A couple of years ago, Apple came under fire after it was discovered that it was slowing the performance on some older iPhones as their batteries get older to help prevent random shutdowns. Now the company has confirmed that it's bringing that performance throttling to last year's phones.
The iPhone XR, iPhone XS, and iPhone XS Max will get Apple's performance management with the update to iOS 13.1 (via The Verge), which is slated to roll out on September 24. Apple does say that the effects of its performance management on newer iPhones may be less noticeable because of their "more advanced hardware and software design."
The performance throttling looks at your phone's temperature, battery charge, and battery impedance. If required, iOS will throttle the performance of components like the CPU and GPU to help prevent your iPhone from shutting down unexpectedly. The goal of the feature is to self-balance workloads and more smoothly distribute system tasks, explains Apple, rather than have larger and quicker spikes of performance all at once.
To check your iPhone battery's health and performance, you can go into Settings > Battery > Battery Health. There you'll find info on your battery's maximum capacity and its peak performance capability. If your iPhone experiences an unexpected shutdown, it'll begin applying performance management to prevent it from happening again. You do have the option of disabling this performance management if you'd like.
