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Nothing you've expressed is an effective counterclaim to the assertion that Apple chose a more deceptive route to dealing with the inevitable degradation of bat

Nothing you've expressed is an effective counterclaim to the assertion that Apple chose a more deceptive route to dealing with the inevitable degradation of batteries in its devices. On balance, the expected behavior for an aging phone is to suffer from decreased battery life as total battery cycles increase. Apple instead has chosen to decrease system performance to hide diminished battery life, and failed to disclose this. This kind of behavior wouldn't be tolerated in other market segments. Can you imagine the public backlash against an auto manufacturer that shipped a vehicle which intentionally decreased performance as its fuel tank drained in order to boost their 'maximum range' metric, but never disclosed this 'feature' to the public?

tbrock 9y ago
For people familiar with electronics yes. Most people don’t understand this and think the phone is a cheap piece of crap if the battery starts dying early.
- sithadmin 9y ago
  >For people familiar with electronics yes. Familiarity with electronics doesn't matter. We can't allow vendors to simply simply cover up what are normal behaviors from components given typical operating conditions.
  - jodrellblank 9y ago
    Yeah we can, that's how vendors make products better than the sum of their components. Nobody wants a DVD player which throws up an error and stops playing if the disk is scratched, compared to retrying then skipping on a few frames. Nobody wants a streaming video which stops playing if there's temporary bandwidth problems instead of pixelating briefly and coming back. Nobody wants ECC memory or hard disk error correction or parity bits removed and corrupt data to become more common because it's "normal behaviour". Nobody wants fanless video cards that overheat and break permanently instead of slowing down a bit and staying working. People do want run-flat tyres because they'd rather keep going instead of getting normal behaviour of hitting something sharp. People do want sat nav which recalculates the route in the case of "typical operating conditions" of making a wrong turn, covering up the normal behaviour of "giving bad directions from then on" with much more useful behaviour of "giving good directions".
    - tbrock 9y ago
      Spot on! Thank you. The companies that make electronics “softer” usually provide a better experience to users. Yes it would be great if everyone went to Shenzhen and made their own iPhone from scratch but I’d much rather Apple handle the details for me and my parents and grandparents... I’m the only one that would be slightly entertained by the harsh realities of batteries being used under duress.
    - pishpash 9y ago
      With the exception of DVD and hard disk bad sector error correction, none of your examples are relevant because they are temporary conditions that are reversible. With persistent media failures there is an issue of data at stake, and replacement would cause data loss, so the next best action is to recover as much as possible. It's already in failure mode. In all of these cases graceful recovery is appropriate because there is no other alternative. Apple does have an alternative. The battery issue is neither irreversible nor has any permanent ramifications to the remedy of just replacing the f-ing battery. In fact I have no problem with graceful degradation as a stopgap. Explicit Power Saving modes already do that. But the issue at hand is completely orthogonal and has to do with why Apple refuses to, at the same time as undervolting, also signal to the user the one sane action to take, which is to obtain a battery replacement. By not signaling such and misdirecting (whether intentional or not), they are passive-aggressively telling the user to replace the entire phone. How else would a typical user interpret this situation? In what way could they know the appropriate action to take from observation? You think a company that prides itself on every meticulous detail of the UX just "missed" this?
- c0smic 9y ago
  I highly doubt this, devices with batteries are near ubiquitous in many places and have been for decades now. "Electronics" knowledge or not, people have used batteries and will have noticed that over time its life goes down.
jodrellblank 9y ago
Are you sure they don't do that? https://www.quora.com/Why-does-my-car-feel-more-powerful-after-I-fill-up-the-gas-tank https://www.quora.com/Why-does-my-car-feel-more-powerful-aft... A couple of people there speculate that's what happens to them. I doubt there would be much backlash - stranding a driver with an empty tank is about the worst thing that could happen short of a breakdown. "Yes of course we do everything we can to help you get to a fuel stop"

tbrock 9y ago

For people familiar with electronics yes. Most people don’t understand this and think the phone is a cheap piece of crap if the battery starts dying early.

sithadmin 9y ago
>For people familiar with electronics yes. Familiarity with electronics doesn't matter. We can't allow vendors to simply simply cover up what are normal behaviors from components given typical operating conditions.
- jodrellblank 9y ago
  Yeah we can, that's how vendors make products better than the sum of their components. Nobody wants a DVD player which throws up an error and stops playing if the disk is scratched, compared to retrying then skipping on a few frames. Nobody wants a streaming video which stops playing if there's temporary bandwidth problems instead of pixelating briefly and coming back. Nobody wants ECC memory or hard disk error correction or parity bits removed and corrupt data to become more common because it's "normal behaviour". Nobody wants fanless video cards that overheat and break permanently instead of slowing down a bit and staying working. People do want run-flat tyres because they'd rather keep going instead of getting normal behaviour of hitting something sharp. People do want sat nav which recalculates the route in the case of "typical operating conditions" of making a wrong turn, covering up the normal behaviour of "giving bad directions from then on" with much more useful behaviour of "giving good directions".
  - tbrock 9y ago
    Spot on! Thank you. The companies that make electronics “softer” usually provide a better experience to users. Yes it would be great if everyone went to Shenzhen and made their own iPhone from scratch but I’d much rather Apple handle the details for me and my parents and grandparents... I’m the only one that would be slightly entertained by the harsh realities of batteries being used under duress.
  - pishpash 9y ago
    With the exception of DVD and hard disk bad sector error correction, none of your examples are relevant because they are temporary conditions that are reversible. With persistent media failures there is an issue of data at stake, and replacement would cause data loss, so the next best action is to recover as much as possible. It's already in failure mode. In all of these cases graceful recovery is appropriate because there is no other alternative. Apple does have an alternative. The battery issue is neither irreversible nor has any permanent ramifications to the remedy of just replacing the f-ing battery. In fact I have no problem with graceful degradation as a stopgap. Explicit Power Saving modes already do that. But the issue at hand is completely orthogonal and has to do with why Apple refuses to, at the same time as undervolting, also signal to the user the one sane action to take, which is to obtain a battery replacement. By not signaling such and misdirecting (whether intentional or not), they are passive-aggressively telling the user to replace the entire phone. How else would a typical user interpret this situation? In what way could they know the appropriate action to take from observation? You think a company that prides itself on every meticulous detail of the UX just "missed" this?
c0smic 9y ago
I highly doubt this, devices with batteries are near ubiquitous in many places and have been for decades now. "Electronics" knowledge or not, people have used batteries and will have noticed that over time its life goes down.

jodrellblank 9y ago

Are you sure they don't do that? https://www.quora.com/Why-does-my-car-feel-more-powerful-after-I-fill-up-the-gas-tank https://www.quora.com/Why-does-my-car-feel-more-powerful-aft... A couple of people there speculate that's what happens to them. I doubt there would be much backlash - stranding a driver with an empty tank is about the worst thing that could happen short of a breakdown. "Yes of course we do everything we can to help you get to a fuel stop"