How to make your iPhone faster? Why, change the region to France
Remember the iPhone battery degradation and performance throttling scandal? Yeah, how could one forget Apple eating crow and swapping their battery for free. This whole debacle, it turns out, has provided one unexpected way to make your iPhone run iOS faster. How?
Well, Chinese users are reporting that simply changing your iPhone geographical region to France, reports GizChina, gives the good ol' iGear a kick in the proverbial behind when it comes to matters of interface speed and general app performance.
How to speed up your iPhone? Vive la révolution!
The reason why may be connected with the fact that in some countries, especially in France, the throttling scandal was more outsized than in others like China. France levied a big fine on Apple for what it deemed unfair slowing down of older iPhones, while in China it simply had to lower the battery replacement prices.
Thus, changing the region to France would result in Apple's infamous "performance management" system being deactivated, which in turn would affect performance on more ancient iPhones in a positive way. It's not just a subjective feeling, too, as the users benchmarked the before and after scores of the France region change, and noticed higher "after" numbers.
iPhone 7 benchmark scores before and after the region change
Needless to say, there was virtually no difference in the performance of newer Apple handsets like the iPhone 12 Pro whose batteries are in perfect condition still and need not be throttled yet for any reason. When it comes to older iPhone with more years notched on their usage belts, the curious case of the France region change applied full throttle, pun intended. Why?
Well, today's lithium batteries are rated for a certain amount of charge cycles before they start degrading in terms of capacity or ability to provide peak current. This simple fact led to a real #batterygate scandal when Apple acknowledged that iPhones with aged or weaker batteries will take a hit in peak performance, in order to preserve their internals better.
Chipsets and other hardware are becoming ever more powerful and demanding, especially Apple's AX line of processors, resulting in going over the fence when trying to extract stronger current from a weaker battery. At that time, older iPhones employed shutdown procedures to safeguard the electronics in certain extreme scenarios.
Apple tried to remedy the situation with the iOS 10.2.1 update, smoothing out the peak battery demands by dispersing them over several quick cycles. That meant throttling the processor's power, and resulted in 80% fewer iPhone 6 shutdowns, Apple reported at the time, but it also made older iPhones feel comparatively slow.
Apple kept this "performance management" system in the next iOS updates, too, with the ability to switch it off in the battery settings if desired. Once the battery in your iPhone 6 or 7 aged enough, for instance, they became a bit slower and less responsive unless you cracked them open and changed the power bank with a brand new one at Apple's expense.
These performance control optimizations are perhaps exactly the ones blocked in the French models which would explain the iPhone speed improvements when you change the region to the land of cheese and wine. Vive la révolution indeed!
FCC OKs Cingular\'s purchase of AT&T Wireless
Things that are NOT allowed: