Each year, fall ushers in a few certainties. Leaves change color and fall gently to the ground. Pumpkin spice flavors turn up in unlikely foodstuffs. And iPhone owners feel pretty sure that Apple has intentionally slowed down their smartphone, in a dastardly attempt to get them to upgrade to the latest model. That last one? It’s not a thing.

Hue and cry about Apple’s “planned obsolescence” has burbled up for years, at one point gracing even the pages of The New York Times Magazine. But a new look at historic iPhone performance data disproves the notion for good. Does your iPhone run a little slower than it used to, just in time for the iPhone 8? Maybe. If you’re blaming Apple, though, you’re barking up the wrong corporate monolith.

[Update: Since this article was published, Apple has admitted it intentionally slowed down some iPhones to mitigate crashes caused by aging batteries. The company still wasn't doing this for the reasons many continued to suspect, which are outlined in this article. While everything in this report is still accurate, we urge you to also read what we now know about Apple's forced iPhone slow-downs.]

3DMarks the Spot

The data that disproves any malicious intent on Apple’s part comes from Futuremark, the company behind a popular benchmarking app called 3DMark. The app runs a series of tests that measure your phone's performance.

“The way 3DMark is designed and created is to emulate exactly how a real game would operate,” says Futuremark commerce director Jani Joki. “The methodologies, APIs, and 3-D structures that we use are all done in a way that act like a modern-day game would end up using. It gives you a good prediction of how games would perform on a device.”

That’s important, because gaming stresses your iPhone more than pretty much any other activity. Not only that, but 3DMark actual comprises two tests, one each for your smartphone’s GPU and CPU, to test against both graphics-intensive tasks and those that require heavy-duty physics calculations and the like.

The basic argument: If Apple were purposefully debilitating an older iPhone, that would clearly show up in the 3DMark score. Reader, it didn’t.

In fact, Futuremark’s data set includes hundreds of thousands of benchmarks for seven different iPhone models and three different versions of iOS. You can see a bunch of charts here, and they all show the same thing: GPU performance holds steady on an iPhone 5S, even across three firmware updates. The CPU wavers a skosh, but not enough that you’d notice.

So, your iPhone’s GPU and CPU don’t shrink over time, and especially not at the specific time that iPhones start tumbling off the Foxconn assembly line. You can have faith in that both because of the rigorous Futuremark analysis, and because the planned obsolescence theory never made any sense in the first place.

“The longevity of Apple’s devices is a key reason why their resale value is so high, which in turn is one reason why people keep buying them and handing them down to family members or selling them on when they get new ones,” says Jan Dawson, founder of Jackdaw Research.

For more proof of Apple’s faith in its devices to keep chugging, note that it’ll sell you a brand new—or refurbished—iPhone 6S right now. If it really downshifted devices after a couple of years, why on earth would it be selling you a two-year-old device? If you sell someone a rotten banana today, they’ll shop at the next fruit stand over tomorrow. (Yes, this metaphor assumes multiple competitive fruit stands in close proximity.)