- Has this ever happened to you?
What about this?
That could be because your iPhone battery is old.
Luckily, you can swap it out for a new one for just $29,
and that will solve most of your problems,
but Apple doesn't always make it easy.
Apple and other smartphone makers use a technology called
lithium ion for their batteries.
It's the best kind of battery for mobile devices,
but it gets a little worse over time.
After two years or so, your iPhone battery can only hold
about 80% of its original charge.
Apple decided to manage this problem by intentionally
slowing down older iPhones so they would draw less power
and avoid random shutdowns, but there was one problem:
Apple never told anyone it was doing this.
So while users noticed better battery life,
they also noticed worse performance.
This has been a longstanding conspiracy theory
about iPhones.
Apple intentionally slows it down to encourage you
to buy a new one.
And it turns out, that conspiracy theory was mostly true.
A site called Geekbench noticed that some older iPhone
models were running slower than they should be.
Apple finally admitted to what it was doing and apologized.
It also changed its battery replacement program,
dropping the price from $79 to just $29.
But it's not that simple.
Since Apple announced its new battery replacement program,
customers have complained that they've gone to get their
batteries tested, and Apple tells them everything is fine.
My colleague Jen was having issues with her iPhone 6
battery life, so we made an appointment at an Apple Store
here in New York City.
So why was she having bad battery life?
In Jen's case, Apple said it was likely due to the fact
that she was using up most of the storage on her iPhone.
After that visit, Apple added a new feature to iOS
that lets user check the health of their batteries
on their own phones.
We tried it and got a slightly better reading.
When we went back to the Apple store, they said some apps
were running in the background,
causing the battery to drain faster.
They suggested deleting those apps and redownloading them.
This is another problem.
Apple's battery tests may say everything is fine,
but that doesn't show up in what the user is experiencing.
Between those two visits, the Apple Geniuses
couldn't pinpoint the exact cause.
The good news: Apple told Jen she could still get
her battery replaced for just $29.
The bad news: she'd have to wait several weeks
for that battery replacement to come in.
It's in Apple's best interest to make sure customers
are upgrading to new, $700 iPhones instead of extending
the life of their current devices with a new $29 battery.
About 2/3 of Apple's revenue comes from iPhone sales,
and Wall Street judges the company on how many
iPhones it sells each quarter.
On top of this, Apple's been giving customers fewer reasons
to upgrade the iPhone each year.
New iPhone models have looked the same pretty much since
2014, and the iPhone 8 doesn't have a lot in there
to convince people to upgrade from the iPhone 7,
and the iPhone X's $1,000 price tag has turned
a lot of people off from upgrading.
Even though this process sounds annoying,
it's actually better than a lot of Apple's competitors.
Samsung, HTC, Motorola, and several other companies
have said they don't intentionally slow down their devices
to preserve battery life, but they also
don't make it easy to replace it.
It's not like there's a Samsung store you can walk into
and get your battery replaced.
You have to mail it in.
I used to tell people to upgrade their iPhone
every two years or so, but with this battery replacement
program, you can extend the life by another two years.
My advice: if you're having bad battery life and
performance, go into the Apple store, pay that $29,
get a new battery, and you'll feel like you have
a brand new iPhone.
(calm music)