Apple CEO Tim Cook has promised iPhone users that they’ll be able to disable the feature that throttles the performance of their handsets processors as the battery pack ages.
While Cook doesn’t recommend iPhone users do so, he told ABC that the slowdown feature will have an option to turn it off in the next iOS update.
“We’re gonna give people the visibility of the health of their battery so its very very transparent, this hasn’t been done before,” Apple’s chief said.
“We will tell somebody we’re slightly reducing your performance by some amount in order to not have a sudden restart, and if you don’t want it you can turn it off.”
However, he added a caveat: “We don’t recommend it, because we think people’s iPhones are really important to them and you never can tell when something is so urgent.”
Apple has faced strong criticism and even court filings over its intentional slowing down of older iPhones, with people arguing that Cupertino failed to inform them about the processor throttling and argued it forced people to upgrade to the latest iOS devices like the iPhone X.
While Cook didn’t specifically say Apple did anything wrong, he did note the company could be more transparent about the intentional slowdown and apologised to any iPhone users affected by it.
“Our actions were always in service of the user, maybe we should have been clearer at a point of time but our actions were always the purest,” Cook said.
“If anybody out there believes we did something nefariously we apologise for any kind of thing that we did or didn’t do.”
We’ll have to wait and see how many people decide to turn off the throttling feature and the damage having it on by default has caused to Apple’s reputation. But we suspect die-hard Apple fans will be rather nonplussed and still nail their colours to Apple’s mast.
Related: Samsung Galaxy S9 release
Do you have an older iPhone and will you be turning off the throttling feature? Let us know on our Facebook page or tweet @TrustedReviews.
Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
