The iPhone battery wait may end soon
When Apple announced it would give owners of older iPhones a deep discount on replacement batteries — penance for slowing down those models to prevent unexpected shutdowns — the company’s retail stores were flooded with customers taking Apple up on the offer.
That caused a shortage of batteries, resulting in delays of sometimes weeks for the repair to be done.
Now, the tech news site MacRumors reports that supply apparently has caught up with demand.
The site got its hands on a memo sent to Apple Stores and authorized repair centers on April 27 that says “service inventory of all iPhone replacement batteries is now available without delay.”
That doesn’t mean that
there won’t be a delay in some instances. Apple’s support site still warns that battery replacements could take up to five days.
But apparently, getting the part won’t be the issue.
The backlog arose because Apple dropped the price of replacing batteries in iPhones to $29 from $79, apologizing for not making it clear that an update to iOS caused some older models to run slower.
The aging batteries couldn’t keep up with the power demands of Apple’s processors, causing the phones to sometimes restart without warning. Slowing down the device prevented the shutdowns but left owners convinced that Apple was slowing iPhones to force them to buy a newer one.
A subsequent update to iOS 11 now provides more details about battery health as a result and gives owners the option to turn off the slowdown, though that leaves them subject to the sudden reboots.