Apple does not slow down older phone speeds says bench-marking agency

Benchmarking company Futuremark has debunked the long-standing speculation that Apple intentionally slows down older iPhones while releasing new software updates to make customers buy new devices.

Starting with 2016, Futuremark collected more than 100,000 benchmark results for seven different iPhone models across three versions of iOS. It then used that data to create performance comparison charts to determine performance drops, if any, in iOS 9, iOS 10, and iOS 11.

The iPhone 5s was the first device to be tested as it is the oldest device capable of running iOS 11 and also because the 2013 released version was the first iPhone to get a 64-bit A7 chip. iOS 11 is limited to 64-bit devices.

Using the 3DMark Sling Shot Extreme Graphics test Futuremark calculated all benchmark scores from the iPhone 5s across a given month to make its comparison.

The higher the bar, the better the performance, and on the basis of testing, GPU performance on the iPhone 5s was found to remain constant from iOS 9 to iOS 11 with only minor variations that Futuremark said "fall well within normal levels."

"The graphs for CPU performance show a very slight drop in performance over time - possibly due to minor iOS updates or other factors -

but a user would be unlikely to notice this small difference in everyday use," a Futuremark statement reads.

For the iPhone 6, GPU performance scores increased over time, and only a small jump at the time of iOS 10's release was seen, and another larger increase for iOS 11.

CPU performance did decline in the results, but only slightly, and the graph leveled off from May 2017 onward.

In the graphs for iPhone 6s graphs, GPU performance was seen to peak with the introduction of iOS 10, before it dropped off slightly and leveled again from May 2017.