If you’ve been following the news recently, I’m pretty sure you’ve heard about the “Meltdown and Spectre” fiasco a million times by now.
The Spectre is a security vulnerability that’s within the devices’ CPU itself. This can possibly allow hackers to gain access to your personal and private data. And unfortunately, Apple admitted that both the iPhones and the iPads are affected by it — just like every other gadget out there.
Apple is eager to react and they immediately released the iOS 11.2.2 security update. However, since the problem is within the hardware itself, the software update can do nothing but the mitigate the effect.
However, it appears that the update has a downside to it. As reported by Melvin Mughal, there had been an average of 41% and 39% drop in performance when he benchmarked his iPhone 6 after the update.
Apple did give a warning about a possible drop in performance but only stated that it wouldn’t be higher than 2.5%. Although the drop in performance might probably be due to how Apple is intentionally throttling the performance for the sake of preserving the battery.
I did run the same test on my iPhone 7 and I got a surprising result. As it turns out, the benchmark score after the update was slightly higher. Check out the before and after benchmark results below.
Whatever the case may be, I think going with the iOS 11.2.2 update is a better option, especially if you have a lot of sensitive information (i.e bank information) stored on your Apple device.
Source: Forbes