Tim Cook says users will be able to turn off iPhone slowdown 'feature'

If you're not happy with Apple's assessment that iPhones should be slowed down as their batteries degrade, Apple CEO Tim Cook's got good news for you: You'll soon be able to turn that functionality off.

In an interview with ABC News, Cook once again apologized for perhaps not being clear enough about the motivation behind the move, which only became widely known after developer John Poole published a study which showed that the performance of iPhone 6S and 7 degrade over time.

"We deeply apologize to anybody that thinks we had some other kind of motivation, cause our motivation is always the user," Cook said.

For the first time, Cook also promised a software update that will let users monitor their battery performance, and give them the ability to run their iPhone at full speed, battery be damned.

"In a developer release that's gonna happen next month, we're gonna give people the visibility of the health of the battery, so it's very, very transparent," he said. "We will tell somebody, we'll say we are slightly reducing your performance by a certain amount, in order to not have an unexpected restart, and if you don't want it, you can turn it off. "

Cook says that this is not recommended, as you never know when the phone is going to restart at just the wrong time -- for example, when you're waiting for an important call. But as the company has learned (or failed to learn) time and time again, users like to have as much control as possible over the devices they own. Judging by the piling lawsuits related to the iPhone slowdown "feature," many users will welcome the possibility to turn it off.