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Ask HN: After iOS 11 problems with battery. I am alone?

1 points by 2dvisio ↗ HN
After updating to iOS 11 on my iPhone 7 ( <7 months old), I had several issues with my battery life.

Initially the phone would act very weird and would turn off whenever below 20%. This was (partially) fixed by updating to 11.1.1 but the phone now would act erratically. The battery would suddenly drop several % points (like from 30% to 21%, in a matter of minutes).

I have interrogated both online Apple support and have also gone through an intensive (1h) session with one of their geniuses. However, apart from having me walk away with all my settings disabled (no background activities, no location updates for any app, no automatic background intensity, ...) they have done nothing else. The battery is still acting erratically, and they claim it is still in their GREEN zone. So not much from them.

I don't think it is normal to pay a phone that much (I got mine for >£650) and then having to disable all its features to still have it not working.

So I am asking, is there someone who shares the pain or am I alone in this? Is there a "bug" in their iOS 11.x.x that I am not aware of (and probably neither they)?

2 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 11.2 ms ] thread
halfbrown
My iPhone 6 is doing pretty much the same thing, though when it turns off doesn't seem to tied to any particular percentage. A few days ago I made a call and pulled the charging cord out to chat. I walked outside, and 20 minutes later the phone was dead, from 100% when I walked out. I put it back on the charger and checked about 5 minutes later and it said it was at around 65%.
2dvisio
If you haven't seen an Apple genius you should probably. I got mine replaced now as my iPhone 7 continued to show signs of erratic battery behaviour after any SW attempt at fixing it.

Apple customer service has been quite useful, however it has taken me lots of time and effort while I was effectively trying to 'debug' the issue for them.

In addition, the tools that Apple has to check the battery is very vague.

When my phone was tested it had a Green/Red/Yellow chart with no axis whatsoever with a dot showing the status of my battery (Green borderline with Yellow). We have tried the phone of my GF, a 2 yrs old iPhone 5S which has completely random battery behaviour. In this case the graph showed only the Yellow square but with no indication of where the battery was in terms of battery life.

Now considering what to do with the iPhone as I am now a bit disappointed by how this (very) high end phone behaved.