Apple Apologizes for Slowing Down Older iPhones

Apple has apologized to its customers for slowing down older iPhones. In a lengthy message posted on its site, the company gave an explanation for the controversial update. To make amends, Apple will temporarily drop the prices of replacement of batteries to $29 in late January 2018 for anyone with iPhone 6 or later whose battery needs to be replaced. This offer will be available worldwide till December 2018.

"Early in 2018, we will issue an iOS software update with new features that give users more visibility into the health of their iPhone's battery, so they can see for themselves if its condition is affecting performance," the post said.

The company confirmed the slowdown last week but said that it was a part of power management feature. The feature was meant to prevent older batteries from shutting down suddenly.

"First and foremost, 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," the post said.

The company began to receive feedback from some users who were seeing slower performance in certain situations, they first thought that it was due to a normal,temporary lag caused by a new operating system update.

But the company now believes that another contributor to these user experiences is the continued chemical aging of the batteries in older iPhone 6 and iPhone 6s devices, many of which are still running on their original batteries.

According to Apple, upgrading to a new battery will clear up any slowdowns related to the update.