> First and foremost, we have never — and would never — do anything to intentionally shorten the life of any Apple product, or degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades.
Didn't they degrade the user experience by slowing down the cpu? I definitely wasn't enjoying my slow iPhone
It's choosing the lesser of two evils. The two options are to have the phone run slower, or have the phone shut down unexpectedly with shorter battery life.
Personally, I agree with Apple's call on this one.
Hmm, that could work, but I feel like that might go against Apple's ethos. Not malicious, they just seem to like telling the user what's best and surfacing fewer options. I feel like the average user doesn't want to have to make this decision
>Plus, having the phone shutdown would force users to upgrade out of necessity without feeling swindled.
I'd disagree, but may be in the minority. I would hate having to upgrade because my battery life is shot. A large reason I chose iPhone was the battery life
As the owner of an iPhone 6 that was degraded enough that even with the mitigation I had the issue, I agree.
Any time my phone was under ~15% battery, it would randomly crash during demanding tasks. I'd think the battery had died, but turning it back on would work immediately and my battery wouldn't be at 1%/0%.
At that point the battery capacity might as well be 85% of the already degraded value since the phone stops being stable.
The right call is actually targeting performance at a level that would allow for longer consistent performance state.
If they're having to go to measures this drastic to keep their phones from shutting down, their batteries are underspec'd and their processors are overspec'd.
The other option would have been to alert the user this was going on. This didn't always happen. They were degrading users phones while showing the battery as fine. That's the problem, you can't just start degrading performance without telling people why.
When you have people running 3rd party apps to determine whether their phones are still running fine, and then going to get battery replacements and finding performance returning, and nothing the OS told them indicated anything was wrong, that's a problem.
That's a false dichotomy; Apple has many options other than slowing down the phone and having it randomly restart.
For example, they could have altered the calibration of the battery indicator so 0% charge corresponds to the charge level where random restarts/throttling starts to occur.
Calibrating for a new "0%" effectively lead to a "shorter battery life".
I don't know the intricacies of these options, but I can make a guess. The point which a phone resets isn't accurately predicted. Some user actions may cause larger voltage drops than others. For which action do you calibrate to 0%? What if you only do that action once a day? Is this trade off worth sacrificing 1% of your full capacity? What about 10% or 30%?
Rock and a hard place for Apple, after 600 cycles or 2 years 'average usage' (based on reports I've seen in the past) the battery might only have 50-60% of the design capacity, so their choice is between reducing battery consumption (via throttling) or having users whose phones are totally drained in significantly less than an 'average working day'.
It's not just battery life, some people might live with 50% battery but due to chemistry they can't put out the designed voltage leading to the iPhone suddenly turning off.
If iPhones are really experiencing that rate of degradation, then Apple are solely to blame for using such an aggressive battery management profile. If they had given up a millimetre of thickness, overprovisioned the battery and managed it less aggressively, they could have easily reduced battery degradation to <20% after 1,500 cycles. Adding 50% to the capacity also gives you 50% more current at the same C-rate. I think this is a clear case of Apple prioritising shelf appeal over durability; it's the same root cause as the Galaxy S7 battery crisis.
Idk if the grandparent comment is correct about the degradation rate, but I’d need to see more evidence supporting the claim that Apple is doing something aggressive relative to the rest of the industry. Overprovisioning the battery is silly, and would deservedly cause a much bigger controversy if it were discovered.
>Overprovisioning the battery is silly, and would deservedly cause a much bigger controversy if it were discovered.
Really? Would there be a strong negative reaction if Apple said "we've designed the iPhone 9 to give you all-day battery life for four years"? Would customers be angry that their device was built to last longer and perform better? To my mind, it's a marketable feature.
All battery management is a trade-off between capacity and durability. Manufacturers have an obvious commercial incentive to sacrifice durability - you get a thinner device with longer initial battery life.
Purchasing habits are starting to change in the mobile market. Pricing is moving away from an all-inclusive line rental price to separate usage charges and device payments. As the market matures, customers are holding onto their devices for longer. I think it's inevitable that manufacturers will have to improve durability as we move away from the lock-step of 24 month contracts.
> If iPhones are really experiencing that rate of degradation, then Apple are solely to blame for using such an aggressive battery management profile.
Consumers are responsible at least as much as manufacturers for the current state of phones. Manufacturers may create the designs for phones, but consumers vote with their wallets for what they want, and they've consistently voted for thin over longer battery life.
There's a difference between battery life and battery longevity. The Galaxy Note 7 had a fairly beefy 3500mAh battery, but Samsung tried to cram too much capacity into too little volume. The unconventional pack shape created a substantial risk of internal shorts. Poor thermal management or aggressive battery management can vastly increase the rate of battery degradation, but they're non-obvious and most tech journalists don't have the knowledge needed to identify those issues.
Most consumers don't understand battery technology and don't know what's available on the market. They go into their local cellphone store and choose whatever looks nice and is recommended by the salesman. They aren't aware of handsets with bigger or user-replaceable batteries, because the industry hasn't really offered them the choice. I use a Chinaphone with a giant battery, but I have a lot of knowledge that no average consumer has.
Old batteries draining to zero quickly isn’t even the primary problem. The primary problem is phone instantly shutting off during a peak in CPU usage because the battery voltage drops below a usagable threshold. This can happen with old batteries long before the battery life meter goes down to zero.
I remember experiencing it with my six. I’d be using my phone and then the phone would just randomly shut down. I might have noticed the battery indicator saying five percent or something like that right before it died (even though that wasn’t true).
You’d restart the phone and after a second trip to the battery indicator would show the correct level (let’s say 60 to 80 percent).
Not necessarily, I'd rather have my phone die at 40% or something, at least I can investigate then, and replace my battery. In the other hand, throttling my system and hiding it from me...
Would you rather have a slightly slower phone, or one that shuts off at random due to the battery not being able to provide peak current.
I think the only major mistake Apple made here was not being originally transparent about this. I don't think that Apple is being 100% noble in its intents either. In addition to driving users to buy new devices, there's the much less obvious side-effect which is a lot of people attempting to get their batteries replaced at roughly the same time as devices age. Which creates a tremendous support burden at Apple Stores around the world as people pile in to get their batteries replaced. (Although more daring consumers may attempt the DIY route, but I expect that to be a very small minority).
I am affected by this issue. I would rather have a risk of my phone shutting down at <40% than my phone gas lighting me with performance degradation.
If my phone shut down when it shouldn't then I know to search out diagnostics about my battery. But if my phone slows down I have actually done these things:
* complained to developers that their apps are slower, wasting their time and resources when my battery should have been changed.
* reinstalled my OS. Which did not help when I should have changed my battery.
* searched and searched and searched resources online. When I should have researched a new battery.
* I also have to mea culpa all friends to whom I have ensured through the years that Apple never intentionally slows down their hardware. I have lied to my friends and need to apologise to them.
> Would you rather have a slightly slower phone, or one that shuts off at random due to the battery not being able to provide peak current.
I wish people would stop inventing this false dichotomy. What people want is a phone that doesn't degrade horribly after only a year, regardless of whether that degradation is that it shuts itself off at 40% (which is fucking ridiculous) or that it gets noticeably slower. When a phone degrades so noticeably after only a year, people feel like they've been cheated. Do any other phones turn themselves off at 40% charge? My android phones certainly don't.
It’s not a false dichotomy. That’s what the phone did before. It was a pre-existing problem.
They could choose to do nothing. They could do what they did. With either of those they could’ve chosen to be more transparent (which clearly they should’ve).
You’re arguing that given the problem they saw once the phones have been in the field for years they should have designed the phone differently originally. That’s not reasonable.
I’d be very curious to know how android phones handle this. They must, in someway. There’s another comment in this story that someone had an HTC phone that would tend to just suddenly die under 20%, that may be the same thing iPhones were doing before.
When your battery doesn't last as long, what do you think of replacing?
When everything on your device runs noticeably slowly, what do you think of replacing?
> You’re arguing that given the problem they saw once the phones have been in the field for years they should have designed the phone differently originally. That’s not reasonable.
I'm arguing that given that battery degradation curves are absolutely a known quantity, and have been for many years, they should have chosen to not put in a CPU that would, with 100% certainty, fuck itself in the eye with batteries that otherwise still appear to be reasonably healthy. 500 _complete_ charge cycles should get a battery to 80% capacity according to Apple. 80% original capacity doesn't mean suddenly turning off at 40% of current capacity because of power draw.
> they should have designed the phone differently originally
They should have. The current situation has been caused by either negligence or intent to deceive. That's what has people so upset. Did you know that you don't get the performance back if you keep the iPhone plugged in?
> I’d be very curious to know how android phones handle this. They must, in someway.
By running their CPUs at voltages farther from the absolute edge of what their batteries are capable of putting out. Possibly by displaying charge percentage differently. Definitely not by making performance unbearable.
That doesn't happen unless you have an absurd number of charge cycles. It usually takes 2-3 years of normal use to reach a point where the battery degradation is a major problem.
Probably because low power mode is completely different, and probably doesn’t do much to reduce the CPU usage peaks that the old battery protection code protects against.
"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, starting in late January and available worldwide through December 2018. Details will be provided soon on apple.com.
Early in 2018, we will issue an iOS software update with new features that give users more visibility into the health of their iPhone’s battery, so they can see for themselves if its condition is affecting performance."
This basically means they're giving you the battery for free. Takes 30-45 minutes of semi-skilled labor to replace it, loaded cost of the employee for even 30 minutes has got to be pretty close to the $29 they're charging.
Wonder if this means we'll see 12-24 month phones popping up on eBay with battery health reports, or receipts showing the owner(s) had them changed out just prior to sale.
They wouldn't have to give anything for free if, like for many other phones, the owner could replace the battery in 1 minute flat with no special tools...
My guess is that the downvote was a sort of "offtopic" one: "yeah, we can't change the battery ourselves, c'est la vie, it's Apple, get over it, let's discuss the issue at hand".
Not even that much of a pain. Apple makes the batteries fairly easy to replace (with the right tools) to lower their own cost of warranty repairs, staffing, etc.
What "many other phones?" Samsung, Google, Motorola, LG, and others have all gone to sealed battery design. It led to thinner phones and, down the road, better water resistance. Samsung tried water resistance and removable batter with the S5 and it was inconsistent at best. I'm sure there are some phones out there that still have removable batteries (BLU comes to mind), but by and large all flagships have sealed designs now. Whether the trade-off is worth it is up to the person (I prefer a sleeker phone with water resistance myself, but I'm also capable enough to replace an iPhone battery on my own), but the idea that there are "many other phones" where one can replace the battery in 1 minute with no special tools is just not true.
To your second point, I'm curious to see if Apple only offers this to original owners, or if a subsequent purchaser can get it swapped at this price also.
This is great, and it's going to really hurt some independent shops that offer battery replacements.
Also, I wonder what percent of people will walk into an Apple Store intending to get their battery replaced and will end up walking out with a shiny new iPhone. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple offered incentives to folks who want to just trade in and be done with the old device. At the very least, they've got you hanging out in their store for 15 mins.
Yup, they took some bad press and made it good for themselves and their customers. This announcement should be used as an example for other big companies. Be sympathetic, truthful, and human. I don't own a single apple product but I respect how they handled this.
Everyone was having fun, eating and singing Mariah Carey. Christmas is over and moods are worse, so here's the good Santa Apple Claus is bringing you a gift.
That's the logic behind this, I guess... ;)
Reducing the battery replacement by $50 is a great move. While I think this is a completely manufactured scandal, this will definitely take away the last argument people have against them.
I'm sure some people will still hate them for something, though.
Personally I think this is great news. I like my 6s. I like my headphone port. I don't do anything CPU intensive on the phone. As long as security updates continue to be issued, I don't see a need to upgrade.
I got lucky and wasn't affected by the battery shutdown issue even though my serial # was eligible for a free battery replacement, so I was able to put off the free battery replacement for a couple years and get a new one free. In another 2 years I'll probably swap it again for 25 bucks :D
Same here. I already had my battery replaced under that replacement plan, and for $25 why not get it replaced at some point this coming year and hopefully get another year out it.
Apple has criteria for whether or not they'll replace your phone's battery at all. I assume that eligibility for the lower battery replacement price will be identical to the eligibility test they're already doing for the battery replacement service.
When you take your phone in, they'll do a test on the battery's current capacity and status, using a custom app. If the battery has reported errors, or if the reported capacity is low enough (below 80% capacity remaining, as I recall), then they'll agree to replace the battery. Takes a couple minutes to run the test, and then about an hour to swap the battery.
(Caveat: I was last through this process on my old iPhone 5, about six months ago. I assume that the procedure and policies are basically the same for newer iPhones, and haven't changed substantively since then. My battery's remaining capacity was below 40%, and was reporting errors, when I had it replaced.)
Health needs to be under 80%. Sadly my iPhone 7 device is at 87% and nevertheless suffering from frequent 5-10s UI freezes when doing anything as complicated as opening an app, responding to a notification, or switching IMEs.
As reported by so many others, this happened immediately after the iOS 11 update. And by immediately I mean within seconds of booting right after installing the update. I stupidly waited for 11.1 hoping it would address the issue rather than revert while it was still possible.
Apple will not replace my battery even under this new program, as it’s still considered healthy by their standard. However an iPhone 7 with 87% battery health is unable to run iOS 11 without frequent UI freezes or sudden power loss, as I’ve found out, due most likely to the fact that I’m running iOS 11 on hardware designed for iOS 10. I’d be okay with that if there was some way to revert, but there is not.
I understand the promotional cost of swapping it is valid until December 2018 as per the article (though I am not a native speaker of english so perhaps I got it wrong).
You are correct in how you understood the article. But I get the impression from the parent poster that he will use a "DIY" solution which costs $25 to get the same result.
If this is an issue that affects every iPhone say past 2 years (although I think I've heard reports of the issue affecting much newer iPhones), then wouldn't a much better solution (for the future) be to make iPhones with user-replaceable batteries? Why do people have to come in to the Apple Store to replace their batteries? Is Apple just counting on the fact that not too many will take them up on it?
> Why do people have to come in to the Apple Store to replace their batteries?
You don't. Thousands of people replace their own iPhone batteries every week. Even I've done it, and I'm not especially dexterous.
Just go to Amazon or Google and search for a $20 replacement kit. Or, if you're not a DIY person, where I live there are places on every other streetcorner that will replace your battery for you.
> Why do people have to come in to the Apple Store to replace their batteries?
That’s how Apple tends to handle almost all warranty issues. Either that or you can mail it in.
iPhones are not exactly designed to be easily opened and messed with by normal people. It’s part of how they get them so thin (insert various other theories that may or may not apply here).
I don't think it's a completely manufactured scandal, although most of the reporting was deceptive (as is, I'm starting to suspect, most reporting, full stop).
I think the non-manufactured part of the scandal is having your phone throttle itself w/o telling you it's doing that is pretty annoying.
You're left wondering, is my phone running slower or is my mind playing tricks on me?
> (as is, I'm starting to suspect, most reporting, full stop).
Don't hate on all journalism (or anything, really) just because of some bad apples. Even if it were true (which it isn't), it takes away all motivation for people in that industry to do the right thing. Why bother spending time on well-researched reporting, if all you get back is "fake news" or "all journalists are corrupt and produce clickbait"-hate on Twitter?
More specifically, here's a Q&A, and a previous article, discounting Apple conspiracy theories by The New York Times:
> Don't hate on all journalism (or anything, really) just because of some bad apples
Unfortunately, since these days anyone with a smartphone can call themselves a "journalist," it's become like the lawyer situation — the 90% bad ones give the 10% good ones a bad name.
I've also seen news reporting be frustratingly inaccurate on plenty of occasions, but I guess the right approach is to apply some amount of skepticism and think about the limitations of news reporting and the signs that the reporting is biased or editorialized.
In this case, I saw lots of headlines like "Apple admits it deliberately slowed down old phones". To me, the word "admits" is a big red flag. It's a loaded term that you can apply to pretty much any public statement, and it suggests (but doesn't directly imply) that Apple is admitting to wrongdoing. Phrasing like that signals to me that the reporting is untrustworthy.
I’m curious whether anyone who was organically affected by this power management feature actually could notice the peak CPU throttling, and especially if the throttling would be anywhere near as noticeable as the gradual increase in random shutdowns. Of course it will show up in synthetic benchmarks, but I haven’t heard any analysis of whether people’s perception that their old phones are getting slow had anything to do with this power management code.
Yes I was noticing it. I was really noticeable compared to my wife’s iPhone that’s newer but of the same model. The time it takes for search to return was the biggest thing that was bugging me.
A $50 battery replacement for 2.5 years of service is totally reasonable.
It may depend on various factors, but I know someone with an iPhone 6+ that is ridiculously slow. At times it can’t keep up with typing terribly well. Or you’ll go to open a simple app and it will take a couple of seconds.
And iPhone 6 that one of their relatives purchased on the same exact day does not exhibit this behavior. At least not to a noticeable degree.
The phone is three years old and has had a hard life. It gets discharged down to 10% pretty often.
As soon as the articles about this started to come out it fit perfectly. We’ll find out when they try and replace the battery, but I suspect this is the issue.
However this is also probably one of the worst cases. I mean if my phone was throttled 10 or 15% I’m not sure I would really notice. If things get bad and it starts being 40%+ I can see how it would be noticeable.
That version came out almost a year ago, but I’ve only heard the complaint about performance recently.
However the battery would’ve been deteriorating that time, and it’s starting to get quite cold here which would only make things worse. I think I remember hearing that it would randomly shut off before that so I’m totally willing to believe the battery already had small problems.
No, my mind is not playing tricks on me. My 6 slowed down to a barely usable pace after an iOS upgrade. This happened suddently, and not gradually, right at the time Apple was releasing new devices.
It is normal to be suspicious. My battery did not wear out overnight.
the theory is that your battery was already worn out, putting your device at at greater risk for sudden shutdowns.
when you updated your software, it started throttling.
per that theory, a new battery should put you right again. (or wait for a future software update, which will tell you for sure if it was throttling.)
i think there is a little more going on, though, because my old ipad mini is slow a.f. w/ the new software update, and it shouldn't be affected by this throttling. my guess is it's simply lazy software engineering: apple doesn't seem to try to target good performance on old devices.
It is knowing that sometimes reinstalling the OS from scratch can make a big difference on iOS devices. Even John Gruber posted about it today.
I’m not sure what it is but there can be some sort of “gremlin“ on a few old installs. It’s possible that’s your issue if the problem is especially severe.
I have bought a device of a certain performance, fully expecting that the battery will degrade and hold a smaller and smaller charge, but NOT expecting the performance of the device to suffer. I was given absolutely no warning that, come a certain age or use-pattern, the performance of the device will degrade. Apple went behind my back and installed software that prevented device lockup, and gave me no info about it.
What if I was entitled to a warranty replacement of the battery, but the software hid that from me by devaluing my purchase? This is not 'great', it's sleazy. Apple is essentially getting away with installing lower performance batteries and/or reducing it's warranty costs compared to competitors. The behavior itself is good from an engineering point of view, the communication was deceptive and fraudulent; the feature should be made optional, enabled at the user's discretion to extend the life of terminals that are outside of warranty and start to lock up, or the customer should be thoroughly informed at the time of purchase that the performance of the terminal will significantly degrade.
- They make no promise of the target lifespan of their devices. It appears that their internal culture believes that devices that last only 1 year is acceptable. They do not say if they want to deviate from this.
- No transparency on the expected battery degradation and performance impact over time.
batteries seem to be tricky for everyone (remember the exploding samsung notes?). visibility into the battery status and official replacements after 1 year for $30 seems pretty darn good to me.
more generally the useful lifespan of iphones is definitely more than a year. i was recentlu able to sell still-perfectly-functioning iphonr 7 for almost half it's cost new. my 3-year-old ipad mini only started feeling slow a couple months ago. this seems better than what my friends with android experience, anecodotally.
> I think the non-manufactured part of the scandal is having your phone throttle itself w/o telling you it's doing that is pretty annoying.
If you have a laptop then I have bad news; your CPU throttles itself. Especially if you play games.
It gets too hot and slows itself down to prevent damage. There’s not even a direct way to detect this. Which I do admit is annoying.
Apple deserves this PR egg on their face. But they aren’t doing anything super wrong. Additional battery life info will go a long ways towards doing things right.
fair point, tho there are a few salient differences:
the laptop always does this; it's not something where it magically (and mysteriously) gets slower as it ages. it's also obvious when this is happening, even if not directly indicated: the fan will be cranking and the laptop will be really hot to the touch.
and, there's also somehow more of a feeling that a phone is a controlled system that will "just work," whereas computers/laptops are always screwing up in one way or another...
> it's not something where it magically (and mysteriously) gets slower as it ages
In some ways that does happen. As computers get more lint in them that often start heading thermal barrier’s and automatically throttling themselves without telling the user.
As for whether the fan makes it obvious I guess that depends on how loud the fan is. Or this could happen to a desktop that you just have placed out of the way enough that you can’t hear it well.
How is it "completely manufactured"? Apple programmed (and hid) the slowdown because it knows the batteries it is shipping with its phones won't last more than a year. Linus compared it to a car performing worse after 1 year of usage..
> because it knows the batteries it is shipping with its phones won't last more than a year.
There is no evidence for this. Plenty of people use iPhones for two or three years and don’t have an issue, and didn’t before any of the iOS changes that “hid” them.
Some people are just really hard on phone batteries. I have a few relatives that way. I’m not sure I’ve ever had an issue using the phone for 2+ years but I don’t tend to drain it down near the bottom much.
> Linus compared it to a car performing worse after 1 year of usage
I hate to break it to him, but a one-year-old car will perform worse than a brand new car. A car is a hugely more robust piece of machinery than a telephone, so the degradation is less noticeable, but it's there. Why do you think the car depreciates the second you drive it off the lot?
> Why do you think the car depreciates the second you drive it off the lot?
Because of the dealership and "new car" markup. There's next to no difference between the car that left the parking lot and a "new" one. If you don't care about this silly game, you can save a lot by buying an ex-display model with a few hundred/thousand km done.
I bought a "used" one-year-old Cadillac ATS with 6,000 miles on it. It had AWD, the V6 engine, and every option available except the rear-seat BluRay entertainment system. It was priced at 60% of new.
It was a great deal and I challenge anyone to tell the car wasn't brand new without checking the odometer.
It's not less noticeable. It's unnoticeable to anyone who isn't a professional mechanic.
How many people complain that their new car is slowing down significantly after less than a year, or becomes inexplicably unusable around the time the year+1 model appears?
This is very much not the case with the iPhone slowdown, where a lot of people were noticing issues, on a product which already has a pitiful and barely practical battery life.
It depends on lots of factors; but the degradation can be a lot more than that if you really abuse your battery. And unfortunately most devices don't make it easy to avoid being hard on your battery - you just kind of need to know what not to do, and play a guessing game. Apple specifically isn't one to burden the user with unnecessary mental load - so battery-health management is unsurprisingly something I've never seen on any apple device (but it's pretty rare anyhow).
I am no Apple fan, but part of what they sell you is an experience where details like that are hidden from you. Before everybody got a Mac, didn't techies complain about Apple dumbing down computers?
Do you have any evidence that this much battery degradation would happen after just one year? I highly doubt that, unless the battery was very heavily used or was exposed to extreme temperatures.
The car analogy is not great. First off, new cars cost way more than phones, and are built out of very different types of components. Secondly, cars absolutely need maintenance, and generally more than $29 a year.
Just my case, but Apple replaced my 6s battery because of random shutdowns under the replacement program on Jan 17th.
Around the release of iOs 11 (not sure exactly when because it was gradual and I was also on the iOs 11 beta) my 6s became incredibly slow, almost unbearable, until last month I decided to upgrade to an X because of how slow it was. Was planning a year more but I just couldn't see myself using it 1 year more.
Now I see via CPU Dasher and Geekbench that my 6s with a battery less than a year old (95,7% original capacity, 406 cycles) is running at 1400-900Mhz, (almost always between 1200-1000Mhz) instead of 1800Mhz.
Tens of millions of old iPhone users were left in the dark why all of a sudden the phone was slowing down to the point where it was becoming unusable. Millions of people probably spent hundreds of dollars otherwise they wouldn't need to spend if they know this was something they can fix with a new battery.
I personally have been using iPhone 6 for 3 years until this CPU-Battery disaster struck. So I ended up buying an Android phone. I love my Android phone now, but it's still money I wouldn't have had to spend.
This is a huge scandal. I like the response by Apple, but it's too late and millions of people already spent money they could've avoided spending. Good bye iPhone. I won't be coming back.
If Apple hadn’t made this change those phones would have randomly turned off instead. Those people probably would’ve gone and bought either a new were iPhone or switch to android like you did.
On the whole I don’t think this would have caused anyone to spend money they wouldn’t have otherwise. Perhaps they would have stayed with their phone longer.
It’s hard to tell, and this is certainly worse than if they had just told people about the battery in the first place (although I imagine THAT would’ve become a scandal two).
> Why is apple the only company with this problem?
It’s the only one people care about enough. Apple gets a major "scandal" almost each year about something that affects every single smartphone company on the planet. Think of the antenna-gate or the bending issues. Lots of non-Apple phones have shown these issues, and the random shutdowns are no exception [1].
I’ve never been to WWDC. I watched the most recent iPhone announcement and I don’t specifically remember any negative commentary against Android. Hence my comment and my question.
You completely missed his point. If Apple had made the issue clear, he could have just paid for a battery replacement instead of a completely new phone. And they clearly knew the battery was the problem.
Apple certainly should have communicated the real issue, I have no problem with that idea.
The idea I’m arguing against is that Apple either did nothing or purposefully made it worse. They tried to fix one bad problem (random shutdowns) and it caused a different, although less severe, problem.
Apples move to retard performance to keep the phone from suddenly dying was a GOOD move. It wasn’t a scam as some others have claimed.
But obviously they should have communicated to the user that they knew there was a battery issue.
It is a scam if they're not making it clear to the users why their phone is suddenly being slowed down. The fact is, even if battery issues are a perfectly fine reason to be doing this, by not making that clear to users and instead leaving them in the dark with a now extremely slow phone (Just in time for their new releases!) they are scamming their users.
If you took your car into a dealership, and instead of telling you that you had a bad battery (That they've known was already going bad in similar cars) they told you that they don't know what's wrong with it, but that they have lots of other cars you can buy, would you consider that a scam? I certainly would.
"If Apple hadn’t made this change those phones would have randomly turned off instead"
If Apple hadn't redlined the CPU to hit benchmarks the battery wouldn't have been in such a poor state to need to be shut down/throttled so early in its lifecycle.
They are 100% to blame this situation and have taken the least consumer focused choice up until this point.
It's more than reasonable to expect a manufacturer to not stress their (recently released) hardware to the point of it being damaged without significant throttling or flat out shutting it down.
But if it is that reasonable than surely there is a long list of electronic devices that do such a thing...
I agree, I simply don’t believe that the iPhone is not designed to be able to run at full speed a reasonable fraction of the time.
The implication that I keep getting from people seems to be that Apple is running their phones at 140% and when the battery can’t keep up they then slow it down to make up for the CPU being underprovisioned on battery.
I think it’s far more likely that Apple is running the phone at 100% of what it was designed for. When the battery ages they were running into problems with the phones having to shut themselves down (perhaps the newer chips were more sensitive to power fluctuations?) so they’ve started throttling to under 100%.
In a desktop analogy: I don’t think this is the equivalent of some company selling overclocked CPUs and lying about how fast they were. I think this is closer to a case of the computers just ended a clogged with lots of dust and had to throttle to prevent serious damage after a few years.
Obviously they should’ve told the user but I don’t think they set out from a malicious standpoint.
In that case, why don't Android devices face sudden shutdowns as frequent as iOS devices (yes, you can point to isolated cases, but it is nowhere as prevalent as Apple devices pre-throttling)?
Note that this problem only occurred on devices where Apple fully designed the chips (iPhone 6 and later). "Off the shelf" chips, and those used for Android, simply have a lot more of a voltage window.
Yes, from typing to opening apps, I would say anywhere from 500ms to 5s latencies were added to regular things I do. Opening games and such, forget it, I gave up playing games on it.
I have a 6S and the difference is night and day. Random hangs everywhere, even just typing. My original iPod Touch with iOS 3 runs smoother than this (and has its original battery in it).
Typing a letter, seeing the keyboard respond to show that letter was recognized... Then putting the phone down, making a sandwich, coming back, and finally seeing it actually make the key click noise and enter the letter in the input field.(That is not an exaggeration. That happened.) A day after that it turned into a brick and I had to give it that DFU middle finger to get my iPhone 6 back into a workable state. That was all because of the iOS 11 upgrade.(I skipped past 10.2.) While the full reformat of the phone has more of less resolved the issues it still experiences slow downs while rapidly draining the battery due to iOS 11 idiocy.
>>Tens of millions of old iPhone users were left in the dark why all of a sudden the phone was slowing down to the point where it was becoming unusable.
Enough with the hyperbole already. Yes, a few (rather outspoken) users had this issue. For everyone else, slowdowns were noticeable, but they barely made the phones "unusable".
That's why this is a manufactured scandal. Yes, Apple could have (and should have) been more transparent. But their decision to throttle the CPU was based on sound engineering principles, rather than a nefarious attempt to get people to upgrade.
I uploaded you because I think the down votes are over done, but how much your phone slow down does seem to depend on how the phone was used. Some I’m guessing it was barely noticeable but some it was a real problem for. I’ve seen them.
That's the second time I've seen that timeframe mentioned in this thread. What was your experience? I don't like upgrading so I tend to keep my Android phones for years and just keep the OS updated. I was getting a good day from my S4 after years of ownership.
I bought a new Nexus 5 about ~6 months after reveal to supersede my aging iphone 4 that was 4 years old at that point.
At the beginning I was super excited about the very good performance, just after less than 6 months the performance started to become sluggish, battery life was noticeably worse and while with my iphone 4 I had probably 4 reboots or freezes in 4 years, in 6 months with the nexus 5 I had many more such problems.
The worst was a loop boot after 1 year and something that killed my battery from 80% to 0 very quickly and, very luckily, after it was dead it didn't continue loop booting.
It happened to me another one or two times if I recall correctly.
The phone was 100% stock, I never flashed anything at all, I just performed the android updates.
Arrived at the point of having a quite strong desire to throw it against the wall pretty much every day, I sold it to my friend's father when it was 1 year and 8 months old.
I begged my friend to thoroughly test it before getting it and I gave him a really good price and he was very happy with the performance (I still can't fathom how in the world it is possible...).
After 8 - 10 months his father could not use it anymore because it won't charge.
After that awful experience I would rather get a kick in my genitalia than an android phone.
So you had a bad device. I am using a one plus device for last 2 years with none of your issues. I have friends relatives using even older devices. Not all devices are same.
My friend Nexus 5 had the same shitty performance in the same timeframe and then I realised that he never used an iphone and for him that sluggish performance was normal and he never noticed that he had a problem.
Pretty much every other Nexus 5 that I have seen was the same and my friend Nexus 6n or whatever is called was even slower when it was newer.
Props to Apple for doing the right thing. Sad that it took a manufactured scandal for iOS to provide elementary transparency into the behavior of known-to-degrade battery component.
> Early in 2018, we will issue an iOS software update with new features that give users more visibility into the health of their iPhone’s battery, so they can see for themselves if its condition is affecting performance.
Framing this in terms of “hate” is really dismissive and juvenile. Your comment is in part a comment on the tone of internet discourse- consider that you are not helping.
I could not care less about which company did this, it could have just as easily been Samsung, LG, <put your favorite brand here>
BUT, what I do very much care about is that the company who did this does not get away with it without losing some feathers, because they did intentionally hide something from the user that did affect them quite noticeably and if they would not have been called out could have had even more serious effects in the long run.
Imagine the following scenario. The battery of your phone is happily degrading and the manufacturer of your phone puts in some serious effort to develop a strategy so you as the user don't notice it. You keep using your phone thinking everything is fine, all the while your battery keeps degrading faster and faster. Then some day you actually need the power (in terms of processing power and in terms of stored energy) because, let's say you are taking a longer high quality video of a wedding. But since your phone is now running on full throttle your battery keeps discharging uncharacteristically fast because it is already in a bad state, or the software can't keep up with the data compression and has to start dropping frames and the video of the event you wanted to keep in good memory now looks awful.
Sure, this is only a very benign scenario but it still illustrates that the manufacturer should not try to hide such important information from the user. And as I have mentioned in another thread, no one can tell me that not a single Apple engineer during this whole process has stepped up and said "Hey maybe it's also a good idea to tell the user that we are throttling the whole system so it may live a few months longer"
I still think Apple should sue some publications for defamation for the manifestly bad reporting about this story [1]. Here's John Siracusa about it [2].
This would be a bad PR move. A giant insanely-rich company suing news publications?
Apple has dealt with overblown controversies before (Antennagate, etc.) and the best way to deal with them is to do what they're doing: communicate better, improve their software, make repairs or returns more affordable.
Yes, if they want to be petty about bad publicity, there's other effective strategies like denying access to the publication as they did to Gizmodo back in 2010.
I don't think it's an either/or. They should do what they announced today and sue for defamation. When they announce the suit they could state that they intend to donate any awarded damages/settlement to charity to counter the "Big Company sues blogger" stories. But I think the reputation damage is very real and it would give Apple the opportunity to testify under oath (if it went to trial).
Even if they took publications to court, the public opinion would not change for the better because people stop paying attention to any story within two weeks of when it's revealed. The damage has already been done. The only potential reasonable argument to do something like this is for Apple to scare off other publications from publishing damaging headlines in the future. But the benefit of this strategy would be little when balanced by the negative PR hit it would take by every other news publication writing articles and OpEds on Rich Big Corp vs small, struggling, important-for-democracy news organizations. There's no faster way to torpedo your public approval than to go after news publications.
I think you’re both overstating how widely known this controversy is and understating how bad suing a tech blogger would look (see: Streisand Effect). I’m a techie and have barely heard about this. People who went and bought new phones will be pissed, but the majority of users won’t care.
This response owns the responsibility of countering misconceptions. The huge majority of Apple users won’t remember this in a month.
> opened the segment by condescendingly dismissing any concerns about the behaviour.
Really? I thought that was perfectly fair. Apple made it so people’s phones don’t randomly shut off all the time if the battery is old and people are complaining about it because it fits into a different false narrative.
I honestly do think this whole thing is very overblown. I’m glad they’re fixing iOS to inform users it’s going on (that was certainly an issue) and dropping the price of battery replacements is a great move.
But I don’t think this is the giant scandal that the tech press is trying to make it. I thought Casey’s assessment was quite fair.
Apple hid the cause (an ageing battery), and purposely slowed down peoples phones without warning.
If your phone randomly shuts downs, or it last less time between charges, you know it must be a battery issue. You go to Apple or whatever, and fix it paying no more than 79$ (maybe even free if it still has warranty!)
If you hide it and degrade performance, people don't know its a battery issue, leaving them to suffer a slow phone, or spending 700+$ on a new phone.
No matter the good intentions, and the "good solution" they implemented, they fucked up.
I'm sure ATP knows what is and isn't popular on their show. All three hosts don't need to be in alignment on an issue; having three parrots reciting the party line would be horrible. The fact that Casey is the less technical, touchy feely (hell he's on a podcast named analog for chrissake) is part of ATP. As is making fun of his white cars.
Thats the sort of thing that happens when you are spoiled by buying every iPhone, never experiencing an ageing phone or even an iOs update on an older phone.
Unfortunately, this is just how Apple is treated by much of the industry. People love to hate Apple, so there will always be: "Fingerprint Scanner: how Apple is stealing your identity and eroding your privacy", "Thin phones: how your phone will break in half", "WiFi On/Off: Apple & NSA tracking you even when you think your WiFi is off" articles, etc. This battery thing is just the latest Apple FUD and panic with a perfectly reasonable explanation.
I work with a guy that doesn't use Apple products at all, yet _always_ forwards this stuff to me. I don't even argue about it or defend Apple—it isn't worth my time and it isn't worth Apple's time either.
Maybe they have a defamation case, but really who cares?
I don't think anybody really cares that much, except for I guess the biggest of Apple fanboys. There are fanboys for everything: Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. There's also the inverse, haters for everything. It is interesting, however, how MUCH hate Apple gets proportionally to other companies. Especially around this story, there was a lot of misinformation around what was really going on. There just seem to be a lot more people willing to bash Apple for everything, moreso than there are people doing the same to other companies. And especially more than there are Apple fanboys.
I do use Apple products, but every company and product should be scrutinized equally. Not that it matters if Apple gets hate, they're still a billion dollar company, but I do find it interesting on why they get that hate at times when it's not really worth it.
I dislike animosity based on falsehoods because it diminishes society as a whole. Look at the loss of trust in the media as a consequence of last year's election as a giant red flag in that regard.
John sort of skated by the point that these phones were designed to have this problem. Spontaneous shutdowns with aging batteries are not a standard feature of all smartphones. Apple made a trade-off in the phone design that caused this hardware problem and then used software to try to workaround it but didn’t tell people that this would slow down their phones. My wife has an iphone 6 with this problem and was considering a new iphone to fix her performance problem. Whether apple meant to or not, their lack of full disclosure caused people to needlessly replace their phones. To say apple did nothing wrong is fanboyism.
Was the reporting bad? Sure. Was apple in the right? Definitely not.
Apple is right that this is a fundamental battery issue. Other phones must have SOME way of dealing with it.
Does anyone know how Samsung phones (for example) deal with low battery voltage issues? Do they simply adjust the battery meter so that it reports zero percent by the time you might start having these issues? Does it slow the phone down The way Apple did? Does it issue some sort of warning that your battery is getting bad?
Or does it just shut down if you overtax things?
It must be possible to figure out how other vendors solved this issue.
If by "fundamental battery issue" you mean that all phones have this issue or some comparably severe tradeoff, then no, this is not a fundamental issue. Batteries don't all degrade at the same rate, and even given a specific battery tech, the way it's implemented in the device can have a dramatic impact on the longevity. Temperature, rate of charging, the degree (i.e. voltage) up to which it is charged, the degree (i.e. voltage) at which it is considered empty are all factors that are primarily in the device manufacturers hands.
Even a few percent overprovisioning can extend life expectency by a lot; and aggressive temperature-related charging (and discharging) throttling can trade peak (benchmark) performance and predictable charging speeds for longevity. I bet apple could make a phone with at least double the battery longevity with 1% price, mass, and size increases, and perf and battery life decreases -- if they wanted to. Of course, those factors are easily quantifiable, and battery longevity less so...
So sure: battery degradation is a fundamental issue in the sense that all batteries degrade - but how they do and what tradeoffs the device makes to minimize that are largely up to the manufacturer, and unfortunately also poorly documented, poorly benchmarkable, and I'm not sure how clearly a warranty would apply - so yeah, the it's a factor that manufacturers are bound to skimp on.
(I wouldn't particularly expect apple to be any worse than the rest of the pack, though).
There are ways to try and mitigate it, but when I was really getting at is that if you use ANY device with the lithium ion battery long enough something like this will end up happening.
Some other phone may be designed so it takes an extra year and a half or two, but it will still happen one day.
Technically, I suspect they could easily make em last 10 years without too many drawbacks. And if you're willing to be a bit more compromising, much more even than that. But why engineer that kind of life expectancy into a device that's going to be hopelessly outdated before then?
But a little more honesty in expected degradation would be nice, including the warranty that if degradation exceeds some minimal specification, the phone will be fixed at the manufacturer's cost, and not just for a year. 10 years may be unnecessarily long, but 1 year is definitely too short; and the level of acceptable degradation is too vague.
Back when I was still an Android user, I had a Nexus 4. After a year of use, it also started shutting down at random points if battery was below 20%. Before that I had HTC Desire (the first one), which did the same, at reaching 10% of battery, after about a year of use.
Maybe manufacturers should focus on usability instead of bling and flesh-cutting thinness, the latter of which would probably never make it as a feature request if it weren't for the incentivized yearly upgrade cycle.
Well, yeah. But to be honest, I'd rather the performance decline than knowing I have 20% of battery and am waiting for a critical call and then the battery dies.
Cheaper Samsung phones shut off, thought Samsung has SO TERRIBLE BATTERIES it's not even shameful, they should be sued! Every battery puffs up after 6-12 months, and the warranty only covers first 6 months of usage. I know many people to whom it happened, to some multiple times, and they didn't drop the phones. This was with cheap phones obviously, but still, very bad behavior from phone manufacturers on all sides... :/
Why would they, if other people throw mud on their brand, respond by throwing more mud?
The proper response is to clean their brand. That’s what they do now. I think it is better late than never, but it also is somewhat (depending on how picky they will be on replacing those batteries, and on whether they will pay back people who replaced their battery recently because of this problem) classy.
I also think this is intended to, and will, stop the class action suits being filed before they have even started.
I kind of doubt it. This is been going on for what, a week or two? I’m guessing they’ve been working on this response that entire time, not just in the last 24 to 48 hours.
Apple is in this situation because they've very invested in having the fastest mobile processor on paper. So you get a high performing part when your phone is new, and all the reviews and benchmarks are done with the high performing part, but after a while the battery can't handle it, so they're forced into these shenanigans.
It’s not like android phones are purposefully running with multi year old chips to avoid this issue. The high-end found they are all rush to have the newest chips as well.
I’ll ignore the “on paper“ comment. It was totally unnecessary.
His point was that Apple's latest chips promise something like 2x the performance of the best Qualcomm or Samsung chip.
If that gain is indeed real, or mostly real, then the difference may be explained by the fact that Apple makes some compromises that other chip makers don't - such as increasing the boost performance of the chip more than the battery and the heat management can handle.
As for the "on paper" claim, I think it's justified, because largely we only know the Apple chips are "so much faster" from synthetic benchmarks. But in real world tests it doesn't seem to make much of a difference.
It’s the “on paper“ that I took issue with. From what I’ve seen from developers (which is admittedly limited) the chips Apple has do seem to be incredibly fast. Between that and the benchmarks I have no reason to think Apple chips are artificially optimized to look good on benchmarks and aren’t noticeably better on normal tasks.
> I have no reason to think Apple chips are artificially optimized to look good on benchmarks
I never stated that. My point was that they wanted their processors to benchmark above everyone else's, and this quest for the highest performance numbers in synthetic benchmarks (aka on paper) has lead them to a bad place.
This is a great response imho. It doesn't fully tackle the issues I'm having with the approach Apple is taking, but at least Apple acknowledges its customers in a human way. This is almost un-Apple.
At least now they are finally making it very clear what they were caught doing behind the curtains (from the new support page on battery performance, linked in the press release):
In cases that require more extreme forms of this power management, the user may notice effects such as:
Longer app launch times
Lower frame rates while scrolling
Backlight dimming (which can be overridden in Control Center)
Lower speaker volume by up to -3dB
Gradual frame rate reductions in some apps
During the most extreme cases, the camera flash will be disabled as visible in the camera UI
Apps refreshing in background may require reloading upon launch
Many key areas are not impacted by this power management feature. Some of these include:
Cellular call quality and networking throughput performance
This was a Half-Life 3 kind of issue. They kind of got backed into a corner where they could never really talk about what the truth was. Would it have been better to go out and announce: "we're not working on Half Life 3"? Tough to say.
To be fair that is a pretty decent response. The reality is batteries do degrade over time and they have to manage that. They should have been transparent about what they were doing and I'm not sure giving the user control over it is all that sensible.
Are there any battery experts who can chime in with their opinion on this?
I'm not a battery expert, but it needs to be pointed out that other smartphone manufacturers do not have this problem. It was Apple specific - it's not as if every device with a lithium battery shuts off at 40%. So it still feels like they're doing it to mitigate a fault with the device, and should've been more transparent about that in the first place.
Is there any evidence that, all else being equal, Apple’s batteries degrade faster or degraded iPhones shut off during peak usage more than other smartphones?
To be fair: the OP didn't merely ask, he also gave a subjective opinion on the matter; and it looks like the response was to that, and not related to the battery expertise bit.
But hey; in an online forum things get off topic... kind of like this ;-)!
As posted above, Android phones do show this behavior, too. However, and I'm no battery expert, I think that Apple was running the CPU incredibly close to the red line and draining the batter faster than necessary. They already have the fastest phone CPU by quite a large margin, they could probably run it at a lower frequency that the batteries can better match, leading to slower degrading.
This whole battery scandal is ridiculous. It's literally the opposite of planned obsolescence, they're prolonging the usable life of these phones by underclocking them enough to stay functional for a full day, when otherwise they'd be shutting off randomly. I wish I could underclock even with a fresh battery in order to have solid 2-day battery life.
Under the old software, where the phone would randomly turn off on you, what do you think they would’ve done? Probably the same thing. Buy a new phone.
I think the argument is that one would notice that the battery drains very quickly, and starts shutting off at a certain percent. Then they could know the battery is a problem, and pay $79 to get that replaced, instead of upgrading.
So I question the question is would users be happier having their phone slow down or having the battery appear to drain extremely fast?
I guess my answer to that would depend on how bad the average “slowdown“ is. I think you’re right if the issue is serious, but if most people only take a 10% hit when your phone is old then the slowdown may be a better option.
I think this Siri there is that if the battery is only capable of supporting full voltage when it’s charged to 80% or more, then you consider that top 20% the full range of the battery and when the battery gets to 80% actual charge you tell the user it’s at zero.
I’ll admit that I’m not sure how possible that is. If this technique would let you pretend that the battery only had half its capacity left without slowing down the phone then that maybe one thing. If even a slight battery degradation meant you have to pretend the phone only had 1/20th of its original battery left then obviously that’s pointless.
The random shutdowns sound like a technical problem with the phone. The correct solution is for Apple to fix it. It doesn't happen on any other flagship phone. So you are being disingenuous in listing that as a choice. The real choice is between slowing down the whole phone or the battery lasting a day instead of a day and a half. Or another choice is for Apple to include bigger batteries so that the degraded battery still provides a day and a half of usage.
Apple knows what typical usage patterns will do to the battery. If most customers hit an issue that degrades their phone performance before 1 year, then Apple made that conscious decision when doing system design (multiple phones have this issue). It’s fully within their power to spec a battery that lasts a bit longer.
They always release a new OS when a new phone comes out, which puts more strain on the old phones, causing them to perform worse because they have old batteries. It's pretty similar to planned obsolescence that has a good technical explanation.
We must be getting completely different experiences then. I have a couple of friends with the same issues as mine, I know I'm not alone. It started immediately after upgrading to iOS 11.
Pulling down search on the home screen: freeze. Typing into search input: freeze. Unlocking from notifications screen: freeze. Freezes every two or three times an app is opened or closed. Screen transitions always stutter a little, Safari hangs, screen becomes unresponsive, sometimes it just starts draining battery and gets hot with no app running at all.
I think my mention of Android triggered some emotions here (many downvotes). My first smartphone was a Dell with 1.5 that ran horribly slow, around 2010. That one was really bad, couldn't even answer calls most of that time due to unresponsive UI, and is still my benchmark for bad experience. This iPhone is getting quite close.
> Having a too small battery is the exact definition of planned obsolescence!
That’s not true. Having a too-small battery on purpose is planned obsolescence. Having a small battery (what does "too small" means? Compared to what?) has nothing to do with that. That’s the purpose of "planned" in "planned obsolescence".
If a battery has not enough capacity to carry the phone trough a whole day after 1-2 years of use then it was too small to begin with.
I have the feeling that iPhone batteries are just large enough that the phones survives a day of medium use if the phone is brand new. After 1 or 2 years the battery is so bad that it barely holds enough charge for a few hours of usage.
> I have the feeling that iPhone batteries are just large enough that the phones survives a day of medium use if the phone is brand new. After 1 or 2 years the battery is so bad that it barely holds enough charge for a few hours of usage.
That’s just a feeling. I’ve had my iPhone for 3 years now and the battery is completely fine.
Not. Even. I felt forced to upgrade my 6 because it was unbearably slow. The battery? Excellent. In fact, at the time of trade-in, it was lasting longer than my iPhone X does brand new. More proof - the 6 was actually almost brand new itself; 3 months prior I smashed the screen and Apple replaced the entire unit (yes, generous on their part) instead of a screen swap (the body was bent enough to not allow a screen replacement). New unit, new battery, and thus not just anecdotal evidence.
Perhaps there is _some_ good intention on Apple's part. But I think it hides a just-as-motivating factor as forcing upgrade purchases. My opinion is their position is disingenuous at best. I would rather see them move toward the customer having the control to choose the experience or not instead of - as they explained - only adding transparency into the decisions into which Apple is forcing you.
Plainly, my experience was: I had perfectly healthy hardware, yet my 2-gen old device was almost too slow to be useable. And now here I sit with a $1200 unnecessary replacement.
> Early in 2018, we will issue an iOS software update with new features that give users more visibility into the health of their iPhone’s battery, so they can see for themselves if its condition is affecting performance.
Thank you! I've always thought phones should provide info about battery health.
> To address our customers’ concerns, to recognize their loyalty and to regain the trust of anyone who may have doubted Apple’s intentions, we’ve decided to take the following steps:
> 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, starting in late January and available worldwide through December 2018. Details will be provided soon on apple.com.
> Early in 2018, we will issue an iOS software update with new features that give users more visibility into the health of their iPhone’s battery, so they can see for themselves if its condition is affecting performance.
> As always, our team is working on ways to make the user experience even better, including improving how we manage performance and avoid unexpected shutdowns as batteries age.
I cannot think of a better move from Apple than these three options. Bring awareness to the user by displaying battery performance and if updating the battery would resolve their power issues, you have a (now even cheaper) method of fixing it. As I understand it, the only way to tell if one needs to update their battery is by downloading some third party app (that costs money) and then praying that it helps in some way.
Also wanted to point out that by going deeper into the issue with this article shows (at least to me) some sense of transparency and should be really encouraged. While I disagree that they needed a scandal to bring clarity and it should've been brought up a while back, it's still great they did it nonetheless. This has been a conspiracy for some time, glad to see Apple has shed some light on it.
My 6S was affected by the faulty batch of batteries, and it was a miserable experience to have my phone shut down unexpectedly at 40% if I was using it outside in ~60F or colder weather.
Apple replaced the battery once they admitted to the faulty batch, and my phone has been great since, but the way they handle battery issues is extremely frustrating. Going to an Apple Store and having them to their standard test, being told everything is fine and there's nothing they can do is not what I expect from them.
The elephant in the room is, of course, Apple's obsession with thinness which makes it near impossible these days to get a usable laptop because PC makers totally copied Apple alas. It also gave us nonreplaceable batteries and any successful lawsuit that comes out of it is totally justified.
No one asked for this. Lighter, somewhat, yes but thin to the point where batteries are barely functional? Samsung's colossal Note failure is just another symptom of this. I had a Panasonic CF-Y5, a 14" 1.5kg laptop ten years ago and somehow it managed to be that light without this thinness craziness.
Is it also why we have these awful keyboards on the new mbp ?
I feel them absolutely awful to type on (I have never complained about a keyboard before but I just can't stand this one), although it is subjective, some people are fine with it.
What is unquestionably bad though is that you need to replace the whole keyboard if one key has an issue (and apparently it happens a lot). I know several people for which Apple had to reset the whole laptop after a keyboard issue, but I can't make sense of it.
> I feel them absolutely awful to type on (I have never complained about a keyboard before but I just can't stand this one), although it is subjective, some people are fine with it.
I don't know why some people hate these keyboards. I don't really have a strong opinion about them. They feel slightly different and noisier but I get identical typing speed results compared to the previous one.
I totally agree with you. I'd rather have a slightly bigger laptop with the ability to replace the battery easily.
I slightly disagree with this though:
> but thin to the point where batteries are barely functional?
My previous MBP (mid-2014) was still very usable after 3 years of intensive use. Overall, I can't say I suffered from not being able to change the battery easily. (I passed the problem to the next owner...).
>makes it near impossible these days to get a usable laptop because PC makers totally copied Apple alas.
I'd say that is only the Ultrabook market which goes for super thin. There are plenty of other laptops out there that are thick enough to even have a CD drive. On top of that there are the gaming laptops which are even thicker.
You mean the obsession customers have with buying thin products, which Apple is simply satisfying, and extremely well, judging from sales.
> No one asked for this.
Yes actually, I asked for this, like many other customers who bought much thinner Apple products instead of thicker, bulkier, heavier competing products.
Not all laptops are thus compromised. My HP Elite X2 G1 1012 matches the Surface physical attributes and yet has a user-replaceable battery (and screen, and m.2 SSD.)
That's a great response PR-wise, but it doesn't answer the question of why these batteries are degrading to a point where unexpected shutdowns are a concern in a single year. The iPhone 7 is only one year old. That just isn't OK.
A uniform answer to that question isn't possible. There are many different environments that batteries operate in and those environments produce wildly different results.
The Nexus 6P recently had a big consumer backlash and refund process bc phones would shut off randomly below 20% charge once they got older. I would guess the same thing is happening here. I would have much rather had reduced performance than a phone unusable under 20%. Luckily I got a free upgrade to the Pixel to fix it.
Yeah, I have owned various Android and iPhones over the years and this was a pretty common issue especially with an older phone in either a hot or cold climate.
My wife’s 6+ was incredibly slow after the iOS upgrade.
My 6+ drained the battery incredibly quickly. I was told that upgrading the iOS would fix that problem [0]; it didn’t. Instead it slowed my phone to the point of being unusable.
If I’d have known replacing the battery would have fixed both of them, I’d have done that. Instead, I stupidly bought two new, very expensive phones. Since we were already locked into the Apple ecosystem (with paid apps and media), we bought iPhones.
This does nothing to compensate or win back the trust of customers like me.
They could offer to buy back any functioning iPhone 6S at an above market rate from anyone who recently purchased a new phone. Its sort of a crazy idea, but close to what people want.
How about free battery replacement? That's not asking much. The solution to underclock to make sure the device doesn't go off is a hack. A cool hack, because it ensures the device stays somewhat useable, but a temporary one. Which also targets devices which don't suffer from the problem.
It's a legitimate question. Frankly, the idea of a phone's performance drastically changing over the course of one(1) version upgrade should aggrivate someone more than this. How can it be acceptable for a single release to "slow a phone to a crawl"?
This response makes sense. They screwed up communicating the issue of battery life to the masses that apparently don't know batteries wear out. They're fixing it, they're biting into their revenue with a mea culpa price cut, and they're making the OS more communicative of this nuance of phone performance.
People know batteries wear out, but the expected behaviour is the phone lasting less hours between charges, or even unexpected shutdowns, but definitely not degraded CPU performance.
That has never happened before, there was no precedent for that, and no way of knowing it was a battery issue. The only solution for most people was buying a new phone.
How about be more open and acknowledge problems sooner?
While Apple always eventually gets to the right response, they can sometimes take too long to do so. In the case of these iPhone batteries, I think Apple's response was relatively timely.
But there have been cases where well known problems took over a year to acknowledge and remedy (like the early 2011 15" Macbook Pro GPU problems).
This story broke less than 2 weeks ago. So 10 business days (minus holidays) to put together a corporate response that affects hundreds of millions of devices seems pretty damn quick.
As soon as iOS 11 came out, there were widespread complaints from iPhone 6 owners. Your timeline is about determining the cause which had to sadly be done independently. Ask yourself why they had to wait for outrage about the cause for this response instead of the symptoms (which should have provoked research into the cause)?
Ok, if you read my post, I did say "In the case of these iPhone batteries, I think Apple's response was relatively timely."
But even then, my comment is only with respect to the response being timely relative to the problem becoming publicly known.
If you take a cynical view that Apple knew what the side effects were a year ago when they released the software update but chose not to disclose it in the release notes, then the response was not timely.
Be transparent in all of these surreptitious actions henceforth. Give more power to users to make their own decisions about browser, battery, OS, etc. But they won't. So I guess the answer to your question is to change the type of people that they are, which is an unrealistic request of course.
I actually would say yes. Come out with a Pro model of the iPhone that lets you pick which OS And Battery you want as well as expandable storage. This would get me to buy one...
There's nothing that Apple can do here; trust is hard earned and easily lost. Apple just lost however much of trust the grandparent had accumulated over the years.
Trustworthiness aside, Apple as a hardware company has made many questionable choices that makes me rethink purchasing their hardware. (headphone jack and the touch bar being the most egregious) I don't think I'll be getting the next macbook if these don't get addressed.
Even with stock Android you can skip setting up a Google account, turn on "Unknown Sources", and direct-download an alternative app store like F-Droid. It probably still feeds them telemetry, but you're not locked in to any of their cloud services.
Google services and apps are constantly phoning back to HQ, the important part is getting that off your device...just like most other apps, facebook included.
LineageOS with microG [1], microG in general, or installing another port of an OS such as Ubuntu Touch or SailfishOS. The Fairphone [2] can run any of these OSes, without unlocking the bootloader and without rooting the phone.
I think they could offer free battery replacement for affected models for the next year, and, more permanently, a 1 hour or less turnaround for battery replacement or a loaner program.
Yup, but Apple innovated the non-user replaceable battery with the iPhone. They set the trend, the rest followed. Before that, in the 90s and 00s we had user replaceable batteries.
On top of that, the iPhone 7, 8, and X make it significantly more difficult and cumbersome to replace the battery. See the iFixit guides. Even with the iPhone 6 you need special screwdrivers and tools.
What does "locked in the Apple ecosystem" imply? Apps that don't have a satisfactory equivalent on Android, integration between Apple devices or general usability/user experience?
That's relatively trivial to switch. If anything it would be the ecosystem of purchased applications that you still intend to use.
Other than that, nothing should really keep you "locked-in" on iOS. Not even iMessage. You can use WhatsApp or FB Messenger with friends or family. It's not a big deal.
I still like iOS better and don't intend on switching but the only "lock in" I feel exists is the years of sunk cost I have in purchased apps I still use.
I would disagree about iMessage though. I have older family members on iOS that would not use another messaging or video chat app. Our chat experience would simply degrade to stock SMS.
I had a very similar experience with my 6+ but instead of buying iPhone I finally jumped ship and bought Essential Phone (Android). (I also changed my Apple Watch 1 to Nokia Steel HR as a result of ecosystem change)
If only I knew that replacing battery would make my 6+ usable again I would remain iPhone user.
This is the first real argument I've heard on this. Everything else has been noise about apple slowing phones to rip people off.
Thank you very much for sharing your experience.
To be fair, they said iOS upgrade may help fix the problem, and I agree that they were probably just saying "update so I can check that off my list of things to recommend."
The battery issue is unrelated to your slowdowns if you were experiencing them constantly. Lost in all the media reports is that the throttling only happens at peak system power demand. My 6s Plus also was constantly slow until last week, when I backed it up, wiped it, and restored. Now it's as fast as ever, on the latest iOS.
We take the underlying computer for granted, but apparently the iPhone can benefit from a clean install to clean out always-running rogue processes.
This is not true according to my experience. See https://imgur.com/a/VH0Bs. Note that in my case the performance restoration came about after I had my battery replaced -- no data wiping or other system cleaning occurred.
> Lost in all the media reports is that the throttling only happens at peak system power demand.
Throttling at least occurs during app loading. Apple admits as much and it was true (subjectively) in my experience. If loading an app qualifies as "peak system power demand" your point is kind of lost because loading apps is something everyone with a mobile device does very frequently.
I can't claim to know what was going on with your phone, of course. But artificial benchmarks that push the system to its limits seem more likely to trigger this behavior than everyday usage, so I wouldn't take those results as evidence. I didn't see the app loading bullet point and agree with you there.
In my own case, everything was slow. Loading apps, loading web pages, whatever. And the difference after a clean install now is huge. Went back and did the same to an old iPad that I stopped using for its sluggishness, and it's usable again.
Complex devices, so there's certainly going to be a complex set of problems, but I think that some of it is due to us taking Apple's message that iOS devices are appliances to heart, whereas the truth is that these portable computers still need mysterious maintenance rituals. It's been impressive, but Apple's still got some work to do to make these things bulletproof.
I'd assume that these processors use the same 'race to sleep' philosophy that Intel CPUs have been using for a while, which would mean that peak power draw would be requested very frequently in short bursts.
The degree of throttling that seems to be occurring does seem to be quite excessive. Excessive enough that I wonder whether they've had unexpected battery degradation in the field, or unexpected degradation of the power delivery circuit, or unexpectedly high load consumption or some kind of fault with the SoC.
Either that or they have just pushed the envelope a little too much knowing that their customers are likely to get fed up and buy new phones... hmmm...
You realize you are locked-in into a proprietary ecosystem. Clearly, that is bad for you and customer-unfriendly. But I wonder why you don't take action, and get alternatives that don't lock you in. Is this an example of the sunken cost fallacy?
With Android you are not necessarily forced into a locked-in ecosystem. I use a Google-free Android phone. I can watch movies and listen to music, talk to people and chat. And I'm free to take my data and move to another device.
So, yes, extracting all of your data Apple is not withholding from you, getting another device, and then selling the Apple devices is what I would start with.
Also, I would keep an open eye for neither Android nor Apple devices. The Librem 5 might become an excellent alternative.
most popular android phones have large development communities[0] behind them. Removing the default [Android] OS that's ridden with spyware, including always-on Google Services, is critical to getting control over your phone.
Flashing something like LineageOS (formerly CyanogenMod) is the best way to get started with a lean android os
How much can I trust those ROM builders, though? If I use anything other than the official LineageOS builds (e.g. if there are none for my device, or only nightly ones) I can't even be sure that the binaries that people upload match the source code they publish, right?
They might even not publish the source, and if they do, what are the chances that anyone has audited it?
you only have to install what you trust. Why go beyond LineageOS? Just stick to that, get Xposed and a good firewall. Have control over what your apps send back to HQ.
> Since we were already locked into the Apple ecosystem (with paid apps and media), we bought iPhones.
So, they are locked-in into the ecosystem partly because of media. This directly implies they can't move their media out, for else they wouldn't be locked-in.
I'm not lying, and received no Upvote, still I'm responding. Actually, I think I'm risking downvotes for responding to a rather angry comment without content for the topic of the link. It's simply that you asked, so I answer.
Yelling at commenters that they have an "upvote agenda" for being educational and informative, by giving useful advice....it seems rather crude. Please be a little more thoughtful and give others the benefit of the doubt. Even if you work for Apple's marketing department..
I actually specified a reason for the agenda, while you meandered about the posters' personal characteristics. Quite different. If you work for Apple, we can all understand the intrinsic bias you would have toward Apple doing something questionable or wrong. In fact, you sidestepped whether or not this is true
- to do a bid for false equivalency. Do you or do you not work for Apple? Feel free to drop the mic and not reply if you cannot by the bounds of your contract.
Make changes over time. When other devices are due to be replaced, make sure they work with multiple vendors or ideally, using open standards. Then when your iPhone is up next for replacement, you won't be locked in. Consider lack of lock-in a real feature worth trading for other nice-to-haves, such as price, convenience or features.
And, cynically, they don't care as much as they should about this lost trust, because:
> Since we were already locked into the Apple ecosystem (with paid apps and media), we bought iPhones.
I feel that iPhone vs Android is the current Holy War [1], and it's just as contentious as Mac vs PC, Windows vs Linux or even vim vs emacs. (PC, Linux and vim, of course!)
My guess is that iOS 11 is much more to blame for slowdown that users are experiencing, myself included. Unfortunately, that is unlikely to be resolved -- even if I replace my battery for $30, my iPhone 6 will still be worse than it was in August.
> This does nothing to compensate or win back the trust of customers like me
You simply behaved exactly the way that Apple predicted you would (preferring to spend money over the inconvenience of migrating your data to Android).
I traded my 6 in early but I put the blame of slowness on the iOS upgrades reasoning that each version added more bloat. I do enjoy my 8s and don't regret the upgrade. I only annoyed at most that Apple didn't fully disclose the issue and perhaps the performance hit they chose was a bit over the top
> Since we were already locked into the Apple ecosystem
How is that a thing? Media - you should be able to move. And how much do the apps that you actually use cost? You could apparently afford 2 new Apple phones... you can't be truly locked in
Being locked into the Apple ecosystem is mainly because:
1) Important historical data you can't move out - like iMessages
2) Apple Music - Your curated playlist is just that without actual songs (Of course you can recreate and start from scratch here)
3) Apps/Games - Specifically where the account is tied to your apple account and you have ample progress be it in app purchases or unlocking features on apps (which can really add up)
4) Your family - My entire family, wife, parents, sisters, neices/nephews and brother in law are all on iPhone and we all share the same Apple family plan for music and purchases. We also share location information so we know where each other is at once - This is done through Apple's find friends app.
#4 is the most important one. Because the habit of many individuals has to be changed in order for me to get out. Which is not impossible but it's just a lot of work (teaching my senior parents android? not worth it imo). And this also comes back to having our group messages in iMessage and my family loves going back to reference something or look at pictures we send each other.
It was common knowledge that lithium batteries chemically degrade over time. It was not common knowledge, even to those with technical backgrounds, that the iPhone compensated by degrading performance. That was only made recently public by user research.
Many consumers have been buying new iPhones after at least 1 year because of this performance degradation. Had Apple been transparent about its performance degradation strategy from the beginning, people would have spent far less money.
This will have a substantial effect on Apple's revenue next year as people buy new batteries instead of new iPhones.
Eek, I wish I hadn't capitulated so quickly when iOS 11 came out and my wife complained and complained about performance issues on her 2-year-old iPhone 6 until we just decided to buy an 8 and be done with it. It's not like she would be willing to move off Apple, and we had the money. I doubt my situation is unique. Oh well.
Lots of people saying that Apple only had two options - make old handsets slower, or have them randomly shutdown.
Might be a reflection of the culture those commenters are from, but it's disingenuous to assert.
Other options existed -- notably to advise the user, as part of the update, via mail-out, etc, that this choice had been made from them, and (optionally) what they could do about it.
b) make the battery percentage accurate so that people will know when the battery is empty
I have used Samsung phones for a long time (since Galaxy S4), and I've never had a phone turn off on me when the battery percentage was anything other than 0%. Are we supposed to believe that the maker of the "world's most advanced smartphone" (their words) cannot figure out how to prevent random shutdowns without slowing down the whole phone?
You know, you shouldn't comment if you haven't even bothered to read the article or don't understand the issue being discussed right? HN really does turn into a low-effort circlejerk any time Apple comes up.
Agreed. The comments here apologising for Apple are so disheartening. Inform the user that the battery has degraded or failing that at least allow the batteries to be user or third-party serviceable.
I know car analogies are overused but … I would be classed as literally insane if I replaced my car because the battery had become degraded. When this happens you get a mechanic to replace the battery. (Or, if the owner is very competent they replace it themselves.) If we do it for cars, why not for phones?
I would absolutely love if this issue got regulated across the board the same way the charging cable connection (everything has to be usb-micro or usb-C) got regulated. Though somehow Apple didn't comply and didn't get penalised.
I'm really infuriated about this. Since mid-2016, my iPhone 6 Plus started to act "weird". It'd shut down sporadically, would reach 40% and then suddenly deplete, and started to get slow. But the problems were not consistent. I went to the Apple Store, and the phone passed all their diagnosis checks, even the battery.
A few months later, after my AppleCare+ expired, the problems intensified. And I spent most of 2017 with a very slow and unreliable phone. I honestly thought it was iOS 10. Had I known it was the battery, I'd have paid to replace it. Or I'd have forced them to upgrade it for me for free when I had AppleCare+.
I upgraded to an iPhone X, thinking the 6 Plus had reached its EOL, but now I think I've been lied to!
Your issue isn't this "scandal" though. This is about preventing sporadic shutdowns by throttling, so if your phone was shutting down it was an undiagnosed bad battery, which is a legit complaint.
The fix, the throttling, is the controversial part, NOT the sporadic shutdowns. It's absurd, because throttling is much better than brownouts, but that's what the lawsuits are about.
Same here i had a iPhone 6s and i had exactly the same problems you described.
1) Drop from 30% to 5% in some minutes. iOS 10.x fixed this issue.
2) Now with iOS 11 the battery does even last a day and the phone was extremely slow.
Sure i had issues in the past after 2 years with my Nexus 5 and Galaxy Nexus but both were kind of mid range price ~400 Euros.
But with a high end phone that cost 800 Euros I would expect better quality and also better costumer support.
This xmas i just got myself a ~350 Euros Android and i'm much more happy. After 2 years if the phone has battery issues or whatever i will not be so furious has i am now.
I've been recently moving away from Apple mainly due to Quality / Price ratio. I have a 2012 iMac which is basically useless except from Browsing on the Web.
Other companies like Google, Amazon etc... ship good quality devices for much cheaper price.
So for me i'm not thinking in buying anything else from Apple.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 393 ms ] threadDidn't they degrade the user experience by slowing down the cpu? I definitely wasn't enjoying my slow iPhone
Personally, I agree with Apple's call on this one.
Hmm, that could work, but I feel like that might go against Apple's ethos. Not malicious, they just seem to like telling the user what's best and surfacing fewer options. I feel like the average user doesn't want to have to make this decision
>Plus, having the phone shutdown would force users to upgrade out of necessity without feeling swindled.
I'd disagree, but may be in the minority. I would hate having to upgrade because my battery life is shot. A large reason I chose iPhone was the battery life
Any time my phone was under ~15% battery, it would randomly crash during demanding tasks. I'd think the battery had died, but turning it back on would work immediately and my battery wouldn't be at 1%/0%.
At that point the battery capacity might as well be 85% of the already degraded value since the phone stops being stable.
If they're having to go to measures this drastic to keep their phones from shutting down, their batteries are underspec'd and their processors are overspec'd.
The iPhone 7 came out a year ago. iPhone 7 users are also being offered the $29 battery replacement.
When you have people running 3rd party apps to determine whether their phones are still running fine, and then going to get battery replacements and finding performance returning, and nothing the OS told them indicated anything was wrong, that's a problem.
For example, they could have altered the calibration of the battery indicator so 0% charge corresponds to the charge level where random restarts/throttling starts to occur.
That seems almost useless. Certainly worse than having a slower phone that has hours of battery life.
Calibrating for a new "0%" effectively lead to a "shorter battery life".
I don't know the intricacies of these options, but I can make a guess. The point which a phone resets isn't accurately predicted. Some user actions may cause larger voltage drops than others. For which action do you calibrate to 0%? What if you only do that action once a day? Is this trade off worth sacrificing 1% of your full capacity? What about 10% or 30%?
Really? Would there be a strong negative reaction if Apple said "we've designed the iPhone 9 to give you all-day battery life for four years"? Would customers be angry that their device was built to last longer and perform better? To my mind, it's a marketable feature.
All battery management is a trade-off between capacity and durability. Manufacturers have an obvious commercial incentive to sacrifice durability - you get a thinner device with longer initial battery life.
Purchasing habits are starting to change in the mobile market. Pricing is moving away from an all-inclusive line rental price to separate usage charges and device payments. As the market matures, customers are holding onto their devices for longer. I think it's inevitable that manufacturers will have to improve durability as we move away from the lock-step of 24 month contracts.
Consumers are responsible at least as much as manufacturers for the current state of phones. Manufacturers may create the designs for phones, but consumers vote with their wallets for what they want, and they've consistently voted for thin over longer battery life.
Most consumers don't understand battery technology and don't know what's available on the market. They go into their local cellphone store and choose whatever looks nice and is recommended by the salesman. They aren't aware of handsets with bigger or user-replaceable batteries, because the industry hasn't really offered them the choice. I use a Chinaphone with a giant battery, but I have a lot of knowledge that no average consumer has.
You’d restart the phone and after a second trip to the battery indicator would show the correct level (let’s say 60 to 80 percent).
I think the only major mistake Apple made here was not being originally transparent about this. I don't think that Apple is being 100% noble in its intents either. In addition to driving users to buy new devices, there's the much less obvious side-effect which is a lot of people attempting to get their batteries replaced at roughly the same time as devices age. Which creates a tremendous support burden at Apple Stores around the world as people pile in to get their batteries replaced. (Although more daring consumers may attempt the DIY route, but I expect that to be a very small minority).
If my phone shut down when it shouldn't then I know to search out diagnostics about my battery. But if my phone slows down I have actually done these things:
* complained to developers that their apps are slower, wasting their time and resources when my battery should have been changed.
* reinstalled my OS. Which did not help when I should have changed my battery.
* searched and searched and searched resources online. When I should have researched a new battery.
* I also have to mea culpa all friends to whom I have ensured through the years that Apple never intentionally slows down their hardware. I have lied to my friends and need to apologise to them.
I wish people would stop inventing this false dichotomy. What people want is a phone that doesn't degrade horribly after only a year, regardless of whether that degradation is that it shuts itself off at 40% (which is fucking ridiculous) or that it gets noticeably slower. When a phone degrades so noticeably after only a year, people feel like they've been cheated. Do any other phones turn themselves off at 40% charge? My android phones certainly don't.
They could choose to do nothing. They could do what they did. With either of those they could’ve chosen to be more transparent (which clearly they should’ve).
You’re arguing that given the problem they saw once the phones have been in the field for years they should have designed the phone differently originally. That’s not reasonable.
I’d be very curious to know how android phones handle this. They must, in someway. There’s another comment in this story that someone had an HTC phone that would tend to just suddenly die under 20%, that may be the same thing iPhones were doing before.
When your battery doesn't last as long, what do you think of replacing? When everything on your device runs noticeably slowly, what do you think of replacing?
> You’re arguing that given the problem they saw once the phones have been in the field for years they should have designed the phone differently originally. That’s not reasonable.
I'm arguing that given that battery degradation curves are absolutely a known quantity, and have been for many years, they should have chosen to not put in a CPU that would, with 100% certainty, fuck itself in the eye with batteries that otherwise still appear to be reasonably healthy. 500 _complete_ charge cycles should get a battery to 80% capacity according to Apple. 80% original capacity doesn't mean suddenly turning off at 40% of current capacity because of power draw.
> they should have designed the phone differently originally
They should have. The current situation has been caused by either negligence or intent to deceive. That's what has people so upset. Did you know that you don't get the performance back if you keep the iPhone plugged in?
> I’d be very curious to know how android phones handle this. They must, in someway.
By running their CPUs at voltages farther from the absolute edge of what their batteries are capable of putting out. Possibly by displaying charge percentage differently. Definitely not by making performance unbearable.
That doesn't happen unless you have an absurd number of charge cycles. It usually takes 2-3 years of normal use to reach a point where the battery degradation is a major problem.
If you bought a new phone strictly because your old one was slow, you might have an anecdotal point to make.
"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, starting in late January and available worldwide through December 2018. Details will be provided soon on apple.com.
Early in 2018, we will issue an iOS software update with new features that give users more visibility into the health of their iPhone’s battery, so they can see for themselves if its condition is affecting performance."
Wonder if this means we'll see 12-24 month phones popping up on eBay with battery health reports, or receipts showing the owner(s) had them changed out just prior to sale.
Batteries fail after a while, it has been a constant for a very long time.
What has changed is that in many recent phones it is a pain to replace it yourself.
To your second point, I'm curious to see if Apple only offers this to original owners, or if a subsequent purchaser can get it swapped at this price also.
Also, I wonder what percent of people will walk into an Apple Store intending to get their battery replaced and will end up walking out with a shiny new iPhone. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple offered incentives to folks who want to just trade in and be done with the old device. At the very least, they've got you hanging out in their store for 15 mins.
I'm sure some people will still hate them for something, though.
I got lucky and wasn't affected by the battery shutdown issue even though my serial # was eligible for a free battery replacement, so I was able to put off the free battery replacement for a couple years and get a new one free. In another 2 years I'll probably swap it again for 25 bucks :D
I'm guessing they'll have some criteria on that
When you take your phone in, they'll do a test on the battery's current capacity and status, using a custom app. If the battery has reported errors, or if the reported capacity is low enough (below 80% capacity remaining, as I recall), then they'll agree to replace the battery. Takes a couple minutes to run the test, and then about an hour to swap the battery.
(Caveat: I was last through this process on my old iPhone 5, about six months ago. I assume that the procedure and policies are basically the same for newer iPhones, and haven't changed substantively since then. My battery's remaining capacity was below 40%, and was reporting errors, when I had it replaced.)
As reported by so many others, this happened immediately after the iOS 11 update. And by immediately I mean within seconds of booting right after installing the update. I stupidly waited for 11.1 hoping it would address the issue rather than revert while it was still possible.
Apple will not replace my battery even under this new program, as it’s still considered healthy by their standard. However an iPhone 7 with 87% battery health is unable to run iOS 11 without frequent UI freezes or sudden power loss, as I’ve found out, due most likely to the fact that I’m running iOS 11 on hardware designed for iOS 10. I’d be okay with that if there was some way to revert, but there is not.
You don't. Thousands of people replace their own iPhone batteries every week. Even I've done it, and I'm not especially dexterous.
Just go to Amazon or Google and search for a $20 replacement kit. Or, if you're not a DIY person, where I live there are places on every other streetcorner that will replace your battery for you.
That’s how Apple tends to handle almost all warranty issues. Either that or you can mail it in.
iPhones are not exactly designed to be easily opened and messed with by normal people. It’s part of how they get them so thin (insert various other theories that may or may not apply here).
I think the non-manufactured part of the scandal is having your phone throttle itself w/o telling you it's doing that is pretty annoying.
You're left wondering, is my phone running slower or is my mind playing tricks on me?
I think Apple's response here is great.
Don't hate on all journalism (or anything, really) just because of some bad apples. Even if it were true (which it isn't), it takes away all motivation for people in that industry to do the right thing. Why bother spending time on well-researched reporting, if all you get back is "fake news" or "all journalists are corrupt and produce clickbait"-hate on Twitter?
More specifically, here's a Q&A, and a previous article, discounting Apple conspiracy theories by The New York Times:
"Is Apple Slowing Down Old iPhones? Questions and Answers": https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/21/technology/iphone-battery...
"A New Phone Comes Out. Yours Slows Down. A Conspiracy? No.": https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/15/technology/personaltech/n...
Unfortunately, since these days anyone with a smartphone can call themselves a "journalist," it's become like the lawyer situation — the 90% bad ones give the 10% good ones a bad name.
In this case, I saw lots of headlines like "Apple admits it deliberately slowed down old phones". To me, the word "admits" is a big red flag. It's a loaded term that you can apply to pretty much any public statement, and it suggests (but doesn't directly imply) that Apple is admitting to wrongdoing. Phrasing like that signals to me that the reporting is untrustworthy.
A $50 battery replacement for 2.5 years of service is totally reasonable.
I made the same mistake, which someone else pointed out to me.
There are a lot of companies that make their money fixing iPhone batteries for $30. If this isn’t a limited time offer they’re in deep trouble.
It is.
> starting in late January and available worldwide through December 2018.
It may depend on various factors, but I know someone with an iPhone 6+ that is ridiculously slow. At times it can’t keep up with typing terribly well. Or you’ll go to open a simple app and it will take a couple of seconds.
And iPhone 6 that one of their relatives purchased on the same exact day does not exhibit this behavior. At least not to a noticeable degree.
The phone is three years old and has had a hard life. It gets discharged down to 10% pretty often.
As soon as the articles about this started to come out it fit perfectly. We’ll find out when they try and replace the battery, but I suspect this is the issue.
However this is also probably one of the worst cases. I mean if my phone was throttled 10 or 15% I’m not sure I would really notice. If things get bad and it starts being 40%+ I can see how it would be noticeable.
However the battery would’ve been deteriorating that time, and it’s starting to get quite cold here which would only make things worse. I think I remember hearing that it would randomly shut off before that so I’m totally willing to believe the battery already had small problems.
It is normal to be suspicious. My battery did not wear out overnight.
when you updated your software, it started throttling.
per that theory, a new battery should put you right again. (or wait for a future software update, which will tell you for sure if it was throttling.)
i think there is a little more going on, though, because my old ipad mini is slow a.f. w/ the new software update, and it shouldn't be affected by this throttling. my guess is it's simply lazy software engineering: apple doesn't seem to try to target good performance on old devices.
I’m not sure what it is but there can be some sort of “gremlin“ on a few old installs. It’s possible that’s your issue if the problem is especially severe.
I have bought a device of a certain performance, fully expecting that the battery will degrade and hold a smaller and smaller charge, but NOT expecting the performance of the device to suffer. I was given absolutely no warning that, come a certain age or use-pattern, the performance of the device will degrade. Apple went behind my back and installed software that prevented device lockup, and gave me no info about it.
What if I was entitled to a warranty replacement of the battery, but the software hid that from me by devaluing my purchase? This is not 'great', it's sleazy. Apple is essentially getting away with installing lower performance batteries and/or reducing it's warranty costs compared to competitors. The behavior itself is good from an engineering point of view, the communication was deceptive and fraudulent; the feature should be made optional, enabled at the user's discretion to extend the life of terminals that are outside of warranty and start to lock up, or the customer should be thoroughly informed at the time of purchase that the performance of the terminal will significantly degrade.
their response is
- an apology
- a promise to update the software so you know when you're getting throttled
- cheap battery replacements
i think that's pretty solid.
- They make no promise of the target lifespan of their devices. It appears that their internal culture believes that devices that last only 1 year is acceptable. They do not say if they want to deviate from this.
- No transparency on the expected battery degradation and performance impact over time.
more generally the useful lifespan of iphones is definitely more than a year. i was recentlu able to sell still-perfectly-functioning iphonr 7 for almost half it's cost new. my 3-year-old ipad mini only started feeling slow a couple months ago. this seems better than what my friends with android experience, anecodotally.
If you have a laptop then I have bad news; your CPU throttles itself. Especially if you play games.
It gets too hot and slows itself down to prevent damage. There’s not even a direct way to detect this. Which I do admit is annoying.
Apple deserves this PR egg on their face. But they aren’t doing anything super wrong. Additional battery life info will go a long ways towards doing things right.
the laptop always does this; it's not something where it magically (and mysteriously) gets slower as it ages. it's also obvious when this is happening, even if not directly indicated: the fan will be cranking and the laptop will be really hot to the touch.
and, there's also somehow more of a feeling that a phone is a controlled system that will "just work," whereas computers/laptops are always screwing up in one way or another...
In some ways that does happen. As computers get more lint in them that often start heading thermal barrier’s and automatically throttling themselves without telling the user.
As for whether the fan makes it obvious I guess that depends on how loud the fan is. Or this could happen to a desktop that you just have placed out of the way enough that you can’t hear it well.
I'm not sure what you mean by this, but you can run software that will give you these details and much, much more about the state of the CPU.
https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2013/08/06/defective-heat-...
How is it "completely manufactured"? Apple programmed (and hid) the slowdown because it knows the batteries it is shipping with its phones won't last more than a year. Linus compared it to a car performing worse after 1 year of usage..
There is no evidence for this. Plenty of people use iPhones for two or three years and don’t have an issue, and didn’t before any of the iOS changes that “hid” them.
Some people are just really hard on phone batteries. I have a few relatives that way. I’m not sure I’ve ever had an issue using the phone for 2+ years but I don’t tend to drain it down near the bottom much.
I hate to break it to him, but a one-year-old car will perform worse than a brand new car. A car is a hugely more robust piece of machinery than a telephone, so the degradation is less noticeable, but it's there. Why do you think the car depreciates the second you drive it off the lot?
> Why do you think the car depreciates the second you drive it off the lot?
Because of the dealership and "new car" markup. There's next to no difference between the car that left the parking lot and a "new" one. If you don't care about this silly game, you can save a lot by buying an ex-display model with a few hundred/thousand km done.
I bought a "used" one-year-old Cadillac ATS with 6,000 miles on it. It had AWD, the V6 engine, and every option available except the rear-seat BluRay entertainment system. It was priced at 60% of new.
It was a great deal and I challenge anyone to tell the car wasn't brand new without checking the odometer.
How many people complain that their new car is slowing down significantly after less than a year, or becomes inexplicably unusable around the time the year+1 model appears?
This is very much not the case with the iPhone slowdown, where a lot of people were noticing issues, on a product which already has a pitiful and barely practical battery life.
Actually, it's an 8% decrease starting after the first year. But go ahead and keep on spreading the FUD. Your HTC stock should catch up soon.
Because stock price is an indicator of how well a company's products are engineered!
Meanwhile until a month ago; username: root, password: none (no password, not the word "none"). Try it twice, get administrator access!
The car analogy is not great. First off, new cars cost way more than phones, and are built out of very different types of components. Secondly, cars absolutely need maintenance, and generally more than $29 a year.
Around the release of iOs 11 (not sure exactly when because it was gradual and I was also on the iOs 11 beta) my 6s became incredibly slow, almost unbearable, until last month I decided to upgrade to an X because of how slow it was. Was planning a year more but I just couldn't see myself using it 1 year more.
Now I see via CPU Dasher and Geekbench that my 6s with a battery less than a year old (95,7% original capacity, 406 cycles) is running at 1400-900Mhz, (almost always between 1200-1000Mhz) instead of 1800Mhz.
Tens of millions of old iPhone users were left in the dark why all of a sudden the phone was slowing down to the point where it was becoming unusable. Millions of people probably spent hundreds of dollars otherwise they wouldn't need to spend if they know this was something they can fix with a new battery.
I personally have been using iPhone 6 for 3 years until this CPU-Battery disaster struck. So I ended up buying an Android phone. I love my Android phone now, but it's still money I wouldn't have had to spend.
This is a huge scandal. I like the response by Apple, but it's too late and millions of people already spent money they could've avoided spending. Good bye iPhone. I won't be coming back.
On the whole I don’t think this would have caused anyone to spend money they wouldn’t have otherwise. Perhaps they would have stayed with their phone longer.
It’s hard to tell, and this is certainly worse than if they had just told people about the battery in the first place (although I imagine THAT would’ve become a scandal two).
Why is apple the only company with this problem?
It’s the only one people care about enough. Apple gets a major "scandal" almost each year about something that affects every single smartphone company on the planet. Think of the antenna-gate or the bending issues. Lots of non-Apple phones have shown these issues, and the random shutdowns are no exception [1].
[1]: http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/12/20/some-nexus-6ps-have-...
(updated to add a link)
It's all about expectations.
https://plus.google.com/+YgorCortes/posts/CZ2GhoxgHk3
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=cz2ghoxghk3&sort=byPopularity&...
The idea I’m arguing against is that Apple either did nothing or purposefully made it worse. They tried to fix one bad problem (random shutdowns) and it caused a different, although less severe, problem.
Apples move to retard performance to keep the phone from suddenly dying was a GOOD move. It wasn’t a scam as some others have claimed.
But obviously they should have communicated to the user that they knew there was a battery issue.
It is a scam if they're not making it clear to the users why their phone is suddenly being slowed down. The fact is, even if battery issues are a perfectly fine reason to be doing this, by not making that clear to users and instead leaving them in the dark with a now extremely slow phone (Just in time for their new releases!) they are scamming their users.
If you took your car into a dealership, and instead of telling you that you had a bad battery (That they've known was already going bad in similar cars) they told you that they don't know what's wrong with it, but that they have lots of other cars you can buy, would you consider that a scam? I certainly would.
If Apple hadn't redlined the CPU to hit benchmarks the battery wouldn't have been in such a poor state to need to be shut down/throttled so early in its lifecycle.
They are 100% to blame this situation and have taken the least consumer focused choice up until this point.
That doesn’t seem like a reasonable solution.
But if it is that reasonable than surely there is a long list of electronic devices that do such a thing...
The implication that I keep getting from people seems to be that Apple is running their phones at 140% and when the battery can’t keep up they then slow it down to make up for the CPU being underprovisioned on battery.
I think it’s far more likely that Apple is running the phone at 100% of what it was designed for. When the battery ages they were running into problems with the phones having to shut themselves down (perhaps the newer chips were more sensitive to power fluctuations?) so they’ve started throttling to under 100%.
In a desktop analogy: I don’t think this is the equivalent of some company selling overclocked CPUs and lying about how fast they were. I think this is closer to a case of the computers just ended a clogged with lots of dust and had to throttle to prevent serious damage after a few years.
Obviously they should’ve told the user but I don’t think they set out from a malicious standpoint.
Note that this problem only occurred on devices where Apple fully designed the chips (iPhone 6 and later). "Off the shelf" chips, and those used for Android, simply have a lot more of a voltage window.
Were the phones really slowed down by that much?
In some cases, yeah. It’s bad.
My phone's remaining battery life is above 80%.
Enough with the hyperbole already. Yes, a few (rather outspoken) users had this issue. For everyone else, slowdowns were noticeable, but they barely made the phones "unusable".
That's why this is a manufactured scandal. Yes, Apple could have (and should have) been more transparent. But their decision to throttle the CPU was based on sound engineering principles, rather than a nefarious attempt to get people to upgrade.
After that awful experience I would rather get a kick in my genitalia than an android phone.
> Early in 2018, we will issue an iOS software update with new features that give users more visibility into the health of their iPhone’s battery, so they can see for themselves if its condition is affecting performance.
BUT, what I do very much care about is that the company who did this does not get away with it without losing some feathers, because they did intentionally hide something from the user that did affect them quite noticeably and if they would not have been called out could have had even more serious effects in the long run.
Imagine the following scenario. The battery of your phone is happily degrading and the manufacturer of your phone puts in some serious effort to develop a strategy so you as the user don't notice it. You keep using your phone thinking everything is fine, all the while your battery keeps degrading faster and faster. Then some day you actually need the power (in terms of processing power and in terms of stored energy) because, let's say you are taking a longer high quality video of a wedding. But since your phone is now running on full throttle your battery keeps discharging uncharacteristically fast because it is already in a bad state, or the software can't keep up with the data compression and has to start dropping frames and the video of the event you wanted to keep in good memory now looks awful.
Sure, this is only a very benign scenario but it still illustrates that the manufacturer should not try to hide such important information from the user. And as I have mentioned in another thread, no one can tell me that not a single Apple engineer during this whole process has stepped up and said "Hey maybe it's also a good idea to tell the user that we are throttling the whole system so it may live a few months longer"
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15995018
[2] https://overcast.fm/+CdQP59ws/56:00
Apple has dealt with overblown controversies before (Antennagate, etc.) and the best way to deal with them is to do what they're doing: communicate better, improve their software, make repairs or returns more affordable.
This response owns the responsibility of countering misconceptions. The huge majority of Apple users won’t remember this in a month.
Marco doesn't see the value in tracking podcast listeners, but I'd think he'd benefit to know what causes people to stop when listening to their show.
Really? I thought that was perfectly fair. Apple made it so people’s phones don’t randomly shut off all the time if the battery is old and people are complaining about it because it fits into a different false narrative.
I honestly do think this whole thing is very overblown. I’m glad they’re fixing iOS to inform users it’s going on (that was certainly an issue) and dropping the price of battery replacements is a great move.
But I don’t think this is the giant scandal that the tech press is trying to make it. I thought Casey’s assessment was quite fair.
If your phone randomly shuts downs, or it last less time between charges, you know it must be a battery issue. You go to Apple or whatever, and fix it paying no more than 79$ (maybe even free if it still has warranty!)
If you hide it and degrade performance, people don't know its a battery issue, leaving them to suffer a slow phone, or spending 700+$ on a new phone.
No matter the good intentions, and the "good solution" they implemented, they fucked up.
It was painful to hear.
I work with a guy that doesn't use Apple products at all, yet _always_ forwards this stuff to me. I don't even argue about it or defend Apple—it isn't worth my time and it isn't worth Apple's time either.
Maybe they have a defamation case, but really who cares?
(edit grammar)
I do use Apple products, but every company and product should be scrutinized equally. Not that it matters if Apple gets hate, they're still a billion dollar company, but I do find it interesting on why they get that hate at times when it's not really worth it.
Was the reporting bad? Sure. Was apple in the right? Definitely not.
Does anyone know how Samsung phones (for example) deal with low battery voltage issues? Do they simply adjust the battery meter so that it reports zero percent by the time you might start having these issues? Does it slow the phone down The way Apple did? Does it issue some sort of warning that your battery is getting bad?
Or does it just shut down if you overtax things?
It must be possible to figure out how other vendors solved this issue.
Even a few percent overprovisioning can extend life expectency by a lot; and aggressive temperature-related charging (and discharging) throttling can trade peak (benchmark) performance and predictable charging speeds for longevity. I bet apple could make a phone with at least double the battery longevity with 1% price, mass, and size increases, and perf and battery life decreases -- if they wanted to. Of course, those factors are easily quantifiable, and battery longevity less so...
So sure: battery degradation is a fundamental issue in the sense that all batteries degrade - but how they do and what tradeoffs the device makes to minimize that are largely up to the manufacturer, and unfortunately also poorly documented, poorly benchmarkable, and I'm not sure how clearly a warranty would apply - so yeah, the it's a factor that manufacturers are bound to skimp on.
(I wouldn't particularly expect apple to be any worse than the rest of the pack, though).
Some other phone may be designed so it takes an extra year and a half or two, but it will still happen one day.
But a little more honesty in expected degradation would be nice, including the warranty that if degradation exceeds some minimal specification, the phone will be fixed at the manufacturer's cost, and not just for a year. 10 years may be unnecessarily long, but 1 year is definitely too short; and the level of acceptable degradation is too vague.
That's the main problem here.
http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/12/20/some-nexus-6ps-have-...
https://plus.google.com/+YgorCortes/posts/CZ2GhoxgHk3
Reality: Apple secretly slowed down people's phones.
The proper response is to clean their brand. That’s what they do now. I think it is better late than never, but it also is somewhat (depending on how picky they will be on replacing those batteries, and on whether they will pay back people who replaced their battery recently because of this problem) classy.
I also think this is intended to, and will, stop the class action suits being filed before they have even started.
[0] - https://www.thelocal.fr/20171228/french-lawsuit-launched-aga...
Company internal investigation followed by public facing change is pretty much the death knell in a civil/monetary lawsuit.
I’ll ignore the “on paper“ comment. It was totally unnecessary.
If that gain is indeed real, or mostly real, then the difference may be explained by the fact that Apple makes some compromises that other chip makers don't - such as increasing the boost performance of the chip more than the battery and the heat management can handle.
As for the "on paper" claim, I think it's justified, because largely we only know the Apple chips are "so much faster" from synthetic benchmarks. But in real world tests it doesn't seem to make much of a difference.
I never stated that. My point was that they wanted their processors to benchmark above everyone else's, and this quest for the highest performance numbers in synthetic benchmarks (aka on paper) has lead them to a bad place.
I think I read one during the whole disk encryption fiasco a few months ago..
Edit: no, that was the username: root, password: (blank) fiasco. And literally less than a month ago.
In cases that require more extreme forms of this power management, the user may notice effects such as:
Longer app launch times
Lower frame rates while scrolling
Backlight dimming (which can be overridden in Control Center)
Lower speaker volume by up to -3dB
Gradual frame rate reductions in some apps
During the most extreme cases, the camera flash will be disabled as visible in the camera UI
Apps refreshing in background may require reloading upon launch
Many key areas are not impacted by this power management feature. Some of these include:
Cellular call quality and networking throughput performance
Captured photo and video quality
GPS performance
Location accuracy
Sensors like gyroscope, accelerometer, barometer
Apple Pay
Are there any battery experts who can chime in with their opinion on this?
Maybe these symptoms are Apple specific but Samsung had fire and explosions:
http://www.techradar.com/news/samsung-galaxy-note-7-battery-...
> response: [non-battery expert with subjective opinion]
sums up why I hate HN comments sometimes.
But hey; in an online forum things get off topic... kind of like this ;-)!
https://support.google.com/pixelphone/forum/AAAAb4-OgUsQiGBJ...
https://us.community.samsung.com/t5/Galaxy-Note-Phones/Note-...
Nexus 6P.
So I question the question is would users be happier having their phone slow down or having the battery appear to drain extremely fast?
I guess my answer to that would depend on how bad the average “slowdown“ is. I think you’re right if the issue is serious, but if most people only take a 10% hit when your phone is old then the slowdown may be a better option.
I’ll admit that I’m not sure how possible that is. If this technique would let you pretend that the battery only had half its capacity left without slowing down the phone then that maybe one thing. If even a slight battery degradation meant you have to pretend the phone only had 1/20th of its original battery left then obviously that’s pointless.
Pulling down search on the home screen: freeze. Typing into search input: freeze. Unlocking from notifications screen: freeze. Freezes every two or three times an app is opened or closed. Screen transitions always stutter a little, Safari hangs, screen becomes unresponsive, sometimes it just starts draining battery and gets hot with no app running at all.
I think my mention of Android triggered some emotions here (many downvotes). My first smartphone was a Dell with 1.5 that ran horribly slow, around 2010. That one was really bad, couldn't even answer calls most of that time due to unresponsive UI, and is still my benchmark for bad experience. This iPhone is getting quite close.
Having a too small battery is the exact definition of planned obsolescence!
If they hadn't tried to make the phones as small as possible and used a battery with 20% more capacity the problems would not be as severe.
That’s not true. Having a too-small battery on purpose is planned obsolescence. Having a small battery (what does "too small" means? Compared to what?) has nothing to do with that. That’s the purpose of "planned" in "planned obsolescence".
If a battery has not enough capacity to carry the phone trough a whole day after 1-2 years of use then it was too small to begin with.
I have the feeling that iPhone batteries are just large enough that the phones survives a day of medium use if the phone is brand new. After 1 or 2 years the battery is so bad that it barely holds enough charge for a few hours of usage.
That’s just a feeling. I’ve had my iPhone for 3 years now and the battery is completely fine.
Perhaps there is _some_ good intention on Apple's part. But I think it hides a just-as-motivating factor as forcing upgrade purchases. My opinion is their position is disingenuous at best. I would rather see them move toward the customer having the control to choose the experience or not instead of - as they explained - only adding transparency into the decisions into which Apple is forcing you.
Plainly, my experience was: I had perfectly healthy hardware, yet my 2-gen old device was almost too slow to be useable. And now here I sit with a $1200 unnecessary replacement.
Thank you! I've always thought phones should provide info about battery health.
> 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, starting in late January and available worldwide through December 2018. Details will be provided soon on apple.com.
> Early in 2018, we will issue an iOS software update with new features that give users more visibility into the health of their iPhone’s battery, so they can see for themselves if its condition is affecting performance.
> As always, our team is working on ways to make the user experience even better, including improving how we manage performance and avoid unexpected shutdowns as batteries age.
I cannot think of a better move from Apple than these three options. Bring awareness to the user by displaying battery performance and if updating the battery would resolve their power issues, you have a (now even cheaper) method of fixing it. As I understand it, the only way to tell if one needs to update their battery is by downloading some third party app (that costs money) and then praying that it helps in some way.
Also wanted to point out that by going deeper into the issue with this article shows (at least to me) some sense of transparency and should be really encouraged. While I disagree that they needed a scandal to bring clarity and it should've been brought up a while back, it's still great they did it nonetheless. This has been a conspiracy for some time, glad to see Apple has shed some light on it.
Apple replaced the battery once they admitted to the faulty batch, and my phone has been great since, but the way they handle battery issues is extremely frustrating. Going to an Apple Store and having them to their standard test, being told everything is fine and there's nothing they can do is not what I expect from them.
No one asked for this. Lighter, somewhat, yes but thin to the point where batteries are barely functional? Samsung's colossal Note failure is just another symptom of this. I had a Panasonic CF-Y5, a 14" 1.5kg laptop ten years ago and somehow it managed to be that light without this thinness craziness.
I feel them absolutely awful to type on (I have never complained about a keyboard before but I just can't stand this one), although it is subjective, some people are fine with it.
What is unquestionably bad though is that you need to replace the whole keyboard if one key has an issue (and apparently it happens a lot). I know several people for which Apple had to reset the whole laptop after a keyboard issue, but I can't make sense of it.
I don't know why some people hate these keyboards. I don't really have a strong opinion about them. They feel slightly different and noisier but I get identical typing speed results compared to the previous one.
I slightly disagree with this though:
> but thin to the point where batteries are barely functional?
My previous MBP (mid-2014) was still very usable after 3 years of intensive use. Overall, I can't say I suffered from not being able to change the battery easily. (I passed the problem to the next owner...).
I'd say that is only the Ultrabook market which goes for super thin. There are plenty of other laptops out there that are thick enough to even have a CD drive. On top of that there are the gaming laptops which are even thicker.
You mean the obsession customers have with buying thin products, which Apple is simply satisfying, and extremely well, judging from sales.
> No one asked for this.
Yes actually, I asked for this, like many other customers who bought much thinner Apple products instead of thicker, bulkier, heavier competing products.
https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/12/28/16825288/...
Usually they send you to Huawei who wants a few hundred bucks to fix it. ...no.
My 6+ drained the battery incredibly quickly. I was told that upgrading the iOS would fix that problem [0]; it didn’t. Instead it slowed my phone to the point of being unusable.
If I’d have known replacing the battery would have fixed both of them, I’d have done that. Instead, I stupidly bought two new, very expensive phones. Since we were already locked into the Apple ecosystem (with paid apps and media), we bought iPhones.
This does nothing to compensate or win back the trust of customers like me.
[0] https://i.imgur.com/OYZr7zd.png
What is it that you want Apple to do to make you personally feel better?
Of course, what people want is free iPhones. Apple isn’t going to do it just because it’s what everyone wants.
This response makes sense. They screwed up communicating the issue of battery life to the masses that apparently don't know batteries wear out. They're fixing it, they're biting into their revenue with a mea culpa price cut, and they're making the OS more communicative of this nuance of phone performance.
That has never happened before, there was no precedent for that, and no way of knowing it was a battery issue. The only solution for most people was buying a new phone.
While Apple always eventually gets to the right response, they can sometimes take too long to do so. In the case of these iPhone batteries, I think Apple's response was relatively timely.
But there have been cases where well known problems took over a year to acknowledge and remedy (like the early 2011 15" Macbook Pro GPU problems).
But even then, my comment is only with respect to the response being timely relative to the problem becoming publicly known.
If you take a cynical view that Apple knew what the side effects were a year ago when they released the software update but chose not to disclose it in the release notes, then the response was not timely.
To be fair: what do you expect from Apple? Power to the power users? Because that’s not happening.
Trustworthiness aside, Apple as a hardware company has made many questionable choices that makes me rethink purchasing their hardware. (headphone jack and the touch bar being the most egregious) I don't think I'll be getting the next macbook if these don't get addressed.
[1] https://lineage.microg.org
[2] https://www.fairphone.com
On top of that, the iPhone 7, 8, and X make it significantly more difficult and cumbersome to replace the battery. See the iFixit guides. Even with the iPhone 6 you need special screwdrivers and tools.
Other than that, nothing should really keep you "locked-in" on iOS. Not even iMessage. You can use WhatsApp or FB Messenger with friends or family. It's not a big deal.
https://www.android.com/switch/
https://www.apple.com/iphone/move-to-ios/
I still like iOS better and don't intend on switching but the only "lock in" I feel exists is the years of sunk cost I have in purchased apps I still use.
I would disagree about iMessage though. I have older family members on iOS that would not use another messaging or video chat app. Our chat experience would simply degrade to stock SMS.
If only I knew that replacing battery would make my 6+ usable again I would remain iPhone user.
Thank you very much for sharing your experience.
To be fair, they said iOS upgrade may help fix the problem, and I agree that they were probably just saying "update so I can check that off my list of things to recommend."
We take the underlying computer for granted, but apparently the iPhone can benefit from a clean install to clean out always-running rogue processes.
> Lost in all the media reports is that the throttling only happens at peak system power demand.
Throttling at least occurs during app loading. Apple admits as much and it was true (subjectively) in my experience. If loading an app qualifies as "peak system power demand" your point is kind of lost because loading apps is something everyone with a mobile device does very frequently.
In my own case, everything was slow. Loading apps, loading web pages, whatever. And the difference after a clean install now is huge. Went back and did the same to an old iPad that I stopped using for its sluggishness, and it's usable again.
Complex devices, so there's certainly going to be a complex set of problems, but I think that some of it is due to us taking Apple's message that iOS devices are appliances to heart, whereas the truth is that these portable computers still need mysterious maintenance rituals. It's been impressive, but Apple's still got some work to do to make these things bulletproof.
The degree of throttling that seems to be occurring does seem to be quite excessive. Excessive enough that I wonder whether they've had unexpected battery degradation in the field, or unexpected degradation of the power delivery circuit, or unexpectedly high load consumption or some kind of fault with the SoC.
Either that or they have just pushed the envelope a little too much knowing that their customers are likely to get fed up and buy new phones... hmmm...
Ok, so what do we do? Sell iphone ((or android phone)) and then.. get what?
So, yes, extracting all of your data Apple is not withholding from you, getting another device, and then selling the Apple devices is what I would start with.
Also, I would keep an open eye for neither Android nor Apple devices. The Librem 5 might become an excellent alternative.
Flashing something like LineageOS (formerly CyanogenMod) is the best way to get started with a lean android os
[0]- forum.xda-developers.com
They might even not publish the source, and if they do, what are the chances that anyone has audited it?
Is that somehow impressive? Every smartphone since 1980 can do that.
>> And I'm free to take my data and move to another device.
So what. People with Androids and Iphones can, and do, move to another device, data included. So what is your point.
The first ancestor of this comment chain is saying, that they were locked-in partly because they couldn't move media out. This contradicts you.
Sorry, you are just making things up. The first ancestor did not complain about moving media out. That is something that you invented.
Btw I do not know what your purpose here is... lying... to get what? Upvotes? Are these really worth... this? Just asking.
The exact quote is:
> Since we were already locked into the Apple ecosystem (with paid apps and media), we bought iPhones.
So, they are locked-in into the ecosystem partly because of media. This directly implies they can't move their media out, for else they wouldn't be locked-in.
I'm not lying, and received no Upvote, still I'm responding. Actually, I think I'm risking downvotes for responding to a rather angry comment without content for the topic of the link. It's simply that you asked, so I answer.
That's funny. I hope you can see how it is funny.
I made a single app purchase in the last 5 years so I don't feel too locked-in, at least other than habit.
> Since we were already locked into the Apple ecosystem (with paid apps and media), we bought iPhones.
I feel that iPhone vs Android is the current Holy War [1], and it's just as contentious as Mac vs PC, Windows vs Linux or even vim vs emacs. (PC, Linux and vim, of course!)
1: http://catb.org/jargon/html/H/holy-wars.html
You simply behaved exactly the way that Apple predicted you would (preferring to spend money over the inconvenience of migrating your data to Android).
How is that a thing? Media - you should be able to move. And how much do the apps that you actually use cost? You could apparently afford 2 new Apple phones... you can't be truly locked in
1) Important historical data you can't move out - like iMessages
2) Apple Music - Your curated playlist is just that without actual songs (Of course you can recreate and start from scratch here)
3) Apps/Games - Specifically where the account is tied to your apple account and you have ample progress be it in app purchases or unlocking features on apps (which can really add up)
4) Your family - My entire family, wife, parents, sisters, neices/nephews and brother in law are all on iPhone and we all share the same Apple family plan for music and purchases. We also share location information so we know where each other is at once - This is done through Apple's find friends app.
#4 is the most important one. Because the habit of many individuals has to be changed in order for me to get out. Which is not impossible but it's just a lot of work (teaching my senior parents android? not worth it imo). And this also comes back to having our group messages in iMessage and my family loves going back to reference something or look at pictures we send each other.
It was common knowledge that lithium batteries chemically degrade over time. It was not common knowledge, even to those with technical backgrounds, that the iPhone compensated by degrading performance. That was only made recently public by user research.
Many consumers have been buying new iPhones after at least 1 year because of this performance degradation. Had Apple been transparent about its performance degradation strategy from the beginning, people would have spent far less money.
This will have a substantial effect on Apple's revenue next year as people buy new batteries instead of new iPhones.
Might be a reflection of the culture those commenters are from, but it's disingenuous to assert.
Other options existed -- notably to advise the user, as part of the update, via mail-out, etc, that this choice had been made from them, and (optionally) what they could do about it.
a) slow the phone down
b) make the battery percentage accurate so that people will know when the battery is empty
I have used Samsung phones for a long time (since Galaxy S4), and I've never had a phone turn off on me when the battery percentage was anything other than 0%. Are we supposed to believe that the maker of the "world's most advanced smartphone" (their words) cannot figure out how to prevent random shutdowns without slowing down the whole phone?
I know car analogies are overused but … I would be classed as literally insane if I replaced my car because the battery had become degraded. When this happens you get a mechanic to replace the battery. (Or, if the owner is very competent they replace it themselves.) If we do it for cars, why not for phones?
I would absolutely love if this issue got regulated across the board the same way the charging cable connection (everything has to be usb-micro or usb-C) got regulated. Though somehow Apple didn't comply and didn't get penalised.
A few months later, after my AppleCare+ expired, the problems intensified. And I spent most of 2017 with a very slow and unreliable phone. I honestly thought it was iOS 10. Had I known it was the battery, I'd have paid to replace it. Or I'd have forced them to upgrade it for me for free when I had AppleCare+.
I upgraded to an iPhone X, thinking the 6 Plus had reached its EOL, but now I think I've been lied to!
The real scandal is the shoddy design and engineering that led to brownouts that necessitated either a massive recall or this throttling.
1) Drop from 30% to 5% in some minutes. iOS 10.x fixed this issue.
2) Now with iOS 11 the battery does even last a day and the phone was extremely slow.
Sure i had issues in the past after 2 years with my Nexus 5 and Galaxy Nexus but both were kind of mid range price ~400 Euros.
But with a high end phone that cost 800 Euros I would expect better quality and also better costumer support.
This xmas i just got myself a ~350 Euros Android and i'm much more happy. After 2 years if the phone has battery issues or whatever i will not be so furious has i am now.
I've been recently moving away from Apple mainly due to Quality / Price ratio. I have a 2012 iMac which is basically useless except from Browsing on the Web. Other companies like Google, Amazon etc... ship good quality devices for much cheaper price. So for me i'm not thinking in buying anything else from Apple.
https://www.apple.com/support/iphone6s-unexpectedshutdown/
Not sure if they checked when the battery was manufactured. But now given $29 I guess no longer relevant...