How To Stop Apple From Throttling Your iPhone’s Power in iOS 12

When your battery is old, Apple slows your iPhone down.

Last year people it the fan when it was discovered Apple was purposely slowing down iPhones. Naturally, conspiracy theories abounded. The most common one was Apple was slowing down older phones so people would buy new ones.

And frankly, that’s the dumbest effing theory I’d ever heard. Purposely making your product worse is hardly a way to get people to go out and buy another one. I mean, come on people.

Yet, Apple was indeed throttling the power of older iPhones. But the reason for this was to preserve an iPhone’s aging battery’s life through the day (or as long as possible) so the phone could keep working. After all, the more powerful a phone is, the quicker it burns through the battery. As Apple explained to TechCrunch at the time:

"Our goal is to deliver the best experience for customers, which includes overall performance and prolonging the life of their devices. Lithium-ion batteries become less capable of supplying peak current demands when in cold conditions, have a low battery charge or as they age over time, which can result in the device unexpectedly shutting down to protect its electronic components.

"Last year we released a feature for iPhone 6, iPhone 6s and iPhone SE to smooth out the instantaneous peaks only when needed to prevent the device from unexpectedly shutting down during these conditions. We’ve now extended that feature to iPhone 7 with iOS 11.2, and plan to add support for other products in the future."

Apple has now introduced the same power-throttling to the iPhone 8 series and the iPhone X series. But Apple now allows people to disable this throttling. That means iPhones with older batteries can now be forced by their owners to run at full performance–but again, the tradeoff is going to be that you’ll burn through battery life quicker.

Again, that’s not an evil Apple conspiracy–it’s just the rules and laws of physics and chemistry.

So, if you want power and performance over battery life in an iPhone with an aging battery, how can you tell iOS to stop throttling your phone? Follow these steps:

1. Open the Settings app.
2. Tap Battery.
3. Tap Battery Health.
4. Next, you’ll want to see what your Maximum Capacity is. If it’s in the 90th percentile or higher, your battery is running at peak performance and it’s not being throttled. However, if it’s in the 80s or lower, you’ll see a blue “Disable” link under Peak Performance Capacity. Tap this link to turn off iOS 12’s iPhone power throttling.

Again, if you disable this, your iPhone’s battery will drain quicker throughout the day. The only way to fix it is to have Apple install a brand new battery.