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Opinion: How Apple could have prevented the iPhone-slowdown controversy

77 points by chmaynard 9y ago

JimDabell 9y ago
> Knowing the battery size (which also limits the total peak power draw from the battery) and software system in play, Apple could have (and I would argue should have) designed a processor that would provide consistent performance throughout the life of the phone. > Yes, this would result in lower peak performance for iPhone devices. Aren't they essentially arguing that Apple should enable the throttling on day one instead of waiting until the battery degrades? How does that benefit anyone?
- sandworm101 9y ago
  No. It's about building a chip that isnt going to crash when the voltage drops for a picosecond, allowing throttling to happen only as needed without fear of crash.
  - ghshephard 9y ago
    Are there processors out there that can handle voltage drops without crashing?
    - ComputerGuru 9y ago
      Pretty much all processors start off that way. The clock speed needs to drop to compensate, though. Unless you actually put some thought into your hardware designs because you're making phones that have a life expectancy of greater than a mere 12 months that will be used around the world for years to come... in which case you can easily reference an electrical engineering textbook and design a circuit that can buffer enough power and supply sufficient voltage/current to meet your expected max sustained power draw with some very simple and cheap components. But simple frequency scaling based off of _dynamically detected_ available power. There's no need to slow down a CPU based off the age of the battery so you can "guess" what the max speed you can safely run at without inducing a brownout is (and even less of a reason to do so in discrete steps instead of linearly scaling the performance, except if you're trying to do it discreetly) - all you have to do is monitor available power and scale the CPU clock rate accordingly in realtime. But if your circuit is poorly designed with no forethought as to what you'd do if the maximum rated power of the battery wasn't available, I suppose that's not so easy to retrofit.
    - sliverstorm 9y ago
      Modern x86 chips have built in support for voltage drops, as part of margin recovery. As the chip changes activity profile increasing current draw (e.g. turning on all cores for multithreaded code) the voltage will drop until the regulators catch up. "Back in the day" you used margin to accommodate this. Today, circuitry detects these events on the fly and slows down the chip for a few microseconds waiting for the voltage to recover. This allows you to remove margin and operate closer to the limit.
  - tmd83 9y ago
    Essentially they designed a processor that cannot handle the normal variance of real life usage and so did a software fix that's very expensive to the user but very cheap for them. I am wondering is there a reason they can't be sued to oblivion for this?
    - QAPereo 9y ago
      Sued? Yes. To oblivion? No... not enough harm done, and Apple has good lawyers and deep pockets.
  - alkonaut 9y ago
    It's a tradeoff. Building a chip with more margin costs perf and/or power too. So it's a game you can't win.
    - sandworm101 9y ago
      No. You can build circuit to accommodate small voltage fluctuations without crashing things, defeating the need to drop the clock speed 24/7. Lots of other chips do this. Apple dropping clock speed as phones age is a very convenient excuse for an anti-feature to sell new phones.
- deckar01 9y ago
  Yes, and I think this is a common strategy in the CPU manufacturing world. The companies developing and testing software for these devices probably don't realize that the performance of their software will start to degrade in 18 months.
  - gm-conspiracy 9y ago
    I think this is a really important point. Also, consider the effect it has on companies that have contracted that development out, and a year later, their app "sucks", without any code changes.
- sliverstorm 9y ago
  If you design a chip with the whole lifecycle of the battery in mind, you can achieve better average performance for the life of the chip. Pulling numbers out of the air, the argument is the chip was designed for maximum performance with a fresh battery, 100% performance. But later it's throttled to 80%. Or, Apple could have designed the chip for a steady 95% performance throughout the life of the phone.
  - greedo 9y ago
    I would prefer a phone that lost performance over time than one that was gimped at the start. I think the optics aside, most consumers would prefer that as well.
    - syrrim 9y ago
      Depends on the customer. If you're planning on keeping it for five years, you'd like it to last the time. If you're planning on replacing it when the new one comes out next year, you'd rather it got maximal performance during that year. What it comes down to is which customer apple wants to cater to which is fairly obviously the latter.
      - greedo 9y ago
        Keeping a phone for five years isn't something I'd want considering the rate of performance improvement. A five year old iPhone would be an iPhone 5. The improvements in CPU/GPU since then are fairly astounding. Going from an A6 dual-core at 1.3GHz to an A11 six-core at 2.39GHz is just nuts. One is 32nm, the other 10nm. Smartphones are the one area in computing that seem to still be having huge jumps in performance compared to desktop/laptop computers.
- binaryapparatus 9y ago
  Seriously, isn't this discussion of the wrong topic altogether? CPU is not too strong, battery is too weak by design. Am I missing the point in this and other articles arguing about everything else but not about battery capacity? What if we had 10% more battery capacity and (oh horror) 0.1 mm thicker phone?
  - madeofpalk 9y ago
    You mean what they did in the recent round of iPhones?
    - binaryapparatus 9y ago
      Maybe. I hope so but we can't really tell if new batteries have security margin or not. It will show in 12+ months.
  - WillPostForFood 9y ago
    I recently swapped the battery on my iPhone 6. I can tell you that if the battery is too weak it is due to space constraints. Mabe that's what you mean by design, but given the form and space available, I don't think the battery could be stronger than it is.
    - binaryapparatus 9y ago
      Sorry I wasn't completely clear. When I say 'by design' I don't really mean 'planned obsolescence', I mean 'system design problem' because somebody wanted to shave another 0.01 mm of thickness. I would be surprised to see any other reason than stupid form over function that causes this.
- DrScump 9y ago
  If they knew this from day one, or even day 501, then insisting on designs with non-user-replaceable batteries looks even more like planned obsolescence for financial gain.
jagger27 9y ago
No one would have blinked if Apple had just built the throttle into Low Power mode and documented the X% cut to clock speed and left stock performance alone.
- apetrovic 9y ago
  The problem is - when the battery is bad, the phone will shutdown even if the gauge says 60% or so, and that isn’t obviously “low power mode”. Source: saw it happening on my daugher’s iPhone 6, a year or so ago. To be clear: I’m not apologizing Apple. They have “we’ll make decisions for the user” attitude in their DNK, but this was gone too far.
  - StavrosK 9y ago
    I wonder if that's what's happening with my Nexus 6P, which shuts down at 40ish%.
    - dsr_ 9y ago
      No, that's a widespread defect. I called Google Fi to complain about in October, and they decided to replace my out-of-warranty 6P with a Pixel XL (1st gen, but new). Apparently they had run out of 6Ps and were trying to clear stock of 1st gen Pixels. They probably won't be quite so nice to you, sorry.
      - StavrosK 9y ago
        Yeah, I already called them and they said I could at most talk to Huawei to see if maybe they'll get it repaired :/
mgiannopoulos 9y ago
So his argument is that the CPU should be throttled from day 1 so that it doesn't have to be throttled after a year of operation at a higher speed? How is that logical?
- awinder 9y ago
  You could provide a smaller throttle to get the same effect over longer periods of time. Leveling the throttle over the average lifespan of the phone would provide a consistent performance experience. That’s how I read the argument at least.
  - mgiannopoulos 9y ago
    How does he know the CPU isn't actually throttled already per his suggestion? :)
iamgopal 9y ago
The fun part is, everybody easily accepts that battery degrades. But thinks hardware shouldn't.
- sliverstorm 9y ago
  Because it doesn't degrade, at least not in ways that are meaningful to the customer.
- deckar01 9y ago
  I have a 6 year old battery in my 2011 Macbook Air and it seems to handle the peak load of my quad core i7 just fine.
  - Codestare 9y ago
    Surprised you have a quadcore macbook air, since they were never made.
    - deckar01 9y ago
      You are right, it is dual core. I forget the mobile variants can be dual core. *4 virtual cores :p
  - valuearb 9y ago
    Batteries degrade with cycles and heat. Maybe your battery has few of both? Or a new battery?
  - gok 9y ago
    Different devices have a longer consumer replacement cycle and less need for out-of-the-box energy density. For the same level of capacity degradation (80%) MacBooks are designed to 1000 cycles whereas iPhones batteries are designed for 500 cycles [1] [1] https://www.apple.com/batteries/service-and-recycling/ https://www.apple.com/batteries/service-and-recycling/
  - jws 9y ago
    Phones and laptops are different beasts. I'm going to make up some numbers here to simplify, but the idea is the important part. Note: I wrote this whole comment with C inverted the first time. Too little sleep. It is now fixed thanks to user revelation. First: Battery people like to talk about discharge and charge rates in a unit called "C". If you drain a battery at 1/10C, you will totally use it up in 10 hours. If you drain it at 1/2C you will totally use it up in 2 hours. Laptop: 5000 milliamp hours at 10 volts for 50 watt hours of energy. This will last for 10 hours of use if you average 5 watts. You will be discharging at 0.1C on average. Your CPU might be a 15 watt CPU, so you can burst to maybe 20 watts total, or 0.4C. Phone: 1500 milliamp hours at 4 volts for 6 watt hours of energy. This will last for 6 hours of active use, so that is 1 watt. You are discharging at 0.16C on average. Let's guess the CPU can surge to 5 watts. That takes you to 6 watts total use and a discharge rate of 1C. So that is a 2.5x safety margin that the laptop has for degraded batteries over the phone. Summary: Phones operate much closer to the current limits of batteries compared to older laptops. Accumulated wear or damage to the battery will affect them sooner.
sweden 9y ago
Apple could have just implemented replaceable batteries and all this situation could have been avoided. Edit: When I mean replaceable, I mean replaceable batteries without the user having to go an Apple store. Like in the old days, taking the cover off and putting the new battery back in.
- ghshephard 9y ago
  Apple batteries are replaceable. $79 and an hour at the Apple store will do the job. If you want to save money you can get it done at a third-party shop for less than $50. Where Apple made a mistake was in not communicating to its users that this is something they need to do on an annual basis, so people could budget it in to their cost.
  - beamatronic 9y ago
    The hour at the Apple Store is the deal breaker. My time is too valuable for that.
    - mehrdada 9y ago
      Then you can afford iPhone upgrade annually.
    - mewse 9y ago
      You don't have to spend the hour at the Apple Store. You drop the phone off, leave, and come back at literally any time more than 1 hour later. Go to your important meeting. Do some shopping. Have that doctor's appointment you've been putting off. Have a nice long lunch. Whatever. You don't actually lose that hour. I mean, obviously.
      - rmwaite 9y ago
        I love Apple products. Every major computing device I use is made by them. I am lucky to be closer than the vast majority of people to an Apple store and even for me this is a huge pain in the ass. I think it is incredibly unreasonable to just hand wave this away like its no big deal. It absolutely is and to pretend otherwise is naive at best.
binaryapparatus 9y ago
There is a lot of gymnastics this days, from people like John Gruber and Rene Ritchie to downplay what just happened. Truth is their 'explanations' are disturbing to watch and extremely unhelpful to Apple. Plain and simple, battery is shaved so much that there is no surplus left (in the name of thinness), nothing to amortize normal battery degradation, so iPhone only works beautifully during initial review and couple of months after that. I really love Apple and some of my daily living depends on it, but this crap has to stop already. Three years back until now there are many missteps in the name of fad and profit, couple of years more and it won't matter since I won't have any market in that ecosystem.
- redial 9y ago
  > There is a lot of gymnastics this days, > iPhone only works beautifully during initial review and couple of months after that. I guess both sides are guilty.
- JustSomeNobody 9y ago
  > Plain and simple, battery is shaved so much that there is no surplus left (in the name of thinness), nothing to amortize normal battery degradation, so iPhone only works beautifully during initial review and couple of months after that. This is the crux of the issue. Apple is trying to "fix" a design flaw with software.
  - binaryapparatus 9y ago
    If it is only one hiccup I woundn't react half as much but we could see exactly the same 'form over function' flaw with Mac Pro recently. Mac Pro has no cooling margin so it often fries graphic cards as soon as you try using it for (surprise) pro stuff. I really dislike gimmicks over reliability, and I count race to thinness there too, that can be seen with Apple in last couple of years.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- mikestew 9y ago
ComputerGuru 9y ago
I don’t know if I’m just too old having lived through the old nickel-cadmium “memory effect” days, it everybody I know - techie or not - already knows and accepts that batteries “get old” and then “die faster” and “don’t charge right” as the device ages. Lithium battery tech today is an incredible step forward, but simply acknowledging the still existent limitations of the battery and it’s lifespan seems like a much simpler and saner solution than building a house of cards trying to hide that reality. Battery dying in 2 hours after a full charge? Time to get it replaced. If your device is still under warranty, it’s free. Otherwise it’s 80 bucks and you’re golden. What’s the big deal? Instead we have this nonsense approach to pretend that batteries live forever at such a cost. And then you have the people that pop up out of the woodworks in each and every single iPhone battery life thread to say "it's not that the battery dies faster, it's that the phone suddenly shuts off at 60% [or whatever]," which is an absolute load of BS. The iPhone 6S was the first device to have that problem (I went to the Apple store within a year of its release with my iPhone 6S and spent over 3 hours explaining to the tech what was going on despite what his fancy charts and on-chip reporting software saw until he relented and gave me a replacement phone well before Apple ever acknowledged the issue and initiated the limited recall) - and it's the equivalent of a bug in the hardware design. As a battery ages, the "definition" of 100% slides (as the charge cycles go up the charge capacity goes down - although it's not that simple since li-ion batteries also retain some form of the old cadmium cell memory effect that doesn't scale in a directly linear fashion with the charge cycles, but not to an appreciable extent that would have a bearing on this particular matter), but there's no reason that a device should die at 60% of its _remaining_ battery life. Except that the iPhone 6S' hardware was designed in such a way that it demanded current that could only be supplied at a voltage in excess of what the reduced-capacity battery could supply, leading to the problem at hand. This is just me guessing, but I'm fairly convinced of the truth here: Apple didn't implement CPU scaling to improve the end user experience nor to make money off of "planned obsolescence" but rather to avoid having to replace phones/batteries within and without the warranty period (as a recall was warranted due to the faulty design) and decided to implement a software _workaround_ (and decidedly _not_ a _fix_) to get all but the most susceptible phones to avoid the scenario that would trigger the brownout.
- pronoiac 9y ago
teenytim 9y ago
Apple also could have paid fair taxes on well over a quarter over a trillion dollars. Apple does what Apple shareholders want, however, not what is best for us users.
walterbell 9y ago
Why is throttling needed when the phone is connected to AC power?
- binaryapparatus 9y ago
  This is another very good question that didn't get proper answer yet. I have noticed significant slowdown on my 2012 Mac Book Pro, after installing High Sierra. Up to the point of not being to start any app for several seconds, which wasn't the case with Sierra or before. So in this new light it may as well be throttled down too. Anybody else noticed this?
  - jesscxc 9y ago
    I'm running High Sierra on a 2012 MacBook Air and haven't noticed any slowdown. Heats up if I run a lot of things at once, but individual apps seem fine.
- mthoms 9y ago
  Good question. Here's another that needs to be answered IMHO: Do third party battery replacements return the processor to normal performance? Or is it just "official" Apple-performed battery replacements that do so? I wouldn't be surprised if there were some sort of extra procedure needed to reset the processor throttling back to normal. Or, perhaps the throttling code checks for genuine Apple batteries somehow? Apple needs to come clean with more details about exactly how this is implemented.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- cesarb 9y ago
  Due to the length of the wire leading to the AC adapter, it probably can't respond quickly enough to the voltage drop. The battery is much closer. A solution would be to use a big enough capacitor on the phone end of the wire, but phones are very space constrained, and since the battery is non-removable, it can be used as sort of a "capacitor" for these instantaneous power demands, so there's no need for the extra cost and space of beefier input capacitors.
ankushnarula 9y ago
Rather than throttle, Apple has done something similar since the A10/A11 processors with their additional low-power cores. Presumably this should reduce the short-term wear on the battery and extend the life of the cells.
IBM 9y ago
The lede of the story and pretty much every one I've read is false. >For years consumers have complained and theorized that Apple would purposely degrade the performance of older iPhones, pushing them to upgrade faster than they normally would. >This week the theory of slowing iPhones was validated by external sources and eventually corroborated by Apple. The conspiracy theory we're talking about is that Apple slows your old iPhone to make you upgrade to new ones and it goes back all the way to the first iPhones. It's false on its face because this fix wasn't added until iOS 10.2.1 [1] and it wasn't what Apple "corroborated" at all. And for the "Apple should have been transparent" crowd, here's what it said in the release notes: >iOS 10.2.1 includes bug fixes and improves the security of your iPhone or iPad. >It also improves power management during peak workloads to avoid unexpected shutdowns on iPhone. >For information on the security content of Apple software updates, please visit this website: https://support.apple.com/HT201222 https://support.apple.com/HT201222 There's some extremely bad writing on the internet about this story meant to capitalize on the general controversy. Honestly, Apple should find the most egregious one and sue for defamation, and relish the opportunity to testify under oath if it goes to trial. [1] https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1893?locale=en_US https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1893?locale=en_US
- iiiggglll 9y ago
  I agree with most of what you wrote, and I do think it was the right call for them to implement this feature for iPhones with batteries having trouble, and I agree most if not all the articles about this have been poorly written and badly misinformed. However... > for the "Apple should have been transparent" crowd, here's what it said in the release notes I can't agree that that's sufficient. That little one liner in the release notes just isn't enough. On macOS, they did more. The battery menu extra will actually display a warning when clicked if it detects that your battery is having trouble. It shows as an extra row at the top of the drop-down menu with a little little caution triangle icon and the string "Service Battery". When you click this, it takes you to a help article advising you to "take your computer in for service". It's not perfect, but it's better than not telling the user anything. Apple could and should have done something similar on iOS, especially given that there's a whole section in Settings for just the battery. They could have displayed a similar alert icon with similar help text, for starters. A full-screen alert advising the user to get their battery serviced whenever this condition was detected would have been even better. Burying it as a single sentence in the release notes wasn't all that helpful or informative for customers.
herf 9y ago
What if the flaw was earlier in the design? The iPhone has a battery that's 2/3 the size of other phone batteries. Would there even be a problem with a 1000mAh bigger battery?
kabdib 9y ago
When we were doing the Apple Newton, one of my cow-orkers noted that the CPU had a divisor register that let you choose pretty much any clock frequency you could want, down to kilohertz. His half-serious proposal to guarantee users "a 12 hour battery life" regardless of battery condition was poorly received by the rest of the team . . .
- gm-conspiracy 9y ago
  Under Siege 2?
- nerfhammer 9y ago
  Is that different from what a prescaler is?
  - kabdib 9y ago
    It was a "CPU throttle" register that controlled the ARM's clock, with four or eight bits of divisor from the base 20Mhz clock. It's been a long time and it's hard to remember h/w register layouts from several decades ago :-) (Yes, we did the whole Newton on a 20Mhz ARM with less than 512K of RAM).
CamperBob2 9y ago
Just add a setting. Prefer performance, or prefer battery life. Is that so hard? What arguments are there against this other than planned obsolescence? Educate me. Downvotes aren't arguments.
- twotwotwo 9y ago
  Performance isn't lowered to extend battery life, it's lowered because the degradation in old batteries makes it impossible to reliably run the processor at max clock; if you flip a switch to force high clocks despite an old battery, your phone will randomly shut down sometimes. So they couldn't really run the CPU full speed for years. They sure could have, say, highlighted to users that a battery replacement can make an old phone run better for longer, but of course they'd much rather users replace their phones. Or, as another comment here suggested, they could have left more margin--overspecced the battery so it could run the CPU at higher speeds even once it was somewhat degraded, rather than putting so much of the efficiency gain over iPhone generations into thinness and lightness. Might also help battery life for heavy users.
  - CamperBob2 9y ago
    Performance isn't lowered to extend battery life, it's lowered because the degradation in old batteries makes it impossible to reliably run the processor at max clock; if you flip a switch to force high clocks despite an old battery, your phone will randomly shut down sometimes. That may be what they're telling people, but there is absolutely no engineering basis for it. Battery voltages decrease gradually under all normal operating conditions, and switched-mode converters can extract useful energy from them throughout the entire discharge regime. The main constraint on battery voltage isn't some mysterious "random shutdown" effect, but the health of the battery itself. If you allow the battery voltage to fall too low -- which will, again, happen gradually and not instantaneously -- its service life will be greatly impaired. This is not something that happens without warning. It's a perfectly well understood effect. Once the phone's CPU sees this happening, it will have plenty of time to post a "Shutting down in xx seconds" message to the user, go into emergency low-power mode, or otherwise take action to protect the battery.
devit 9y ago
The simplest solution is to just tell the user that they need to replace the battery with a popup. The fact that they didn't implement it and that doing so might benefit them financially obviously leads people to assume malicious intent.
- theDoug 9y ago
  Agreed. They can have a $79 in-warranty battery replacement program but if no one knows about it, it does little good to point to its existence later.
ChildOfChaos 9y ago
There is no controversy. stfu and relax.
- kurtisc 9y ago
  If you have tell someone they're wrong about there being a controversy, there's a controversy.
sigi45 9y ago
"controversy" I replacyed my old Samsung S4 Mini because the flash storage got super slow. It is known, you can test it and because android uses sqlite and there are apparently many small iops, the smart phone starts to become slow and lagy. Who cares? I cared. Had to replace it because i can't / will not re solder flash chips. Who else cared? NO ONE... My previous smartphone was also too old for warranty and had an issue with the mainboard. Also enough other people had this issue. I don't mind when there are better lawys like 3 year warranty for specific specs like battry lifetime, broken pixel and iops but this is not a 'controversy'.
goblins 9y ago
>How Apple could have prevented the iPhone-slowdown controversy Easy, user replaceable battery. (For clarity by "user replaceable" I don't mean by the user paying $79 for Apple to do it; which is a rip off) IMO if you design a phone (costing the better part of a grand) with a battery unsuitable for a years worth of use it's a design flaw, if the battery is not easily replaceable by the user then the phone is not fit for purpose.
- dEnigma 9y ago
  Not to mention the junk this generates and resources this wastes by forcing users to buy a new phone, when a replacement battery would make it perfectly usable again. I hope some regulatory body would step in here, like the EU did for unified phone charger ports.
- greedo 9y ago
  I (and many other buyers) don't want a user-replaceable battery. I think they look like crap, they make the phone look like crap, and in my history of owning iPhones since day one, I've never had to replace my iPhones battery. I did have one replaced through a warranty extension thing but that was because I was reselling the phone and wanted to give the buyer a perfectly new battery. Otherwise I would have kept the one inside.
  - petecox 9y ago
    Many phone owners these days put their device in a case. How then can it then "look like crap" if aesthetically it's hidden under a layer of coloured rubber?
    - goblins 9y ago
      Not to mention you'd be hard pressed telling if a phone has a user replaceable battery just by looking at it. I should know because that's the first thing I ask because I won't buy a phone without a user replaceable battery.
chmaynard 9y ago
From Apple's statement: "Lithium-ion batteries become less capable of supplying peak current demands when in cold conditions, have a low battery charge, or as they age over time, which can result in the device unexpectedly shutting down to protect its electronic components." Apple seems to be saying that throttling might occur even if the battery is perfectly fine. This points to a fundamental design flaw across many different models and generations, which is the main conclusion of this article. One could even argue that Apple is using a "cheat device" that produces different performance during benchmarks vs. actual real-world use. Sound familiar? This is exactly what VW did. Is it illegal? We will find out as the lawsuits proceed.
thecollate 9y ago
What happens if you charge your throttled iPhone. Does the performance improve while charging vs running on battery ?
catilac 9y ago
then they should have charged less for their products. or created a more environmentally friendly design. my guess is that apple's PR team made this article happen

77 points by chmaynard 9y ago

> Knowing the battery size (which also limits the total peak power draw from the battery) and software system in play, Apple could have (and I would argue should have) designed a processor that would provide consistent performance throughout the life of the phone. > Yes, this would result in lower peak performance for iPhone devices. Aren't they essentially arguing that Apple should enable the throttling on day one instead of waiting until the battery degrades? How does that benefit anyone?

sandworm101 9y ago
No. It's about building a chip that isnt going to crash when the voltage drops for a picosecond, allowing throttling to happen only as needed without fear of crash.
- ghshephard 9y ago
  Are there processors out there that can handle voltage drops without crashing?
  - ComputerGuru 9y ago
    Pretty much all processors start off that way. The clock speed needs to drop to compensate, though. Unless you actually put some thought into your hardware designs because you're making phones that have a life expectancy of greater than a mere 12 months that will be used around the world for years to come... in which case you can easily reference an electrical engineering textbook and design a circuit that can buffer enough power and supply sufficient voltage/current to meet your expected max sustained power draw with some very simple and cheap components. But simple frequency scaling based off of _dynamically detected_ available power. There's no need to slow down a CPU based off the age of the battery so you can "guess" what the max speed you can safely run at without inducing a brownout is (and even less of a reason to do so in discrete steps instead of linearly scaling the performance, except if you're trying to do it discreetly) - all you have to do is monitor available power and scale the CPU clock rate accordingly in realtime. But if your circuit is poorly designed with no forethought as to what you'd do if the maximum rated power of the battery wasn't available, I suppose that's not so easy to retrofit.
  - sliverstorm 9y ago
    Modern x86 chips have built in support for voltage drops, as part of margin recovery. As the chip changes activity profile increasing current draw (e.g. turning on all cores for multithreaded code) the voltage will drop until the regulators catch up. "Back in the day" you used margin to accommodate this. Today, circuitry detects these events on the fly and slows down the chip for a few microseconds waiting for the voltage to recover. This allows you to remove margin and operate closer to the limit.
- tmd83 9y ago
  Essentially they designed a processor that cannot handle the normal variance of real life usage and so did a software fix that's very expensive to the user but very cheap for them. I am wondering is there a reason they can't be sued to oblivion for this?
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    Sued? Yes. To oblivion? No... not enough harm done, and Apple has good lawyers and deep pockets.
- alkonaut 9y ago
  It's a tradeoff. Building a chip with more margin costs perf and/or power too. So it's a game you can't win.
  - sandworm101 9y ago
    No. You can build circuit to accommodate small voltage fluctuations without crashing things, defeating the need to drop the clock speed 24/7. Lots of other chips do this. Apple dropping clock speed as phones age is a very convenient excuse for an anti-feature to sell new phones.
deckar01 9y ago
Yes, and I think this is a common strategy in the CPU manufacturing world. The companies developing and testing software for these devices probably don't realize that the performance of their software will start to degrade in 18 months.
- gm-conspiracy 9y ago
  I think this is a really important point. Also, consider the effect it has on companies that have contracted that development out, and a year later, their app "sucks", without any code changes.
sliverstorm 9y ago
If you design a chip with the whole lifecycle of the battery in mind, you can achieve better average performance for the life of the chip. Pulling numbers out of the air, the argument is the chip was designed for maximum performance with a fresh battery, 100% performance. But later it's throttled to 80%. Or, Apple could have designed the chip for a steady 95% performance throughout the life of the phone.
- greedo 9y ago
  I would prefer a phone that lost performance over time than one that was gimped at the start. I think the optics aside, most consumers would prefer that as well.
  - syrrim 9y ago
    Depends on the customer. If you're planning on keeping it for five years, you'd like it to last the time. If you're planning on replacing it when the new one comes out next year, you'd rather it got maximal performance during that year. What it comes down to is which customer apple wants to cater to which is fairly obviously the latter.
    - greedo 9y ago
      Keeping a phone for five years isn't something I'd want considering the rate of performance improvement. A five year old iPhone would be an iPhone 5. The improvements in CPU/GPU since then are fairly astounding. Going from an A6 dual-core at 1.3GHz to an A11 six-core at 2.39GHz is just nuts. One is 32nm, the other 10nm. Smartphones are the one area in computing that seem to still be having huge jumps in performance compared to desktop/laptop computers.
binaryapparatus 9y ago
Seriously, isn't this discussion of the wrong topic altogether? CPU is not too strong, battery is too weak by design. Am I missing the point in this and other articles arguing about everything else but not about battery capacity? What if we had 10% more battery capacity and (oh horror) 0.1 mm thicker phone?
- madeofpalk 9y ago
  You mean what they did in the recent round of iPhones?
  - binaryapparatus 9y ago
    Maybe. I hope so but we can't really tell if new batteries have security margin or not. It will show in 12+ months.
- WillPostForFood 9y ago
  I recently swapped the battery on my iPhone 6. I can tell you that if the battery is too weak it is due to space constraints. Mabe that's what you mean by design, but given the form and space available, I don't think the battery could be stronger than it is.
  - binaryapparatus 9y ago
    Sorry I wasn't completely clear. When I say 'by design' I don't really mean 'planned obsolescence', I mean 'system design problem' because somebody wanted to shave another 0.01 mm of thickness. I would be surprised to see any other reason than stupid form over function that causes this.
DrScump 9y ago
If they knew this from day one, or even day 501, then insisting on designs with non-user-replaceable batteries looks even more like planned obsolescence for financial gain.

jagger27 9y ago

No one would have blinked if Apple had just built the throttle into Low Power mode and documented the X% cut to clock speed and left stock performance alone.

apetrovic 9y ago
The problem is - when the battery is bad, the phone will shutdown even if the gauge says 60% or so, and that isn’t obviously “low power mode”. Source: saw it happening on my daugher’s iPhone 6, a year or so ago. To be clear: I’m not apologizing Apple. They have “we’ll make decisions for the user” attitude in their DNK, but this was gone too far.
- StavrosK 9y ago
  I wonder if that's what's happening with my Nexus 6P, which shuts down at 40ish%.
  - dsr_ 9y ago
    No, that's a widespread defect. I called Google Fi to complain about in October, and they decided to replace my out-of-warranty 6P with a Pixel XL (1st gen, but new). Apparently they had run out of 6Ps and were trying to clear stock of 1st gen Pixels. They probably won't be quite so nice to you, sorry.
    - StavrosK 9y ago
      Yeah, I already called them and they said I could at most talk to Huawei to see if maybe they'll get it repaired :/

mgiannopoulos 9y ago

So his argument is that the CPU should be throttled from day 1 so that it doesn't have to be throttled after a year of operation at a higher speed? How is that logical?

awinder 9y ago
You could provide a smaller throttle to get the same effect over longer periods of time. Leveling the throttle over the average lifespan of the phone would provide a consistent performance experience. That’s how I read the argument at least.
- mgiannopoulos 9y ago
  How does he know the CPU isn't actually throttled already per his suggestion? :)

iamgopal 9y ago

The fun part is, everybody easily accepts that battery degrades. But thinks hardware shouldn't.

sliverstorm 9y ago
Because it doesn't degrade, at least not in ways that are meaningful to the customer.
deckar01 9y ago
I have a 6 year old battery in my 2011 Macbook Air and it seems to handle the peak load of my quad core i7 just fine.
- Codestare 9y ago
  Surprised you have a quadcore macbook air, since they were never made.
  - deckar01 9y ago
    You are right, it is dual core. I forget the mobile variants can be dual core. *4 virtual cores :p
- valuearb 9y ago
  Batteries degrade with cycles and heat. Maybe your battery has few of both? Or a new battery?
- gok 9y ago
  Different devices have a longer consumer replacement cycle and less need for out-of-the-box energy density. For the same level of capacity degradation (80%) MacBooks are designed to 1000 cycles whereas iPhones batteries are designed for 500 cycles [1] [1] https://www.apple.com/batteries/service-and-recycling/ https://www.apple.com/batteries/service-and-recycling/
- jws 9y ago
  Phones and laptops are different beasts. I'm going to make up some numbers here to simplify, but the idea is the important part. Note: I wrote this whole comment with C inverted the first time. Too little sleep. It is now fixed thanks to user revelation. First: Battery people like to talk about discharge and charge rates in a unit called "C". If you drain a battery at 1/10C, you will totally use it up in 10 hours. If you drain it at 1/2C you will totally use it up in 2 hours. Laptop: 5000 milliamp hours at 10 volts for 50 watt hours of energy. This will last for 10 hours of use if you average 5 watts. You will be discharging at 0.1C on average. Your CPU might be a 15 watt CPU, so you can burst to maybe 20 watts total, or 0.4C. Phone: 1500 milliamp hours at 4 volts for 6 watt hours of energy. This will last for 6 hours of active use, so that is 1 watt. You are discharging at 0.16C on average. Let's guess the CPU can surge to 5 watts. That takes you to 6 watts total use and a discharge rate of 1C. So that is a 2.5x safety margin that the laptop has for degraded batteries over the phone. Summary: Phones operate much closer to the current limits of batteries compared to older laptops. Accumulated wear or damage to the battery will affect them sooner.

sweden 9y ago

Apple could have just implemented replaceable batteries and all this situation could have been avoided. Edit: When I mean replaceable, I mean replaceable batteries without the user having to go an Apple store. Like in the old days, taking the cover off and putting the new battery back in.

ghshephard 9y ago
Apple batteries are replaceable. $79 and an hour at the Apple store will do the job. If you want to save money you can get it done at a third-party shop for less than $50. Where Apple made a mistake was in not communicating to its users that this is something they need to do on an annual basis, so people could budget it in to their cost.
- beamatronic 9y ago
  The hour at the Apple Store is the deal breaker. My time is too valuable for that.
  - mehrdada 9y ago
    Then you can afford iPhone upgrade annually.
  - mewse 9y ago
    You don't have to spend the hour at the Apple Store. You drop the phone off, leave, and come back at literally any time more than 1 hour later. Go to your important meeting. Do some shopping. Have that doctor's appointment you've been putting off. Have a nice long lunch. Whatever. You don't actually lose that hour. I mean, obviously.
    - rmwaite 9y ago
      I love Apple products. Every major computing device I use is made by them. I am lucky to be closer than the vast majority of people to an Apple store and even for me this is a huge pain in the ass. I think it is incredibly unreasonable to just hand wave this away like its no big deal. It absolutely is and to pretend otherwise is naive at best.

binaryapparatus 9y ago

There is a lot of gymnastics this days, from people like John Gruber and Rene Ritchie to downplay what just happened. Truth is their 'explanations' are disturbing to watch and extremely unhelpful to Apple. Plain and simple, battery is shaved so much that there is no surplus left (in the name of thinness), nothing to amortize normal battery degradation, so iPhone only works beautifully during initial review and couple of months after that. I really love Apple and some of my daily living depends on it, but this crap has to stop already. Three years back until now there are many missteps in the name of fad and profit, couple of years more and it won't matter since I won't have any market in that ecosystem.

redial 9y ago
> There is a lot of gymnastics this days, > iPhone only works beautifully during initial review and couple of months after that. I guess both sides are guilty.
JustSomeNobody 9y ago
> Plain and simple, battery is shaved so much that there is no surplus left (in the name of thinness), nothing to amortize normal battery degradation, so iPhone only works beautifully during initial review and couple of months after that. This is the crux of the issue. Apple is trying to "fix" a design flaw with software.
- binaryapparatus 9y ago
  If it is only one hiccup I woundn't react half as much but we could see exactly the same 'form over function' flaw with Mac Pro recently. Mac Pro has no cooling margin so it often fries graphic cards as soon as you try using it for (surprise) pro stuff. I really dislike gimmicks over reliability, and I count race to thinness there too, that can be seen with Apple in last couple of years.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
mikestew 9y ago

ComputerGuru 9y ago

I don’t know if I’m just too old having lived through the old nickel-cadmium “memory effect” days, it everybody I know - techie or not - already knows and accepts that batteries “get old” and then “die faster” and “don’t charge right” as the device ages. Lithium battery tech today is an incredible step forward, but simply acknowledging the still existent limitations of the battery and it’s lifespan seems like a much simpler and saner solution than building a house of cards trying to hide that reality. Battery dying in 2 hours after a full charge? Time to get it replaced. If your device is still under warranty, it’s free. Otherwise it’s 80 bucks and you’re golden. What’s the big deal? Instead we have this nonsense approach to pretend that batteries live forever at such a cost. And then you have the people that pop up out of the woodworks in each and every single iPhone battery life thread to say "it's not that the battery dies faster, it's that the phone suddenly shuts off at 60% [or whatever]," which is an absolute load of BS. The iPhone 6S was the first device to have that problem (I went to the Apple store within a year of its release with my iPhone 6S and spent over 3 hours explaining to the tech what was going on despite what his fancy charts and on-chip reporting software saw until he relented and gave me a replacement phone well before Apple ever acknowledged the issue and initiated the limited recall) - and it's the equivalent of a bug in the hardware design. As a battery ages, the "definition" of 100% slides (as the charge cycles go up the charge capacity goes down - although it's not that simple since li-ion batteries also retain some form of the old cadmium cell memory effect that doesn't scale in a directly linear fashion with the charge cycles, but not to an appreciable extent that would have a bearing on this particular matter), but there's no reason that a device should die at 60% of its _remaining_ battery life. Except that the iPhone 6S' hardware was designed in such a way that it demanded current that could only be supplied at a voltage in excess of what the reduced-capacity battery could supply, leading to the problem at hand. This is just me guessing, but I'm fairly convinced of the truth here: Apple didn't implement CPU scaling to improve the end user experience nor to make money off of "planned obsolescence" but rather to avoid having to replace phones/batteries within and without the warranty period (as a recall was warranted due to the faulty design) and decided to implement a software _workaround_ (and decidedly _not_ a _fix_) to get all but the most susceptible phones to avoid the scenario that would trigger the brownout.

pronoiac 9y ago

teenytim 9y ago

Apple also could have paid fair taxes on well over a quarter over a trillion dollars. Apple does what Apple shareholders want, however, not what is best for us users.

walterbell 9y ago

Why is throttling needed when the phone is connected to AC power?

binaryapparatus 9y ago
This is another very good question that didn't get proper answer yet. I have noticed significant slowdown on my 2012 Mac Book Pro, after installing High Sierra. Up to the point of not being to start any app for several seconds, which wasn't the case with Sierra or before. So in this new light it may as well be throttled down too. Anybody else noticed this?
- jesscxc 9y ago
  I'm running High Sierra on a 2012 MacBook Air and haven't noticed any slowdown. Heats up if I run a lot of things at once, but individual apps seem fine.
mthoms 9y ago
Good question. Here's another that needs to be answered IMHO: Do third party battery replacements return the processor to normal performance? Or is it just "official" Apple-performed battery replacements that do so? I wouldn't be surprised if there were some sort of extra procedure needed to reset the processor throttling back to normal. Or, perhaps the throttling code checks for genuine Apple batteries somehow? Apple needs to come clean with more details about exactly how this is implemented.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
cesarb 9y ago
Due to the length of the wire leading to the AC adapter, it probably can't respond quickly enough to the voltage drop. The battery is much closer. A solution would be to use a big enough capacitor on the phone end of the wire, but phones are very space constrained, and since the battery is non-removable, it can be used as sort of a "capacitor" for these instantaneous power demands, so there's no need for the extra cost and space of beefier input capacitors.

ankushnarula 9y ago

Rather than throttle, Apple has done something similar since the A10/A11 processors with their additional low-power cores. Presumably this should reduce the short-term wear on the battery and extend the life of the cells.

IBM 9y ago

The lede of the story and pretty much every one I've read is false. >For years consumers have complained and theorized that Apple would purposely degrade the performance of older iPhones, pushing them to upgrade faster than they normally would. >This week the theory of slowing iPhones was validated by external sources and eventually corroborated by Apple. The conspiracy theory we're talking about is that Apple slows your old iPhone to make you upgrade to new ones and it goes back all the way to the first iPhones. It's false on its face because this fix wasn't added until iOS 10.2.1 [1] and it wasn't what Apple "corroborated" at all. And for the "Apple should have been transparent" crowd, here's what it said in the release notes: >iOS 10.2.1 includes bug fixes and improves the security of your iPhone or iPad. >It also improves power management during peak workloads to avoid unexpected shutdowns on iPhone. >For information on the security content of Apple software updates, please visit this website: https://support.apple.com/HT201222 https://support.apple.com/HT201222 There's some extremely bad writing on the internet about this story meant to capitalize on the general controversy. Honestly, Apple should find the most egregious one and sue for defamation, and relish the opportunity to testify under oath if it goes to trial. [1] https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1893?locale=en_US https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1893?locale=en_US

iiiggglll 9y ago
I agree with most of what you wrote, and I do think it was the right call for them to implement this feature for iPhones with batteries having trouble, and I agree most if not all the articles about this have been poorly written and badly misinformed. However... > for the "Apple should have been transparent" crowd, here's what it said in the release notes I can't agree that that's sufficient. That little one liner in the release notes just isn't enough. On macOS, they did more. The battery menu extra will actually display a warning when clicked if it detects that your battery is having trouble. It shows as an extra row at the top of the drop-down menu with a little little caution triangle icon and the string "Service Battery". When you click this, it takes you to a help article advising you to "take your computer in for service". It's not perfect, but it's better than not telling the user anything. Apple could and should have done something similar on iOS, especially given that there's a whole section in Settings for just the battery. They could have displayed a similar alert icon with similar help text, for starters. A full-screen alert advising the user to get their battery serviced whenever this condition was detected would have been even better. Burying it as a single sentence in the release notes wasn't all that helpful or informative for customers.

herf 9y ago

What if the flaw was earlier in the design? The iPhone has a battery that's 2/3 the size of other phone batteries. Would there even be a problem with a 1000mAh bigger battery?

kabdib 9y ago

When we were doing the Apple Newton, one of my cow-orkers noted that the CPU had a divisor register that let you choose pretty much any clock frequency you could want, down to kilohertz. His half-serious proposal to guarantee users "a 12 hour battery life" regardless of battery condition was poorly received by the rest of the team . . .

gm-conspiracy 9y ago
Under Siege 2?
nerfhammer 9y ago
Is that different from what a prescaler is?
- kabdib 9y ago
  It was a "CPU throttle" register that controlled the ARM's clock, with four or eight bits of divisor from the base 20Mhz clock. It's been a long time and it's hard to remember h/w register layouts from several decades ago :-) (Yes, we did the whole Newton on a 20Mhz ARM with less than 512K of RAM).

CamperBob2 9y ago

Just add a setting. Prefer performance, or prefer battery life. Is that so hard? What arguments are there against this other than planned obsolescence? Educate me. Downvotes aren't arguments.

twotwotwo 9y ago
Performance isn't lowered to extend battery life, it's lowered because the degradation in old batteries makes it impossible to reliably run the processor at max clock; if you flip a switch to force high clocks despite an old battery, your phone will randomly shut down sometimes. So they couldn't really run the CPU full speed for years. They sure could have, say, highlighted to users that a battery replacement can make an old phone run better for longer, but of course they'd much rather users replace their phones. Or, as another comment here suggested, they could have left more margin--overspecced the battery so it could run the CPU at higher speeds even once it was somewhat degraded, rather than putting so much of the efficiency gain over iPhone generations into thinness and lightness. Might also help battery life for heavy users.
- CamperBob2 9y ago
  Performance isn't lowered to extend battery life, it's lowered because the degradation in old batteries makes it impossible to reliably run the processor at max clock; if you flip a switch to force high clocks despite an old battery, your phone will randomly shut down sometimes. That may be what they're telling people, but there is absolutely no engineering basis for it. Battery voltages decrease gradually under all normal operating conditions, and switched-mode converters can extract useful energy from them throughout the entire discharge regime. The main constraint on battery voltage isn't some mysterious "random shutdown" effect, but the health of the battery itself. If you allow the battery voltage to fall too low -- which will, again, happen gradually and not instantaneously -- its service life will be greatly impaired. This is not something that happens without warning. It's a perfectly well understood effect. Once the phone's CPU sees this happening, it will have plenty of time to post a "Shutting down in xx seconds" message to the user, go into emergency low-power mode, or otherwise take action to protect the battery.

devit 9y ago

The simplest solution is to just tell the user that they need to replace the battery with a popup. The fact that they didn't implement it and that doing so might benefit them financially obviously leads people to assume malicious intent.

theDoug 9y ago
Agreed. They can have a $79 in-warranty battery replacement program but if no one knows about it, it does little good to point to its existence later.

ChildOfChaos 9y ago

There is no controversy. stfu and relax.

kurtisc 9y ago
If you have tell someone they're wrong about there being a controversy, there's a controversy.

sigi45 9y ago

"controversy" I replacyed my old Samsung S4 Mini because the flash storage got super slow. It is known, you can test it and because android uses sqlite and there are apparently many small iops, the smart phone starts to become slow and lagy. Who cares? I cared. Had to replace it because i can't / will not re solder flash chips. Who else cared? NO ONE... My previous smartphone was also too old for warranty and had an issue with the mainboard. Also enough other people had this issue. I don't mind when there are better lawys like 3 year warranty for specific specs like battry lifetime, broken pixel and iops but this is not a 'controversy'.

goblins 9y ago

>How Apple could have prevented the iPhone-slowdown controversy Easy, user replaceable battery. (For clarity by "user replaceable" I don't mean by the user paying $79 for Apple to do it; which is a rip off) IMO if you design a phone (costing the better part of a grand) with a battery unsuitable for a years worth of use it's a design flaw, if the battery is not easily replaceable by the user then the phone is not fit for purpose.

dEnigma 9y ago
Not to mention the junk this generates and resources this wastes by forcing users to buy a new phone, when a replacement battery would make it perfectly usable again. I hope some regulatory body would step in here, like the EU did for unified phone charger ports.
greedo 9y ago
I (and many other buyers) don't want a user-replaceable battery. I think they look like crap, they make the phone look like crap, and in my history of owning iPhones since day one, I've never had to replace my iPhones battery. I did have one replaced through a warranty extension thing but that was because I was reselling the phone and wanted to give the buyer a perfectly new battery. Otherwise I would have kept the one inside.
- petecox 9y ago
  Many phone owners these days put their device in a case. How then can it then "look like crap" if aesthetically it's hidden under a layer of coloured rubber?
  - goblins 9y ago
    Not to mention you'd be hard pressed telling if a phone has a user replaceable battery just by looking at it. I should know because that's the first thing I ask because I won't buy a phone without a user replaceable battery.

chmaynard 9y ago

From Apple's statement: "Lithium-ion batteries become less capable of supplying peak current demands when in cold conditions, have a low battery charge, or as they age over time, which can result in the device unexpectedly shutting down to protect its electronic components." Apple seems to be saying that throttling might occur even if the battery is perfectly fine. This points to a fundamental design flaw across many different models and generations, which is the main conclusion of this article. One could even argue that Apple is using a "cheat device" that produces different performance during benchmarks vs. actual real-world use. Sound familiar? This is exactly what VW did. Is it illegal? We will find out as the lawsuits proceed.

thecollate 9y ago

What happens if you charge your throttled iPhone. Does the performance improve while charging vs running on battery ?

catilac 9y ago

then they should have charged less for their products. or created a more environmentally friendly design. my guess is that apple's PR team made this article happen