10 ms·

IPhones start slowing down after a year

197 points by alex_young 9y ago

herodotus 9y ago
> Or Apple could make it easier and cheaper to replace the iPhone's battery Apple charges $79 to replace a battery. Seems cheap to me. And, btw I have been running my SE for a couple of years and the battery is only reduced by 8%. Seems pretty good to me. I think peoples expectations are just absurd.
- epmaybe 9y ago
  It's not cheap for me, as it is nearly half the amount I paid for my iPhone SE. At that point, I'd be much better off buying a newer phone. As for the battery only being reduced by 8%, I think that's a huge positive point for the SE and its internals. This phone just lasts so long that you charge it less than the other phones Apple sells.
  - pdpi 9y ago
    Did you buy it second hand? Or was that on contract? If on contract, are you sure that's what you paid for it?
    - smhenderson 9y ago
      That’s about they cost at Walmart with straighttalk. My son still has an SE he bought a few years ago. No contract, just prepaid service every month
      - prodent 9y ago
        SE only came out in March 2016.
- ksk 9y ago
  Yeah IMHO, the $79 is fine and so is the turnaround time. In fact I had mine replaced for free (6s) through a recall program they had. IMO, the problem is Apple either tricks you into upgrading your OS or constantly nags you if you don't. When you find out that the new iOS has slowed down your phone, you're forced to keep using it instead of being able to revert your phone back to the factory state - something every user expects out of a consumer device.
  - asendra 9y ago
    I also had mine replaced for free (6s) on the same recall program ~11months ago. The battery still has 95.7% of the capacity, with 400 cycles, yet my device is throttling the cpu between 30% and 50%. It was how slow it was running that made me upgrade this year instead of the next which was my original plan. If I had known that replacing the battery fixed the speed problems I would have saved the money. They really need to communicate this reduced power state to the user.
  - ProAm 9y ago
    $79 is a lot for a battery.
    - ksk 9y ago
      Yeah, and I support the 'right to repair' laws, which could make that even more affordable.
  - jcadam 9y ago
    iOS 11 turned my iphone se from a solid, dependable little device into a flaky, crash-happy rectangle of frustration. 11.2.1 and they still haven't fixed all of the major bugs. Including this one that is driving me insane as a developer: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=176896 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=176896
    - seba_dos1 9y ago
      I don't know much about the older versions (last time I have played with iOS was iOS 7 I think), but I have recently got an iPhone 5S for development with iOS 11.2 and it's definitely one of the most glitchy mobile OSes I have ever used - and I've used plenty of community managed AOSP "ROMs", Replicant with missing drivers and some Openmoko distributions. I didn't expect much, but I honestly didn't expect it to be so bad. And I'm not even using it as a phone.
- have_faith 9y ago
  > I think peoples expectations are just absurd. From the perspective of environmentalism, I think all phones should have mandatory replaceable batteries. Is that really so absurd? Why are companies allowed to design devices with such disregard for the environment.
  - jakobegger 9y ago
    The batteries are replaceable — you just need a few tools.
    - throwanem 9y ago
      That's true for iPhones before the 5 series. After that, it just goes completely bonkers. See my sibling comment to yours, and the two iFixit guides linked from there - as I mention there, I don't regard the idea of doing my own device repairs as especially trepidatory in general, but current Apple hardware is an extremely special case.
      - ballenf 9y ago
        True, but we're still not talking about the batteries being soldered to the board, like with RAM or storage on newer computers.
        throwanem 9y ago
        A point, but as far as I know the next phone manufacturer to do that will be the first.
        throwanem 9y ago
        ...he said, before checking the iFixit teardown for the used iPod Touch bought to serve as a stereo headend. It's not precisely a phone, but that's not much excuse.
  - throwanem 9y ago
- tjoff 9y ago
  Maybe a third of that is a reasonable price. Oh, and 50% after two years is a pretty good rough estimate on phones that are charged often.
- eat_veggies 9y ago
  $79 is quite a bit of money to pay each year, considering I can buy two batteries and a charger for my Android phone on Amazon for far less than that.
  - narrator 9y ago
    My brand new Note 4 battery costs all of $13 and took 30 seconds to change. The last couple of revisions of phones aren't that much better than previous generations. This seems mainly due to Moore's law slowing down. Heck, Intel hasn't released a process shrink in 4 years. Apple and other vendors are going to have to start pulling even more of these planned obsolescence tricks if technology doesn't pick up soon.
    - balls187 9y ago
      Samsung brand battery, or is it just a replacement part?
      - eat_veggies 9y ago
        I find Anker batteries to be the same or higher quality than Samsung's own. They usually run for about $10-$15.
  - eyeareque 9y ago
    A replacement iPhone battery can be bought on eBay for around 10 bucks shipped. I’ve replaced a few iPhone 6 batteries. Support a small business and have someone else install it for you if you need a new battery. It won’t cost that much. If Samsung had stores they would charge you something near Apples price without question.
    - slig 9y ago
      How trustable are those no-brand batteries? I'm kind of wary of buying a no-brand battery that will charge everyday on my night stand.
- Finnucane 9y ago
  I got a new battery for my iPhone 5 for free as part of the recall. It's now going on five years of service and still works fine.
- jakobegger 9y ago
  Given that you can buy these batteries for under $10 on ebay, I do think that $80 is expensive. Also, Apple‘s service is atrocious. Mail it in, and you‘ll be without a phone for up to two weeks (!). I tried bringing mine to an authorised service provider in Austria, and they told me it would take 24h to get a quote, and the actual repair would take up to two weeks. I went to a 3rd party shop, it took them about 15minutes to do the swap, and it cost a fraction.
  - balls187 9y ago
    I'm always leery about buying batteries off ebay.
    - eyeareque 9y ago
      I’ve bought two and they were great. eBay has reviews now so you can have some confidence in the seller.
      - acdha 9y ago
        They’ve had reviews for ages. The problem was that scammers learned how to game them.
- toast0 9y ago
  Samsung charges $25 for a Note 4 battery, and the user can easily replace it. If they had kept the battery as easily replaceable, Samsung wouldn't have had to recall all the Note 7s, instead they could offer to take the phone or ship a safer, lower capacity battery and a consolation prize for lower capacity.
- beamatronic 9y ago
  The battery itself is a $10 part. If I value my time at say $100 an hour then the $79 isn't the issue if I have to waste my time going to the Apple Store. $79 is not the issue. My time is.
- paulus_magnus2 9y ago
  Making battery non-user replaceable we're engineering a time sink + cost sink on the side of the user. This isn't progress, it's rentseeking. $79 per year x 1 billion phones. Apple profit on the transaction is smaller than my loss. It takes me 15sec to replace battery compared to driving to/from the store & involving 5 people in the process (sales, technicians, accounting). It's a clear win- lose with a negative total transaction.
- lloeki 9y ago
  Anecdotal sample of wear ratios as reported via coconut battery: - my iPhone 6S, barely one year in: down to 87%, 282 cycles. - a friend's 6S+, one and a half year in: down to 74%, 398 cycles - another friend's 6S+, two and a half years in: down to 54%, slightly less than 600 cycles Those LiPo are supposed to last 800-1000 cycles before dipping below the 80% mark and it's a far cry from that. Even before I checked the values for mine I noticed a cliff effect when charge goes below 40%, at which point it takes only a dozen of minutes of light use to drain. This is not OK. I can readily accept a non-replaceable battery on a 800-1000€ phone but it has to keep giving good performance (WRT both battery life and throttling) for three years (it was so for my iPhone 3G and 4). Changing the battery on my dime each year is not an acceptable solution. This is poor engineering that minmaxes thinness vs battery, and I see the same trend on the MacBook line, which currently makes me very unlikely to upgrade my 2013 rMBP.
  - m_eiman 9y ago
    I've read somewhere, that I can't find at the moment, that Apple expects/promises that Mac batteries will retain 80% capacity after 1000 cycles, and iOS devices will retain 80% after 500 cycles. The lower cycle number for iOS devices is presumably due to them being exposed to higher temperatures (in pockets e.g.) and not having any active cooling to counter this.
    - m_eiman 9y ago
      Found a source: https://www.apple.com/batteries/service-and-recycling/ https://www.apple.com/batteries/service-and-recycling/
- jhack 9y ago
  So on top of spending $800-1000 on a new phone, you'll have to spend $80/year just to maintain its original performance. Cheap!
- prodent 9y ago
  > running my SE for a couple of years and the battery is only reduced by 8% Or maybe it's only degraded by 8% because it's only a year and a half (a year and 9 months tops since the first ones were sold) old?
sleepybrett 9y ago
It's a tradeoff, would you rather have to charge it more or have it slow down slightly to extend battery life?
- concerned_user 9y ago
  I am OK with it slowing down, I am NOT OK with it not telling me about it.
- pier25 9y ago
  Slightly? IIRC from those Geekbench scores it seemed as low as 50%.
  - asendra 9y ago
    Can confirm, my 6s with an 11 months old battery serviced by Apple, 95% of original capacity, and ~400cycles throttles between 30% and 50%.
- epmaybe 9y ago
  I don't believe that the phone is slowing down to extend battery life. I believe it is because when batteries degrade, they can no longer supply the same max voltage they used to. This can lead to CPU instability, and CPU voltage requirements can be reduced by underclocking. It makes more sense to me since the race to sleep would be faster if the iPhone still had its higher max clock speed, which would actually save your battery more often than not.
  - guntars 9y ago
    This is probably it. There is no way to tell the remaining charge of a lithium battery other than estimating it from the voltage which drops with the level of charge. It also drops more when it provides more power and this gets worse as the battery is aging (increasing internal resistance). This is why your phone might think that it has 20% battery remaining according to the voltage, but the second you open a power hungry app, the voltage drops below a safe level and the phone shuts down.
- 9y ago
davidf18 9y ago
I'm on the Verizon yearly upgrade program which is similar to the Apple yearly upgrade, thus assured a new battery every year as well as assuring coverage during the 1 year warranty. You send in the old phone in a pre-paid mailer once you've received the new one. Couldn't be easier. One still has to pay sales tax (about $100 in NYS for iPhone X) and new case (usually) which for the Apple leather case is $50. So the overall upgrade fee can be about $150. Still, compared with the cost of cellular service, this upgrade cost is a small proportion of the overall cost (about $12 per month). With that you have new battery, warranty coverage, better camera, better cell signal service, etc. etc.
carlmcqueen 9y ago
The only reason I'm upset by this is speculative. If I buy a 'boost' battery case because I know the battery is going to be getting worse with time does their software solution acknowledge this and let me keep the full speed my phone should have?
- thinkythought 9y ago
  No, it only checks the battery state. I'm suspicious it runs off the battery even when plugged in, and works like power>charge controller>battery>power management>system rather than power>power management>system when plugged in(or "plugged in" to a case). An iphone usually wont boot with no battery
kruhft 9y ago
I'd rather have more battery life. I see no problem with this.
- andrewcarter 9y ago
  100%. Most users will never know or care about this. Most users just use their phones for casual internet browsing, candy crush, and texting. They'll never notice the slowdown like they would notice the battery life decrease. You have to target the main consumer base of your product and make things work well for them, even if the loud tech community minority may get upset.
  - asendra 9y ago
    I noticed the slowdown. Never believed in planned obsolescence so I though it could be an optimisation problem in iOs 11 but problem persisted after several os updates. I finally decided to upgrade to an X because how bad it was. Turns out it is throttling by as much as 50% (I still have the phone) so I could have just spent 79$ instead of buying a new iPhone. The same will happen to a lot of people.
  - e1ven 9y ago
    I've been an iPhone user since launch, but this really is user-hostile behavior. I understand why they did it, and it's not bad as a field-patch to a hardware bug, but doing it silently is pretty skeevy. They should have mentioned this in the original battery recall, and displayed a warning on the battery screen in Settings, at the least.
  - dominotw 9y ago
    > casual internet browsing, candy crush, and texting. All these slow down as well. Try using instagram on low battery.
  - simion314 9y ago
    The problem is that this "Feature" is/was hidden, after 1 year when a new iPhone is launched and the person would test it , he will notice a big performance improvement so in a way he will be tricked to think the new iPhone is much more perform ant so he will be tempted to buy a new phone instead of replacing the battery. If instead he would be informed that his CPU runs at 50% because of old battery and that a battery replacement would fix the performance issue then the users would not feel cheated.
1undo 9y ago
I smell a lawsuit coming. Its perfectly fine if the phones are designed to slow down as long as this information is disclosed to the customers. Intentionally misleading customers is illegal. Its probably splitting hairs, but I can easily see a law firm looking into this.
NDizzle 9y ago
I'm going to throw out an impossible solution to this problem. It's impossible because it's very un-Apple. Let the user choose their own fate. I know, I know, that's crazy talk, right? If given the option on my old iPhone 6 plus, I would have chose to maybe have the phone shut off suddenly at 40% battery life and run at full speed. On the rare days when I'm going to be heavily using my device (and not near constant power) I could change the setting so that it would run slower, but not freak out with battery problems. This assumes that Apple doesn't know best, and that the user actually has a say in the matter, which goes against iOS / OS X / Apple at a deep, philosophical level.
- Thaxll 9y ago
  Users are "idiots" and you should decide for them.
  - theodorton 9y ago
    I find it funny that the human interface guidelines for iOS states the following under User Control: > Throughout iOS, people—not apps—are in control. An app can suggest a course of action or warn about dangerous consequences, but it’s usually a mistake for the app to take over the decision-making.
    - hinkley 9y ago
      “Do as I say and not as I do” has a long and storied history in software. See also various UI guidelines from Microsoft at times when not a single MS app that was profitable followed those guidelines.
  - mtgx 9y ago
    Assuming that comment is not sarcastic, you can choose for the user (default option) and still allow them to change that option somewhere. Of course implying that there are only two possible solutions to this problem is exactly what Apple wants you to think. It's kind of like Kevin Spacey raping minor boys and saying "okay, you caught me - I'm gay," to avoid any real consequences. It's misdirection. There are two real solutions to this issue, none of which is being offered or hinted at by Apple: 1) increase battery size to match that of competitors (so up to 2x from what it is now), making the lower battery life over the years a much smaller problem for users 2) compromise a millimitre of thickness and allow users to replace the battery on their own, especially now after Apple gained more space by giving up the audio jack. But of course Apple doesn't want you to think of any of these. Instead it wants its customers to keep fighting over the "Battery or Performance* faux choice.
jchw 9y ago
How is this news like 3 or 4 times? I'm serious when I say I believe this has hit the frontpage that many times or more...
jamiesonbecker 9y ago
If your battery is only reduced by 8% after a couple of years, why does the device have a artificial, significant decrease in performance after just one year? Worse yet, Apple doesn't disclose this and it took an independent researcher to actually measure it and discover this. Wonder why? Smells a bit reminiscent of VW's diesel strategy. "Thank you for spending your precious, discretionary income on a new Tesla! Your new vehicle will automatically slow down as it ages, because random battery parts will wear out, and going slower 'helps stop random shutdowns, which are a major pain.' By year five, your vehicle's max speed will be artificially limited to approximately 20 mph. We can help with that if you bring it in to an authorized manufacturer-owned store, assuming there is one in your country, or ship it to us at your cost, where we will replace a random part at only 20% the cost of a new Tesla. You could do this every year to maintain peak performance, but we prefer that you don't know about this at all and just buy a new car from us instead." Planned obsolescence, with an air of plausibility to its reckless, environmentally unsound 'science' that forces you to dispose of the phone (if you don't know about this pre-programmed slowdown) or battery (if you do) before it actually ceases being useful to you.. brilliant. But, when you get that shiny new phone home, you're blown away at how 'fast' it is compared to your previous phone. It's actually breathtakingly brilliant, in an evil genius sort of way.
- gambiting 9y ago
  All manufacturers face the same design decision - once the battery life declines, do you cut the CPU speed and keep the battery life, or do you keep the performance but the phone now dies halfway through the day. I'd say Apple took the correct approach here - 100% of your customers will notice their devices dying much earlier than expected, most customers won't notice the phone getting a bit slower. My mum never ever would for example, she only uses hers for making phone calls. If the phone app takes 2 seconds longer to open she doesn't care, she cares about having a phone that works all day long though.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    I disagree - people do notice their phones gradually slowing down. They just live with it, because there's nothing they can do about it beyond buying a new phone, which is a large purchase best postponed (that is, if they're not on a contract - if they are, the burden is much worse). This behaviour adds significant stress and annoyance to lives of millions of people. In my book, it's just evil.
mediocrejoker 9y ago
I think the outrage is a bit excessive. People buy apple phones because they want all the technical details abstracted away and they don't want to have to make the decisions on things like the tradeoff between clock speed and battery life. That's Apple's selling point in a way, making technology accessible. If you want to tune your core voltages then isn't that what Android is for?
- glenstein 9y ago
  That only works because Apple has been so good at executing technical details in a way that benefits the consumer. Everything just works. When it starts not just-working, that shows up in the experience with the device, and it no longer makes sense to tell people they shouldn't be asking questions.
- slantyyz 9y ago
  Not that excessive, imo. When you pay a lot of money for a high performance phone (which is what all iPhones are when they're released), you also expect it to perform accordingly for a reasonable amount of time.
- sasmithjr 9y ago
  People aren't upset because they cannot tune the voltage themselves; they're upset because of a lack of communication. You cannot make informed purchasing decisions if manufacturers are hiding this kind of information from you. How many people bought a new iPhone due to degraded performance when a new battery would have fixed it right up? People didn't have the information to make that choice, and I believe that's what's upsetting at least some people.
- sweden 9y ago
  I actually think that the outrage is not enough, this problem wouldn't even happen if people were able to easily swap batteries like everyone did 10 years ago. Wasn't it obvious to Apple that batteries start to suffer from degradation over time? Wasn't it obvious that the solution to this was the replacement of batteries? If so, why didn't they implement a replaceable battery?
mtgx 9y ago
Apple seems to be side-stepping the real issue: them not making iPhones with user-replaceable batteries. There are multiple ways in which Apple can do planned obsolescence without actually there being a record somewhere of a "meeting on planning to make the iPhone obsolete".
overcast 9y ago
Just a heads up to everyone. I had my 6S battery swapped for free under Apple warranty last weekend. The CPU has remained at 1848mhz the entire time since, all the way down to 1%. It no longer throttles the frequency. You should contact Apple if you're having whacky slowdown issues. Because my old phone feels brand new again. https://www.apple.com/support/iphone6s-unexpectedshutdown/ https://www.apple.com/support/iphone6s-unexpectedshutdown/
- slededit 9y ago
  Be aware that sometimes the battery replacement "fails" and your phone is lost. They give you a new one but you better have had a back up.
- malchow 9y ago
  How was your 6S still under warranty? Were you able to claim "manufacturing defect" to Apple?
  - overcast 9y ago
    https://www.apple.com/support/iphone6s-unexpectedshutdown/ https://www.apple.com/support/iphone6s-unexpectedshutdown/ Type in your serial number, and it's probably covered.
JoshMnem 9y ago
This situation provides another good argument for the need for Free software operating systems, especially on mobile devices.
blinkingled 9y ago
Another way to look at this is Apple isn't putting in the right sized batteries in their phones because they believe thinner phone is a better phone. If all it takes is one year for the phone battery to stop providing enough juice to the CPU/GPU then either the battery is not of adequately designed capacity or the CPU/GPU has too much peak power draw for the battery. Either way looks like a design issue that's just too convenient for Apple to keep selling new phones each year. If they put slightly thicker battery with adequate spare capacity or reduced peak power draw for their SoC people can get 2+ years of consistent performance out of their device. Instead Apple is designing to provide one year of peak performance followed by slow downs so you can go out and get the new phone next year - sounds not very user friendly to me no matter if it looks intentional or not.
- roc 9y ago
  Who in the world would run right out and buy a new iPhone if their last one became unusable in one year? People switch to the iPhone because of their longer usable life compared to the competition. People pay more for old iPhones compared to the competition because of their longer usable life. Not only is it not in Apple's interest to make self-destructing phones, to even accuse them of that requires ignoring the entire history of iPhone adoption and resale value. Further, there is no "one year" for batteries. Batteries with more charge cycles degrade faster. Batteries that push peak performance more often degrade faster. Batteries that spend time in extreme heat and cold degrade faster. Because of this, a simple anecdote of "throttling after a year" means even less than usual. No-one has data on how much throttling is going on, but Apple. The best proxy we have is the aggregate purchasing decisions of people who had iPhones, and the prices of used iPhones. And people with iPhones overwhelmingly keep buying iPhones. And the prices of used iPhones aren't going anywhere. This "Apple makes self-destructing phones" theory needs a rest.
  - leerob 9y ago
    > Who in the world would run right out and buy a new iPhone if their last one became unusable in one year? A lot of people? I'm sure there are tons of people who do this where cost isn't an issue.
eyeareque 9y ago
This is so over blown, but expected for something related to Apple. Batteries wear out and need to be replaced after a year or two. Apple does something to make the phones last longer, and people frame it as a negative. I’ve replaced a handful of batteries in iPhons and it is quite easy for anyone who knows how to use a screw driver and watch a YouTube video. Or just pay some small business to replace it.
- slhck 9y ago
  The fact that this was never communicated to users is what's the big issue here. Users may not know that their battery performance is degraded. And even if they knew, how would you expect the average user to correlate bad battery health with low system performance? Apple should have notified users of battery health issues (they do so on MacBooks, for example) and the impact on system performance.
- asendra 9y ago
  The problem is that there is no way for a user to know that they can spend 79$ to fix the problem. Most will asume that is has become slow and think the only solution is spending +700$ on a new one.
goblins 9y ago
I don't think the outrage is excessive and I am more inclined to think poorly of the people not outraged by this. And those ok with the price of replacing something that should be user replaceable anyway. This is one of the richest companies in the world who charge some ridiculous prices for their products arbitrarily slowing down older models of their phones on purpose for no other reason than to force their customers to upgrade to newer phones. Planned obsolescence. Their stated reason for doing this is smacks of bullshit.
- lovehashbrowns 9y ago
  I'm in full agreement with you. A good chunk of the comments in this thread seem ridiculous to me. Some people not deeming these users as doing anything important enough ("Most users just use their phones for casual internet browsing, candy crush, and texting.") to get what they paid for. Here's another one, apparently straight from Apple's marketing team: "It makes perfect sense for Apple to optimize their devices for stability and max run time." This was perfectly timed to come out just after the silly Mozilla thing, with people talking about how they've lost trust in the company; here's Apple gimping their hardware and not telling their paying customers a damn thing about it.
  - goblins 9y ago
    The difference between the Mozilla thing and this though is the level of outrage and the fact people are actually trying to make excuses for Apple. Mozilla did their thing imho in all naivety. Someone there thought that would be "cool" you know because Mr robot is cool, but clearly missed the point. Apple have a history of trying to pass off design flaws as features; antennagate anyone? As far as I'm concerned if you know that a component will deteriorate over time like a battery making it practically impossible to replace is a design flaws.
cranjice 9y ago
It makes perfect sense for Apple to optimize their devices for stability and max run time. These are arguably the most important features of any device. Any other behavior, including offering the user power options (because many users won't understand them) would introduce a poorer user experience (abrupt hard shutdowns, constant need to charge) and likely sway some portion of non-tech users to purchase a different brand when they refresh. At the end of the day the battery is replaceable and if you chose to buy an iPhone you're already aware that they it is a "premium" device.
- 1_2__4 9y ago
  Spoken like a tone-deaf apple PR person. The entire furor around this suggests your opinion is not shared by the general populace. A problem I usually run into with product managers.
  - cranjice 9y ago
    A the verge article represents the opinion of the general populace? Please.
- ceejayoz 9y ago
  Suddenly having half the CPU speed is not what I'd call "stability".
- marcosdumay 9y ago
  Where I am from, "premium" devices were expected to work better than the competition, not to mislead you trying to hide the fact that they are worse.
CalChris 9y ago
The last time I replaced a battery was for my 5S and I noticed it definitely got snappier. My SE is a year old right now at 92% and I'm quite happy with it. I suppose if I was running benchmarks on it all day long, I'd notice. Maybe if I was doing mobile gaming and losing, I'd notice. But I don't. So if this approach gives me a more hours albeit less snappier hours, I'm good with this. But it should be a mode.
calebgilbert 9y ago
100% there will be multiple class action lawsuits regarding this. Whether it's right or wrong going to be people that will wanna see if they can throw something against the wall and make it stick.
surferbayarea 9y ago
They should at least give an option in settings. What is the algorithm for slowdown? Is it guaranteed to be fixed on replacing the battery or its just a linear decay function based on age of phone.
acd 9y ago
One should be able to repair and swap batteries in electronics including the batteries. It is not sustainable for the environment to buy and throw cell phones every few years apart. One should alas be able to reuse components such as displays. If one would be able to swap batteries in the iPhone and Samsung s7 there would have been a less issue. Phones should also have boot loaders allowing free operating systems. It would help with new environmental laws demanding reapairability.
- oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
  > It is not sustainable for the environment to buy and throw cell phones every few years apart. I don't disagree with your overall point, but is this part actually true? How does the environmental impact of creating a phone compare with that of creating a TV which might only last 10 years, or a car? Feels to me like the phone impact must be pretty minimal.
teeray 9y ago
In January, 2016, I put my two-month-old 6S into the Apple battery case, and it's been there to this day. One of the benefits of the case is that it uses the case's external battery first. During a typical day, I never use the internal battery (when traveling I end up using both). I don't have any empirical evidence to support it, but I've noticed no degradation in performance of the phone. Given this news I'd like to attribute that to the minimal use of the internal battery.
- Dolores12 9y ago
  How does your phone know it need use your case battery first?
calimac 9y ago
My iPad does not slow down after a product release cycle.
psadri 9y ago
Just curious what happens to the benchmarks when the phones are plugged in to a charger?
userbinator 9y ago
Apple's power management decisions have always been a little... odd. This throttling reminds me of their older Macbooks with removable batteries, which would actually slow down when running on mains power only, because they (deliberately) designed their AC adapters to not be able to supply enough power to run the computer at full load: https://web.archive.org/web/20080913210306/http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2332 https://web.archive.org/web/20080913210306/http://support.ap...? The exact opposite of all other laptops I've used, where AC-only/AC+battery will be the highest performance, with battery-only being the least. It'd be interesting to see if these iPhones run faster or slower when plugged in and charging.
- toblender 9y ago
  I just ran Geekbench with it plugged in. Got the same crappy performance with an iPhone 6, getting 1000, when it should be 1400. Here I was hoping a battery case would do the trick.
napoleoncomplex 9y ago
A few things that I haven't seen discussed much. 1. Battery degradation should happen to all phones, regardless of OS/manufacturer. How do other phones handle this (flagship Android phones etc.)? 2. If other phones don't experience these shutdowns on such a wide scale or don't throttle the performance so harshly (to literally half or one third of original performance) to avoid shutdowns, what about the iPhone is different to force them into this decision? Geekbench which posted the larger group of data confirming this, they could probably run the same analysis on S8 phones from Samsung. Now, if the same does not happen on other phones, the entire debate being framed as it currently is, is a pretty amazing PR spin. It's much easier to justify the decision between phones shutting down or throttling the device, than it would be to justify a engineering decision that makes the above two choices the only choices, despite other vendors being able to seemingly pull off this magic trick of keeping devices working for more than a year. With all of Apple's resources and engineering know-how, it seems a stretch that they would be the only ones incapable of solving this issue. I don't actually know if other vendors solve it differently, but I do know that they have the same battery life, the same phone thinness and powerful specs. Does anyone have a clue about this? Seems like the more interesting story.
- bb88 9y ago
  If you bought a car and it stopped working after a year because the battery failed, you would expect to be able to change the battery yourself.
  - jmull 9y ago
    The ol' car analogy has failed you here. Cars do sometimes stop working after a year because their batteries fail and the great majority of people in that situation take their cars to a repair shop rather than do the work themselves. Actually, the battery in a phone is more comparable to the entire fuel delivery and ignition system in a car, not just the battery. Even fewer people could handle that work on their own.
    - jaclaz 9y ago
_greim_ 9y ago
This brings to mind Louis CK's "everything's amazing and nobody's happy" routine from several years ago[1]. Sure, Apple could communicate this, and a thousand other trade-offs like it, but that would shatter the illusion which people pay Apple so much money for: a magic black box that just works. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8LaT5Iiwo4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8LaT5Iiwo4
tzahola 9y ago
To those who've read the article: is the performance limit lifted when the device is put on a charger?
- doublerebel 9y ago
  Please don't bring lazyweb to HN.
okreallywtf 9y ago
My question would be - how are you supposed to know when to replace the battery? You can judge your battery capacity fairly decently yourself - if the phone used to be at 40% after a day of hard use and now it barely makes it to bedtime you know its degraded. Measuring relative performance of the phone would be very difficult to gauge yourself. Granted, in both situations you could have other issues (unknown apps running etc), but if you aren't changing anything about your phone for the most part you'll know when the battery is not doing as good as it has. You then know to replace it. Even if this isn't planned obsolescence, it is tangential to it. They know they are putting a new phone out every year or so, and they are hedging their bets that people will move to it so this decision makes total sense for them financially. It feels underhanded even if not fraudulent, they made a decision that is better for them than you. God forbid you have to charge your phone during the day?
- roc 9y ago
  Apple needs to do way better at informing the user when the battery is notably degraded, and when that degradation is leading to notable throttling. Particularly, when as the throttling is severe (more than 25% or so) and when the user is encountering it with any frequency.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Robotbeat 9y ago
Why can't this just be rolled into "Low Power Mode" or something? I have a charger at work, at home, and in the car. I'm used to having to charge things. Just having a reduced battery life is fine with me. The reason why they're taking the "reduced performance" route is that it is planned obsolescence. It drives sales of new phones in a world where the actual phone, if well-protected, could last a decade. In our current world where smartphones have plateaued for years and Moore's Law has stagnated, it makes business sense to artificially induce a marked GUI performance difference between an older and newer phone. But it sucks for the consumer, and this sort of intentional downgrading should almost be illegal. Glad to know I just have to change the battery. ~$40-50 at a local shop.
markoutso 9y ago
This is another example of a corporation that's too greedy and dishonest. Apple is by no means the only one. I'm sure there are going to be many "fan boys" and girls or maybe marketeers that will try to justify this, but the fact remains that the company that manufactures and sells the most expensive device in the market and has 100% control over the hardware and software , is degrading its performance on purpose. The user has no knowledge of this (hence the lying) and doesn't have the option of replacing the battery in an easy way. Who tells me that this isn't part of a strategy so that the user will buy the newest and more expensive phone...
elhenrico 9y ago
Woah. I have a 2013 macbook that was getting pretty sluggish even for browsing. Thankfully the battery is easily removeable and I could test this. After removing it I noticed a great difference! I'll try to live with the dangers of a sudden power loss from the cable unplugging. Why throttle the ac connected devices?
toblender 9y ago
FYI, I ran the benchmark with power from wall and with out, and got the same performance. It appears to check battery life before deciding core speed.
TYPE_FASTER 9y ago
I did not notice a big difference with my iPhone 6 and 10.2. I have noticed a difference with 11.2. Very low sample counts of CPU frequency using the "CPU DasherX" app seem to back this up: my CPU has gone from running at 1.4GHz prior to 11.2 to 600-839MHz after the 11.2 update. I'm averaging roughly 3.25 years per iPhone, having upgraded from 3GS to 4 to 6 over the past ten years. I'm going to replace the battery on my 6 and see how long I can keep it going.
perfectstorm 9y ago
This was a surprise to me. I always thought Apple engineers worked on the next flagship device and the lag on older hardware was because they didn't optimize iOS for the older devices. As an app developer myself I tend to test my app on the latest device that I could get hold of and the older devices are an after thought (most of the time).
superbrama 9y ago
It would be quite different if they reduced speed without a need to control battery expenditure. Planned obsolescence is a benefit to future sales, but seems this is a technical requirement to work around limitations of batteries. Transparency to end user would be helpful to end user. Doesn’t full performance come back when running on wire power?

197 points by alex_young 9y ago

> Or Apple could make it easier and cheaper to replace the iPhone's battery Apple charges $79 to replace a battery. Seems cheap to me. And, btw I have been running my SE for a couple of years and the battery is only reduced by 8%. Seems pretty good to me. I think peoples expectations are just absurd.

epmaybe 9y ago
It's not cheap for me, as it is nearly half the amount I paid for my iPhone SE. At that point, I'd be much better off buying a newer phone. As for the battery only being reduced by 8%, I think that's a huge positive point for the SE and its internals. This phone just lasts so long that you charge it less than the other phones Apple sells.
- pdpi 9y ago
  Did you buy it second hand? Or was that on contract? If on contract, are you sure that's what you paid for it?
  - smhenderson 9y ago
    That’s about they cost at Walmart with straighttalk. My son still has an SE he bought a few years ago. No contract, just prepaid service every month
    - prodent 9y ago
      SE only came out in March 2016.
ksk 9y ago
Yeah IMHO, the $79 is fine and so is the turnaround time. In fact I had mine replaced for free (6s) through a recall program they had. IMO, the problem is Apple either tricks you into upgrading your OS or constantly nags you if you don't. When you find out that the new iOS has slowed down your phone, you're forced to keep using it instead of being able to revert your phone back to the factory state - something every user expects out of a consumer device.
- asendra 9y ago
  I also had mine replaced for free (6s) on the same recall program ~11months ago. The battery still has 95.7% of the capacity, with 400 cycles, yet my device is throttling the cpu between 30% and 50%. It was how slow it was running that made me upgrade this year instead of the next which was my original plan. If I had known that replacing the battery fixed the speed problems I would have saved the money. They really need to communicate this reduced power state to the user.
- ProAm 9y ago
  $79 is a lot for a battery.
  - ksk 9y ago
    Yeah, and I support the 'right to repair' laws, which could make that even more affordable.
- jcadam 9y ago
  iOS 11 turned my iphone se from a solid, dependable little device into a flaky, crash-happy rectangle of frustration. 11.2.1 and they still haven't fixed all of the major bugs. Including this one that is driving me insane as a developer: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=176896 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=176896
  - seba_dos1 9y ago
    I don't know much about the older versions (last time I have played with iOS was iOS 7 I think), but I have recently got an iPhone 5S for development with iOS 11.2 and it's definitely one of the most glitchy mobile OSes I have ever used - and I've used plenty of community managed AOSP "ROMs", Replicant with missing drivers and some Openmoko distributions. I didn't expect much, but I honestly didn't expect it to be so bad. And I'm not even using it as a phone.
have_faith 9y ago
> I think peoples expectations are just absurd. From the perspective of environmentalism, I think all phones should have mandatory replaceable batteries. Is that really so absurd? Why are companies allowed to design devices with such disregard for the environment.
- jakobegger 9y ago
  The batteries are replaceable — you just need a few tools.
  - throwanem 9y ago
    That's true for iPhones before the 5 series. After that, it just goes completely bonkers. See my sibling comment to yours, and the two iFixit guides linked from there - as I mention there, I don't regard the idea of doing my own device repairs as especially trepidatory in general, but current Apple hardware is an extremely special case.
    - ballenf 9y ago
      True, but we're still not talking about the batteries being soldered to the board, like with RAM or storage on newer computers.
      - throwanem 9y ago
        A point, but as far as I know the next phone manufacturer to do that will be the first.
        throwanem 9y ago
        ...he said, before checking the iFixit teardown for the used iPod Touch bought to serve as a stereo headend. It's not precisely a phone, but that's not much excuse.
- throwanem 9y ago
tjoff 9y ago
Maybe a third of that is a reasonable price. Oh, and 50% after two years is a pretty good rough estimate on phones that are charged often.
eat_veggies 9y ago
$79 is quite a bit of money to pay each year, considering I can buy two batteries and a charger for my Android phone on Amazon for far less than that.
- narrator 9y ago
  My brand new Note 4 battery costs all of $13 and took 30 seconds to change. The last couple of revisions of phones aren't that much better than previous generations. This seems mainly due to Moore's law slowing down. Heck, Intel hasn't released a process shrink in 4 years. Apple and other vendors are going to have to start pulling even more of these planned obsolescence tricks if technology doesn't pick up soon.
  - balls187 9y ago
    Samsung brand battery, or is it just a replacement part?
    - eat_veggies 9y ago
      I find Anker batteries to be the same or higher quality than Samsung's own. They usually run for about $10-$15.
- eyeareque 9y ago
  A replacement iPhone battery can be bought on eBay for around 10 bucks shipped. I’ve replaced a few iPhone 6 batteries. Support a small business and have someone else install it for you if you need a new battery. It won’t cost that much. If Samsung had stores they would charge you something near Apples price without question.
  - slig 9y ago
    How trustable are those no-brand batteries? I'm kind of wary of buying a no-brand battery that will charge everyday on my night stand.
Finnucane 9y ago
I got a new battery for my iPhone 5 for free as part of the recall. It's now going on five years of service and still works fine.
jakobegger 9y ago
Given that you can buy these batteries for under $10 on ebay, I do think that $80 is expensive. Also, Apple‘s service is atrocious. Mail it in, and you‘ll be without a phone for up to two weeks (!). I tried bringing mine to an authorised service provider in Austria, and they told me it would take 24h to get a quote, and the actual repair would take up to two weeks. I went to a 3rd party shop, it took them about 15minutes to do the swap, and it cost a fraction.
- balls187 9y ago
  I'm always leery about buying batteries off ebay.
  - eyeareque 9y ago
    I’ve bought two and they were great. eBay has reviews now so you can have some confidence in the seller.
    - acdha 9y ago
      They’ve had reviews for ages. The problem was that scammers learned how to game them.
toast0 9y ago
Samsung charges $25 for a Note 4 battery, and the user can easily replace it. If they had kept the battery as easily replaceable, Samsung wouldn't have had to recall all the Note 7s, instead they could offer to take the phone or ship a safer, lower capacity battery and a consolation prize for lower capacity.
beamatronic 9y ago
The battery itself is a $10 part. If I value my time at say $100 an hour then the $79 isn't the issue if I have to waste my time going to the Apple Store. $79 is not the issue. My time is.
paulus_magnus2 9y ago
Making battery non-user replaceable we're engineering a time sink + cost sink on the side of the user. This isn't progress, it's rentseeking. $79 per year x 1 billion phones. Apple profit on the transaction is smaller than my loss. It takes me 15sec to replace battery compared to driving to/from the store & involving 5 people in the process (sales, technicians, accounting). It's a clear win- lose with a negative total transaction.
lloeki 9y ago
Anecdotal sample of wear ratios as reported via coconut battery: - my iPhone 6S, barely one year in: down to 87%, 282 cycles. - a friend's 6S+, one and a half year in: down to 74%, 398 cycles - another friend's 6S+, two and a half years in: down to 54%, slightly less than 600 cycles Those LiPo are supposed to last 800-1000 cycles before dipping below the 80% mark and it's a far cry from that. Even before I checked the values for mine I noticed a cliff effect when charge goes below 40%, at which point it takes only a dozen of minutes of light use to drain. This is not OK. I can readily accept a non-replaceable battery on a 800-1000€ phone but it has to keep giving good performance (WRT both battery life and throttling) for three years (it was so for my iPhone 3G and 4). Changing the battery on my dime each year is not an acceptable solution. This is poor engineering that minmaxes thinness vs battery, and I see the same trend on the MacBook line, which currently makes me very unlikely to upgrade my 2013 rMBP.
- m_eiman 9y ago
  I've read somewhere, that I can't find at the moment, that Apple expects/promises that Mac batteries will retain 80% capacity after 1000 cycles, and iOS devices will retain 80% after 500 cycles. The lower cycle number for iOS devices is presumably due to them being exposed to higher temperatures (in pockets e.g.) and not having any active cooling to counter this.
  - m_eiman 9y ago
    Found a source: https://www.apple.com/batteries/service-and-recycling/ https://www.apple.com/batteries/service-and-recycling/
jhack 9y ago
So on top of spending $800-1000 on a new phone, you'll have to spend $80/year just to maintain its original performance. Cheap!
prodent 9y ago
> running my SE for a couple of years and the battery is only reduced by 8% Or maybe it's only degraded by 8% because it's only a year and a half (a year and 9 months tops since the first ones were sold) old?

sleepybrett 9y ago

It's a tradeoff, would you rather have to charge it more or have it slow down slightly to extend battery life?

concerned_user 9y ago
I am OK with it slowing down, I am NOT OK with it not telling me about it.
pier25 9y ago
Slightly? IIRC from those Geekbench scores it seemed as low as 50%.
- asendra 9y ago
  Can confirm, my 6s with an 11 months old battery serviced by Apple, 95% of original capacity, and ~400cycles throttles between 30% and 50%.
epmaybe 9y ago
I don't believe that the phone is slowing down to extend battery life. I believe it is because when batteries degrade, they can no longer supply the same max voltage they used to. This can lead to CPU instability, and CPU voltage requirements can be reduced by underclocking. It makes more sense to me since the race to sleep would be faster if the iPhone still had its higher max clock speed, which would actually save your battery more often than not.
- guntars 9y ago
  This is probably it. There is no way to tell the remaining charge of a lithium battery other than estimating it from the voltage which drops with the level of charge. It also drops more when it provides more power and this gets worse as the battery is aging (increasing internal resistance). This is why your phone might think that it has 20% battery remaining according to the voltage, but the second you open a power hungry app, the voltage drops below a safe level and the phone shuts down.
9y ago

davidf18 9y ago

I'm on the Verizon yearly upgrade program which is similar to the Apple yearly upgrade, thus assured a new battery every year as well as assuring coverage during the 1 year warranty. You send in the old phone in a pre-paid mailer once you've received the new one. Couldn't be easier. One still has to pay sales tax (about $100 in NYS for iPhone X) and new case (usually) which for the Apple leather case is $50. So the overall upgrade fee can be about $150. Still, compared with the cost of cellular service, this upgrade cost is a small proportion of the overall cost (about $12 per month). With that you have new battery, warranty coverage, better camera, better cell signal service, etc. etc.

carlmcqueen 9y ago

The only reason I'm upset by this is speculative. If I buy a 'boost' battery case because I know the battery is going to be getting worse with time does their software solution acknowledge this and let me keep the full speed my phone should have?

thinkythought 9y ago
No, it only checks the battery state. I'm suspicious it runs off the battery even when plugged in, and works like power>charge controller>battery>power management>system rather than power>power management>system when plugged in(or "plugged in" to a case). An iphone usually wont boot with no battery

kruhft 9y ago

I'd rather have more battery life. I see no problem with this.

andrewcarter 9y ago
100%. Most users will never know or care about this. Most users just use their phones for casual internet browsing, candy crush, and texting. They'll never notice the slowdown like they would notice the battery life decrease. You have to target the main consumer base of your product and make things work well for them, even if the loud tech community minority may get upset.
- asendra 9y ago
  I noticed the slowdown. Never believed in planned obsolescence so I though it could be an optimisation problem in iOs 11 but problem persisted after several os updates. I finally decided to upgrade to an X because how bad it was. Turns out it is throttling by as much as 50% (I still have the phone) so I could have just spent 79$ instead of buying a new iPhone. The same will happen to a lot of people.
- e1ven 9y ago
  I've been an iPhone user since launch, but this really is user-hostile behavior. I understand why they did it, and it's not bad as a field-patch to a hardware bug, but doing it silently is pretty skeevy. They should have mentioned this in the original battery recall, and displayed a warning on the battery screen in Settings, at the least.
- dominotw 9y ago
  > casual internet browsing, candy crush, and texting. All these slow down as well. Try using instagram on low battery.
- simion314 9y ago
  The problem is that this "Feature" is/was hidden, after 1 year when a new iPhone is launched and the person would test it , he will notice a big performance improvement so in a way he will be tricked to think the new iPhone is much more perform ant so he will be tempted to buy a new phone instead of replacing the battery. If instead he would be informed that his CPU runs at 50% because of old battery and that a battery replacement would fix the performance issue then the users would not feel cheated.

1undo 9y ago

I smell a lawsuit coming. Its perfectly fine if the phones are designed to slow down as long as this information is disclosed to the customers. Intentionally misleading customers is illegal. Its probably splitting hairs, but I can easily see a law firm looking into this.

NDizzle 9y ago

I'm going to throw out an impossible solution to this problem. It's impossible because it's very un-Apple. Let the user choose their own fate. I know, I know, that's crazy talk, right? If given the option on my old iPhone 6 plus, I would have chose to maybe have the phone shut off suddenly at 40% battery life and run at full speed. On the rare days when I'm going to be heavily using my device (and not near constant power) I could change the setting so that it would run slower, but not freak out with battery problems. This assumes that Apple doesn't know best, and that the user actually has a say in the matter, which goes against iOS / OS X / Apple at a deep, philosophical level.

Thaxll 9y ago
Users are "idiots" and you should decide for them.
- theodorton 9y ago
  I find it funny that the human interface guidelines for iOS states the following under User Control: > Throughout iOS, people—not apps—are in control. An app can suggest a course of action or warn about dangerous consequences, but it’s usually a mistake for the app to take over the decision-making.
  - hinkley 9y ago
    “Do as I say and not as I do” has a long and storied history in software. See also various UI guidelines from Microsoft at times when not a single MS app that was profitable followed those guidelines.
- mtgx 9y ago
  Assuming that comment is not sarcastic, you can choose for the user (default option) and still allow them to change that option somewhere. Of course implying that there are only two possible solutions to this problem is exactly what Apple wants you to think. It's kind of like Kevin Spacey raping minor boys and saying "okay, you caught me - I'm gay," to avoid any real consequences. It's misdirection. There are two real solutions to this issue, none of which is being offered or hinted at by Apple: 1) increase battery size to match that of competitors (so up to 2x from what it is now), making the lower battery life over the years a much smaller problem for users 2) compromise a millimitre of thickness and allow users to replace the battery on their own, especially now after Apple gained more space by giving up the audio jack. But of course Apple doesn't want you to think of any of these. Instead it wants its customers to keep fighting over the "Battery or Performance* faux choice.

jchw 9y ago

How is this news like 3 or 4 times? I'm serious when I say I believe this has hit the frontpage that many times or more...

jamiesonbecker 9y ago

If your battery is only reduced by 8% after a couple of years, why does the device have a artificial, significant decrease in performance after just one year? Worse yet, Apple doesn't disclose this and it took an independent researcher to actually measure it and discover this. Wonder why? Smells a bit reminiscent of VW's diesel strategy. "Thank you for spending your precious, discretionary income on a new Tesla! Your new vehicle will automatically slow down as it ages, because random battery parts will wear out, and going slower 'helps stop random shutdowns, which are a major pain.' By year five, your vehicle's max speed will be artificially limited to approximately 20 mph. We can help with that if you bring it in to an authorized manufacturer-owned store, assuming there is one in your country, or ship it to us at your cost, where we will replace a random part at only 20% the cost of a new Tesla. You could do this every year to maintain peak performance, but we prefer that you don't know about this at all and just buy a new car from us instead." Planned obsolescence, with an air of plausibility to its reckless, environmentally unsound 'science' that forces you to dispose of the phone (if you don't know about this pre-programmed slowdown) or battery (if you do) before it actually ceases being useful to you.. brilliant. But, when you get that shiny new phone home, you're blown away at how 'fast' it is compared to your previous phone. It's actually breathtakingly brilliant, in an evil genius sort of way.

gambiting 9y ago
All manufacturers face the same design decision - once the battery life declines, do you cut the CPU speed and keep the battery life, or do you keep the performance but the phone now dies halfway through the day. I'd say Apple took the correct approach here - 100% of your customers will notice their devices dying much earlier than expected, most customers won't notice the phone getting a bit slower. My mum never ever would for example, she only uses hers for making phone calls. If the phone app takes 2 seconds longer to open she doesn't care, she cares about having a phone that works all day long though.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  I disagree - people do notice their phones gradually slowing down. They just live with it, because there's nothing they can do about it beyond buying a new phone, which is a large purchase best postponed (that is, if they're not on a contract - if they are, the burden is much worse). This behaviour adds significant stress and annoyance to lives of millions of people. In my book, it's just evil.

mediocrejoker 9y ago

I think the outrage is a bit excessive. People buy apple phones because they want all the technical details abstracted away and they don't want to have to make the decisions on things like the tradeoff between clock speed and battery life. That's Apple's selling point in a way, making technology accessible. If you want to tune your core voltages then isn't that what Android is for?

glenstein 9y ago
That only works because Apple has been so good at executing technical details in a way that benefits the consumer. Everything just works. When it starts not just-working, that shows up in the experience with the device, and it no longer makes sense to tell people they shouldn't be asking questions.
slantyyz 9y ago
Not that excessive, imo. When you pay a lot of money for a high performance phone (which is what all iPhones are when they're released), you also expect it to perform accordingly for a reasonable amount of time.
sasmithjr 9y ago
People aren't upset because they cannot tune the voltage themselves; they're upset because of a lack of communication. You cannot make informed purchasing decisions if manufacturers are hiding this kind of information from you. How many people bought a new iPhone due to degraded performance when a new battery would have fixed it right up? People didn't have the information to make that choice, and I believe that's what's upsetting at least some people.
sweden 9y ago
I actually think that the outrage is not enough, this problem wouldn't even happen if people were able to easily swap batteries like everyone did 10 years ago. Wasn't it obvious to Apple that batteries start to suffer from degradation over time? Wasn't it obvious that the solution to this was the replacement of batteries? If so, why didn't they implement a replaceable battery?

mtgx 9y ago

Apple seems to be side-stepping the real issue: them not making iPhones with user-replaceable batteries. There are multiple ways in which Apple can do planned obsolescence without actually there being a record somewhere of a "meeting on planning to make the iPhone obsolete".

overcast 9y ago

Just a heads up to everyone. I had my 6S battery swapped for free under Apple warranty last weekend. The CPU has remained at 1848mhz the entire time since, all the way down to 1%. It no longer throttles the frequency. You should contact Apple if you're having whacky slowdown issues. Because my old phone feels brand new again. https://www.apple.com/support/iphone6s-unexpectedshutdown/ https://www.apple.com/support/iphone6s-unexpectedshutdown/

slededit 9y ago
Be aware that sometimes the battery replacement "fails" and your phone is lost. They give you a new one but you better have had a back up.
malchow 9y ago
How was your 6S still under warranty? Were you able to claim "manufacturing defect" to Apple?
- overcast 9y ago
  https://www.apple.com/support/iphone6s-unexpectedshutdown/ https://www.apple.com/support/iphone6s-unexpectedshutdown/ Type in your serial number, and it's probably covered.

JoshMnem 9y ago

This situation provides another good argument for the need for Free software operating systems, especially on mobile devices.

blinkingled 9y ago

Another way to look at this is Apple isn't putting in the right sized batteries in their phones because they believe thinner phone is a better phone. If all it takes is one year for the phone battery to stop providing enough juice to the CPU/GPU then either the battery is not of adequately designed capacity or the CPU/GPU has too much peak power draw for the battery. Either way looks like a design issue that's just too convenient for Apple to keep selling new phones each year. If they put slightly thicker battery with adequate spare capacity or reduced peak power draw for their SoC people can get 2+ years of consistent performance out of their device. Instead Apple is designing to provide one year of peak performance followed by slow downs so you can go out and get the new phone next year - sounds not very user friendly to me no matter if it looks intentional or not.

roc 9y ago
Who in the world would run right out and buy a new iPhone if their last one became unusable in one year? People switch to the iPhone because of their longer usable life compared to the competition. People pay more for old iPhones compared to the competition because of their longer usable life. Not only is it not in Apple's interest to make self-destructing phones, to even accuse them of that requires ignoring the entire history of iPhone adoption and resale value. Further, there is no "one year" for batteries. Batteries with more charge cycles degrade faster. Batteries that push peak performance more often degrade faster. Batteries that spend time in extreme heat and cold degrade faster. Because of this, a simple anecdote of "throttling after a year" means even less than usual. No-one has data on how much throttling is going on, but Apple. The best proxy we have is the aggregate purchasing decisions of people who had iPhones, and the prices of used iPhones. And people with iPhones overwhelmingly keep buying iPhones. And the prices of used iPhones aren't going anywhere. This "Apple makes self-destructing phones" theory needs a rest.
- leerob 9y ago
  > Who in the world would run right out and buy a new iPhone if their last one became unusable in one year? A lot of people? I'm sure there are tons of people who do this where cost isn't an issue.

eyeareque 9y ago

This is so over blown, but expected for something related to Apple. Batteries wear out and need to be replaced after a year or two. Apple does something to make the phones last longer, and people frame it as a negative. I’ve replaced a handful of batteries in iPhons and it is quite easy for anyone who knows how to use a screw driver and watch a YouTube video. Or just pay some small business to replace it.

slhck 9y ago
The fact that this was never communicated to users is what's the big issue here. Users may not know that their battery performance is degraded. And even if they knew, how would you expect the average user to correlate bad battery health with low system performance? Apple should have notified users of battery health issues (they do so on MacBooks, for example) and the impact on system performance.
asendra 9y ago
The problem is that there is no way for a user to know that they can spend 79$ to fix the problem. Most will asume that is has become slow and think the only solution is spending +700$ on a new one.

goblins 9y ago

I don't think the outrage is excessive and I am more inclined to think poorly of the people not outraged by this. And those ok with the price of replacing something that should be user replaceable anyway. This is one of the richest companies in the world who charge some ridiculous prices for their products arbitrarily slowing down older models of their phones on purpose for no other reason than to force their customers to upgrade to newer phones. Planned obsolescence. Their stated reason for doing this is smacks of bullshit.

lovehashbrowns 9y ago
I'm in full agreement with you. A good chunk of the comments in this thread seem ridiculous to me. Some people not deeming these users as doing anything important enough ("Most users just use their phones for casual internet browsing, candy crush, and texting.") to get what they paid for. Here's another one, apparently straight from Apple's marketing team: "It makes perfect sense for Apple to optimize their devices for stability and max run time." This was perfectly timed to come out just after the silly Mozilla thing, with people talking about how they've lost trust in the company; here's Apple gimping their hardware and not telling their paying customers a damn thing about it.
- goblins 9y ago
  The difference between the Mozilla thing and this though is the level of outrage and the fact people are actually trying to make excuses for Apple. Mozilla did their thing imho in all naivety. Someone there thought that would be "cool" you know because Mr robot is cool, but clearly missed the point. Apple have a history of trying to pass off design flaws as features; antennagate anyone? As far as I'm concerned if you know that a component will deteriorate over time like a battery making it practically impossible to replace is a design flaws.

cranjice 9y ago

It makes perfect sense for Apple to optimize their devices for stability and max run time. These are arguably the most important features of any device. Any other behavior, including offering the user power options (because many users won't understand them) would introduce a poorer user experience (abrupt hard shutdowns, constant need to charge) and likely sway some portion of non-tech users to purchase a different brand when they refresh. At the end of the day the battery is replaceable and if you chose to buy an iPhone you're already aware that they it is a "premium" device.

1_2__4 9y ago
Spoken like a tone-deaf apple PR person. The entire furor around this suggests your opinion is not shared by the general populace. A problem I usually run into with product managers.
- cranjice 9y ago
  A the verge article represents the opinion of the general populace? Please.
ceejayoz 9y ago
Suddenly having half the CPU speed is not what I'd call "stability".
marcosdumay 9y ago
Where I am from, "premium" devices were expected to work better than the competition, not to mislead you trying to hide the fact that they are worse.

CalChris 9y ago

The last time I replaced a battery was for my 5S and I noticed it definitely got snappier. My SE is a year old right now at 92% and I'm quite happy with it. I suppose if I was running benchmarks on it all day long, I'd notice. Maybe if I was doing mobile gaming and losing, I'd notice. But I don't. So if this approach gives me a more hours albeit less snappier hours, I'm good with this. But it should be a mode.

calebgilbert 9y ago

100% there will be multiple class action lawsuits regarding this. Whether it's right or wrong going to be people that will wanna see if they can throw something against the wall and make it stick.

surferbayarea 9y ago

They should at least give an option in settings. What is the algorithm for slowdown? Is it guaranteed to be fixed on replacing the battery or its just a linear decay function based on age of phone.

acd 9y ago

One should be able to repair and swap batteries in electronics including the batteries. It is not sustainable for the environment to buy and throw cell phones every few years apart. One should alas be able to reuse components such as displays. If one would be able to swap batteries in the iPhone and Samsung s7 there would have been a less issue. Phones should also have boot loaders allowing free operating systems. It would help with new environmental laws demanding reapairability.

oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
> It is not sustainable for the environment to buy and throw cell phones every few years apart. I don't disagree with your overall point, but is this part actually true? How does the environmental impact of creating a phone compare with that of creating a TV which might only last 10 years, or a car? Feels to me like the phone impact must be pretty minimal.

teeray 9y ago

In January, 2016, I put my two-month-old 6S into the Apple battery case, and it's been there to this day. One of the benefits of the case is that it uses the case's external battery first. During a typical day, I never use the internal battery (when traveling I end up using both). I don't have any empirical evidence to support it, but I've noticed no degradation in performance of the phone. Given this news I'd like to attribute that to the minimal use of the internal battery.

Dolores12 9y ago
How does your phone know it need use your case battery first?

calimac 9y ago

My iPad does not slow down after a product release cycle.

psadri 9y ago

Just curious what happens to the benchmarks when the phones are plugged in to a charger?

userbinator 9y ago

Apple's power management decisions have always been a little... odd. This throttling reminds me of their older Macbooks with removable batteries, which would actually slow down when running on mains power only, because they (deliberately) designed their AC adapters to not be able to supply enough power to run the computer at full load: https://web.archive.org/web/20080913210306/http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2332 https://web.archive.org/web/20080913210306/http://support.ap...? The exact opposite of all other laptops I've used, where AC-only/AC+battery will be the highest performance, with battery-only being the least. It'd be interesting to see if these iPhones run faster or slower when plugged in and charging.

toblender 9y ago
I just ran Geekbench with it plugged in. Got the same crappy performance with an iPhone 6, getting 1000, when it should be 1400. Here I was hoping a battery case would do the trick.

napoleoncomplex 9y ago

A few things that I haven't seen discussed much. 1. Battery degradation should happen to all phones, regardless of OS/manufacturer. How do other phones handle this (flagship Android phones etc.)? 2. If other phones don't experience these shutdowns on such a wide scale or don't throttle the performance so harshly (to literally half or one third of original performance) to avoid shutdowns, what about the iPhone is different to force them into this decision? Geekbench which posted the larger group of data confirming this, they could probably run the same analysis on S8 phones from Samsung. Now, if the same does not happen on other phones, the entire debate being framed as it currently is, is a pretty amazing PR spin. It's much easier to justify the decision between phones shutting down or throttling the device, than it would be to justify a engineering decision that makes the above two choices the only choices, despite other vendors being able to seemingly pull off this magic trick of keeping devices working for more than a year. With all of Apple's resources and engineering know-how, it seems a stretch that they would be the only ones incapable of solving this issue. I don't actually know if other vendors solve it differently, but I do know that they have the same battery life, the same phone thinness and powerful specs. Does anyone have a clue about this? Seems like the more interesting story.

bb88 9y ago
If you bought a car and it stopped working after a year because the battery failed, you would expect to be able to change the battery yourself.
- jmull 9y ago
  The ol' car analogy has failed you here. Cars do sometimes stop working after a year because their batteries fail and the great majority of people in that situation take their cars to a repair shop rather than do the work themselves. Actually, the battery in a phone is more comparable to the entire fuel delivery and ignition system in a car, not just the battery. Even fewer people could handle that work on their own.
  - jaclaz 9y ago

_greim_ 9y ago

This brings to mind Louis CK's "everything's amazing and nobody's happy" routine from several years ago[1]. Sure, Apple could communicate this, and a thousand other trade-offs like it, but that would shatter the illusion which people pay Apple so much money for: a magic black box that just works. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8LaT5Iiwo4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8LaT5Iiwo4

tzahola 9y ago

To those who've read the article: is the performance limit lifted when the device is put on a charger?

doublerebel 9y ago
Please don't bring lazyweb to HN.

okreallywtf 9y ago

My question would be - how are you supposed to know when to replace the battery? You can judge your battery capacity fairly decently yourself - if the phone used to be at 40% after a day of hard use and now it barely makes it to bedtime you know its degraded. Measuring relative performance of the phone would be very difficult to gauge yourself. Granted, in both situations you could have other issues (unknown apps running etc), but if you aren't changing anything about your phone for the most part you'll know when the battery is not doing as good as it has. You then know to replace it. Even if this isn't planned obsolescence, it is tangential to it. They know they are putting a new phone out every year or so, and they are hedging their bets that people will move to it so this decision makes total sense for them financially. It feels underhanded even if not fraudulent, they made a decision that is better for them than you. God forbid you have to charge your phone during the day?

roc 9y ago
Apple needs to do way better at informing the user when the battery is notably degraded, and when that degradation is leading to notable throttling. Particularly, when as the throttling is severe (more than 25% or so) and when the user is encountering it with any frequency.

deleted 9y ago

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Robotbeat 9y ago

Why can't this just be rolled into "Low Power Mode" or something? I have a charger at work, at home, and in the car. I'm used to having to charge things. Just having a reduced battery life is fine with me. The reason why they're taking the "reduced performance" route is that it is planned obsolescence. It drives sales of new phones in a world where the actual phone, if well-protected, could last a decade. In our current world where smartphones have plateaued for years and Moore's Law has stagnated, it makes business sense to artificially induce a marked GUI performance difference between an older and newer phone. But it sucks for the consumer, and this sort of intentional downgrading should almost be illegal. Glad to know I just have to change the battery. ~$40-50 at a local shop.

markoutso 9y ago

This is another example of a corporation that's too greedy and dishonest. Apple is by no means the only one. I'm sure there are going to be many "fan boys" and girls or maybe marketeers that will try to justify this, but the fact remains that the company that manufactures and sells the most expensive device in the market and has 100% control over the hardware and software , is degrading its performance on purpose. The user has no knowledge of this (hence the lying) and doesn't have the option of replacing the battery in an easy way. Who tells me that this isn't part of a strategy so that the user will buy the newest and more expensive phone...

elhenrico 9y ago

Woah. I have a 2013 macbook that was getting pretty sluggish even for browsing. Thankfully the battery is easily removeable and I could test this. After removing it I noticed a great difference! I'll try to live with the dangers of a sudden power loss from the cable unplugging. Why throttle the ac connected devices?

toblender 9y ago

FYI, I ran the benchmark with power from wall and with out, and got the same performance. It appears to check battery life before deciding core speed.

TYPE_FASTER 9y ago

I did not notice a big difference with my iPhone 6 and 10.2. I have noticed a difference with 11.2. Very low sample counts of CPU frequency using the "CPU DasherX" app seem to back this up: my CPU has gone from running at 1.4GHz prior to 11.2 to 600-839MHz after the 11.2 update. I'm averaging roughly 3.25 years per iPhone, having upgraded from 3GS to 4 to 6 over the past ten years. I'm going to replace the battery on my 6 and see how long I can keep it going.

perfectstorm 9y ago

This was a surprise to me. I always thought Apple engineers worked on the next flagship device and the lag on older hardware was because they didn't optimize iOS for the older devices. As an app developer myself I tend to test my app on the latest device that I could get hold of and the older devices are an after thought (most of the time).

superbrama 9y ago

It would be quite different if they reduced speed without a need to control battery expenditure. Planned obsolescence is a benefit to future sales, but seems this is a technical requirement to work around limitations of batteries. Transparency to end user would be helpful to end user. Doesn’t full performance come back when running on wire power?