Old iPhones become faster if you change the region to France

In the recent past, there have been contro­ver­sies surroun­ding the perfor­mance of iPho­nes, espe­ci­ally old iPho­nes. Accor­ding to a recent report out of China, as long as you change the loca­tion to France, the perfor­mance of its phones will become faster and smoot­her. The reason for the smooth­ness is that Apple has been fined by France for the frequency reduc­tion inci­dent. This means that the company can not temper the perfor­mance of old iPho­nes in the country.

Apple inten­ti­o­nally redu­ces the perfor­mance output of old iPho­nes in order to prevent their perfor­mance from affec­ting the battery life due to the aging of the battery. This reduc­tion in perfor­mance means that the iPhone beco­mes slower. This inci­dent actu­ally happe­ned a couple of years ago. While Apple had to cope with a fine in France, the company had a way out in many other regi­ons. 

For China, the company did not pay any fine for slowing down old iPho­nes. Howe­ver, it had to intro­duce a policy to reduce the price of repla­ce­ment batte­ries. Further­more, it added battery health opti­ons in the system, so that users can clearly see the health of the battery. With these, users beli­e­ved that the company will not reduce the perfor­mance of old iPho­nes again. Howe­ver, it appe­ars that this is not the case. 

There are reports that after chan­ging the region, the iPhone (espe­ci­ally old iPho­nes) beco­mes faster and smoot­her. The report also claims that even the iPad beco­mes smoot­her and faster after chan­ging the region.

Further­more, a compa­ri­son of the AnTuTu score before and after the region was chan­ged shows that the phone running score directly chan­ged by 5W. This is a signi­fi­cant incre­ase in perfor­mance after chan­ging the loca­tion to France. 

On the iPhone 12 Pro, a test of the Geek­Bench 5 running score shows that it is basi­cally the same before and after chan­ging the loca­tion to France. This shows that the reduc­tion of the iPhone perfor­mance does not affect new iPho­nes. Howe­ver, for old iPho­nes, the case is diffe­rent.

The report did a test on the iPhone 7 before and after chan­ging the loca­tion to France. The Geek­Bench running score before chan­ging the loca­tion to France is 286,632. Howe­ver, after chan­ging the loca­tion to France, the running score is 298,321.

We can all see that there is a change in the running points when the loca­tion is chan­ged. The CPU single-core and multi-core scores repor­ted by Geek­Bench 5 are consis­tent with the AnTuTu running scores. The scores before and after the modi­fi­ca­tion of the region are only a few tenths apart.