Apple's Tim Cook Says Future iOS Update Will Allow iPhone Throttling To Be Disabled

At first, Cook tried to explain the reasoning behind throttling in the first place, telling ABC News' Rebecca Jarvis in an interview:

And so you can imagine if you’re making an emergency call or you’re making an important call that’s important to you or a message that you’re waiting for, or you want to capture that moment that’s fleeting with your camera… we always focus on the user experience. So at the heart of any decision that we make is the user. We felt it would be better to take something off of the performance to prevent that from happening.

Then Cook got to the crux of the matter, saying that customers would be allowed to disable the throttling mechanism, although it is not recommended in order to preserve the user experience.

[We] will tell someone we’re reducing your performance by some amount in order to not have an unexpected restart. And if you don’t want it, you can turn it off. Now we don’t recommend it because we think people’s iPhones are really important to them, and you never can tell when something is so urgent. Our actions were all in service of the user. I can’t stress that enough.

According to Cook, these additional user controls will first show up in the next iOS developer branch that will be released in February. In addition to the ability to disable throttling, this developer build will also give customers "visibility of the health of their battery" so that they can see when their battery isn't performing as originally intended.

If the developer release is set for a February debut, this updated version of iOS should arrive for public release sometime in March.