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iPhone Performance Degrades as Battery Ages

456 points by Deinos 9y ago

fvrghl 9y ago
Relevant recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15889519 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15889519
mikerg87 9y ago
How do non-apple devices cope as they age ? Any word on what Nexus, Galaxy or Pixel devices of a similar vintage do? does the performance stay the same but the battery life becomes shorter?
- plushpuffin 9y ago
  I have a Nexus 6P and its battery is going bad. It just shuts down when it reaches 20-30%. Kind of annoying because I never know quite how much battery life I actually have remaining.
  - darrylb42 9y ago
    Same here, the phone is otherwise fine. I don't really want to go to a Pixel 2XL because I like having a headphone jack.
  - kilroy123 9y ago
    Same here. I have to carry around an extra battery booster. :-/
  - disconnected 9y ago
    I have a similar situation. My Android (1st Gen Moto G, running Lineage OS, about 3 years old) shuts down once the battery level hits 15%. You can actually see it change from 15% to 1% for one brief moment before it shuts down. Sure, the battery is old, but this behavior is unlike the behavior of any other OS/device I've seen. I've seen some laptops with seriously messed up batteries and as far as I can remember, the OS reports a smooth discharge profile without steep drops and without and strange "surprises". I think Android is probably not taking battery health into account when it reports remaining capacity, but that is only a guess.
    - kalleboo 9y ago
      My old MacBook Pro battery got so bad that it would jump down and back up 20% randomly.
    - k3a 9y ago
      Can't it be a problem with the fuel gauge inacurately measuring the battery capacity? I have seen it only on one "cheap" Android device and I have been using Androids for a long time. Anyway, easily removable batteries are the way to go.
  - wstrange 9y ago
    I replaced the battery on my 6P, and it's like a new phone. It is a bit tricky, but well worth it.
  - katastic 9y ago
    That's really strange. Because most/all modern systems build statistics about your battery as it charges and drains, to predict the life left. Without those statistics they'd have no idea how long it will last because it changes over the life of the battery. In Linux you can even see pretty graphs showing "confidence" for each percentage of battery vs "how confident" Linux is of remaining power. https://www.makeuseof.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/power_statistics_laptop_battery_history.jpg https://www.makeuseof.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/power_s... My Samsung Android phone shuts down at 5-7% battery life. And the battery dies much faster these days. But it's never "inaccurate." It doesn't jump from 50% to 2% over a course of five minutes. Other than something else being wrong with your OS, my only guess there would be the battery got bad so quickly the OS hasn't adapted to the new life cycle yet by removing enough of the old datapoints.
  - praneshp 9y ago
    Effectively the same, but it just quickly degrades from 60-0 for me (like 20 mins of just reddit/hn). 100-60 is still decent.
- bjackman 9y ago
  I worked on Android power perf (frequency scaling in particular) for the last 18 months and I'm not aware of any linkage with the battery state, except for the Battery Saver mode. So yeah same perf, just shorter life. There could be something in vendor Android builds I don't know about, but it isn't there in AOSP and almost certainly isn't in Pixel/Nexus.
  - londons_explore 9y ago
    I vaguely remember the dram and camera clock rates being reduced when the battery SoC went under 40% in the nexus 5, and then when users complained of early shutdowns when using the camera with HDR mode, an update changed it to 60%. I think I even commented on the bugreport that it would be best to do the frequency scaling based on interrupts from the voltage regulators on board, but that piping all the necessary drivers/events to do that with low enough latency to not cause an under-voltage reset was far more work than was feasible. Thats also why 60fps video dropped frames at the start of the video if you were recording video with less than 60% battery. Anyone care to dig out the relevant commit...?
- izacus 9y ago
  Most Android devices have rather severe issues with flash degradation (due to use of cheaper chips, controllers and connection... cheap MMC controllers are still very standard) which makes them practically unusable after a few years.
  - copperx 9y ago
    Is this true for flagship Android devices too?
    - izacus 9y ago
      Depends really, a lot of them nowdays use better flash controllers and technology (e.g. UFS) but only time can tell how they cope with aging. Pixels seem to be doing quite well.
  - ams6110 9y ago
    I've owned two low cost Moto G phones and never had this issue.
  - endorphone 9y ago
    Most? Absolute nonsense. The Nexus 7 have a small issue that was resolved when Google added TRIM support for Android. That was years ago. I have a long history with almost every Android device. The device doesn't get slower, the battery life just gets terrible.
    - plaguuuuuu 9y ago
      My Nexus 6P's performance has degraded considerably over the past couple of years. It's actually quite laggy now. A few of my friends report the same with their 6Ps. To be fair I haven't tried factory resetting it in a while, although I shouldn't need to do that in the first place..
    - izacus 9y ago
      The 2012 Nexus 7 is an outlier because it has especially bad flash controller - by 2015 most of the devices were unusable due to degraded flash. TRIM helped very little. Other devices suffer from similar effects - not as bad, but most devices certanly lose quite a bit of I/O performance (especially writes) over time which makes OS run noticably slower.
- slg 9y ago
  Electric cars have fundamentally the same problem and Tesla decided to attack it by hiding some of the battery's capacity when the car is new. While the car might report to the user it is 100% full, it might only be actually 90% full. The battery can therefore lose a decent percent of its capacity before the user will ever notice the difference. This decision was made because cars obviously have a longer ownership cycle than phones and a drastic drop in range as a car ages is a huge flaw. But I do wonder if any phone companies might start to rethink this decision now that we are seeing some people use the same smartphone for 3-5 years.
  - tormeh 9y ago
    Li-ion batteries also last longer when kept between 30% and 90%. Several car manufacturers don't let you completely charge or expend your battery for this reason.
    - greglindahl 9y ago
      Tesla, for example, encourages owners to not charge beyond 90%, and refuses you let you drive below some number, which is around 20%, that it hides from the driver.
    - UncleEntity 9y ago
      I wonder how much driving style effects that too, racing around vs Driving Ms. Daisy?
      - bri3d 9y ago
        Discharging lithium batteries at a high C rate (C = Instantaneous Draw / Capacity) causes a different form of degraded life than storage at a high state of charge. And the major killer of lithium batteries is heat, which Tesla are known to manage well. The biggest killer, though, is storage with the graphite electrode more than 50% lithiated - there is a gigantic step-up in capacity fade when batteries are stored with the State of Charge over around 90%, which Tesla are very smart to avoid. http://jes.ecsdl.org/content/163/9/A1872.full http://jes.ecsdl.org/content/163/9/A1872.full
- aequitas 9y ago
  I had a Nexus 5 before which I replaced of about 2 years after buying it. Can definitely say performance improved after that (for a short while though as it was a cheap ebay battery).
- meebs 9y ago
  Nexus 6P the phone will die randomly at random percentages. Sometimes you can turn it back on hours later and it'll last thirty minutes. Sometimes you have to "charge" it a little bit first. This issue happens at all percentages and I've had it for over 8 months now.
leeoniya 9y ago
> This will likely feed into the “planned obsolescence” narrative. well, non-replaceable battery and all...
- Retric 9y ago
  You can replace the batteries at both Apple stores and independent retailers. https://www.cnet.com/how-to/iphone-battery-replacement-diy-or-hire-a-pro/ https://www.cnet.com/how-to/iphone-battery-replacement-diy-o... The issue IMO, is it's not obvious that the battery needs to be replaced and when. It's not holding charge > new battery is far more obvious than it's slow > new battery. Most people probably prefer a slow phone than one without charge however Apple should have some indication of what's going on.
  - oceanghost 9y ago
    You really can't though. I had a phone with an awful battery-- it would shut off around 25% randomly. I brought it into Apple 3 times, it even had apple care-- and because the f*ing diagnostic suite identified the battery as good, they wouldn't replace it. They wouldn't even LET ME PAY FOR THE REPAIR.
    - fleitz 9y ago
      Smash your phone, pay for a new phone under apple care. Voila.
    - suryamp 9y ago
      > LET ME PAY FOR THE REPAIR. Then you would know that it is totally their fault and the liability would be on Apple to fix other people's devices.
    - schrodinger 9y ago
      Same here. I went to a 3rd party place and they replaced it cheaper anyway, with no problems.
    - riahi 9y ago
Someone1234 9y ago
I feel like more transparency would have been welcomed, but aside from that this is a "no win" situation, since you have to pick a winner: - Do you degrade performance but leave screen-on time relatively unchanged? - Do you degrade screen-on time but leave performance relatively unchanged? Most Android devices seem to do the opposite (lose screen-on time, but keep performance relatively unchanged). Different people will have a different perspective on what the "right" strategy is for this, but I think we can all agree that better transparency and maybe even leaving it to the consumer to make the choice would be welcome. PS - "Planned obsolescence" only applies if Apple was doing this artificially. It seems like if they didn't degrade performance you'd lose screen-on time instead, so you'd still likely replace the handset and perhaps even sooner (since core services e.g. calling, texting, etc, work even with lower performance but not on a phone out of juice).
- EGreg 9y ago
  With Apple being Apple, I think they can do it in an Apple way and degrade screen-on time for performance, switching it to favor battery whenever you turn on the "Low Power Mode" setting. Simple binary decision in the user's hands. I would also put "Conserve Battery" in the control center.
  - conradev 9y ago
    You can put Low Power Mode in Control Center on iOS 11
  - derefr 9y ago
    This is already a (separate) thing, though. When battery life drops to 20% (and then again at 10%), iOS devices suggest that you enable "Low Power Mode." In effect, right now, on old devices, Low Power Mode is always either fully-enabled, or half-enabled, but never fully-disabled. All they'd have to do is to change it from a binary switch (between enabled and {disabled, secretly half-enabled}) to a three-level switch.
- asdjasldkjkljd 9y ago
  Allow the user to decide because there's no right answer.
maltalex 9y ago
This screams "planned obsolescence". If battery scaling is a feature, then why isn't it mentioned by Apple? Why do we need a Reddit thread and a third party benchmarking tool to figure it out? Also, why does the google search for "iphone slow" peak every time a new iPhone is released (https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=iphone%20slow https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=iphone%2...)? Is it purely psychological? I can't find there are no similar spikes for "android slow" or "samsung slow" or similar searches.
- Bud 9y ago
  No, it screams "planned and careful shepherding of user experience".
  - pishpash 9y ago
    Shepherding literally meaning "sheep herding"?
- macintux 9y ago
  When was the last time a new Android phone was the subject of interest to half a billion people? Apple's regular but infrequent release cycle for new phones (and corresponding new version of iOS) lends itself to a cyclical search pattern as well.
mromanuk 9y ago
I have an iPhone 7. Run a test "Antutu benchmark" (The phone was connected to power) and it got "127823", according to their ranking, it should have "160864". 20% less. I would like to know, if this is the case or just coincidence.
- efrafa 9y ago
  I have iPhone 7 as well (almost year old) and got 156,473
geff82 9y ago
Interesting that the battery aged extremely fast when iOS 11 got installed and took the performance down to the „really unpleasant“ level.
- maltalex 9y ago
  It's not just you. Take a look at the google trends data for "iphone slow": https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=iphone%20slow https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=iphone%2...
  - derefr 9y ago
    That chart would seem to indicate that every release of iOS (usually in September) results in some people experiencing their phone as slow. Except, strangely, for iOS 10 last year, which had an extremely minor bump in comparison to the rest. Anyone know why? Was iOS 10 the "Snow Leopard of iOS releases", with more of a performance focus?
    - stock_toaster 9y ago
      It is my understanding (possibly mistaken?), that after a major upgrade iOS reindexes spotlight metadata. This is done in the background, but drains battery and kind of makes the device perform a bit more slowly. Same day right after an upgrade, my phone tends to be a bit pokey and the battery drains pretty quickly. Next day after an upgrade, my phone usually "feels" fine again and battery life is back to normal.
  - nulagrithom 9y ago
    I'm not sure that proves the iPhone gets slower with each update. Whenever I announce an update my users suddenly become hyper-sensitive and start reporting bugs that have been present for weeks/months. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a similar effect here.
- ghaff 9y ago
  It's been slowing down over time but my anecdotal sense is the iOS 11 caused a substantial performance hit in my iPhone 6. When this story came out, I even got the geekbench app but the benchmark is right where it should be--a little higher in fact.
m3kw9 9y ago
Is probably same for Android unless they operate at a lower voltage than the peak so no performance is degraded over a bigger, but at the expense overall lower performance.
g09980 9y ago
I wouldn't say "degrades," will confuse non-tech readers. Makes it sound like the old battery also causes the CPU to age. Something like "is intentionally reduced" may be more accurate.
jay_kyburz 9y ago
I have a question. Didn't read the article. Does the phones performance pick back up if you plug it in, regardless of the battery?
- dannyw 9y ago
  No.
- dukeflukem 9y ago
  I didn't the article but probably.
jmull 9y ago
The problem here isn’t that iOS throttles the CPU when your battery can no longer properly power the phone. (This is a really nice feature, compared to, e.g., sudden shutdown when voltage drops too low to run the CPU at normal speed.) The problem is that iOS doesn’t alert you about what’s happening. If it said something like, “Your battery needs to be replaced. Until it is, your phone will run with reduced speed.” Then you would have the information you need to make an intelligent choice. You have to suspect Apple doesn’t do this because if you don’t know what’s going on you’re likely to assume your phone is just old and needs to be replaced.
- briandear 9y ago
  It does do that.. it tells you your battery needs servicing.
  - fourthark 9y ago
    Maybe it warns when the problem gets more severe. But the problem described here is when the battery still has as much as 80% capacity. Source: I have 6s+, noticed it was slow recently, after some updates but not right after. Read about this. Got GeekBench and battery test. It tests normal when the battery is full, slower when battery is less full.
    - jmull 9y ago
      Just because it’s interesting to compare: it was worse for me. My 6 Plus (three years old) ran at 600Mhz most of the time according to CPU DasherX, fully charged or not. Normal is 1400Mhz. I replaced the battery this morning and it’s back to the normal level and is quite noticeable in real-world usage doing practically anything. (It wouldn’t surprise me if the GPU or something else in the rendering pipeline was even more affected than the CPU. There were previously long delays in things that just seem to be screen rendering. Those delays aren’t just faster now, but are completely gone.)
    - fourthark 9y ago
      FWIW I replaced my battery (at a reputable place but not Apple). Performance actually got Worse - now scoring less than half the GeekBench norm for this model. Battery life is great, though!
zaroth 9y ago
Finally the data to prove what I’ve always felt. I knew my phones were getting slower even on the same iOS versions. I always assumed flash, but suspected that there was a time-based clock slowing... lo and behold! Fucking Apple, I’ll be happy to join the coming class action!
thewayfarer 9y ago
> Under iOS 11.2.0 the effect is even more pronounced. No, the effect is exactly the same as you can see from the charts since they peak at the same benchmark scores. It is the distribution of those effects that is different, with the performance being negatively affected for more phones. But keep in mind that under iOS 11.2.0, most iPhone 6S's that are tested are probably about 2 years old. Under iOS 10.x, most iPhone 6S's probably about 1 year old. I'd like to know the distribution of the times that these Geekbench benchmarks were run. If scores for one phone model in one month are one average score under iOS (x) but is substantially lower the next month under iOS (x+1), then I would consider that to be a significant act of "planned obsolescence". But really Apple should probably be more transparent about this. And the bottom line for users is that if you notice any kind of significant performance degradation, whether it is fast battery drainage or sluggish performance, you should consider taking the phone in.
ringaroundthetx 9y ago
I had suspected that one of my iphone's RAM chips had gone bad, because the slow speed was as if it was swapping a lot when I saw the reddit post I was like GTFO
freeflight 9y ago
Still does not really explain why my 4S suffered from both after an iOS update: Reduced screen-on time and degraded performance at the same time, that was a couple of years ago tho. As a user, it's just utterly baffling how apps that used to work fine suddenly became near impossible to use, like messaging apps taking ages to type a word, the phone felt like a computer with too much bloatware running in the background, struggling with the most mundane tasks. Since that happened I've been putting off installing the iOS updates because this degradation in performance, after an iOS update, has been way too common of a theme over the years.
- k3a 9y ago
  Yes, one of the reason I switched to Android years ago (which has its own issues). But Apple makes people pay lot of money for "premium device" which has worse long-time usability than Android ones.
kbumsik 9y ago
Wow, I thought Apple did this to make people buy newer iPhone. But Apple did it not only for that but also to hide the battery issue. Well done Tim :/
lostmsu 9y ago
Has anybody sued already? That seems like a huge issue.
habosa 9y ago
Can someone explain to me why (outside of this one issue) phones get so slow over time? As a professional programmer I though I understood computers but I clearly don't. What's going on my phone that it grinds to a halt? Why does a factory reset sometimes help, but sometimes not? It can't just be that the workloads are more resource intensive. If I go get an old tablet it will take 5x as long to load google.com as the day I bought it.
- spamizbad 9y ago
  This article does a good job of explaining the main reason: To retain runtime on a degraded battery, they underclock/undervolt the hardware.. drawing less power and producing less performance. This honestly accounts for mobile device performance loss in the majority of cases and it isn't iPhone or Apple-specific. A resets might improve performance of the flash device if it frees up additional space or does something similar to an SSD "trim" event.
  - Puer 9y ago
    Pretty much. I was still using the original Galaxy S when the Galaxy S6 was the hot new toy. I was able to use it despite its archaic hardware on the latest versions of Android because I forced the CPU to always run at maximum speed instead of throttling. I couldn't get around the minimal amount of RAM that came installed with the phone, but the CPU trick helped immensely day to day.
  - habosa 9y ago
    This implies I could fix all my old phones with a new battery ... Could that possibly be true?
    - spamizbad 9y ago
      Probably. I replaced the battery in my iPhone 4S and iPhone 6 a little after a year. I did it mostly for more battery life, but I haven't noticed significant performance degradation.
- 9y ago
satyajeet23 9y ago
The point is that older batteries don't produce as much current as new ones do. So the CPU has to be speed-stepped down in order that the system doesn't brown out. Not that this will stop the conspiracy loons foaming at the mouth in their apple hate, obviously.
sliken 9y ago
Seems like everyone is forgetting the #1 failure in older phones. With today's technology phones are very power efficient, the manage a rather amazing number of circuits with different functionality. Things like CPU, GPU, display, backlight, battery monitor, accelerometer, gps, compass, bluetooth, wifi, wan, camera, NFC, microphone, dsp, light senors, proximity sensors, etc. The vast majority of those circuits are sleeping pretty much all the time. However as you get older your battery keeps up.. except those challenging times when you activate too many things. Like say nav (that runs the GPS, GPU, 3D chip, CPU, radio, compass, etc). Then the phone just turns off because there's not enough voltage. Many people complain about "crashing" phones, claiming less reliability over time. Seems like often it's just the battery that can't manage the needed number of volts under load. You can witness this when ever less intensive things crash, but they all work if you are plugged in. The sad thing is that these new top of the line smart phones could be useful for 5-10 years. Fit/finish with glass/aluminum, top spec CPU/RAM, expandable storage, etc. Sadly the epoxied battery reduces the practical life to 2-3 years. In what world would a modular/expandable phone (like has been attempted several times) decide you might want to add fancy speakers, fancy camera, 3d vision, etc. But STILL expoxy in the battery? WTF? I wish the government would stem in and just mandate that phones have user replaceable batteries to keep them from just filling the landfills after a few years.
- juanmirocks 9y ago
  This is very enlightened. As a consumer, I personally do not care so much for a modular phone, yet I do pretty much care about maintaining the same level of performance for my current device. Swappable batteries to increase performance is/could be a good selling point for modular phones.
  - romanovcode 9y ago
    EU should make a rule like that
  - brixon 9y ago
    One of the main reasons I bought the LG V20. With easy to swap batteries, I plan to replace them every year or two and maintain a good screen time.
xmpirate 9y ago
I feel the same applies to Macbook as well. I've a Macbook Pro Retina 13 inch, early 2015 at a battery cycle count of 1001. From the last few weeks, the system is terribly slow. I randomly see the fan speed going berserk. :/
- saagarjha 9y ago
  Might be something wrong with your SMC or thermal throttling going on. Either way I'd suggest resetting the SMC and if that doesn't fix it check out Activity Monitor to see what's wrong.
  - xmpirate 9y ago
    Nothing really. I did reset the SMC couple of times and also check the Activity Monitor every time the fan speed increases, but to no avail.
    - xmpirate 9y ago
      Looks like I need to replace the battery as it's near it's end of life - https://support.apple.com/en-in/HT201585 https://support.apple.com/en-in/HT201585
    - Domenic_S 9y ago
      Could be dirty. Google a cleaning guide for your model, the fans get all sorts of dusty and it causes thermal issues.
    - gnyman 9y ago
      Did you try running the hardware test? https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201257 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201257 I had a old Air which ran very slowly and fans spinning like crazy due to a issue with the cable from the keyboard/touchpad. Apparently if the SMC does not get proper signals it will go into a "failsafe" where things work but slowly. Probably not the same issue, but just a little anecdote on a similar symptoms caused by different issues so that nobody gets tunnel vision on the battery, which might very well be the cause in this case.
avian 9y ago
Nitpicking about an otherwise well written post: why show a kernel density estimate instead of a simple histogram? It can be normalized if you don’t want reveal the exact number of samples. Calculating a kernel density estimate just seems to add an unneccesary step between raw data and the visualization. It can hide some shortcomings in the data (e.g. low number of samples), but doesn’t add anything.
ComputerGuru 9y ago
I think that if iPhone performance remains degraded while plugged into an outlet, there can be no other explanation aside from planned obsolescence. I haven’t seen any benchmarks to that end, however.
andrewstuart 9y ago
If truly necessary it should be a user option.
bump-ladel 9y ago
Related: If you have a Mac, you can check the health of an iPhone battery via the Console app when the phone is connected via USB. Search for the string "BatteryHealth", logged by the phone's Springboard process.
- juanmirocks 9y ago
  Handy. It didn't log "BatteryHealth" but other Battery infos. Do I miss something? Stuff that I could see is the battery percentage, example: ``` default 08:44:30.015519 +0100 coreduetd CDDBatteryMonitor: received batterycallback, currentPercentage:94.555824! ```
- bendews 9y ago
  "Battery Life" (Free) on the AppStore is good for checking stats as well.
- xrjn 9y ago
  Coconut Battery also shows this, albeit with a graphical interface. You can install it via 'brew cask install coconutbattery'
  - hyperduc 9y ago
    You can also download it from here: https://coconut-flavour.com/downloads/coconutBattery_3.6.4.zip https://coconut-flavour.com/downloads/coconutBattery_3.6.4.z...
Nanite 9y ago
looking at https://david-smith.org/iosversionstats/ https://david-smith.org/iosversionstats/ and apparently still ±50% of currently active iPhones seem to be a 6(S)(+). Which is a LOT more than I expected. I don't see how Apple is going to ignore this one.
iampoul 9y ago
iPhone performance degrades when new iPhones hit the market. xD
jdking 9y ago
Why does this correlate so well with iOS version increments? My iPhone 6 was faultless prior to the upgrade to iOS 11, and immediately after it battery life was greatly reduced and it now shuts down automatically when the battery hits 10%. Apparently I am now supposed to accept that the battery has degraded not gradually but all at once and on the same day as I upgraded iOS, and this is now being managed for my benefit by the OS. Hmmm...
- romanovcode 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence
- barronlroth 9y ago
  In the same boat with my iPhone 6 and also curious. Day-to-night degradation after iOS 11.
- MRSallee 9y ago
  Also have an iPhone 6. I didn't plan to replace it this year until iOS 11 made it frustrating to use. My primary issue was constant Bluetooth disconnections. Now I have an Android phone. (Not especially happy about it.)
rusk 9y ago
I smell an antitrust ...
- azurelogic 9y ago
  This has nothing to do with a monopoly, so antitrust law is totally not applicable here. You might be thinking "class action lawsuit", which someone might attempt. However, if Apple can show that this is actually a mechanism to provide maximum screen time for the life of the battery (as opposed to malicious planned obsolescence), the suit would likely fail.
  - rusk 9y ago
    I mean in Europe. Class action does not apply but EU has a strong record of defending consumer rights. The clandestine nature of how apple has provided this feature would not work in their favour.
toblender 9y ago
Wow I was, wondering what the heck was happening with my Iphone 6 plus. I new it had something to do with the software update, but it makes sense now, they had to make a choice, so they limited the CPU based on battery... At least it wasn't because they are trying to force us to upgrade. I'm going to try an update the battery and see if it makes a difference.
yig 9y ago
Why isn’t this an issue with laptops as well as phones?
- azurelogic 9y ago
  It is but you see less screen time instead of degraded performance. The suggestion here is that Apple is throttling the hardware via software in order to prevent reduced screen time. Also, after 3-4 years with a laptop, you typically start to see decreased performance because of clogging of fans, degradation in the thermal paste, etc. This causes the CPU to run hotter and throttle sooner to stay inside of its thermal envelope.
hyperduc 9y ago
A friend's iPhone 6 felt slow as molasses. I downloaded cpudasher after reading the reddit thread: CPU clocked at 700MHz (vs original 1400Mhz). No wonder it feels like a turd. Where are folks buying replacement batteries? I have gone through 4-5 on eBay between fakes or used genuines, and gave up. Is there a good OEM source or are they generally off-brand? I would also replace mine if I could get my hands on one I trust.

456 points by Deinos 9y ago

Relevant recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15889519 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15889519

How do non-apple devices cope as they age ? Any word on what Nexus, Galaxy or Pixel devices of a similar vintage do? does the performance stay the same but the battery life becomes shorter?

plushpuffin 9y ago
I have a Nexus 6P and its battery is going bad. It just shuts down when it reaches 20-30%. Kind of annoying because I never know quite how much battery life I actually have remaining.
- darrylb42 9y ago
  Same here, the phone is otherwise fine. I don't really want to go to a Pixel 2XL because I like having a headphone jack.
- kilroy123 9y ago
  Same here. I have to carry around an extra battery booster. :-/
- disconnected 9y ago
  I have a similar situation. My Android (1st Gen Moto G, running Lineage OS, about 3 years old) shuts down once the battery level hits 15%. You can actually see it change from 15% to 1% for one brief moment before it shuts down. Sure, the battery is old, but this behavior is unlike the behavior of any other OS/device I've seen. I've seen some laptops with seriously messed up batteries and as far as I can remember, the OS reports a smooth discharge profile without steep drops and without and strange "surprises". I think Android is probably not taking battery health into account when it reports remaining capacity, but that is only a guess.
  - kalleboo 9y ago
    My old MacBook Pro battery got so bad that it would jump down and back up 20% randomly.
  - k3a 9y ago
    Can't it be a problem with the fuel gauge inacurately measuring the battery capacity? I have seen it only on one "cheap" Android device and I have been using Androids for a long time. Anyway, easily removable batteries are the way to go.
- wstrange 9y ago
  I replaced the battery on my 6P, and it's like a new phone. It is a bit tricky, but well worth it.
- katastic 9y ago
  That's really strange. Because most/all modern systems build statistics about your battery as it charges and drains, to predict the life left. Without those statistics they'd have no idea how long it will last because it changes over the life of the battery. In Linux you can even see pretty graphs showing "confidence" for each percentage of battery vs "how confident" Linux is of remaining power. https://www.makeuseof.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/power_statistics_laptop_battery_history.jpg https://www.makeuseof.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/power_s... My Samsung Android phone shuts down at 5-7% battery life. And the battery dies much faster these days. But it's never "inaccurate." It doesn't jump from 50% to 2% over a course of five minutes. Other than something else being wrong with your OS, my only guess there would be the battery got bad so quickly the OS hasn't adapted to the new life cycle yet by removing enough of the old datapoints.
- praneshp 9y ago
  Effectively the same, but it just quickly degrades from 60-0 for me (like 20 mins of just reddit/hn). 100-60 is still decent.
bjackman 9y ago
I worked on Android power perf (frequency scaling in particular) for the last 18 months and I'm not aware of any linkage with the battery state, except for the Battery Saver mode. So yeah same perf, just shorter life. There could be something in vendor Android builds I don't know about, but it isn't there in AOSP and almost certainly isn't in Pixel/Nexus.
- londons_explore 9y ago
  I vaguely remember the dram and camera clock rates being reduced when the battery SoC went under 40% in the nexus 5, and then when users complained of early shutdowns when using the camera with HDR mode, an update changed it to 60%. I think I even commented on the bugreport that it would be best to do the frequency scaling based on interrupts from the voltage regulators on board, but that piping all the necessary drivers/events to do that with low enough latency to not cause an under-voltage reset was far more work than was feasible. Thats also why 60fps video dropped frames at the start of the video if you were recording video with less than 60% battery. Anyone care to dig out the relevant commit...?
izacus 9y ago
Most Android devices have rather severe issues with flash degradation (due to use of cheaper chips, controllers and connection... cheap MMC controllers are still very standard) which makes them practically unusable after a few years.
- copperx 9y ago
  Is this true for flagship Android devices too?
  - izacus 9y ago
    Depends really, a lot of them nowdays use better flash controllers and technology (e.g. UFS) but only time can tell how they cope with aging. Pixels seem to be doing quite well.
- ams6110 9y ago
  I've owned two low cost Moto G phones and never had this issue.
- endorphone 9y ago
  Most? Absolute nonsense. The Nexus 7 have a small issue that was resolved when Google added TRIM support for Android. That was years ago. I have a long history with almost every Android device. The device doesn't get slower, the battery life just gets terrible.
  - plaguuuuuu 9y ago
    My Nexus 6P's performance has degraded considerably over the past couple of years. It's actually quite laggy now. A few of my friends report the same with their 6Ps. To be fair I haven't tried factory resetting it in a while, although I shouldn't need to do that in the first place..
  - izacus 9y ago
    The 2012 Nexus 7 is an outlier because it has especially bad flash controller - by 2015 most of the devices were unusable due to degraded flash. TRIM helped very little. Other devices suffer from similar effects - not as bad, but most devices certanly lose quite a bit of I/O performance (especially writes) over time which makes OS run noticably slower.
slg 9y ago
Electric cars have fundamentally the same problem and Tesla decided to attack it by hiding some of the battery's capacity when the car is new. While the car might report to the user it is 100% full, it might only be actually 90% full. The battery can therefore lose a decent percent of its capacity before the user will ever notice the difference. This decision was made because cars obviously have a longer ownership cycle than phones and a drastic drop in range as a car ages is a huge flaw. But I do wonder if any phone companies might start to rethink this decision now that we are seeing some people use the same smartphone for 3-5 years.
- tormeh 9y ago
  Li-ion batteries also last longer when kept between 30% and 90%. Several car manufacturers don't let you completely charge or expend your battery for this reason.
  - greglindahl 9y ago
    Tesla, for example, encourages owners to not charge beyond 90%, and refuses you let you drive below some number, which is around 20%, that it hides from the driver.
  - UncleEntity 9y ago
    I wonder how much driving style effects that too, racing around vs Driving Ms. Daisy?
    - bri3d 9y ago
      Discharging lithium batteries at a high C rate (C = Instantaneous Draw / Capacity) causes a different form of degraded life than storage at a high state of charge. And the major killer of lithium batteries is heat, which Tesla are known to manage well. The biggest killer, though, is storage with the graphite electrode more than 50% lithiated - there is a gigantic step-up in capacity fade when batteries are stored with the State of Charge over around 90%, which Tesla are very smart to avoid. http://jes.ecsdl.org/content/163/9/A1872.full http://jes.ecsdl.org/content/163/9/A1872.full
aequitas 9y ago
I had a Nexus 5 before which I replaced of about 2 years after buying it. Can definitely say performance improved after that (for a short while though as it was a cheap ebay battery).
meebs 9y ago
Nexus 6P the phone will die randomly at random percentages. Sometimes you can turn it back on hours later and it'll last thirty minutes. Sometimes you have to "charge" it a little bit first. This issue happens at all percentages and I've had it for over 8 months now.

leeoniya 9y ago

> This will likely feed into the “planned obsolescence” narrative. well, non-replaceable battery and all...

Retric 9y ago
You can replace the batteries at both Apple stores and independent retailers. https://www.cnet.com/how-to/iphone-battery-replacement-diy-or-hire-a-pro/ https://www.cnet.com/how-to/iphone-battery-replacement-diy-o... The issue IMO, is it's not obvious that the battery needs to be replaced and when. It's not holding charge > new battery is far more obvious than it's slow > new battery. Most people probably prefer a slow phone than one without charge however Apple should have some indication of what's going on.
- oceanghost 9y ago
  You really can't though. I had a phone with an awful battery-- it would shut off around 25% randomly. I brought it into Apple 3 times, it even had apple care-- and because the f*ing diagnostic suite identified the battery as good, they wouldn't replace it. They wouldn't even LET ME PAY FOR THE REPAIR.
  - fleitz 9y ago
    Smash your phone, pay for a new phone under apple care. Voila.
  - suryamp 9y ago
    > LET ME PAY FOR THE REPAIR. Then you would know that it is totally their fault and the liability would be on Apple to fix other people's devices.
  - schrodinger 9y ago
    Same here. I went to a 3rd party place and they replaced it cheaper anyway, with no problems.
  - riahi 9y ago

Someone1234 9y ago

I feel like more transparency would have been welcomed, but aside from that this is a "no win" situation, since you have to pick a winner: - Do you degrade performance but leave screen-on time relatively unchanged? - Do you degrade screen-on time but leave performance relatively unchanged? Most Android devices seem to do the opposite (lose screen-on time, but keep performance relatively unchanged). Different people will have a different perspective on what the "right" strategy is for this, but I think we can all agree that better transparency and maybe even leaving it to the consumer to make the choice would be welcome. PS - "Planned obsolescence" only applies if Apple was doing this artificially. It seems like if they didn't degrade performance you'd lose screen-on time instead, so you'd still likely replace the handset and perhaps even sooner (since core services e.g. calling, texting, etc, work even with lower performance but not on a phone out of juice).

EGreg 9y ago
With Apple being Apple, I think they can do it in an Apple way and degrade screen-on time for performance, switching it to favor battery whenever you turn on the "Low Power Mode" setting. Simple binary decision in the user's hands. I would also put "Conserve Battery" in the control center.
- conradev 9y ago
  You can put Low Power Mode in Control Center on iOS 11
- derefr 9y ago
  This is already a (separate) thing, though. When battery life drops to 20% (and then again at 10%), iOS devices suggest that you enable "Low Power Mode." In effect, right now, on old devices, Low Power Mode is always either fully-enabled, or half-enabled, but never fully-disabled. All they'd have to do is to change it from a binary switch (between enabled and {disabled, secretly half-enabled}) to a three-level switch.
asdjasldkjkljd 9y ago
Allow the user to decide because there's no right answer.

maltalex 9y ago

This screams "planned obsolescence". If battery scaling is a feature, then why isn't it mentioned by Apple? Why do we need a Reddit thread and a third party benchmarking tool to figure it out? Also, why does the google search for "iphone slow" peak every time a new iPhone is released (https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=iphone%20slow https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=iphone%2...)? Is it purely psychological? I can't find there are no similar spikes for "android slow" or "samsung slow" or similar searches.

Bud 9y ago
No, it screams "planned and careful shepherding of user experience".
- pishpash 9y ago
  Shepherding literally meaning "sheep herding"?
macintux 9y ago
When was the last time a new Android phone was the subject of interest to half a billion people? Apple's regular but infrequent release cycle for new phones (and corresponding new version of iOS) lends itself to a cyclical search pattern as well.

mromanuk 9y ago

I have an iPhone 7. Run a test "Antutu benchmark" (The phone was connected to power) and it got "127823", according to their ranking, it should have "160864". 20% less. I would like to know, if this is the case or just coincidence.

efrafa 9y ago
I have iPhone 7 as well (almost year old) and got 156,473

geff82 9y ago

Interesting that the battery aged extremely fast when iOS 11 got installed and took the performance down to the „really unpleasant“ level.

maltalex 9y ago
It's not just you. Take a look at the google trends data for "iphone slow": https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=iphone%20slow https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=iphone%2...
- derefr 9y ago
  That chart would seem to indicate that every release of iOS (usually in September) results in some people experiencing their phone as slow. Except, strangely, for iOS 10 last year, which had an extremely minor bump in comparison to the rest. Anyone know why? Was iOS 10 the "Snow Leopard of iOS releases", with more of a performance focus?
  - stock_toaster 9y ago
    It is my understanding (possibly mistaken?), that after a major upgrade iOS reindexes spotlight metadata. This is done in the background, but drains battery and kind of makes the device perform a bit more slowly. Same day right after an upgrade, my phone tends to be a bit pokey and the battery drains pretty quickly. Next day after an upgrade, my phone usually "feels" fine again and battery life is back to normal.
- nulagrithom 9y ago
  I'm not sure that proves the iPhone gets slower with each update. Whenever I announce an update my users suddenly become hyper-sensitive and start reporting bugs that have been present for weeks/months. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a similar effect here.
ghaff 9y ago
It's been slowing down over time but my anecdotal sense is the iOS 11 caused a substantial performance hit in my iPhone 6. When this story came out, I even got the geekbench app but the benchmark is right where it should be--a little higher in fact.

m3kw9 9y ago

Is probably same for Android unless they operate at a lower voltage than the peak so no performance is degraded over a bigger, but at the expense overall lower performance.

g09980 9y ago

I wouldn't say "degrades," will confuse non-tech readers. Makes it sound like the old battery also causes the CPU to age. Something like "is intentionally reduced" may be more accurate.

jay_kyburz 9y ago

I have a question. Didn't read the article. Does the phones performance pick back up if you plug it in, regardless of the battery?

dannyw 9y ago
No.
dukeflukem 9y ago
I didn't the article but probably.

jmull 9y ago

The problem here isn’t that iOS throttles the CPU when your battery can no longer properly power the phone. (This is a really nice feature, compared to, e.g., sudden shutdown when voltage drops too low to run the CPU at normal speed.) The problem is that iOS doesn’t alert you about what’s happening. If it said something like, “Your battery needs to be replaced. Until it is, your phone will run with reduced speed.” Then you would have the information you need to make an intelligent choice. You have to suspect Apple doesn’t do this because if you don’t know what’s going on you’re likely to assume your phone is just old and needs to be replaced.

briandear 9y ago
It does do that.. it tells you your battery needs servicing.
- fourthark 9y ago
  Maybe it warns when the problem gets more severe. But the problem described here is when the battery still has as much as 80% capacity. Source: I have 6s+, noticed it was slow recently, after some updates but not right after. Read about this. Got GeekBench and battery test. It tests normal when the battery is full, slower when battery is less full.
  - jmull 9y ago
    Just because it’s interesting to compare: it was worse for me. My 6 Plus (three years old) ran at 600Mhz most of the time according to CPU DasherX, fully charged or not. Normal is 1400Mhz. I replaced the battery this morning and it’s back to the normal level and is quite noticeable in real-world usage doing practically anything. (It wouldn’t surprise me if the GPU or something else in the rendering pipeline was even more affected than the CPU. There were previously long delays in things that just seem to be screen rendering. Those delays aren’t just faster now, but are completely gone.)
  - fourthark 9y ago
    FWIW I replaced my battery (at a reputable place but not Apple). Performance actually got Worse - now scoring less than half the GeekBench norm for this model. Battery life is great, though!

zaroth 9y ago

Finally the data to prove what I’ve always felt. I knew my phones were getting slower even on the same iOS versions. I always assumed flash, but suspected that there was a time-based clock slowing... lo and behold! Fucking Apple, I’ll be happy to join the coming class action!

thewayfarer 9y ago

> Under iOS 11.2.0 the effect is even more pronounced. No, the effect is exactly the same as you can see from the charts since they peak at the same benchmark scores. It is the distribution of those effects that is different, with the performance being negatively affected for more phones. But keep in mind that under iOS 11.2.0, most iPhone 6S's that are tested are probably about 2 years old. Under iOS 10.x, most iPhone 6S's probably about 1 year old. I'd like to know the distribution of the times that these Geekbench benchmarks were run. If scores for one phone model in one month are one average score under iOS (x) but is substantially lower the next month under iOS (x+1), then I would consider that to be a significant act of "planned obsolescence". But really Apple should probably be more transparent about this. And the bottom line for users is that if you notice any kind of significant performance degradation, whether it is fast battery drainage or sluggish performance, you should consider taking the phone in.

ringaroundthetx 9y ago

I had suspected that one of my iphone's RAM chips had gone bad, because the slow speed was as if it was swapping a lot when I saw the reddit post I was like GTFO

freeflight 9y ago

Still does not really explain why my 4S suffered from both after an iOS update: Reduced screen-on time and degraded performance at the same time, that was a couple of years ago tho. As a user, it's just utterly baffling how apps that used to work fine suddenly became near impossible to use, like messaging apps taking ages to type a word, the phone felt like a computer with too much bloatware running in the background, struggling with the most mundane tasks. Since that happened I've been putting off installing the iOS updates because this degradation in performance, after an iOS update, has been way too common of a theme over the years.

k3a 9y ago
Yes, one of the reason I switched to Android years ago (which has its own issues). But Apple makes people pay lot of money for "premium device" which has worse long-time usability than Android ones.

kbumsik 9y ago

Wow, I thought Apple did this to make people buy newer iPhone. But Apple did it not only for that but also to hide the battery issue. Well done Tim :/

lostmsu 9y ago

Has anybody sued already? That seems like a huge issue.

habosa 9y ago

Can someone explain to me why (outside of this one issue) phones get so slow over time? As a professional programmer I though I understood computers but I clearly don't. What's going on my phone that it grinds to a halt? Why does a factory reset sometimes help, but sometimes not? It can't just be that the workloads are more resource intensive. If I go get an old tablet it will take 5x as long to load google.com as the day I bought it.

spamizbad 9y ago
This article does a good job of explaining the main reason: To retain runtime on a degraded battery, they underclock/undervolt the hardware.. drawing less power and producing less performance. This honestly accounts for mobile device performance loss in the majority of cases and it isn't iPhone or Apple-specific. A resets might improve performance of the flash device if it frees up additional space or does something similar to an SSD "trim" event.
- Puer 9y ago
  Pretty much. I was still using the original Galaxy S when the Galaxy S6 was the hot new toy. I was able to use it despite its archaic hardware on the latest versions of Android because I forced the CPU to always run at maximum speed instead of throttling. I couldn't get around the minimal amount of RAM that came installed with the phone, but the CPU trick helped immensely day to day.
- habosa 9y ago
  This implies I could fix all my old phones with a new battery ... Could that possibly be true?
  - spamizbad 9y ago
    Probably. I replaced the battery in my iPhone 4S and iPhone 6 a little after a year. I did it mostly for more battery life, but I haven't noticed significant performance degradation.
9y ago

satyajeet23 9y ago

The point is that older batteries don't produce as much current as new ones do. So the CPU has to be speed-stepped down in order that the system doesn't brown out. Not that this will stop the conspiracy loons foaming at the mouth in their apple hate, obviously.

sliken 9y ago

Seems like everyone is forgetting the #1 failure in older phones. With today's technology phones are very power efficient, the manage a rather amazing number of circuits with different functionality. Things like CPU, GPU, display, backlight, battery monitor, accelerometer, gps, compass, bluetooth, wifi, wan, camera, NFC, microphone, dsp, light senors, proximity sensors, etc. The vast majority of those circuits are sleeping pretty much all the time. However as you get older your battery keeps up.. except those challenging times when you activate too many things. Like say nav (that runs the GPS, GPU, 3D chip, CPU, radio, compass, etc). Then the phone just turns off because there's not enough voltage. Many people complain about "crashing" phones, claiming less reliability over time. Seems like often it's just the battery that can't manage the needed number of volts under load. You can witness this when ever less intensive things crash, but they all work if you are plugged in. The sad thing is that these new top of the line smart phones could be useful for 5-10 years. Fit/finish with glass/aluminum, top spec CPU/RAM, expandable storage, etc. Sadly the epoxied battery reduces the practical life to 2-3 years. In what world would a modular/expandable phone (like has been attempted several times) decide you might want to add fancy speakers, fancy camera, 3d vision, etc. But STILL expoxy in the battery? WTF? I wish the government would stem in and just mandate that phones have user replaceable batteries to keep them from just filling the landfills after a few years.

juanmirocks 9y ago
This is very enlightened. As a consumer, I personally do not care so much for a modular phone, yet I do pretty much care about maintaining the same level of performance for my current device. Swappable batteries to increase performance is/could be a good selling point for modular phones.
- romanovcode 9y ago
  EU should make a rule like that
- brixon 9y ago
  One of the main reasons I bought the LG V20. With easy to swap batteries, I plan to replace them every year or two and maintain a good screen time.

xmpirate 9y ago

I feel the same applies to Macbook as well. I've a Macbook Pro Retina 13 inch, early 2015 at a battery cycle count of 1001. From the last few weeks, the system is terribly slow. I randomly see the fan speed going berserk. :/

saagarjha 9y ago
Might be something wrong with your SMC or thermal throttling going on. Either way I'd suggest resetting the SMC and if that doesn't fix it check out Activity Monitor to see what's wrong.
- xmpirate 9y ago
  Nothing really. I did reset the SMC couple of times and also check the Activity Monitor every time the fan speed increases, but to no avail.
  - xmpirate 9y ago
    Looks like I need to replace the battery as it's near it's end of life - https://support.apple.com/en-in/HT201585 https://support.apple.com/en-in/HT201585
  - Domenic_S 9y ago
    Could be dirty. Google a cleaning guide for your model, the fans get all sorts of dusty and it causes thermal issues.
  - gnyman 9y ago
    Did you try running the hardware test? https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201257 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201257 I had a old Air which ran very slowly and fans spinning like crazy due to a issue with the cable from the keyboard/touchpad. Apparently if the SMC does not get proper signals it will go into a "failsafe" where things work but slowly. Probably not the same issue, but just a little anecdote on a similar symptoms caused by different issues so that nobody gets tunnel vision on the battery, which might very well be the cause in this case.

avian 9y ago

Nitpicking about an otherwise well written post: why show a kernel density estimate instead of a simple histogram? It can be normalized if you don’t want reveal the exact number of samples. Calculating a kernel density estimate just seems to add an unneccesary step between raw data and the visualization. It can hide some shortcomings in the data (e.g. low number of samples), but doesn’t add anything.

ComputerGuru 9y ago

I think that if iPhone performance remains degraded while plugged into an outlet, there can be no other explanation aside from planned obsolescence. I haven’t seen any benchmarks to that end, however.

andrewstuart 9y ago

If truly necessary it should be a user option.

bump-ladel 9y ago

Related: If you have a Mac, you can check the health of an iPhone battery via the Console app when the phone is connected via USB. Search for the string "BatteryHealth", logged by the phone's Springboard process.

juanmirocks 9y ago
Handy. It didn't log "BatteryHealth" but other Battery infos. Do I miss something? Stuff that I could see is the battery percentage, example: ``` default 08:44:30.015519 +0100 coreduetd CDDBatteryMonitor: received batterycallback, currentPercentage:94.555824! ```
bendews 9y ago
"Battery Life" (Free) on the AppStore is good for checking stats as well.
xrjn 9y ago
Coconut Battery also shows this, albeit with a graphical interface. You can install it via 'brew cask install coconutbattery'
- hyperduc 9y ago
  You can also download it from here: https://coconut-flavour.com/downloads/coconutBattery_3.6.4.zip https://coconut-flavour.com/downloads/coconutBattery_3.6.4.z...

Nanite 9y ago

looking at https://david-smith.org/iosversionstats/ https://david-smith.org/iosversionstats/ and apparently still ±50% of currently active iPhones seem to be a 6(S)(+). Which is a LOT more than I expected. I don't see how Apple is going to ignore this one.

iampoul 9y ago

iPhone performance degrades when new iPhones hit the market. xD

jdking 9y ago

Why does this correlate so well with iOS version increments? My iPhone 6 was faultless prior to the upgrade to iOS 11, and immediately after it battery life was greatly reduced and it now shuts down automatically when the battery hits 10%. Apparently I am now supposed to accept that the battery has degraded not gradually but all at once and on the same day as I upgraded iOS, and this is now being managed for my benefit by the OS. Hmmm...

romanovcode 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence
barronlroth 9y ago
In the same boat with my iPhone 6 and also curious. Day-to-night degradation after iOS 11.
MRSallee 9y ago
Also have an iPhone 6. I didn't plan to replace it this year until iOS 11 made it frustrating to use. My primary issue was constant Bluetooth disconnections. Now I have an Android phone. (Not especially happy about it.)

rusk 9y ago

I smell an antitrust ...

azurelogic 9y ago
This has nothing to do with a monopoly, so antitrust law is totally not applicable here. You might be thinking "class action lawsuit", which someone might attempt. However, if Apple can show that this is actually a mechanism to provide maximum screen time for the life of the battery (as opposed to malicious planned obsolescence), the suit would likely fail.
- rusk 9y ago
  I mean in Europe. Class action does not apply but EU has a strong record of defending consumer rights. The clandestine nature of how apple has provided this feature would not work in their favour.

toblender 9y ago

Wow I was, wondering what the heck was happening with my Iphone 6 plus. I new it had something to do with the software update, but it makes sense now, they had to make a choice, so they limited the CPU based on battery... At least it wasn't because they are trying to force us to upgrade. I'm going to try an update the battery and see if it makes a difference.

yig 9y ago

Why isn’t this an issue with laptops as well as phones?

azurelogic 9y ago
It is but you see less screen time instead of degraded performance. The suggestion here is that Apple is throttling the hardware via software in order to prevent reduced screen time. Also, after 3-4 years with a laptop, you typically start to see decreased performance because of clogging of fans, degradation in the thermal paste, etc. This causes the CPU to run hotter and throttle sooner to stay inside of its thermal envelope.

hyperduc 9y ago

A friend's iPhone 6 felt slow as molasses. I downloaded cpudasher after reading the reddit thread: CPU clocked at 700MHz (vs original 1400Mhz). No wonder it feels like a turd. Where are folks buying replacement batteries? I have gone through 4-5 on eBay between fakes or used genuines, and gave up. Is there a good OEM source or are they generally off-brand? I would also replace mine if I could get my hands on one I trust.