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.
The result is that 11.2.2 is slightly faster than 11.2.1 (around 2%).
And here’s one of my iPad Pro 10.5”: https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/6304146?baselin... (0.9% increase in performance).
That policy has changed, they will replace your battery upon request for $29 no matter what their diagnostic tests say.
> 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.
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.