14 DAY TRIAL // Apple has confirmed the investigations launched by the US government over slowing down of customer's iPhone devices without being more transparent and says the promised power management features are coming next month.
As you may be aware, Apple released last year a new software update that implemented a so-called feature which slowed down the performance of certain iPhone 6 and iPhone 6s devices with degrated batteries under cold weather and when the battery charge was low.
The feature was extended to iPhone 7 models as well a year later, and discovered by accident after some users reported slowdowns on their older iPhone devices. Apple wasn't really transparent about this feature, even so Apple CEO Tim Cook said in an interview earlier this month that they said so in the release notes of the respective iOS update.
Anyway, when Apple came clean about slowing down older iPhone devices, numerous customers sued the company, and it now looks like even the U.S. government is asking them about the handling of older iPhone batteries and their transparency to customers, as Bloomberg reported earlier this week.
iPhone users will be able to disable CPU throttling in the iOS 11.3 update
Apple already apologized about the deliberate iPhone slowdowns and it promised to bring a new battery management feature that would allow customers affected by the CPU throttling functionality to disable it, along with detailed information about the current health of their iPhone's batteries.
These new battery management features will be coming in the next iOS software update, version 11.3, which is expected to arrive this spring. The first iOS 11.3 beta is already available for developers and public beta testers alike, but it doesn't include any of these features as Apple now says they'll be coming next month.
"As we told our customers in December, we have never — and would never — do anything to intentionally shorten the life of any Apple product, or degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades. Our goal has always been to create products that our customers love. Making iPhones last as long as possible is an important part of that," Apple told Axios.
As next month starts tomorrow, we're expecting the second iOS 11.3 beta to be released this week, though it might not include the new toggle option to disable iPhone slowdowns. We'll keep you guys informed as soon as anything changes.