iPhone Performance Degrades as Battery Ages

Relevant recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15889519

> This will likely feed into the “planned obsolescence” narrative.

well, non-replaceable battery and all...

I feel like more transparency would have been welcomed, but aside from that this is a "no win" situation, since you have to pick a winner:

- Do you degrade performance but leave screen-on time relatively unchanged?

- Do you degrade screen-on time but leave performance relatively unchanged?

Most Android devices seem to do the opposite (lose screen-on time, but keep performance relatively unchanged). Different people will have a different perspective on what the "right" strategy is for this, but I think we can all agree that better transparency and maybe even leaving it to the consumer to make the choice would be welcome.

PS - "Planned obsolescence" only applies if Apple was doing this artificially. It seems like if they didn't degrade performance you'd lose screen-on time instead, so you'd still likely replace the handset and perhaps even sooner (since core services e.g. calling, texting, etc, work even with lower performance but not on a phone out of juice).

I worked on Android power perf (frequency scaling in particular) for the last 18 months and I'm not aware of any linkage with the battery state, except for the Battery Saver mode. So yeah same perf, just shorter life. There could be something in vendor Android builds I don't know about, but it isn't there in AOSP and almost certainly isn't in Pixel/Nexus.

This was the final straw for me to move to Android. My 6S was unusably slow with iOS11. I'd rather this be something _I_ can control.

At the very least, the performance should improve if you plug in the phone, and it doesn't.

Edit: other thing I remember is that when I upgraded iOS10 at one point my battery _stopped_ being reliable. I was getting the unexpected shutdowns at Another weird thing I had experienced: after every update, my battery percentage would be totally screwy. I'd burn from 100% -> 1% in no time, then sit at 1% for hours. Over charge cycles, it'd figure it out again, but that'd be reset every time I upgraded.

Edit 2: looks like I angered the fans. This is simply my experience. My geekbench scores were awful, so I was certainly impacted by this issue. I thought I'd done something wrong until this news came out.