This article doesn't make any sense. The author is doing generic phone benchmarks. But the Spectre fix is a webkit fix only, not an OS-wide fix. If they're seeing performance regressions across the whole OS because of fixing Spectre, something's seriously wrong with their benchmark methodology.
Edit: The author upgraded from iOS 11.1.2 to iOS 11.2.2. This isn't just a test of the Spectre fix. The most likely explanation here is upgrading to iOS 11.2 caused their iPhone 6 to start throttling due to battery wear (11.2 added throttling to iPhone 7, and it's plausible that it changed the conditions for throttling on iPhone 6). It's also possible that this is instead caused by the Meltdown patch, but these numbers are still way out of line with what was expected for Meltdown on iOS, whereas they're very much in line with what we've been seeing with battery throttling.
The article should be flagged off the front page or edited by the mods to show that it's questionable.
This is a single person's test results, across versions that are known to have touched the battery/CPU slowdown logic, showing insane performance degradation across almost every aspect of the phone... it's super questionable. And right now it's #1 on HN despite all of that, just spreading misinformation.
I did this same test with an iPhone X and iPad Pro 10.5" as well as a several year old Mini 2 and didn't see a difference. In fact, I saw what you did, my scores got better in most categories.
Yeah there is. Get your battery replaced. Apple will replace your battery for $29 (as long as there's sufficient wear, but if you're seeing throttling, you're well past the cutoff).
> Apple is reducing the price of an out-of-warranty iPhone battery replacement by $50 — from $79 to $29 — for anyone with an iPhone 6 or later whose battery needs to be replaced, available worldwide through December 2018.
The "whose battery needs to be replaced" sure implies they're still going to actually test it.
I have an iPhone 6, and didn’t notice any further performance issues after upgrading to 11.2.2. I did have pretty serious issues (which have mostly remained) since upgrading to iOS 11. So I don’t think the latest version did anything more, at least on my phone.
Edit: The author upgraded from iOS 11.1.2 to iOS 11.2.2. This isn't just a test of the Spectre fix. The most likely explanation here is upgrading to iOS 11.2 caused their iPhone 6 to start throttling due to battery wear (11.2 added throttling to iPhone 7, and it's plausible that it changed the conditions for throttling on iPhone 6). It's also possible that this is instead caused by the Meltdown patch, but these numbers are still way out of line with what was expected for Meltdown on iOS, whereas they're very much in line with what we've been seeing with battery throttling.