The “silly” iOS update turns millions of iPhone 12 into the iPhone XR

Apple’s recently released iOS 14.5.1 update fixes two serious security flaws, but millions of iPhone users have another serious problem.

Spotted by the famous YouTuber Nick Ackerman, iOS 14.5.1 reduced the performance of the iPhone 12 and 11 to 60%. By comparison, the current iPhone 12 models are as good as the 2018 iPhone XR and the iPhone 11 is on par with the iPhone 7.

Testing with Geekbench performance scoring page, iPhone 12 running iOS 14.5.1 scored 1,478 single-core, 2,339 multi-core points. This figure of the iPhone XR with the update is 1,105 and 2,085 points. Before iOS 14.5.1 update, iPhone 12 scored 1,583 and 3,967 performance points single-core and multi-core.

” This is the strangest thing I’ve ever seen ,” said Ackerman. ” We’re getting a performance squeeze again, ” this YouTuber recalls when Apple slowed down the performance of iPhones when battery capacity dropped below 80% in the past.

On the MacRumors forum, a post with more than 250 comments shows that about 25% of iPhone users encounter the aforementioned phenomenon. A large number of users also complained on Apple’s official community support page. So far, Apple has sold about 300 million iPhone 12 and iPhone 11. If the ratio on MacRumors is correct then this is a big problem, affecting millions of iPhones.

According to Forbes, it is difficult for Apple to deliberately reduce performance on the iPhone 12 generation because its battery management technology has now evolved. In addition, the iPhone 12 is only about 6 months old, not to the extent that the battery is affected to reduce performance. Maybe, the company will soon release iOS 14.5.2 update to fix this phenomenon.

However, until then iPhone 12 and 11 users who have not been updated have faced a difficult decision. They have to choose not to update the iPhone and face the risk of being hacked into the iPhone through a widely publicized security vulnerability or updating the device and accepting the device with reduced performance compared to before.

Reference source: Forbes