Apple Inc. admitted something Wednesday that some of its smartphone users had feared for a while: The company purposely slows down its older phones.

Although the conspiracy theory has turned out to be true, it turns out that Apple was doing it for the right reasons, at leasts according to Apple and some of its supporters. The slowdown was not related to planned obsolescence to push users into upgrading their phones, as some people have assumed, but to protect the phones against aging batteries.

Users of the iPhone 6, 6S and SE may have experienced this mysterious slowing down of their devices, and that will now also include iPhone 7 users. The problem is that Apple has only just explained what to some might have felt like a processor flaw. This has led to some amount of criticism regarding the company’s transparency.

Apple said it was only protecting its customers, because when batteries get cold, old or have a low charge, they can just switch off. The sudden turning off of an iPhone has been a problem in the past for a great number of users.

When the phone’s battery is weak, it may not be able to deliver the maximum current to the processor, explained in detail here. During what Apple calls “peak current demands,” the phone can shut down to protect the internal components. Make it so the phone demands less power, and voila, it won’t shut down.

“Our goal is to deliver the best experience for customers, which includes overall performance and prolonging the life of their devices,” a spokesperson for Apple said. In Apple’s words, the performance-slowing update was to “smooth out the instantaneous peaks only when needed to prevent the device from unexpectedly shutting down during these conditions.”

Nonetheless, this has rankled customers. Apple denies that such an update has anything to do with planned obsolescence, but until this disclosure iPhone users may well have thought there was a problem with the processor and not just the battery. It also seems that until some people had figured out what was going on with underperforming phones, Apple was perhaps going to keep the update a secret.

Image: Nathan Borror via Flickr