Q&A With New York Times Tech Columnist Brian X. Chen on the iPhone Battery vs. Performance Issue

Good piece overall, and a welcome relief from the overwhelmingly sensationalized mainstream news coverage of this story (that largely plays into the “Apple is purposefully making year-old iPhones run slow” narrative), but I thought this answer was a bit off:

I would recommend paying a third-party repair shop to replace the aged battery with a fresh one. This will cost between $20 and $70, depending on where you live and which iPhone you own. Repair shops will probably recommend against installing a battery that has a larger capacity than the original, as there can be risks of damage.

An authorized battery replacement from Apple is $79. I would never recommend a third-party battery replacement.

Update: This answer is a bit clumsy too:

What else could be slowing the older phones down?

Often, a buggy operating system upgrade can cause glitches when running apps. Another common cause is having little available device storage.

Low storage space is a real problem, but “a buggy operating system upgrade” is not really a thing. I think what Chen is trying to say is simply that bugs in iOS can make things so. The throttling feature for declining batteries that has been in the spotlight this week should only kick in when the iPhone is attempting to run at peak performance — that’s why it shows up in benchmarks like Geekbench. If “everything” is slow on your iPhone — like this guy, who claims it took more than 5 seconds just to open the Camera app — something else is wrong with your iPhone.

★ Thursday, 21 December 2017