Continuing with its efforts to appease iPhone users after it admitted to throttling performance to save battery life, chief executive Tim Cook has said it will offer users the option to choose between reducing performance and prolonging battery life with a future iOS update.
Cook didn’t offer a definitive timeline for launching the said update but said it could be expected as a developer beta next month. This would be followed by a public launch soon after that.
Among the other measures, Apple had announced to stem the growing descent among its loyalists included the launch of a battery health monitoring tool in December. Before that, it had also reduced the cost of replacement iPhone batteries by $50, which brought the prices down from $79 a pop to just $29.
The replacement policy also has been quite lax which ensured all qualifying handsets irrespective of whether or not their batteries needed to be replaced eventually were provided a new one. The move to reduce performance via iOS update 10.2.1 initially targeted iPhone 6, 6s and SE but have also been extended to iPhone 7 and 7 Plus as well.
Apple had earlier stated their plan to reduce performance only applied when CPU performance was at its peak which is also when battery drain also reaches a max. The said update only works to soothe out the peaks so as to prevent the iPhone devices from restarting.
However, all of those weren’t enough as cases began to pile up against the Cupertino giant accusing it of forcefully reducing the performance of older iPhones just to force uses to upgrade to newer versions. Apple has also faced flack for not being transparent with its plans, choosing to reduce CPU performance unilaterally without keeping the end-users in the loop.
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That seems to change with the upcoming new update which will ensure users have complete control of their devices, choosing whether to reduce performance or draining out their battery on their own. Perhaps this was something that Apple needed to do right at the beginning though it’s always good to see better sense prevailing. As the saying goes, better late than never.
