If you’re a person living the 21st century, there’s a high chance that you own, have owned, or have used an Apple iPhone at some point in time. Every year, Apple makes a big fuss about the new iPhone and all the cool new features that come with it. For those of you who are like me, I tend to wait a little before dropping $1,000 on a new phone when I don’t need one. But there’s always one problem: I regularly notice my phone getting slower and having more glitches.
I’ll be honest – at first, I thought it was just Father Time that made my phone slower. But over the last few years, I began to believe that Apple had actually made my phone slower on purpose in an effort to make me buy a new one.
Well today, a new study has been released that supports that notion. That’s right – it actually looks like Apple sabotages old iPhones so us iPhone users get frustrated, give up and purchase the newest one.
Two different studies looked at a few ways that Apple might sabotage your phone. The first, done by Toronto-based Geekbench, looked at the possibility of the battery slowing down the iPhone. It studied the theory that when the battery got older and slower – as do all batteries – the rest of the iPhone would follow suit, which isn’t supposed to happen.They found was that this was indeed was the case. There is a solution, though – instead of buying a new iPhone, you can just change the battery and the phone will work just fine.
The second study, conducted by MailOnline and various Harvard professors, looked at the notion that Apple’s updates are the cause of the older iPhone models slowing down. They found that the updates are intended for the newer models and thus are programmed for newer software with more RAM. But Dom Ferkin, the director of UK-based Creation Application, doesn’t believe Apple does this on purpose:
“On every hardware release they tend to upgrade the chips and they are faster every time they are released. Each year they release a new iOS. If you’re running an iOS 7 on a 5 chip, for example, it’s comparable to running Windows XP on a Windows 95 machine. It’s just enough to annoy the users, but it’s needed if you want the slew of new features that Apple releases each year.”
Although that’s a plausible explanation, it doesn’t change the fact that new updates screw up older phones.
We hope that this helps you all reading this in your decision of when to get a new iPhone or when to update it. Just be wary of the consequences that come with it.
You can read the full article here.