If one believes that the older versions of the iPhones appear to be slower, they are not wrong.

An older iPhone would operate slowly due to a software feature released last year because the company wants to reduce the problems of an aging lithium ion battery, Apple said on Wednesday.

Aging batteries can result in acute problems when charge is low or in cold temperatures even as they are not able to hold their charges well compared to new batteries.

As were reported in incidents last year with the iPhone 6 and 6S, phones can unexpectedly shut down or encounter operational troubles due to older batteries. Switching off happened in some phones as the aging batteries could not handle the demand for power as some processors in the devices reported, desired to work faster.

The company says that the aim of issuing the upgraded iOS software such as the iOS 10.2.1 issued last year was to offset those problems with aging batteries. Apple says that slow functioning of older iPhones can only happen in cold temperature, a low battery charge or very old batteries and this was ensured by the new features of the operating system.

Apple said in a statement: “Our goal is to deliver the best experience for customers, which includes overall performance and prolonging the life of their devices. Lithium-ion batteries become less capable of supplying peak current demands when in cold conditions, have a low battery charge or as they age over time, which can result in the device unexpectedly shutting down to protect its electronic components.

Last year we released a feature for iPhone 6, iPhone 6S and iPhone SE to smooth out the instantaneous peaks only when needed to prevent the device from unexpectedly shutting down during these conditions. We’ve now extended that feature to iPhone 7 with iOS 11.2, and plan to add support for other products in the future.”

Primate Labs, which owns the Geekbench processor benchmarking software, had made such allegations about the older iPhones earlier this week and the latest statement from Apple is in response to those claims. With the aging and capacity loosing of older iPhone batteries, there is slow down in the speed of functioning and performance of the processors and hence of the phones, said John Poole, founder of the organization.

Soon after the release of new models of iPhones, the older versions seem to slow down, this has been a long-standing complaint of iPhone users. some of the users even allege that this slowdown by Apple and some other companies is done on purpose so that users discard their older phones and purchase the most recent models and this slow down in performance is done intentionally. Such allegations have been denied vehemently by Apple.

(Adapted from CBSNews.com)