iPhone slowing: Apple apologises amid claims it secretly slowed down old devices

The company denied that the decision was made to encourage people to buy new iPhones, but said sorry for failing to tell people about it properly

The new iPhone X is seen in the Apple Store Union Square on November 3, 2017, in San Francisco, California (ELIJAH NOUVELAGE/AFP/Getty Images)

Apple has apologised for apparently secretly slowing down phones and promised to try and win back its customers' trust.

The company will offer huge discounts on replacement batteries and provide new warnings to iPhones users when their phones are being hit by the slowdowns. It also said that it would continue to work hard to avoid the need to slow down the phones at all, by improving its batteries and other components.

The changes are part of the company's attempts to limit the effects of a growing scandal about the way that it limits the performance of older phones, to ensure that they don't suffer when their batteries become aged. When a phone's battery isn't performing, the company slows it down – a move that some have claimed is in keeping with previous suggestions that Apple intentionally breaks older models.

Apple didn't admit to intentionally slowing down phones to encourage people to buy new ones – it has always said that it made the decision to prolong the life of phones. But it did say sorry for the way it had failed to communicate the slowdown properly, apologising and accepting that many people felt they had been let down by Apple.

"First and foremost, we have never — and would never — do anything to intentionally shorten the life of any Apple product, or degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades," Apple said on a special page, titled "A Message to Our Customers. "Our goal has always been to create products that our customers love, and making iPhones last as long as possible is an important part of that."

It then went on to explain that it had made the change in response to the fact that aged batteries were performing far less well than when they were new. That meant that older batteries – especially if they were low on charge – could fail to deliver enough power to the phone sometimes, meaning that it would completely shutdown unexpectedly.

Instead of having iPhones shut down apparently for no reason, the company chose to limit the performance of phones whose batteries were older. But that finally proved that Apple was intentionally and secretly slowing down older phones, critics claimed.

Now Apple has said that it will launch a range of programs intended on winning back its users trust.

First, it will significantly reduce the cost of having the battery in an iPhone replaced and getting it back to its old performance. That will drop by $50 to just $29, and the new price will roll out across the world over the course of next year.

Second, it will make major changes to the operating system so that people can see more easily how healthy their battery is and whether that is limiting the phone's performance. It's not clear whether that change will make it explicit when the phone has been slowed down, but it will allow people to know what condition the battery is in, it said.

And third, it will continue to commit to working to ensure that phones don't shut down or have to have their performance limited.

Apple recognised that many people felt their phones had slowed down over the course of recent months, but said that it initially thought those were explained by normal, temporary changes brought about by installing new software for a new operating system, and bugs that have since been fixed in the new release. It had now decided that the continued chemical aging of batteries was another reason that phones slow down over time, it said.