Is Apple slowing down your old iPad, Mac or Watch

With Apple having confirmed that it’s slowing down iPhones with aged batteries you might understandably be worried that the same thing is happening to your iPad, MacBook or Apple Watch, but you can rest assured that it’s not.

On a support page detailing the ‘feature’, Apple has confirmed that “This power management feature is specific to iPhone and does not apply to any other Apple products.”

So why is the iPhone affected and nothing else? Well, we don’t know for sure, but Apple is slowing older phones down to stop them unexpectedly shutting down, which can happen during performance peaks when the battery is older or at a low state of charge.

Bigger is better
It notes that as iPads have larger batteries than iPhones they’ll be better able to handle performance peaks, and they also tend to be charged less frequently than a phone, which means their batteries don’t wear out as quickly, all of which means that slowing them down should be less necessary. The same should also apply to MacBooks.

The Apple Watch, with its tiny battery, would presumably be susceptible to the same issues as an iPhone, especially since the battery could wear out similarly fast thanks to the regular charges it’s likely to get, but nonetheless Apple won’t throttle it – at least for now.

There’s no guarantee that the company won’t start slowing down other devices in future though, with the iPhone X, iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus – all of which are currently too new to need slowing down – likely to be next in line.