Oliver Haslam on April 1, 2018, 6:34 am

iOS 11.3 Battery Health Feature Not Appearing On iPhone 5s? Here’s Why

There has been more than a little bit of noise surrounding the Apple battery situation, whereby it continues to artificially throttle iPhones with sub-par batteries in order to prevent them from automatically restarting themselves at seemingly random intervals.

Those restarts are caused by the batteries simply being unable to provide enough power when an iPhone’s CPU spins up in order to meet high usage, but users don’t so much care why it happens as just want it to not happen at all.

They also want to be in charge of what their phones are doing, which is why with iOS 11.3, Apple added a new feature that not only showed whether an iPhone’s battery is susceptible to throttling, but also allows users to control whether that throttling even happens. However, it’s not available for all iPhones.

If you are carrying an iPhone 5s, then you could be forgiven for thinking that your particular device would be ripe for throttling due to its age. However, you will notice that even with iOS 11.3 installed, you do not have access to the same battery health information as other devices, something that will come as a surprise.

However, the reason why is simple – Apple does not throttle iPhone 5s handsets no matter the state of their batteries, at least not officially.

Apple confirms that the behavior is to be expected in iPhone 6 handsets and newer, and that’s all.

Of course, that is not to say that replacing an iPhone 5s battery will not yield improvements. If not in performance, you can certainly expect your ageing iPhone 5s battery to not last as long on a full charge as it did on the day you bought it, so replacing the battery is perhaps not a bad idea regardless.