Want to speed up your old iPhone? Try changing its country region to France

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Apple’s gotten itself in trouble in the past for intentionally slowing down older iPhones, but it seems there’s a way to get around it. A new MyDrivers report from China says that changing the region on your old iPhone to France will reclaim that additional performance.

As reported by GizChina, the report cites the fact that France fined Apple $27 million for its deceptive practices as the reason why older iPhones will work faster if they’re set to France as the region. They also mention user reports that state iPhones are “faster and smoother” after changing the region. The same goes for iPads that have been changed to the same region.

It appears that new iPhones aren’t affected, as running tests of GeekBench 5 on an iPhone 12 Pro before and after changing the region to France show the same results. That’s not the case for older phones, like the iPhone 7 that the report used in its testing.

Running GeekBench 5 on an iPhone 7 set to France gave a score of 298,321. Running the same test when the region was changed back to local (presumably China), gave a score of 286,632. That’s roughly a 4-percent increase just by changing the region on the phone.

The thing that GizChina omits is that the report from MyDrivers did some qualitative testing and found that changing the region didn’t make any difference on their test devices.

While some users might be reporting improvements, those could be from the restart needed to change the region on an iPhone, which would close any apps or processes that are in the background eating up system resources.

If you’ve got an older iPhone that’s seeming to slow down, it’s more likely that your device is just aging.

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Joe Rice-Jones

Maker, meme-r, and unabashed geek with nearly half a decade of blogging experience at KnowTechie, SlashGear and XDA Developers. If it runs on electricity (or even if it doesn't), Joe probably has one around his office somewhere, with particular focus in gadgetry and handheld gaming. Shoot him an email at joe@knowtechie.com.