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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?

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.
  - gambiting 9y ago
    As someone who lived with a phone that would run out of battery around 3pm when unplugged at 7am - I would have gladly traded that experience for a slight slowdown of the software. I can't believe that the "significant stress and annoyance" of having a slow phone is any worse than "significant stress and annoyance" of having a phone that just switches off. Slow phone > dead phone.
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      Fast phone + a powerbank > slow phone > dead phone. Apple took away the ability to choose the powerbank option.
jakobegger 9y ago
The slowdown is related to battery health. For some devices, it starts happening after a year; for others it takes longer. Replacing the battery restores normal performance. You don‘t need to go to an authorised repair shop.
- pmlnr 9y ago
  If something like: "In order to maintain the battery life you are used to, we had to introduce limits on your iPhone. This is because by time batteries unfortunately lose their capacity. Your phone will be just as new if you take it to our stores and get the battery replaced" would be communicated, it would be nice. In my opinion. btw batteries usually also have a year of warranty, so there really should be a way to check it's performance.
  - dclowd9901 9y ago
    But essentially infeasible. Most of us cannot spare to not have the phone for even a day. Say what you will about our dependence on the devices, but it's a practical problem.
    - QasimK 9y ago
      You can do both, show the warning and implement performance limiting. The information would be nice (if not outright essential/ethical)
- smhenderson 9y ago
  And how many people end up bricking their phone doing so? It’s not easy and I’m sure a lot of average users simply won’t as they’re afraid to even attempt to take it apart.
- concerned_user 9y ago
  Any responsible manufacturer would notify users about faulty hardware and not try to hide the problem.
jschwartzi 9y ago
I know you think you're joking, but older vehicles typically lose compression as the engine ages, which will reduce performance pretty significantly. And yes, the engine can be rebuilt which replaces the worn-out sealing surfaces that are causing the loss of compression in the first place.
- cptskippy 9y ago
  That's not the same thing. They're artificially limiting one component that's perfectly capable of functioning at peak performance to hide the degradation of another. If your battery starts degrading while still under warranty how would you know other than "hmm... my phone feels slower than usual". How does this throttling occur? Is it gradual or does it happen in large noticeable steps? My guess is that it's gradual throttling because it's taken this long for people to identify it. Does the throttling only occur after the phone is out of warranty? Or is Apple hiding a potential warranty repair?
  - gambiting 9y ago
    Do you think the ECU doesn't limit the performance as the engine ages to protect it from damage? Of course they do, just swapping the ECU in an old car for a brand new one will restore some performance, because the ECU starts supplying the stock levels of fuel/air mixture, at least until it learns that the engine is not performing as expected and cuts down on performance again.
    - cptskippy 9y ago
      The ECU isn't intentionally degrading performance, it's balancing the air to fuel to compression ratios for optimal combustion of fuels and reduced emissions. It's a dynamic systems and degradation in performance occurs as a result. It's not intentionally handicapping the performance to hide the fact that your fuel tank can no longer hold the same volume of fuel.
      - jschwartzi 9y ago
codezero 9y ago
I agree with everything you said – but will point out that modern cars, if they are not properly maintained will degrade in capability in an effort to prevent further damage. I was bad about getting oil changes and eventually my car had a limited ability to accelerate and a limited top speed until I got the oil change, it seemed to be clearly done by a computer control, rather than mechanical degradation.
Matt3o12_ 9y ago
One of the reasons is that it slows down is because the battery is actually not able to deliver enough power to run at full speed. My iPhone 6S would randomly shut down when I was using significant power (I.e a CPU hungry app) even at 70+%. When I got to less then 40% almost any app could cause a sudden restart. Apple apparently fixed this problem in a software update by limiting the power the devices draws, which fixes those random restarts for the most part but slows it down significantly. Fortunately, I could replace my device because that was the case (I went to Apple and they replaced my battery after they did some extended tests because they were aware that a “small number of iPhone suffered from this issue and they tried to find out which ones“). Sure enough, about one or two months later I checked my old serial number and apples website told my that my old phone was eligible to be replaced. This seems to affect the iPhone 6 and 6s the most. According to geek benchmark my used iPhone 7 is at 80% speed when it has about 50% battery remaining and at pretty much full speed when my battery is fully charged.
- etrain 9y ago
  I had one of these phones too - it was a bad batch of serial numbers according to Apple. If this happens to you: https://www.apple.com/support/iphone6s-unexpectedshutdown/ https://www.apple.com/support/iphone6s-unexpectedshutdown/
  - Matt3o12_ 9y ago
    I was referring to that (my old serial number did show up as eligible but I had it replaced before that). Apparently all phones suffer from that problem but the batch we referred to seem to be especially bad. The software update just seems to have mitigated the effects of iPhones which were mostly ok but shut down occasionally (and the effected ones which shut down almost every week when it was at 70% and about once or twice a day at 20-30%).
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
jmull 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? You call the decrease artificial, but I don't see evidence of that. I'm not sure what your "reduced by 8%" number is -- capacity? -- but in any case, it wouldn't necessarily scale linearly with the amount of CPU throttling needed to make the CPU stable. Also, I'm not sure where the "significant decrease in performance after just one year" is coming from. The article says performance starts to degrade after a year, which isn't the same thing. The article doesn't even have a cite for that (that I saw), so I wouldn't take that claim seriously yet. Of course, I'm sure there are batteries out there that are aging prematurely, but that's not the same as a device being designed to degrade after a year. Personally, my iPhone 6 plus began slowing down really noticeably at close to three years old, which is acceptable, IMO. But I think Apple needs to have iOS alert you that it's slowing your phone down because the battery has degraded. Then you know what to do: * If it's less than the normal service life of the battery (2 years, I guess), you should get a free battery replacement. * If it's later than that you can choose to replace the battery on your own dime. * Or you can choose to get a new phone after all. By not telling people what's going on, people with a prematurely degraded battery probably won't know to get it replaced under warranty and people with normally aging batteries are more likely to buy a new phone rather than replace their battery.
- bluedino 9y ago
  >> But I think Apple needs to have iOS alert you that it's slowing your phone down because the battery has degraded. I see so many Mac laptops with the service battery warning on. People won't replace them until they have to, even to the point of the laptop needing to be connected to the wall outlet to run.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    It's exactly because they don't magically lose CPU speed because of battery issues; people can adjust to failing batteries if the device remains useful (even for phones with fixed batteries, powerbanks exist). With iPhones, Apple decided to make the device less useful instead.
bluedino 9y ago
Tesla slightly understates battery capacity from the factory - to give future headroom and the appearance of less battery capacity. In this case, are they 'guilty' of leaving extra performance/range on the table when the vehicle is new?
- greglindahl 9y ago
  Tesla does not leave any headroom. If they did, then the car would appear to be able to charge to its original value for a while -- but it doesn't: https://electrek.co/2016/11/01/tesla-battery-degradation/ https://electrek.co/2016/11/01/tesla-battery-degradation/ What Tesla does do is pretend that the bottom 20% of the battery doesn't exist. That's because it's very damaging to use it at low charge.

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.
- gambiting 9y ago
  As someone who lived with a phone that would run out of battery around 3pm when unplugged at 7am - I would have gladly traded that experience for a slight slowdown of the software. I can't believe that the "significant stress and annoyance" of having a slow phone is any worse than "significant stress and annoyance" of having a phone that just switches off. Slow phone > dead phone.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    Fast phone + a powerbank > slow phone > dead phone. Apple took away the ability to choose the powerbank option.

jakobegger 9y ago

The slowdown is related to battery health. For some devices, it starts happening after a year; for others it takes longer. Replacing the battery restores normal performance. You don‘t need to go to an authorised repair shop.

pmlnr 9y ago
If something like: "In order to maintain the battery life you are used to, we had to introduce limits on your iPhone. This is because by time batteries unfortunately lose their capacity. Your phone will be just as new if you take it to our stores and get the battery replaced" would be communicated, it would be nice. In my opinion. btw batteries usually also have a year of warranty, so there really should be a way to check it's performance.
- dclowd9901 9y ago
  But essentially infeasible. Most of us cannot spare to not have the phone for even a day. Say what you will about our dependence on the devices, but it's a practical problem.
  - QasimK 9y ago
    You can do both, show the warning and implement performance limiting. The information would be nice (if not outright essential/ethical)
smhenderson 9y ago
And how many people end up bricking their phone doing so? It’s not easy and I’m sure a lot of average users simply won’t as they’re afraid to even attempt to take it apart.
concerned_user 9y ago
Any responsible manufacturer would notify users about faulty hardware and not try to hide the problem.

jschwartzi 9y ago

I know you think you're joking, but older vehicles typically lose compression as the engine ages, which will reduce performance pretty significantly. And yes, the engine can be rebuilt which replaces the worn-out sealing surfaces that are causing the loss of compression in the first place.

cptskippy 9y ago
That's not the same thing. They're artificially limiting one component that's perfectly capable of functioning at peak performance to hide the degradation of another. If your battery starts degrading while still under warranty how would you know other than "hmm... my phone feels slower than usual". How does this throttling occur? Is it gradual or does it happen in large noticeable steps? My guess is that it's gradual throttling because it's taken this long for people to identify it. Does the throttling only occur after the phone is out of warranty? Or is Apple hiding a potential warranty repair?
- gambiting 9y ago
  Do you think the ECU doesn't limit the performance as the engine ages to protect it from damage? Of course they do, just swapping the ECU in an old car for a brand new one will restore some performance, because the ECU starts supplying the stock levels of fuel/air mixture, at least until it learns that the engine is not performing as expected and cuts down on performance again.
  - cptskippy 9y ago
    The ECU isn't intentionally degrading performance, it's balancing the air to fuel to compression ratios for optimal combustion of fuels and reduced emissions. It's a dynamic systems and degradation in performance occurs as a result. It's not intentionally handicapping the performance to hide the fact that your fuel tank can no longer hold the same volume of fuel.
    - jschwartzi 9y ago

codezero 9y ago

I agree with everything you said – but will point out that modern cars, if they are not properly maintained will degrade in capability in an effort to prevent further damage. I was bad about getting oil changes and eventually my car had a limited ability to accelerate and a limited top speed until I got the oil change, it seemed to be clearly done by a computer control, rather than mechanical degradation.

Matt3o12_ 9y ago

One of the reasons is that it slows down is because the battery is actually not able to deliver enough power to run at full speed. My iPhone 6S would randomly shut down when I was using significant power (I.e a CPU hungry app) even at 70+%. When I got to less then 40% almost any app could cause a sudden restart. Apple apparently fixed this problem in a software update by limiting the power the devices draws, which fixes those random restarts for the most part but slows it down significantly. Fortunately, I could replace my device because that was the case (I went to Apple and they replaced my battery after they did some extended tests because they were aware that a “small number of iPhone suffered from this issue and they tried to find out which ones“). Sure enough, about one or two months later I checked my old serial number and apples website told my that my old phone was eligible to be replaced. This seems to affect the iPhone 6 and 6s the most. According to geek benchmark my used iPhone 7 is at 80% speed when it has about 50% battery remaining and at pretty much full speed when my battery is fully charged.

etrain 9y ago
I had one of these phones too - it was a bad batch of serial numbers according to Apple. If this happens to you: https://www.apple.com/support/iphone6s-unexpectedshutdown/ https://www.apple.com/support/iphone6s-unexpectedshutdown/
- Matt3o12_ 9y ago
  I was referring to that (my old serial number did show up as eligible but I had it replaced before that). Apparently all phones suffer from that problem but the batch we referred to seem to be especially bad. The software update just seems to have mitigated the effects of iPhones which were mostly ok but shut down occasionally (and the effected ones which shut down almost every week when it was at 70% and about once or twice a day at 20-30%).
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

jmull 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? You call the decrease artificial, but I don't see evidence of that. I'm not sure what your "reduced by 8%" number is -- capacity? -- but in any case, it wouldn't necessarily scale linearly with the amount of CPU throttling needed to make the CPU stable. Also, I'm not sure where the "significant decrease in performance after just one year" is coming from. The article says performance starts to degrade after a year, which isn't the same thing. The article doesn't even have a cite for that (that I saw), so I wouldn't take that claim seriously yet. Of course, I'm sure there are batteries out there that are aging prematurely, but that's not the same as a device being designed to degrade after a year. Personally, my iPhone 6 plus began slowing down really noticeably at close to three years old, which is acceptable, IMO. But I think Apple needs to have iOS alert you that it's slowing your phone down because the battery has degraded. Then you know what to do: * If it's less than the normal service life of the battery (2 years, I guess), you should get a free battery replacement. * If it's later than that you can choose to replace the battery on your own dime. * Or you can choose to get a new phone after all. By not telling people what's going on, people with a prematurely degraded battery probably won't know to get it replaced under warranty and people with normally aging batteries are more likely to buy a new phone rather than replace their battery.

bluedino 9y ago
>> But I think Apple needs to have iOS alert you that it's slowing your phone down because the battery has degraded. I see so many Mac laptops with the service battery warning on. People won't replace them until they have to, even to the point of the laptop needing to be connected to the wall outlet to run.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  It's exactly because they don't magically lose CPU speed because of battery issues; people can adjust to failing batteries if the device remains useful (even for phones with fixed batteries, powerbanks exist). With iPhones, Apple decided to make the device less useful instead.

bluedino 9y ago

Tesla slightly understates battery capacity from the factory - to give future headroom and the appearance of less battery capacity. In this case, are they 'guilty' of leaving extra performance/range on the table when the vehicle is new?

greglindahl 9y ago
Tesla does not leave any headroom. If they did, then the car would appear to be able to charge to its original value for a while -- but it doesn't: https://electrek.co/2016/11/01/tesla-battery-degradation/ https://electrek.co/2016/11/01/tesla-battery-degradation/ What Tesla does do is pretend that the bottom 20% of the battery doesn't exist. That's because it's very damaging to use it at low charge.