It's not only to make them run longer - they're reducing the peak demand on the batteries to avoid spontaneous shutdown when the aged battery can't handle the load.
This seems like a good idea, and it appears to be well executed (ie it's not apparently based just on age or milage like a crappy car maintenance reminder), but Apple should probably have something in iOS that tells people their phone is running slow because the battery is 2 years old.
This comment deserves more attention. And, in fact, means the headline is wrong.
Apple is not slowing down devices to extend battery life. Apple is slowing down devices to prevent the thing from crapping out entirely ("unexpectedly shutting down"). Arguably, this does more to prevent obsolescence than plan it.
Agreed with @djrogers suggestion to alert the user to the situation. It should not be a user choice.
"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 [cold, low battery, battery age]."
That quote really hurts. My iPhone 6S has had spontaneous shutdowns since the first winter it was out (and is supposedly not in the replacement program). No previous Apple phones did. This winter it's the same. To me it suggests a more widespread defect that they do not wish to admit.
I do not think situation is quite so simple. Apple has designed phones with insufficiently good battery to guarantee top speed operation as device ages. They have probably done it to make thinner handsets, but the end result is that an older device physically slows down. Moreover each new iOS release is slower and makes the older devices feel cruftish.
Where does that leave us? People that must have newest and fastest are encouraged to upgrade every year. Others accept slow downs due to old batteries and new iOS.
This is definitely not 'planned obsolescence' because your phone still works. Maybe 'encouraged obsolescence' is a better term.
Alternatively, you could say Apple is putting in a barely-sufficiently-sized battery for planned obsolescence... and masking it under "make it as thin and light as possible".
Strange, I have an old HP veer That is 6 years old and it doesn't spontaneously shut down. I have a 3 year old android phone that doesn't spontaneously shut down. What is so special about iPhones and why do they crap out in 2 years?
This is kinda of a gray area, if they really wanted to treat their customers well, they'd have easily-replaceable batteries and a notification that lets people know their phone is slowing down because they need a new battery. Still seems like planned obsolescence, or at the very least, encouraged obsolescence.
> It's not only to make them run longer - they're reducing the peak demand on the batteries to avoid spontaneous shutdown when the aged battery can't handle the load.
Yes. I used to have spontaneous shutdowns on my iPhone 6 in cold weather when the fuel gauge indicated a number like 20% and it was this sort of problem that was meant to be fixed: the CPU using too much current, causing the battery voltage to drop enough to trigger the low-voltage/brownout detector, causing the phone to die. The battery would last long enough (from last full charge to needing to recharge) -- it wasn't inadequate in the energy department -- it just couldn't deliver enough power in cold conditions.
Throttling the CPU in those cases (when the aged battery can't deliver enough current) is sensical and extends the life of the phone -- the only serious issue is that the user might think that there is a problem with the CPU or the software (and replace the whole phone) when the problem can be adequately fixed with a new battery (far less expensive than a new phone).
The feature is good but Apple's software should be far more proactive in notifying users that this is happening, if only because users jump to a conclusion of "my old phone can't handle this new iOS update, damn Apple making me buy a new phone" rather than "my battery is too old to reliably deliver whatever current the SOC wants".
I think there’s more to this story than mere aging batteries.
I had the exact symptoms of this issue with my one year old iPhone 6 Plus in fall of 2015. Add in some very strange battery % readings: Even when it failed to shut down, the phone would drop rapidly from 20% to 1% but then remain there for ten minutes or more.
Bizarrely, this behavior (albeit less frequent or severe) jumped to my brand new iPhone 6S Plus in November of that year when I restored it from a backup of the 6 Plus. Both phones had Geniuses run battery diagnostics without finding any unusual degradation.
My guess: Apple’s battery “farming” code designed to maximize its life, level drain and charge across the cells, manage load, estimate charge % remaining... is incredibly sophisticated, even so far as to profile your typical use of a device to inform these decisions and estimates. There have been user-visible bugs in this code related to manual clock updates (something I did a fair bit while traveling), and I bet some fraction of these downclocked users have been the victim of that or related bugs. If the code is “farming” the battery incorrectly, some cells may be charged or drained too much for too long, and greatly increase a phone’s susceptibility to these voltage drops, even while the global status of the battery reads as fine.
It does say in iOS that your battery needs to be replaced [1]. Everyone keeps saying they never told anyone about this but they basically announced it to the press with a statement (as well as the notice in iOS) when iOS 10.2.1 was released [2].
I read both, and couldn't find any verbiage indicating they limited the cpu speed based upon the condition of the battery. Only that they "fixed a bug" to reduce "unexpected shutdowns."
Millions of people own iPhone's and don't jump up and down meticulously reading every press release or notification. Hell I can't remember the last notification that didn't catch be at a bad time, prompting me to punt it off my screen as quickly as possible.
I can't tell how well it's executed but the major issue I have with this is that this is not properly communicated to the user. I guess most people already get the feeling that their devices slow down after time, or the new apps/OS's just require more potent hardware and replacement of the devices is necessary as time goes by. But for many of those it seems that a "simple" battery replacement would have done the trick as well.
If my device has to substantially throttle the performance to avoid a complete shutdown I expect a major notification that something is terribly wrong and I better do something about it.
My car had an occasional issue with an exhaust regulation valve and drastically reduced the performance in those situations. Every time I received a notification on the dashboard that the power was reduced but that I can continue driving but that I should visit a service partner as soon as possible. That would be exactly what I expect from a smart device
Alternatively, folks buy batteries they don’t need just because they can. I did that with my Galaxy Note, bought a spare because they were $30 and because I could. Never used it, the Note had great battery life. Now it sits on a shelf, waiting for me to recycle it.
Most phones are probably getting recycled now anyways, so it really doesn’t matter. In fact, I would think user serviceability would increase waste because people would throw their old batteries away.
There are quite a few good phones with a user replaceable battery, but that is just not what consumers want most of the time. The LG v20 is the most recent one that comes to mind
iPhones have the longest life of any smartphone and you can verify that yourself by looking at the used market for it (and any Apple product). User replaceable batteries may ironically decrease that and increase waste.
It's fine rationalizing it but how is that conceptually different from say Comcast saying: "Well actually your 100Mbps connection was just a first year promotional speed and now dropped to 20Mbps unless you sign another limited period contract. Oh, and actually, it's all for good reasons because the crappy modem that you rented at 10$ a month just kinda starts melting if it keeps transmitting at 100Mbps so we just saved your house from burning down. No need to thank us. Sorry we didn't disclose any of this to new customers but don't worry, just give us more money and everything will be ok."
I think the problem is deeper. They put batteries in these devices that cannot handle load the rest of the hardware demands. Their solution is to just slow down the rest of the hardware.
I've got a phone that is nowhere near to needing a new battery. It holds 87% of its original charge capacity. Yet it never runs above 50% speed unless it is above 97% charged, and even then it only runs at 2/3rds original speed.
Yeah, this is a real problem that I’ve had with devices in the past and as someone who doesn’t buy the hot new phone every year, I appreciate that Apple is taking steps to keep my 5S happy. That’s a commitment to long-term support that I would not expect from the average Android phone vendor.
Apple will replace the battery for $79 [1]. When you consider the cost for a battery, the labor for replacement, the confidence that this is not a junk replacement, and the warranty for the service, that's a very reasonable price. There is no way Apple is making money on this.
If you consider that you can't easily change the battery in an iPhone without voiding the warranty or paying a premium price to Apple Support then one can make a strong argument that it's sneaky planned obsolescence.
Then again, a battery that dies down after a few years and is so difficult to replace is also planned obsolescence.
It's just another nail in the coffin. OS upgrades requiring more CPU usage, the lack of repair-ability, dying batteries, and now this CPU tweak.
It's pretty obvious what apple is doing. We need a law to make them stop or at least one which requires them to declare in obvious language about the things that reduce the functioning of their devices over time.
> they're reducing the peak demand on the batteries to avoid spontaneous shutdown when the aged battery can't handle the load.
It doesn't seem to help my gf had an iPhone 5 that started dying on peak demand but only after it got upgraded to new ios (i guess 8.0).
We replaced it (it had bad battery from the start and apple had a program for replacing those). After few years on new battery it started doing the same thing again. I replaced the battery and it stopped. But I know what I can expect in two years or so. Maybe I should stock on iPhone 5 batteries? Do they age less if they are unused?
> but Apple should probably have something in iOS that tells people their phone is running slow because the battery is 2 years old.
Or a disclaimer telling people the caveats (or cons) of upgrading their OS.
More transparency would be great instead of making people feel like the company is pushing them out of their, otherwise, perfectly functional smartphone which cost them a fortune.
> avoid spontaneous shutdown when the aged battery can't handle the load
This doesn't make sense to me. I've been playing with LiPo batteries on quadcopters for a few years now, and I've found that battery capacity is directly related to its voltage, and the voltage decreases in a deterministic fashion according to use. High quality and well maintained LiPo batteries just don't behave randomly - that's why we feel safe attaching them to our houses in the form of Tesla Powercells.
Or, in other words, if a phone is showing 40% charge when it shuts down, that's not the battery "spontaneously" being unable to cope with load; that's a bad charge indicator.
It IS a good idea. My step mom had a high end Samsung phone (not sure exactly which one) and it’s battery degraded enough within a year that it began to shut down randomly a lot.
Did you have it replaced at an Apple Store or by a third party? I'm deciding between the two – my gut is to go with the Apple Store, but the apple website makes it sound like it could take up to 5 days, which is too long.
I'm based in London, so dropped it off with https://www.ismash.com/ in St Pancras. Was done in half an hour and cost £40. Can't vouch for the quality of the battery yet, but they are a pretty big chain now so I'm assuming it won't be awful.
However I've had batteries replaced (different phones) at the Apple Store before and it took about an hour.
I don't get it. An old iPad 2 was running fine card games until we upgraded to IOS 9 a few weeks ago. Now it's almost unusable. Pretty sure we had the same battery before we upgrade, so why wasn't cpu throttled before we upgrade?
This looks more like Apple needed to slow down devices to sell new ones and found a really good excuse for it.
Exactly. I had an old iPhone 3G that was working fine until Apple released an update that crippled it after I held on to it too long after their product line had moved on...
I mean, to all those who might think "well, old phones be old", it's not that simple. The OS was running very smoothly, it's Apple, after all, but then I installed an OS update and after the update everything was slow and painful and took long to load, etc. It was night and day, pre-update: perfection, post-update: laggy as hell.
You can't tell me that this is anything but a way to force users of older models to upgrade.
There are two issues with older phones running more slowly, and you are probably encountering both of them
1. Newer versions of iOS demand more processing power because they do more (or perhaps do it less efficiently).
2. Old batteries can't deliver as much power.
So an old phone will new version of the OS mores slowly than a new one, regardless of the battery situation.
But, if the battery was marginal but hadn't hit the limit before the upgrade, then you get a double whammy
1. The phone simply can't run a more demanding OS as fast as the old one
2. The increased demand pushes the battery over the limit
At some point, the battery was going to age out anyway, so it was only a matter of time until you hit the second issue. But the upgrade made you hit it sonner rather than later.
Does anyone have a citation for this? I know capacity falls, but what fraction of peak current is lost with age? And what fraction with throttling just the CPU to 50% save in total load?
+1 I don’t use any new features in the new iOS releases just want the same speed and efficiency I’ve come to enjoy, and that I literally had minutes before the upgrade.
How come that the MASSIVE slowdown of my iPhone 6s occurred after upgrading to iOS11? TBH the spin that Apple is sending out to make us believe that this was all a clever implementation (which it still might be) does not match with the reality that iOS 11 was creating the slowdown of a device that was working 'fine' before. And yes - this 6s is eligible for the battery replacement program and the Geekbench scores also indicate that this device has an issue. tl;dr: it seems that this is not the only explanation of the slowdown. Any thoughts?
I had this issue, restore it and set it up "as a new phone" then manually reinstall your apps. the backup-restore process introduces all kinds of crappy issues
My wife had a phone replaced off Apple about 6 months back because it was shutting down for no reason about 40% battery life.
She’s recently upgraded from 10.x to latest version. She’s noticed an actual decrease in performance to the point where she’s nearly punching the phone. It just locks up for no reason.
I’d like to blame this on the battery or age of the phone but I can’t. It is an iPhone 6 but it is only half a year old.
I believe that this phone should be able to handle the latest release just fine.
Was her replacement phone a refurbished or new unit? Either way, she can probably get a brand new battery just by taking it in to the Apple Store.
Also, battery age isn't actually time based, it's cycle based. If your wife uses her phone so heavily that she has to recharge it multiple times a day, she's putting more cycles on the battery. Still should last more than 6 months though.
I’m not 100% on whether it was refurb or brand new. It came in a non branded box without a charger etc. The phone looked brand new.
I’m going to install the app to check what the CPU is running at.
It’s still ridiculous that she was running 10.x fine, she only updated because someone sent her some emojis that her phone didn’t understand and now is it’s running like crap
Devil's Advocate to spark discussion (I'm not an iPhone owner so no dog in fight):
Apple did the right thing by not putting a switch in to toggle this slowdown[1]. For many iPhone users, the phone is a magic box that gives them videos and apps and (unlike our HN audience) don't have a clue about how it works, nor do they care. If such a switch existed, these same people would see a twitter comment saying "speed up yuor (sic) IPhone by turning off this setting~~~!!!!1" and would just do it.
The result? iPhones dying at a faster rate. Even today, as Android phones are barely updated at all, it is still a desirable selling feature of an Apple iPhone that it will be supported for years. People turning that switch on without understanding the consequences would shorten the life of their devices and then //still// complain about how the device didn't last that long.
I would think that a jailbreak-locked option would work IE you have to know enough about how your phone works to make the change, thus increasing your chances of making an informed decision on whether to shorten its life or not.
[1]Which is different than not telling people about it, which IMO is shady
The easiest way to get an IP rating is to use lots of glue.
If they went the o-ring route, it would take up more volume and would probably require replacement when the phone was opened as damage from dirt/age will make reusing the o-ring hard. Even worse is that resuse isn’t obvious to a layperson as it could be IP69 with a new o-ring and IP67 with reused o-ring.
> If such a switch existed, these same people would see a twitter comment saying "speed up yuor (sic) IPhone by turning off this setting~~~!!!!1" and would just do it.
If only we had such a technology as a scary warning message with a 5 second wait time before you can toggle the switch... Maybe in 10 years, meanwhile we'll just have to keep crippling old phones and tripling revenue!
The whole problem is that the batteries can't deliver that performance.
They can throttle the chip to what the battery can deliver or it will crash. Maybe Apple's more conservative on the throttling, and some amount of performance could still be achieved without a crash, but there's zero chance Apple's putting a "make my phone unstable" switch in Settings.
That doesn't pass the sniff test. The available voltage from a lithium ion battery will decrease as it is discharged. When your phone turns off, that does not mean there is no more energy in the battery. It means there is no longer enough voltage to power the phone.
Over the course of many discharge cycles, the battery will lose capacity, and the point when the voltage is no longer sufficient to power the phone will come sooner.
But this is overly pedantic. People generally consider this point to be simply an "empty battery."
Android phones do not suffer these performance changes. Instead, the phones lose battery life over time, and within a year or so, you might be lucky to get 12 hours of life out of a full charge.
You can make an argument that we should optimize for duration or performance, but the difference is that casual Android users are aware that their battery is deteriorating, while casual iPhone users believe their phone is itself deteriorating, or else much slower than the newer models.
Readit News
This seems like a good idea, and it appears to be well executed (ie it's not apparently based just on age or milage like a crappy car maintenance reminder), but Apple should probably have something in iOS that tells people their phone is running slow because the battery is 2 years old.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/20/apple-addresses-why-people...
Apple is not slowing down devices to extend battery life. Apple is slowing down devices to prevent the thing from crapping out entirely ("unexpectedly shutting down"). Arguably, this does more to prevent obsolescence than plan it.
Agreed with @djrogers suggestion to alert the user to the situation. It should not be a user choice.
"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 [cold, low battery, battery age]."
Why not simply make the battery replacable?
Where does that leave us? People that must have newest and fastest are encouraged to upgrade every year. Others accept slow downs due to old batteries and new iOS.
This is definitely not 'planned obsolescence' because your phone still works. Maybe 'encouraged obsolescence' is a better term.
In reality, it's probably some mix of both sides.
Yes. I used to have spontaneous shutdowns on my iPhone 6 in cold weather when the fuel gauge indicated a number like 20% and it was this sort of problem that was meant to be fixed: the CPU using too much current, causing the battery voltage to drop enough to trigger the low-voltage/brownout detector, causing the phone to die. The battery would last long enough (from last full charge to needing to recharge) -- it wasn't inadequate in the energy department -- it just couldn't deliver enough power in cold conditions.
Throttling the CPU in those cases (when the aged battery can't deliver enough current) is sensical and extends the life of the phone -- the only serious issue is that the user might think that there is a problem with the CPU or the software (and replace the whole phone) when the problem can be adequately fixed with a new battery (far less expensive than a new phone).
The feature is good but Apple's software should be far more proactive in notifying users that this is happening, if only because users jump to a conclusion of "my old phone can't handle this new iOS update, damn Apple making me buy a new phone" rather than "my battery is too old to reliably deliver whatever current the SOC wants".
I had the exact symptoms of this issue with my one year old iPhone 6 Plus in fall of 2015. Add in some very strange battery % readings: Even when it failed to shut down, the phone would drop rapidly from 20% to 1% but then remain there for ten minutes or more.
Bizarrely, this behavior (albeit less frequent or severe) jumped to my brand new iPhone 6S Plus in November of that year when I restored it from a backup of the 6 Plus. Both phones had Geniuses run battery diagnostics without finding any unusual degradation.
My guess: Apple’s battery “farming” code designed to maximize its life, level drain and charge across the cells, manage load, estimate charge % remaining... is incredibly sophisticated, even so far as to profile your typical use of a device to inform these decisions and estimates. There have been user-visible bugs in this code related to manual clock updates (something I did a fair bit while traveling), and I bet some fraction of these downclocked users have been the victim of that or related bugs. If the code is “farming” the battery incorrectly, some cells may be charged or drained too much for too long, and greatly increase a phone’s susceptibility to these voltage drops, even while the global status of the battery reads as fine.
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207453
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/23/apple-says-ios-10-2-1-has-...
I'll run the speed test later to confirm. But there is absolutely NO warning in iOS that I can see that says it's been put into low-speed mode.
If my device has to substantially throttle the performance to avoid a complete shutdown I expect a major notification that something is terribly wrong and I better do something about it.
My car had an occasional issue with an exhaust regulation valve and drastically reduced the performance in those situations. Every time I received a notification on the dashboard that the power was reduced but that I can continue driving but that I should visit a service partner as soon as possible. That would be exactly what I expect from a smart device
s/user/buyer
Selling a car that markets 300,000 miles but can't drive over 3,000 rpm anymore after the first year is not a car, and marketing it as such is fraud.
Dead Comment
I've got a phone that is nowhere near to needing a new battery. It holds 87% of its original charge capacity. Yet it never runs above 50% speed unless it is above 97% charged, and even then it only runs at 2/3rds original speed.
[1] https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/battery-power
If you consider that you can't easily change the battery in an iPhone without voiding the warranty or paying a premium price to Apple Support then one can make a strong argument that it's sneaky planned obsolescence.
Then again, a battery that dies down after a few years and is so difficult to replace is also planned obsolescence.
It's pretty obvious what apple is doing. We need a law to make them stop or at least one which requires them to declare in obvious language about the things that reduce the functioning of their devices over time.
In which apps would I notice a significant difference if I replace my battery?
If Safari page load speeds increased I would be happy, but I assume that is more influenced by bandwidth and mobile optimization.
It doesn't seem to help my gf had an iPhone 5 that started dying on peak demand but only after it got upgraded to new ios (i guess 8.0).
We replaced it (it had bad battery from the start and apple had a program for replacing those). After few years on new battery it started doing the same thing again. I replaced the battery and it stopped. But I know what I can expect in two years or so. Maybe I should stock on iPhone 5 batteries? Do they age less if they are unused?
Or a disclaimer telling people the caveats (or cons) of upgrading their OS.
More transparency would be great instead of making people feel like the company is pushing them out of their, otherwise, perfectly functional smartphone which cost them a fortune.
This doesn't make sense to me. I've been playing with LiPo batteries on quadcopters for a few years now, and I've found that battery capacity is directly related to its voltage, and the voltage decreases in a deterministic fashion according to use. High quality and well maintained LiPo batteries just don't behave randomly - that's why we feel safe attaching them to our houses in the form of Tesla Powercells.
Or, in other words, if a phone is showing 40% charge when it shuts down, that's not the battery "spontaneously" being unable to cope with load; that's a bad charge indicator.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
Geekbench 4 benchmark before https://twitter.com/invisiblea/status/943439761066397696
And after https://twitter.com/invisiblea/status/943891561661812736
However I've had batteries replaced (different phones) at the Apple Store before and it took about an hour.
This looks more like Apple needed to slow down devices to sell new ones and found a really good excuse for it.
I mean, to all those who might think "well, old phones be old", it's not that simple. The OS was running very smoothly, it's Apple, after all, but then I installed an OS update and after the update everything was slow and painful and took long to load, etc. It was night and day, pre-update: perfection, post-update: laggy as hell.
You can't tell me that this is anything but a way to force users of older models to upgrade.
1. Newer versions of iOS demand more processing power because they do more (or perhaps do it less efficiently).
2. Old batteries can't deliver as much power.
So an old phone will new version of the OS mores slowly than a new one, regardless of the battery situation.
But, if the battery was marginal but hadn't hit the limit before the upgrade, then you get a double whammy
1. The phone simply can't run a more demanding OS as fast as the old one
2. The increased demand pushes the battery over the limit
At some point, the battery was going to age out anyway, so it was only a matter of time until you hit the second issue. But the upgrade made you hit it sonner rather than later.
Does anyone have a citation for this? I know capacity falls, but what fraction of peak current is lost with age? And what fraction with throttling just the CPU to 50% save in total load?
Did your iPad have any problems with spontaneously rebooting?
https://www.geekbench.com/blog/2017/12/iphone-performance-an...
She’s recently upgraded from 10.x to latest version. She’s noticed an actual decrease in performance to the point where she’s nearly punching the phone. It just locks up for no reason.
I’d like to blame this on the battery or age of the phone but I can’t. It is an iPhone 6 but it is only half a year old.
I believe that this phone should be able to handle the latest release just fine.
She’s now looking at upgrading the phone.
Also, battery age isn't actually time based, it's cycle based. If your wife uses her phone so heavily that she has to recharge it multiple times a day, she's putting more cycles on the battery. Still should last more than 6 months though.
I’m going to install the app to check what the CPU is running at.
It’s still ridiculous that she was running 10.x fine, she only updated because someone sent her some emojis that her phone didn’t understand and now is it’s running like crap
Just because Apple replaced the phone doesn't mean the battery isn't deficient.
Devil's Advocate to spark discussion (I'm not an iPhone owner so no dog in fight):
Apple did the right thing by not putting a switch in to toggle this slowdown[1]. For many iPhone users, the phone is a magic box that gives them videos and apps and (unlike our HN audience) don't have a clue about how it works, nor do they care. If such a switch existed, these same people would see a twitter comment saying "speed up yuor (sic) IPhone by turning off this setting~~~!!!!1" and would just do it.
The result? iPhones dying at a faster rate. Even today, as Android phones are barely updated at all, it is still a desirable selling feature of an Apple iPhone that it will be supported for years. People turning that switch on without understanding the consequences would shorten the life of their devices and then //still// complain about how the device didn't last that long.
I would think that a jailbreak-locked option would work IE you have to know enough about how your phone works to make the change, thus increasing your chances of making an informed decision on whether to shorten its life or not.
[1]Which is different than not telling people about it, which IMO is shady
Edit: remove italics
It pains me that I effectively have to choose between replaceable batteries and IPXX ratings.... T_T
Making iPhone batteries user-replaceable means making the phone worse, heavier, larger, more expensive and with worse battery life.
If they went the o-ring route, it would take up more volume and would probably require replacement when the phone was opened as damage from dirt/age will make reusing the o-ring hard. Even worse is that resuse isn’t obvious to a layperson as it could be IP69 with a new o-ring and IP67 with reused o-ring.
No, because this is a new feature as of the iPhone 6. The conspiracy way predates that.
If only we had such a technology as a scary warning message with a 5 second wait time before you can toggle the switch... Maybe in 10 years, meanwhile we'll just have to keep crippling old phones and tripling revenue!
They can throttle the chip to what the battery can deliver or it will crash. Maybe Apple's more conservative on the throttling, and some amount of performance could still be achieved without a crash, but there's zero chance Apple's putting a "make my phone unstable" switch in Settings.
Over the course of many discharge cycles, the battery will lose capacity, and the point when the voltage is no longer sufficient to power the phone will come sooner.
But this is overly pedantic. People generally consider this point to be simply an "empty battery."
Android phones do not suffer these performance changes. Instead, the phones lose battery life over time, and within a year or so, you might be lucky to get 12 hours of life out of a full charge.
You can make an argument that we should optimize for duration or performance, but the difference is that casual Android users are aware that their battery is deteriorating, while casual iPhone users believe their phone is itself deteriorating, or else much slower than the newer models.