KRDO Investigates: Does battery replacement make iPhones faster?
With Apple confirming this week that iPhones slow down as their batteries age, we wanted to know: can you speed it up with a battery change?
We took a two-and-a-half-year-old iPhone 6+ and ran a performance test on it Friday with the intention of comparing the results to another test with a new battery.
After the initial test, we took the phone to Colorado Gadget Fix on N. Academy Blvd. and they replaced the phone’s battery for us. Jason Caldwell, manager of the shop, said he started seeing more people come in for batteries Friday .
Caldwell says Apple has a good reason to throttle phone performance.
“Apple only gives it so many charges because that’s the life expectancy, you know, it’s going to be to the point where it either wears out and blows up or wears out and doesn’t work,” Caldwell said.
After the battery was installed, we charged it up and conducted another test with the same app.
The original result before the battery replacement clocked a single-core score of 1,564 and a multi-core score of 2,643. But the scores after the replacement were nearly the same. One test showed single-core and multi-core scores of 1,564 (exactly the same) and 2,691, respectively. A follow-up test clocked in at 1,511 and 2,613, respectively.
Now while it’s important to note that the replacement wasn’t done officially by Apple, we questioned why there was little-to-no performance increase after the battery change. Apple had said that installing a healthy battery would eliminate the throttling.
Since the announcement, at least two class-action lawsuits have been filed against the tech giant.
One other interesting note is that when we ran the same benchmark with a battery that’s under 10 percent, the scores dropped by about 200 points. So if you want your phone operating at its peak, keep it charged.
But if you want your phone to last longer, Caldwell had a few tips.
“Use your phone to where it’s all the way dead, 10 percent or even lower, then charge it and don’t use it off the charger until it’s full,” Caldwell said.
