower.