13 ms·

Old iPhones become faster if you change the region to France

305 points by fomine3 5y ago

diebeforei485 5y ago
What's the difference between changing the region to France and simply disabling the performance management function?
- peteretep 5y ago
  Whether or not someone will click on the title of an article
- alacritas0 5y ago
  I don't know, but I've had performance management disabled for about a year on my 1st gen SE. After switching to France as my region, my phone died at 15% for the first time in a long while so there seems to be some difference.
wb14123 5y ago
Anyone understand Chinese read the source article at the end? The source article clearly says this is not the case. Whether it’s true or not, I don’t like a report that changes the information from its source.
- ytch 5y ago
  Yes, the Chinese news says someone in Weibo posts about this, then the reporter tests: 1. at first the score is lower after switch region, they guess the reason is thermal throttling because they tested multiple times, after cooling down, the score is only improved a little. 2. they thought the battery capacity is 100%, so there is no throttling. Therefore doing the test on a 80% phone, but there is also no significant difference. 3. Finally they come out an assumption, iPhone will do a soft restart and kill a background process after changing region, so the performance is improved. Therefore the title from gizchina is a little misleading.
lsiebert 5y ago
Old iphones become faster if you reboot them, like most devices. This is true whether or not you change the region. There's no qualitative difference when you test repeatedly. https://knowtechie.com/want-to-speed-up-your-old-iphone-try-changing-its-country-region-to-france/ https://knowtechie.com/want-to-speed-up-your-old-iphone-try-...
- throwawayswede 5y ago
  Are you such a fanboy of Apple that even blatantly throttling old iPhones in specific regions doesn't matter to you anymore?
  - personjerry 5y ago
    Are you so prejudiced against Apple that you didn't read the commenter's linked article which discredits the data?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- ummonk 5y ago
  Oh good point
- MrBoomixer 5y ago
  > If you’ve got an older iPhone that’s seeming to slow down, it’s more likely that your device is just aging. I was under the impression that technology doesn't "just age". The software running and apps being updated for new platforms might make it feel "slower" but in general using the phone itself shouldn't ever feel like it's aging.
kemayo 5y ago
The interesting thing about this story is that "batterygate"[1] represents a period from January 2017 (when Apple added the throttling behavior in iOS 10.2.1, in response to bad press about old batteries causing shutdowns) to March 2018 (when Apple added the messaging explaining the throttling in iOS 11.3, and letting you opt-out of it). I'd speculate that the HN crowd skews towards being the type who'd buy new phones pseudo-regularly, so we're probably less likely than the average person to have actually experienced the throttling on an old battery. Despite the status quo having been the "fixed" state for 3.5 years now, that one year period has left an indelible mark on some people's perceptions of Apple, such that stories claiming performance-shenanigans will always have an audience. And, to be fair, the messaging about an old battery is probably confusing[2]. You get a popup explaining it after your phone restarts from poor battery performance for the first time, and then it's buried in the battery-health segment of preferences. Disabling the performance-throttling is even done just as a text-link, rather than a toggle or button. There's also no call-to-action suggesting that you might be able to get the battery replaced. (That's reserved for when the overall battery capacity drops.) [1]: https://www.ifixit.com/News/11208/batterygate-timeline https://www.ifixit.com/News/11208/batterygate-timeline [2]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208387 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208387
- IIAOPSW 5y ago
  I suspect HN tends towards less likely to be enticed by shinny things and marketing hype cycles. My phone is pushing 4 years at this point. I always buy with the expectation that I will get 3-5 years out of any phone/laptop. Really want to see data on this one.
  - haimez 5y ago
    It would certainly be interesting to see the data, but I’m not sure if I’d expect the results to point towards any particular monolithic user trends. I think a lot of users (perhaps the majority?) are using flagship devices released within the last year.
  - kemayo 5y ago
    My logic is mostly that we're on a site which is targeted at people who're in a fairly high-earning profession, with the added bonus of it being a fairly change-friendly profession. If you're making Silicon Valley engineer money, whether you buy a new flagship phone every year is pretty much a matter of whether you want to, without money being a strong factor.
fleventynine 5y ago
Fun the article: "The GeekBench running score before changing the location to France is 286,632. However, after changing the location to France, the running score is 298,321." I have a hard time caring about a 4% difference in performance.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Conditions aren't even controlled enough to measure the difference. Phone would have to be at exact same temperature, exact same time since boot, same radio conditions, laying on the same surface at the same temperature and with the same ambient air flow and temperature.
  - Y_Y 5y ago
    If I was doing a test like this I'd run the benchmark a large number of times (at least ten) in various (not necessarily strictly controlled) typical usage scenarios. Ideally there would be a variety of handsets of the same model too (assuming variance between those is small). Then I'd filter for outliers and take a mean. I like this kind of testing, because you account for confounds that may only appear in a single highly-controlled lab setup, and won't reflect the results that people are expected to see when they use their phone in a typical way.
f32jhnjk33jj 5y ago
Why is Apple so far behind the competitors regarding hardware? They still have huge notch on the top, but competitors have invisible cameras behind display (Xiaomi Mi Mix 4). No fingerprint behind the screen like competitors. No foldable body frame. The only thing Apple do better than competitors is CPUs / SoCs.
- f32jhnjk33jj 5y ago
  and don't forget missing USB-C connector! I can charge all my 15 devices in a travel via a single cable, but Apple users have to carry another charger (or adapter) just for smartphone...
  - Y_Y 5y ago
    But if you have 15 devices and a single cable you are going to spend all day charging, right? and the adapter for iphone to usb-c is pretty small. Not that I don't love usb-c ubiquity (thanks EU). It rwally grinds my.gears that my new kindle was syill micro-usb. Anyway, for those cases I have a couple of cheap adapters that do lightning/usb-c/micro/mini that I got free as marketing promos. Pretty handy to keep in your bag, especially for taking pity on people with dead iphones.
  - thebruce87m 5y ago
    I have no doubt in my mind that the people calling out Apple to move to usb-c will be first in line to shout “planned obsolescence” if they did make the swap.
- dlivingston 5y ago
  Simple: branding. If you see the notch, you know it’s an iPhone. If every phone was a slab of glass, there’s no product differentiation. On hardware: Apple’s flagship phones are parity or better on most aspects of hardware. The SOC, camera module, material construction, screen color accuracy, and speaker quality meet or exceed just about everyone. I didn’t realize this was still an open question for people.
- dehrmann 5y ago
dzhiurgis 5y ago
It's amazing how much fluff was made about it this when battery replacement in random shop costs about $20-50.
- kemayo 5y ago
  The main reason for the hubbub, back in the day, was that Apple completely obscured (a) that they were throttling performance, and (b) that replacing the battery was the fix. I completely believe that they made the decision to throttle performance thinking it was the best action for their customers, and I agree with them. Throttling is better than random shutdowns. However, it's very easy to imagine that they dragged their feet so long on explaining what was going on because throttled phones were driving upgrade sales, while explaining throttling only drove battery sales. I've never seen anyone claiming to have insider knowledge of the decisions around this inside Apple, unfortunately.
jdlyga 5y ago
It only seems that way because French time is in decimal.
ummonk 5y ago
This article seems to suggest that the throttling happens outside France even when the user sets the phone not to throttle? That is pretty big news and hard to see a good faith reason this would happen. Edit: maybe there is an innocuous explanation after all https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28296812 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28296812
aetherspawn 5y ago
OK, the performance varies by 2%. What is the tolerance of the performance test, even? Those things vary like crazy. I could change the language to Chinese and run the test over and over until I see a 10% improvement and report on that. This level of "performance difference" will not even be noticeable, if it isn't immaterial to begin with.
sebyx07 5y ago
Just tried on a iphone 7, it really does the trick
gabrielblack 5y ago
I could be ok with all those Apple "features" if only they give me the power to disable them, if I want. This could make the difference between keep me as customer or not.
syspec 5y ago
Using this trick, the phone will also die suddenly at 30% power if the cpu draws too much power at once and the old battery cannot keep up. The throttling is there to prevent the instant shutdown due to old batteries having a lower peak output
- trainsplanes 5y ago
  I experienced this for the first time, coincidentally, when traveling around France. Sometimes the battery would suddenly drop 20% or more and then shut off.
- throwawayswede 5y ago
  Great to see blind fanboy-ism up and at it again.
- gattilorenz 5y ago
  > The throttling is there to prevent the instant shutdown due to old batteries having a lower peak output Sure, but it would be nice to be informed about it (so I can choose to get my battery replaced instead) and to be able to turn it off without changing the location to France
  - duskwuff 5y ago
    > it would be nice to be informed about it You are. When the phone reboots as a result of power problems, you get a notification that says: "This iPhone has experienced an unexpected shutdown because the battery was unable to deliver the necessary peak power. Performance management has been applied to help prevent this from happening again." Describing CPU throttling as "performance management" is perhaps a little stilted, but all the basic information is there. > to be able to turn it off without changing the location to France You can. It's in the Battery settings. It's not super obvious (small text link that says "Disable..." after a description of the throttling), but it's there.
    - clusterfish 5y ago
      For comparison, on Mac when the battery starts dying, you get a persistent warning in the menu bar battery indicator. Hard to miss it every day. On the iPhone, the one-time alert with cryptic language will just be dismissed by most users without a second thought. Doesn't matter that the capability to turn this "feature" off is buried somewhere in the settings when most people don't know about it. Apple knows how to design good UI. If they wanted to prompt people to replace batteries, they would find a good way to do that. But they much prefer people buying new phones instead.
TurkishPoptart 5y ago
Is this because France launched the lawsuit against alleged planned obsolescence?
- sodality2 5y ago
  "The reason for the smoothness is that Apple has been fined by France for the frequency reduction incident. This means that the company can not temper the performance of old iPhones in the country."
greatgib 5y ago
Some people are pretending that it is a user feature to throttle and that it is to have a more stable phone when the battery becomes older. But, if my memory is good, when Apple was fined in France, it was shown that the throttling was performed without consideration for the battery state. So was done even with a new battery (or the power cord plugged) Also, for people having Stockholm syndrome, if they would have to throttle to preserve stability when the battery is old, it is not a "nice" user feature but a consequence of having made the battery not removable and easily swappable!
- 1123581321 5y ago
  Your memory is a bit off. You could use a CPU monitoring app to see different speeds on newer and older batteries. You’re right that it didn’t speed up when plugged in.
  - kemayo 5y ago
    I think iPhones don't run directly off external power even when plugged in -- they charge the battery, and run from that. For evidence, note that if your battery is completely dead, you need to provide power for a few minutes to get it some baseline amount of charge before you can turn the phone on. It feels plausible that a battery with bad peak voltage could still be unreliable even while being actively charged, so it'd make sense if the throttling remained.
    - GekkePrutser 5y ago
      Most phones don't run directly from mains with an empty or removed battery. The reason is that the power supply isn't guaranteed to be able to cope with the short peaks in power like from the various radios. It could lead to brownouts. And it's not a common enough usecase for manufacturers to bother supporting.
      - rubyn00bie 5y ago
        > And it's not a common enough usecase for manufacturers to bother supporting. Woah now, I would like to disagree with that, phones running out of a charge is a pretty regular occurrence. In fact, I'd say the only reason people panic so often to keep a charge is because the fucking things won't turn back on immediately. shakes fist at sky It would be fucking GREAT if I could use it (turn it on) immediately upon plugging it into a power source. I have been pissed off about not being able to use my iPhone (or any device) while plugged in since "they" (electronics manufacturers) started doing this shit. Truly, I've seen grown ass people thrown into a panic because their phone is about to die and I promise 80% of that panic (for a plethora of reasons from silly to necessary) would be alleviated if they knew they could just plug the damn thing in and have it turn on immediately. Edit: moar better grammar.

305 points by fomine3 5y ago

diebeforei485 5y ago

What's the difference between changing the region to France and simply disabling the performance management function?

peteretep 5y ago
Whether or not someone will click on the title of an article
alacritas0 5y ago
I don't know, but I've had performance management disabled for about a year on my 1st gen SE. After switching to France as my region, my phone died at 15% for the first time in a long while so there seems to be some difference.

wb14123 5y ago

Anyone understand Chinese read the source article at the end? The source article clearly says this is not the case. Whether it’s true or not, I don’t like a report that changes the information from its source.

ytch 5y ago
Yes, the Chinese news says someone in Weibo posts about this, then the reporter tests: 1. at first the score is lower after switch region, they guess the reason is thermal throttling because they tested multiple times, after cooling down, the score is only improved a little. 2. they thought the battery capacity is 100%, so there is no throttling. Therefore doing the test on a 80% phone, but there is also no significant difference. 3. Finally they come out an assumption, iPhone will do a soft restart and kill a background process after changing region, so the performance is improved. Therefore the title from gizchina is a little misleading.

lsiebert 5y ago

Old iphones become faster if you reboot them, like most devices. This is true whether or not you change the region. There's no qualitative difference when you test repeatedly. https://knowtechie.com/want-to-speed-up-your-old-iphone-try-changing-its-country-region-to-france/ https://knowtechie.com/want-to-speed-up-your-old-iphone-try-...

throwawayswede 5y ago
Are you such a fanboy of Apple that even blatantly throttling old iPhones in specific regions doesn't matter to you anymore?
- personjerry 5y ago
  Are you so prejudiced against Apple that you didn't read the commenter's linked article which discredits the data?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
ummonk 5y ago
Oh good point
MrBoomixer 5y ago
> If you’ve got an older iPhone that’s seeming to slow down, it’s more likely that your device is just aging. I was under the impression that technology doesn't "just age". The software running and apps being updated for new platforms might make it feel "slower" but in general using the phone itself shouldn't ever feel like it's aging.

kemayo 5y ago

The interesting thing about this story is that "batterygate"[1] represents a period from January 2017 (when Apple added the throttling behavior in iOS 10.2.1, in response to bad press about old batteries causing shutdowns) to March 2018 (when Apple added the messaging explaining the throttling in iOS 11.3, and letting you opt-out of it). I'd speculate that the HN crowd skews towards being the type who'd buy new phones pseudo-regularly, so we're probably less likely than the average person to have actually experienced the throttling on an old battery. Despite the status quo having been the "fixed" state for 3.5 years now, that one year period has left an indelible mark on some people's perceptions of Apple, such that stories claiming performance-shenanigans will always have an audience. And, to be fair, the messaging about an old battery is probably confusing[2]. You get a popup explaining it after your phone restarts from poor battery performance for the first time, and then it's buried in the battery-health segment of preferences. Disabling the performance-throttling is even done just as a text-link, rather than a toggle or button. There's also no call-to-action suggesting that you might be able to get the battery replaced. (That's reserved for when the overall battery capacity drops.) [1]: https://www.ifixit.com/News/11208/batterygate-timeline https://www.ifixit.com/News/11208/batterygate-timeline [2]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208387 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208387

IIAOPSW 5y ago
I suspect HN tends towards less likely to be enticed by shinny things and marketing hype cycles. My phone is pushing 4 years at this point. I always buy with the expectation that I will get 3-5 years out of any phone/laptop. Really want to see data on this one.
- haimez 5y ago
  It would certainly be interesting to see the data, but I’m not sure if I’d expect the results to point towards any particular monolithic user trends. I think a lot of users (perhaps the majority?) are using flagship devices released within the last year.
- kemayo 5y ago
  My logic is mostly that we're on a site which is targeted at people who're in a fairly high-earning profession, with the added bonus of it being a fairly change-friendly profession. If you're making Silicon Valley engineer money, whether you buy a new flagship phone every year is pretty much a matter of whether you want to, without money being a strong factor.

fleventynine 5y ago

Fun the article: "The GeekBench running score before changing the location to France is 286,632. However, after changing the location to France, the running score is 298,321." I have a hard time caring about a 4% difference in performance.

jeffbee 5y ago
Conditions aren't even controlled enough to measure the difference. Phone would have to be at exact same temperature, exact same time since boot, same radio conditions, laying on the same surface at the same temperature and with the same ambient air flow and temperature.
- Y_Y 5y ago
  If I was doing a test like this I'd run the benchmark a large number of times (at least ten) in various (not necessarily strictly controlled) typical usage scenarios. Ideally there would be a variety of handsets of the same model too (assuming variance between those is small). Then I'd filter for outliers and take a mean. I like this kind of testing, because you account for confounds that may only appear in a single highly-controlled lab setup, and won't reflect the results that people are expected to see when they use their phone in a typical way.

f32jhnjk33jj 5y ago

Why is Apple so far behind the competitors regarding hardware? They still have huge notch on the top, but competitors have invisible cameras behind display (Xiaomi Mi Mix 4). No fingerprint behind the screen like competitors. No foldable body frame. The only thing Apple do better than competitors is CPUs / SoCs.

f32jhnjk33jj 5y ago
and don't forget missing USB-C connector! I can charge all my 15 devices in a travel via a single cable, but Apple users have to carry another charger (or adapter) just for smartphone...
- Y_Y 5y ago
  But if you have 15 devices and a single cable you are going to spend all day charging, right? and the adapter for iphone to usb-c is pretty small. Not that I don't love usb-c ubiquity (thanks EU). It rwally grinds my.gears that my new kindle was syill micro-usb. Anyway, for those cases I have a couple of cheap adapters that do lightning/usb-c/micro/mini that I got free as marketing promos. Pretty handy to keep in your bag, especially for taking pity on people with dead iphones.
- thebruce87m 5y ago
  I have no doubt in my mind that the people calling out Apple to move to usb-c will be first in line to shout “planned obsolescence” if they did make the swap.
dlivingston 5y ago
Simple: branding. If you see the notch, you know it’s an iPhone. If every phone was a slab of glass, there’s no product differentiation. On hardware: Apple’s flagship phones are parity or better on most aspects of hardware. The SOC, camera module, material construction, screen color accuracy, and speaker quality meet or exceed just about everyone. I didn’t realize this was still an open question for people.
dehrmann 5y ago

dzhiurgis 5y ago

It's amazing how much fluff was made about it this when battery replacement in random shop costs about $20-50.

kemayo 5y ago
The main reason for the hubbub, back in the day, was that Apple completely obscured (a) that they were throttling performance, and (b) that replacing the battery was the fix. I completely believe that they made the decision to throttle performance thinking it was the best action for their customers, and I agree with them. Throttling is better than random shutdowns. However, it's very easy to imagine that they dragged their feet so long on explaining what was going on because throttled phones were driving upgrade sales, while explaining throttling only drove battery sales. I've never seen anyone claiming to have insider knowledge of the decisions around this inside Apple, unfortunately.

jdlyga 5y ago

It only seems that way because French time is in decimal.

ummonk 5y ago

This article seems to suggest that the throttling happens outside France even when the user sets the phone not to throttle? That is pretty big news and hard to see a good faith reason this would happen. Edit: maybe there is an innocuous explanation after all https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28296812 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28296812

aetherspawn 5y ago

OK, the performance varies by 2%. What is the tolerance of the performance test, even? Those things vary like crazy. I could change the language to Chinese and run the test over and over until I see a 10% improvement and report on that. This level of "performance difference" will not even be noticeable, if it isn't immaterial to begin with.

sebyx07 5y ago

Just tried on a iphone 7, it really does the trick

gabrielblack 5y ago

I could be ok with all those Apple "features" if only they give me the power to disable them, if I want. This could make the difference between keep me as customer or not.

syspec 5y ago

Using this trick, the phone will also die suddenly at 30% power if the cpu draws too much power at once and the old battery cannot keep up. The throttling is there to prevent the instant shutdown due to old batteries having a lower peak output

trainsplanes 5y ago
I experienced this for the first time, coincidentally, when traveling around France. Sometimes the battery would suddenly drop 20% or more and then shut off.
throwawayswede 5y ago
Great to see blind fanboy-ism up and at it again.
gattilorenz 5y ago
> The throttling is there to prevent the instant shutdown due to old batteries having a lower peak output Sure, but it would be nice to be informed about it (so I can choose to get my battery replaced instead) and to be able to turn it off without changing the location to France
- duskwuff 5y ago
  > it would be nice to be informed about it You are. When the phone reboots as a result of power problems, you get a notification that says: "This iPhone has experienced an unexpected shutdown because the battery was unable to deliver the necessary peak power. Performance management has been applied to help prevent this from happening again." Describing CPU throttling as "performance management" is perhaps a little stilted, but all the basic information is there. > to be able to turn it off without changing the location to France You can. It's in the Battery settings. It's not super obvious (small text link that says "Disable..." after a description of the throttling), but it's there.
  - clusterfish 5y ago
    For comparison, on Mac when the battery starts dying, you get a persistent warning in the menu bar battery indicator. Hard to miss it every day. On the iPhone, the one-time alert with cryptic language will just be dismissed by most users without a second thought. Doesn't matter that the capability to turn this "feature" off is buried somewhere in the settings when most people don't know about it. Apple knows how to design good UI. If they wanted to prompt people to replace batteries, they would find a good way to do that. But they much prefer people buying new phones instead.

TurkishPoptart 5y ago

Is this because France launched the lawsuit against alleged planned obsolescence?

sodality2 5y ago
"The reason for the smoothness is that Apple has been fined by France for the frequency reduction incident. This means that the company can not temper the performance of old iPhones in the country."

greatgib 5y ago

Some people are pretending that it is a user feature to throttle and that it is to have a more stable phone when the battery becomes older. But, if my memory is good, when Apple was fined in France, it was shown that the throttling was performed without consideration for the battery state. So was done even with a new battery (or the power cord plugged) Also, for people having Stockholm syndrome, if they would have to throttle to preserve stability when the battery is old, it is not a "nice" user feature but a consequence of having made the battery not removable and easily swappable!

1123581321 5y ago
Your memory is a bit off. You could use a CPU monitoring app to see different speeds on newer and older batteries. You’re right that it didn’t speed up when plugged in.
- kemayo 5y ago
  I think iPhones don't run directly off external power even when plugged in -- they charge the battery, and run from that. For evidence, note that if your battery is completely dead, you need to provide power for a few minutes to get it some baseline amount of charge before you can turn the phone on. It feels plausible that a battery with bad peak voltage could still be unreliable even while being actively charged, so it'd make sense if the throttling remained.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    Most phones don't run directly from mains with an empty or removed battery. The reason is that the power supply isn't guaranteed to be able to cope with the short peaks in power like from the various radios. It could lead to brownouts. And it's not a common enough usecase for manufacturers to bother supporting.
    - rubyn00bie 5y ago
      > And it's not a common enough usecase for manufacturers to bother supporting. Woah now, I would like to disagree with that, phones running out of a charge is a pretty regular occurrence. In fact, I'd say the only reason people panic so often to keep a charge is because the fucking things won't turn back on immediately. shakes fist at sky It would be fucking GREAT if I could use it (turn it on) immediately upon plugging it into a power source. I have been pissed off about not being able to use my iPhone (or any device) while plugged in since "they" (electronics manufacturers) started doing this shit. Truly, I've seen grown ass people thrown into a panic because their phone is about to die and I promise 80% of that panic (for a plethora of reasons from silly to necessary) would be alleviated if they knew they could just plug the damn thing in and have it turn on immediately. Edit: moar better grammar.