Are iPads throttled?

Question

Level 1

8 points

Are iPads throttled?

Recently Apple posted a letter about battery performance and degradation overtime.

The letter regarding the slowdown of iPhones, stated that all iPhones with old chemically aged batteries have a software component that dynamically manages the peak power consumption of the device. This could result in lower device performance in some cases.

Since iPads are iOS devices and they also use lithium-ion batteries their performance could be lowered in some cases. Since I own an iPad Air 2 (128 GB) running iOS 11.2.2 with its original battery I have been experiencing a performance degradation in high workload situations (browsing with a lot of tabs opened and playing performance demanding games). I am not sure if this is because of applications getting more demanding or the software managing the iPad’s power. If the slowdown is caused by battery aging then will replacing it return the performance to normal and if so would an Apple certified service provider change the battery.

Thanks for the support!

iPad air 2 Wifi + Cellular -OTHER, iOS 11.2.5

Posted on Jan 24, 2018 9:33 AM

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Answer 1

G_Adrian

Level 1

80 points

Jan 31, 2018 11:42 AM in response to prasanje

Hello Prasanje,

I understand your concern about the iPad battery and wanted to advise that Apple hasn’t stated they are slowing down the iPad battery. Some sources state that your iPad battery is not affected by the slowdown, which means that if your iPad is very old it could experience random spikes (shutdowns). This is because Apple hasn’t added them to the power management system. The reason your iPad is getting slower may be because of the demanding apps. Getting a new battery would extend the life of the iPad. Meaning that your iPad shutdowns would be delayed longer. And I’m not sure if an Apple certified service provider could replace the battery.

Kind Regards,

Adrian

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Answer 2

y_p_w

Level 6

17,762 points

Jan 31, 2018 11:41 AM in response to prasanje

If they did, Primate Labs (the developers of Geekbench) would be all over this. There's no need to do it with a tablet battery. The batteries are considerably larger and more capable of driving a logic board that's has lower raw performance than the latest iPhones. Mostly they need to be bigger to allow a bigger display to run as long on battery power.

The basic issues with the iOS 11 update is that it's somewhat power hungry and you're using a device that's kind of on the edge of being able to properly run it. But the benchmarks don't really care about all that stuff other than raw CPU/memory performance. If it was being throttled, it would be obvious.

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Answer 3

prasanje Author

Level 1

8 points

Jan 31, 2018 11:54 AM in response to y_p_w

Thanks for the reply, y_p_w.

I never considered the fact that new phones are quite underpowered for the software they’re running. As iOS 11 trully is an almost desktop class os running on a battery smaller than a notepad... I guess we are lucky for phones even to run such advanced os’ and for the iPads with much more powerfull batteries throttling shouldn’t be an issue.

Thanks again for replying and enlightening me on this subject.

Best wishes.

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