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Apple addresses people saying their iPhones with older batteries are “slower”
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- lnanek2 9y agoWow, I thought the article was going to say it doesn't actually happen. But it flat out stated they do slow down the phone intentionally when the battery is old. This is to avoid a forced shutoff issue, so is arguably the preferred behavior, but it is also does indeed happen.
- tspike 9y agoYeah. Not just iPhones either. After reading the original article, I replaced the battery in my 2012 MBA. Runs like a new machine.
- jtokoph 9y agoWas it still slow when plugged into the wall? And did the system say your battery was still in the “heathy” range? I was seeing odd slow downs of my MBP and didn’t think of this.
- tspike 9y agoYeah, I was getting the "Service battery" message. Didn't matter if plugged in (always was because it would die within half an hour), still slow.
- walterbell 9y agoWhy would Apple need to slow the system when AC power is available? Are battery-free systems (e.g. Mac Mini) throttled by using some other proxy for system age?
- collyw 9y agoExactly what I was thinking. Sounds like placebo effect to me....
- exhilaration 9y agoWhere did you get it replaced? My "Late 2013" MBP is feeling kinda sluggish, I hadn't considered the battery which still appears to doing fine.
- tspike 9y agoIt's out of warranty so I just swapped it myself. There are kits on Amazon for $70 that include the special screwdrivers. Super easy.
- LeifCarrotson 9y ago> This will not affect the average performance of your device and it is emphatically not throttling, it’s capping the peak demands and not allowing them to be as high... I'd be interested to know what this writer thinks throttling is. Part of the problem is that Apple wants to market their devices as quality, long-lasting, and also sleek objects, but can't really do so as effectively if they admit that one of the internal components wears out and needs to be replaced periodically.
- s0rce 9y agoI'm not sure high quality, long-lasting and sleek objects are incompatible with periodic maintenance and replacement of parts. Lots of people drive high-end cars (BMW, Mercedes, etc.) and consider the cost and effort of replacing parts for maintenance part of ownership. We are all used to this. We have been convinced with consumer electronics that we just need to replace the item but really they would be longer lasting if they simply facilitated battery replacement easily and not try to hide the fact. Just report that after N recharge cycles you need to replace, just like my timing belt after 100k miles.
- mikeash 9y agoBattery replacement is pretty easy. Walk into your Apple store, ask for a battery replacement, and fork over $79. Or find a third party who will do it cheaper, or buy the part and tools and do it yourself.
- LeifCarrotson 9y agoIt could be a $10 operation you could do while walking, as on many older phones. But marketing studies indicate people initially like the look and feel of glued-up phones, and shortsighted capitalism is winning out in part because consumers have little choice and they are uninformed about the long-term consequences, like iOS throttling based on battery health.
- mikeash 9y ago
- binarysaurus 9y agoThis is one of many reasons why I think phones should have easily replaceable batteries. I'm on my second Note 4 since launch and couldn't be much happier.
- adjkant 9y agoThe problem with easy replace is what a lot of old phones had - a drop and the battery comes flying out too. Obviously, this has gotten a lot better since then, but I think there is an advantage in design for daily use for not having batteries being easily accessible to the end user. What Apple should offer is easy battery replacement for a price that isn't marked up significantly like the rest of their products, and treat it like a free maintenance plus the cost of the replacement part.
- s0rce 9y agoWhile having it externally accessible for trivial swapping is nice, the obvious downside is that it can come out inadvertently. A compromise where it is behind a screwed down panel and held in place with a connect (not soldered). This would mean easy replacement either by either by the end user, an authorized repair shop or apple. I don't really see this as any different than routine maintenance and replacement of car parts. If Apple charged 5x battery replacement costs compared to other phone vendors then this might cost them marketshare, however, people still buy fancy cars where parts are much more expensive.
- mikeash 9y agoThis is what Apple does. They'll replace your battery for $79. Third parties will do it for a bit less. Doing it yourself requires a weird screwdriver and some other tools, but isn't terribly hard, and you can get a kit with a new battery and all the required tools for $25.
- ceejayoz 9y agoI'd imagine another concern is waterproofing - Apple and other phone vendors have made major steps in this regard over the last few years.
- 8bitben 9y agoApple probably needs to address the wider misconception that electronics "don't age" just by nature. Batteries, thermal compounds, metal bodies, glass, all are worn by regular usage and consumers ought not to expect them to be perfect 3 years after purchase. While counterintuitive, these changes are decidedly in the interest of the end user.
- collyw 9y agoIs there anything hardware wise that should affect a plugged in laptops performance? Bodies and glass are pretty obviously going to deteriorate and a lot of that will be about how you care for your machine as well as build quality but they shouldn't affect performance. Thermal compound? I have no idea if that will affect performance under "normal" use.
- michaelmrose 9y agoSwapping out a battery ought to be a 30 second operation. Everything else on a thousand dollar device ought to last 10 years unless the user drops it.
- 1_2__4 9y agoStop carrying water for multi billion corporations, and stop thinking consumers are frightened children who can be fooled with simple explanations.
- freehunter 9y agoI do wish there was a way for modern devices to let users know when they're "thinking" about something. Back in the day you could look at the disk access light. If it was blinking quick, your computer is slow because something is taking time reading from the disk. If it's solidly on, the entire system may be hung and it's probably quicker to just reboot and try again. Even with my old iPod Mini, if it was running slow I could put it up to my ear and hear if the hard drive was cranking away. My desktop has an SSD, but if the fans kick on slightly higher, it's probably chewing on something and it might come back, just give it a sec. But with a phone? With modern fanless laptops? There's no indicator that the system is working or if it's straight up hung and you'll need to reboot. And oftentimes for the sake of user friendliness, they just say "please wait" or have a spinning icon instead of saying what they're doing and showing a progress bar. Troubleshooting has gotten a lot harder as devices get faster and smarter.
- MekaiGS 9y agoIf Apple knows the battery is getting to the point where this is happening, shouldn't they just let the user know it's probably time get their battery replaced and throttle? Wouldn't this kind of make everyone happy? This seems no brainer to me.
- MBCook 9y agoApple probably knows how often this happens. Perhaps enough users just buy new phones it’s not that common (as a percentage of phones in use). That said can you imagine the furor if Apple just started popping up a dialog essentially saying ‘Pay us $130 or we’re going to cripple your phone’? The press would have a field day. It would perfectly fit the ‘Apple breaks your phone’ narrative. I mean they fixed the ‘my phone randomly restarts when it has plenty of battery left’ and now they’re in trouble for this. They can’t win.
- mikeash 9y agoThey could win by anticipating battery degradation and designing the electronics to draw no more power than a reasonably aged battery can supply.
- pwinnski 9y agoThey did that using something they call 'powerd' and that's exactly what the current kerfuffle is about. Unless you're saying all phones should be constrained to only use the power a two-year-old battery can supply?
- mikeash 9y agoYes, that second one. Size the battery and the electronics so that when everything is operating at 100%, it doesn't pull so much power that it would shut down on a reasonably degraded battery. Personally I'd like to see this done by keeping the electronics the same but making the battery bigger.
- 9y ago
- nradov 9y agoThis is one of several reasons why building phones without replaceable batteries is a terrible, consumer hostile practice. Unfortunately almost every mobile device available today now has the battery glued in.
- mikeash 9y agoApple will replace the battery in an iPhone for $79. Lots of third parties will do it for less. You can buy the battery and required tools and do it yourself if you're handy with a screwdriver. It's not quite as easy as snapping the new one into place, but it's far from being non-replaceable.
- collyw 9y agoLast time I replaced a battery on a phone I am sure it cost less than 10 euros and was a case of popping the back off of the phone. $79 sounds hideously expensive in comparison, but then you have to pay for some semi skilled labor rather than do it yourself these days.
- mikeash 9y agoI definitely wouldn't call it cheap, but it's totally doable. $79 is a lot, but way cheaper than a new iPhone.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- walterbell 9y agoPlease bring back user-swappable batteries. When users are resorting to carrying around phone-sized external battery packs to get through their day, the “thin” argument loses to “dongle” unportability.
- DenisM 9y agoHere's your user-replaceable battery for iPhone. Make the device a wee bit thicker, but doubles up as a phone case, and then I can also glue things to the back of it. Been using it for a few months now, without issue. [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01DNEDQMS https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01DNEDQMS
- walterbell 9y agoThanks. Now the question is whether Apple will disable throttling when external power is connected.
- KirinDave 9y agoIt's somewhat frustrating to hear folks patiently explaining the customer benefit of this as if the audience was 5, talking about how aged batteries aren't as good and balancing device replacement vs performance. They're forgetting the plot: We're in this mess because Apple decided that replaceable batteries were not in its best interests. It then applies further technical fixes as a consequence. All of these fixes decrease the longevity of the device as a consequence. But hey, our phones are 0.05cm thinner and yay, they're 2% cheaper for Apple to manufacture. Whew.
- Kodix 9y agoDon't forget that this (in their words) "feature" was only announced after it was found by users, not before. And it's now somehow the users' fault for jumping to conclusions.
- spurcell93 9y agoIt is a feature. There was code specifically written to do this. As annoyed as OP may be about people explaining tradeoffs, this is a tradeoff.
- walterbell 9y agoUndocumented and confusing to paying customers, only acknowledged after third-party investigation.
- Kodix 9y agoI agree that it is a feature. If shutdowns are a thing, I'd rather have this feature than not. I emphasized that they call it a feature because they've hidden it and refused to admit it until decent proof appeared. Which is just shady.
- mikeash 9y agoiPhone batteries are replaceable. They're not trivially swapped by the user the way they are in some phones, but Apple will replace them for $79, many third parties will do it for cheaper, and technically-minded people can pretty easily do it themselves. This is unrelated to replaceable batteries. Apple would want to do this anyway, because not everyone will replace their battery (which costs money even on phones designed to make it trivial) at the slightest sign of trouble.
- chisleu 9y agoThe article is basically Apple saying they hurt you because they love you. Batteries are cheap compared to the devices and would be easy to replace if designed to be replaced (even if not user serviceable.) Kill the batteries and recycle them...
- michaelmrose 9y agoI thought that power management and throttling to stay within thermal and power boundaries was a basic hardware function built into any OS. Example: I haven't heard of similar issues with other manufactures phones. Presumably because keeping the phones basic function working has more to do with the firmware than the OS on top of it.
- mankash666 9y agoFucking ludicrous. TechCrunch might as well be Apple's blog/P.R department. Apple has a history of victim shaming, or glossing over bugs as features benefiting customers. From "You're holding the phone wrong" response to antennagate to this response for badly engineering their phones (LiOn battery ageing is well known, they should've mitigated it reasonably in their design), they just don't get it
- lechiffre10 9y agoIf you're out of warranty they'll charge you an arm and a leg to change your battery too, if you opt to go to a service that isn't approved by them they immediately cut off any service or support for your device. $$$$$$$$$$ is all that matters
- paulus_magnus2 9y ago$1000 phones are a bubble. Time to wake up and rationally look at the other end of (generalised) Moore's law. $100 one laptop per child, still waiting for it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child $100 phone today is probably as fast as 4-year old flagship and I can't think of anything I can do on my phone now that wasn't possible 4 years ago.
- brador 9y agoPlacating the audiance before a potential lawsuit hits.
- hrasyid 9y agoThis posting is flagged as "dupe". Which one is the canonical HN thread?