Apple was recently found to be intentionally slowing down older iPhone devices. The company later apologized for poor communication with its users over the intentional slowdowns, claiming that it made changes to iOS to prevent unexpected shutdowns on phones with ageing batteries.

At the time, Apple said the company will be releasing a new iOS update early this year to provide users with more data over their iPhone’s battery health. It also cut down the price of iPhone battery replacements by $50 to let users avoid the slowdowns on their old iPhone by getting a new battery.

In a new interview with ABC News announcing the hardware maker’s massive $350 billion contribution to the US economy,  Apple CEO Tim Cook said a new iOS update will make the intentional slowdowns optional. The toggle will let users prevent iOS from automatically throttling their CPU because of poor battery health, but Cook isn’t recommending users to actually use the feature as it could result in unexpected shutdowns.

“We will tell somebody we are slightly reducing, or we are reducing your performance by some amount in order to not have an unexpected restart. If you don’t want it? You can turn it off. Now, we don’t recommend it, because we think people’s iPhones are really important to them, and you never can tell when something is so urgent, and so our actions were all in service of the user. I can’t stress that enough. Maybe we should have been clear at a point in time, but our actions were always the purest,” Cook said in the interview.

Cook declined allegations against the company for intentionally slowing down iPhones in order to drive customer upgrades, for those wondering.

Apple expects to ship a beta of the new iOS update sometime in February, and a public rollout is expected to happen shortly after, possibly sometime in March. Of course, we can’t exactly say if the new toggle will actually make your old iPhone faster yet, so that remains a mystery.

Tagged with Apple, iOS, iPhone