If you own an iPhone 6 Plus that qualifies for whole body replacement and you haven’t gotten around to getting it serviced, Apple may be willing to upgrade it for you, at no additional expense. The keyword is “may” — we don’t know exactly which devices qualify for this type of replacement.
This information is courtesy of MacRumors, who confirmed the new program with multiple sources and suggests it’s the result of changes to Apple internal processes. Apple had previously ceased producing iPhone 6 batteries itself and has had to reboot its product manufacturing to supply batteries for all of its devices, as part of the battery replacement program it launched earlier this month. The exact text of the directive, according to MR, reads: “orders for whole unit service inventory of some iPhone 6 Plus models may be substituted to an iPhone 6s Plus until the end of March 2018.”
It’s been a rough month for Apple on the whole, thanks to the combined impact of its own battery woes, Spectre, and Meltdown. Initial tests suggested the performance impact from those patches could hit Apple devices very hard (the security researcher in question has removed his benchmark results) but that data may not have been completely accurate. Again, performance impacts seem variable; MacWorld reports a Geekbench score regression of about 2.5 percent.
For those of you who haven’t heard, Apple has also announced it will update iOS to give users control over battery behavior rather than unilaterally implementing throttling. While Ryan hit this topic last week for ET, I wrote a number of stories slamming Apple for its refusal to take this step, and therefore wanted to acknowledge it directly myself. The battery replacement issue isn’t directly related to this full-body replacement issue, save that it probably put further stress on Apple’s supply of iPhone 6 Pluses and necessitated offering iPhone 6s Pluses to some customers instead.
If you’re going to try to get an older iPhone 6 replaced, let us know what you hear from technicians and under what circumstances (if any) you’re able to receive an iPhone 6s. It’d be nice to see Apple extend this offer to iPhone 6 Plus owners who still have ‘Touch Disease” devices that were never fixed, but that may be asking a bit much of the company. And by “a bit much,” what I actually mean is that Apple should fix the devices and apologize to the owners whose products it broke.
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