Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

How can I tell if my iPhone is being throttled?

kohlson said:
I was just talking with a friend - who went from a 4 to an X - about battery life. He asked me why I just don't go and get a new battery for my 6. I told him I don't know if this is a fully understood phenomena yet. In my case, my battery is typically at 40-50% at the end of the day. But it is definitely sluggish. Like when I called my aforementioned friend, from the home screen I pressed the phone icon, and it was an easy 3-4 count before the phone screen came up. Switch to Firefox, same thing. So it's slow, and CPUDasherX says I am running slower, but I have lots of battery left. I don't mind spending the $80, but I would if it didn't fix it.
Click to expand...

It sounds like you have a perfect situation for a battery replacement potentially speeding up your device due to throttling. Check with a battery management app to see what battery capacity you have (not directly linked to age/potential for throttling, but will tell you 80% if you battery is healthy or not - since a healthy battery is a new battery most of the time).

That's my line of thinking in this, anyway. Either that, or if you noticed a significant slowdown from going from one OS to the next (obviously that would not be a battery issue, if the change was immediate).
 
  • Like
Reactions: dk001
Vanilla35 said:
Check with a battery management app to see what battery capacity you have
Click to expand...
No idea if this is a good app, but according the Battery Life app the capacity of my battery is 97% (1700/1751). That is, Wear Level is 3%, or "Very Low".
Could be the holidays, or insufficient caffeine, but I still don't understand. My battery seems to be in good shape. My iPhone 6 is a slug.
 
  • Like
Reactions: TokMok3
kohlson said:
No idea if this is a good app, but according the Battery Life app the capacity of my battery is 97% (1700/1751). That is, Wear Level is 3%, or "Very Low".
Could be the holidays, or insufficient caffeine, but I still don't understand. My battery seems to be in good shape. My iPhone 6 is a slug.
Click to expand...
How old is the battery? Unless it’s pretty new, I’d say that 97% is not accurate. If you have a Mac, use coconut battery to check.
 
Using coconut battery, not as good a reading as previous. But still seems OK. As you can see, 2.5 years old.

To recap, I have 40-50% battery left over at the end of each day. If I am reading/understanding this right, I have a battery that has had 297 cycles, and is capable of 90-plus% charge capacity. Performance is miserable. At least in my case, I don't see the connection between this battery and poor performance.

I'm open to the fact that there may be incomplete information.
CoconutBattery_iPhone.png
 
kohlson said:
Using coconut battery, not as good a reading as previous. But still seems OK. As you can see, 2.5 years old.

To recap, I have 40-50% battery left over at the end of each day. If I am reading/understanding this right, I have a battery that has had 297 cycles, and is capable of 90-plus% charge capacity. Performance is miserable. At least in my case, I don't see the connection between this battery and poor performance.

I'm open to the fact that there may be incomplete information.
View attachment 743479
Click to expand...
Battery seems pretty good. BTW, your phone is only 1.5 years old.

Who knows what is the exact cause. It might not be the battery's health in terms of full charge ratio.

Perhaps it's batteries that exhibit spurts of low voltage. My wife's iPhone6 (over 3+ years old) with a 90% health doesn't have anywhere near the sluggishness that mine does. I'm on my second battery (replaced by Apple at the 2 year mark) which is a little over a year old (50-60% health) and the sluggishness is ridiculous. I did a complete wipe and restore about a month ago and it didn't help.

Gonna order a new battery from ifixit to see if that can revive this zombie.
 
1.5 years old - yes, thanks. I'd forgotten it had been replaced under Apple Care.

But it furthers the mystery, at least for me. A 1.5 year old phone, with a pretty good battery. I'm not trying to be argumentative, or conspiratorial. But Apple issued an explanation that it has inserted code into iOS to throttle the CPU to make sure the battery lasts through the day (or whatever). Should be pretty cut and dry. The dots are not connecting on this throttling explanation - at least for me.
 
Stands to reason that if you CAN'T tell then it DOESN'T matter and you would have never had any KNOWN basis to ask without the dramatic news stories.

But now it's: NOW that I was TOLD (not known from experience or perception) Im ready to sue and never buy Apple again.
 
Julien said:
Stands to reason that if you CAN'T tell then it DOESN'T matter and you would have never had any KNOWN basis to ask without the dramatic news stories.

But now it's: NOW that I was TOLD (not known from experience or perception) Im ready to sue and never buy Apple again.
Click to expand...
on the other hand, many have been having drastic issues with older phones and iOS11 well before this came out. Many have been told that they’ve been imagining things or that it’s only a minor slowdown.

I’ve been hit with major slowdown when I went from 10.3.3 to 11. Maybe it’s the throttling, maybe not. I’m gonna switch my battery to see if it helps. Im handy enough to swap it myself. I feel bad for those hat have to pay apples price to replace the battery.
 
  • Like
Reactions: TokMok3
ftaok said:
on the other hand, many have been having drastic issues....
Click to expand...
That is where the "if you CAN'T" comes in. I would be willing to bet (especially since it can't be verified:eek:) that well over 98% of all iOS users had no idea there might be any sort of problem until last week. Just look at the title of the thread you are posting in. The OP ask if they are 'suffering'. If you are not perceiving/kowing then you are NOT suffering. The answer is if you can't tell then it really doesn't matter and in FACT if Apple is helping to extend battery life then it is a plus to the OP.

I believe Apple should have been forthcoming and offered as a choice (still should offer as a choice) but Apple is notorious for their "If I had asked the customer what they wanted they would have said a faster horse" attitude.
 
Julien said:
That is where the "if you CAN'T" comes in. I would be willing to bet (especially since it can't be verified:eek:) that well over 98% of all iOS users had no idea there might be any sort of problem until last week. Just look at the title of the thread you are posting in. The OP ask if they are 'suffering'. If you are not perceiving/kowing then you are NOT suffering. The answer is if you can't tell then it really doesn't matter and in FACT if Apple is helping to extend battery life then it is a plus to the OP.

I believe Apple should have been forthcoming and offered as a choice (still should offer as a choice) but Apple is notorious for their "If I had asked the customer what they wanted they would have said a faster horse" attitude.
Click to expand...
This is where I'm going to have to disagree with you. Whether or not the OP or others can or can't discern a difference in speed doesn't absolve Apple of anything. Maybe the throttling is slight and a user may just chalk it up to a device that's getting older and not able to handle newer software. That might drive them to upgrade ... or not. By no means am I saying that Apple had bad intentions. In fact, I think they really did intend to solve the sudden shutdown problem, but it lead to unintended consequences.

To take this to a car analogy (note that I'm not saying Apple had any ill intentions), let's think about the VW diesel scandal. To the owner, they had no idea that their cars were running "dirty". In a way, they were throttled and it only became an issue after word got out. So maybe the VW car owners weren't really harmed in the usage of their car, however, they were harmed in the residual value. No one would buy a VW diesel that had the new software to reduce power/emissions. Maybe iPhone 6/6s/7 owners will have lower residual values for their phones because no one would want to buy one that has been throttled.

Anyways, my main point isn't that Apple did anything wrong intentionally, but people who are upset aren't necessarily over reacting either.
 
Many types of slow down won’t be picked up by Geekbench and other benchmarking apps, that’s the real danger. Apple can code slower animations or animation delays to affect certain devices as appears to have happened. The only way to prove this is to have the same model side-by-side with different OS installed. Apple clearly doesn’t want you to even try this - hence the lockdown of iOS software packages. If they weren’t worried about downgrades they could lift the restriction.

Other slowdowns can be caused by lack of optimisation on older devices.
 
ftaok said:
This is where I'm going to have to disagree with you. Whether or not the OP or others can or can't discern a difference in speed doesn't absolve Apple of anything. Maybe the throttling is slight and a user may just chalk it up to a device that's getting older and not able to handle newer software. That might drive them to upgrade ... or not. By no means am I saying that Apple had bad intentions. In fact, I think they really did intend to solve the sudden shutdown problem, but it lead to unintended consequences.

To take this to a car analogy (note that I'm not saying Apple had any ill intentions), let's think about the VW diesel scandal. To the owner, they had no idea that their cars were running "dirty". In a way, they were throttled and it only became an issue after word got out. So maybe the VW car owners weren't really harmed in the usage of their car, however, they were harmed in the residual value. No one would buy a VW diesel that had the new software to reduce power/emissions. Maybe iPhone 6/6s/7 owners will have lower residual values for their phones because no one would want to buy one that has been throttled.

Anyways, my main point isn't that Apple did anything wrong intentionally, but people who are upset aren't necessarily over reacting either.
Click to expand...

How about this scenario: In iOS development Apple has 2 teams. Team 1 makes iOS 10% faster but it is harder on battery reliability. Team 2 makes iOS 10% slower but better battery reliability. Apple selects Team 2 for release and you find out about Team 1 and Apple purposely picking (and therefor slowing) iOS by picking Team 2. Is Apple also wrong for doing this? This may and probably happens but since you don't know about it is it still a problem and are you still suffering?

How about another scenario using a car (since you brought it up). You buy a new car and it's 0-60 time is 6 seconds. In 2 years it is now only 8 seconds. Is the manufacture deceptive because of hardware wear and tear has lowered the performance? So Apple is just doing the same but by adjusting the software to help cover the hardware degradation.
 
Last edited:
So apparently the best way to check is the CPU Frequency.

My iPhone SE is supposed to run at 1840 MHz.

In CPU Dasher I can see it’s running at 911 MHz. Yikes :(
 
No wonder people are annoyed, but at the same time it kind of shows how the computing power of these phones is far above what's actually required. You don't need a x4 faster phone every time you upgrade... Apple seems to believe you'll be happy with x 0.5!!
 
JohnnyW2K1 said:
So apparently the best way to check is the CPU Frequency.

My iPhone SE is supposed to run at 1840 MHz.

In CPU Dasher I can see it’s running at 911 MHz. Yikes :(
Click to expand...

Is this all that's needed to determine whether a phone is throttled?

I have a 6S and I swear that the update to iOS 11 killed this phone. It used to be so snappy and quick but I've been super frustrated since updating to iOS 11. It seemed the slowdown after iOS 11 was so blatantly obvious that I've been frustrated at Apple ever since. The early reports of apple purposely slowing phones seemed to validate my experience and suspicion. However, now with the battery debacle, I'm wondering if it's just an aging battery but I can't make a definitive determination. Apple already replaced the battery once under the 6S battery recall. That was over a year ago.

CoconutBattery shows 616 cycle count and design capacity that seems to vary from 73% to 94%. It never holds still, always changing. Most times coconut battery will read 83%. Battery Life (iOS app) shows about the same, with the same degree of variation. DasherX shows a constant 911mhz and the max I can get that to is 1200mhz but only if I'm playing a high frame rate game and quickly app switch to DasherX, only then will it'll show 1200mhz. A lot of times Dasher will show 600mhz if I just check it from sleep, but that seems reasonable. GeekBench4 shows a low of 1033/1736 (single/multi-core) to a high of 1804/3107 taken at various times over the last few days. This also seems low but then there's reports that it doesn't mean anything anyways...

Mac Console App shows battery health = Good.

I don't have time to take it to Apple and have them tell me it's good and refuse to change it. I work for a living so going to an Apple store is a huge time sink. I just want this phone to be back to what seemed like normal speeds.
 
Doesn't iOS power management increase/decrease the cpu frequency depending on load to conserve power? i.e. why would your iPhone be at full cpu speed if you aren't doing anything cpu intensive?

Does DasherX specifically max out the CPU and then record the frequency or does it display the current frequency which could be lower than usual because the app itself is not using cpu power.
 
netslacker said:
So I've read. I've also read several reports of people being turned away as well. I'm wondering how to hedge by bets if I were to spend the time to ensure that I got a replacement.
Click to expand...
I'd say if you run into that type of thing pulling out information about that from known tech news sources (and pretty much all of them have stories about it with confirmations from Apple) and even general news sources like USA Today should be enough to convince them, and escalating to the manager with all of that if it's not for some reason.
 
JM said:
My 5s on 10.3.3 was slow. Inspired me to get the 7 in september (wanted faster opening apps, and larger keyboard).

Makes me wonder if I had just gotten a new battery if I could have waited it out longer.... but, I got a 7 $200 off, so I went for it.
Click to expand...
Nope. That really is just the slower A7 chipset showing its age.
 
I downloaded Geekbench 4 and and ran a test on my iPhone 8 Plus but I don’t see a section that shows what CPU speed is running at? Only gives you scores for single and multi core. CPU DasherX does show CPU speed, should have downloaded that instead or does Geekbench 4 show you it and I’m missing where to find it??
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back