The Eye on Taiwan news staff
iPhone users may find the performance of their smartphones throttled by as much as 50% after upgrading to iOS 11.2.2 newly released by Apple, according to Forbes’ tech columnist Gordon Kelly.
In his article published on Thursday, Kelly noted that though users might not subjectively report their iPhones and iPads were working slower after the upgrade, tech developer Melvin Mughal found after reading his Upgrade Guide that single-core and multi-core performance of his iPhone 6 fell by an average of 41% and 39% after updating to iOS 11.2.2.
Kelly noted that the obvious finger to point is the sole feature of iOS 11.2.2: mitigations for the serious Spectre vulnerability which is impacting just about every platform around the world.
He said Apple even warned users in advance the patch could have a performance impact in some situations but said it was not expected to be higher than 2.5% in any situation. So are the big drops the consequence of an error in these mitigations or a problem elsewhere in the update, he asked.
Kelly, however, said, he personally found no difference to the benchmark scores of his iPhone X. “I’m sure that’s the same for many others, but it doesn’t help those who have clearly been very badly affected,” he said.
So far Apple has yet to comment on the issue.