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Apple faces lawsuits after admitting it slows down aging iPhones

110 points by empressplay 9y ago

chipperyman573 9y ago
I really like Linus' (Sebastian, not Torvalds) thoughts about this: https://youtu.be/TJUeHmdzSx4?t=11m22s https://youtu.be/TJUeHmdzSx4?t=11m22s Basically, Apple chose to tune the phones to run at a dangerously high configuration to increase benchmarks, knowing that the battery will degrade like this (and that when the iphone X2 comes out, nobody will be talking about this, instead they'll be talking about how much faster the X2 is than the X). His exact quote is that "they are running them so close to the red line that surely they must know, when they're shipping these things (Because it's not like LiOn batteries are especially new tech at this point, and Apple has done TONS of research in this field), Apple knows pretty much exactly what's going to happen with this, pretty much perfectly, and they're making the conscious decision to do this" Before I heard this I thought "Oh come on, Apple truely is protecting your phone here", but after hearing his argument I changed my mind.
- sa1f 9y ago
  What does "running them close to the red line" mean? Do iPhone batteries degrade faster than other phones?
  - chipperyman573 9y ago
    Optimizing for speed instead of device survivability. Basically, instead of running at 110% for the first year then throttling to much less so the device doesn't break, they should have shipped them running at 90-100% so they can last longer. (Those numbers are random but the point is still valid)
    - arcticbull 9y ago
      I don't think that's a fair representation of what's happening though. The reality is that running it at 110% (for whatever that means) is using a new battery at its maximum discharge rate. As the battery ages, its maximum discharge rate decreases, and would have whether run at 110% or 90%. You need to go way out of spec to prematurely age batteries by discharging too fast. They age mostly by being exposed to high temperatures, stored fully charged, and by being fully discharged (partial charge cycles are better). Artificially limiting performance to the post-degradation level can be seen as wasteful, can it not? Now the way Apple handled it, silently, throttling performance without a configuration option is interesting. I think the benchmarks may not be truly representative of what is happening, and it's probably closer to a TDP limit on the CPU where it runs real fast until it realizes it can't then it ... doesn't. That comes across as maximally efficient in real life but slow in benchmarks. This is all in the marketing. Either you can look at it as "iPhone find a way to squeeze every last bit of battery life out of both new and old devices" or you can look at it as "my phone slows down over time" -- the reality of the chemistry of lithium ion devices. IMO this should be handled with a configuration switch and a notification when performance starts to become limited, though how many would be totally confused by this? That hundreds of millions of users took years to notice should be an indication this whole thing worked pretty well IMO.
      - dsharlet 9y ago
        > That hundreds of millions of users took years to notice should be an indication this whole thing worked pretty well IMO. People absolutely have been noticing, this has been a very popular and long running issue. It took years for Apple to admit it, not for people to notice. I think this could have been better handled by throttling according to the actual condition of the battery, rather than controlling it via software updates. The former seems reasonable, the latter is pretty shady. (Maybe this is actually what is happening and the press has confused what is going on.)
        garretraziel 9y ago
        They are throttling it according to battery's condition (but actual throttling apparatus was added via an update). If you replace old battery with a new one, phone starts running at full speed again.
        mehrdada 9y ago
        > People absolutely have been noticing, this has been a very popular and long running issue. It took years for Apple to admit it, not for people to notice. The behavior in question was introduced in 10.2.1 which was first released in Feb 2017. So no, it was not a conspiracy going on for years. The annual slowdown was just poor unoptimized software. Occam's razor.
    - sa1f 9y ago
      Hmm, just a bit skeptical about that. I'm pretty sure that peak "110%" usage rarely happens throughout the day; Maybe during video playback or gaming. This is especially true since the iPhone 7, with its two low power cores who's entire purpose is to extend battery life.
      - thisacctforreal 9y ago
        IIUC the low power cores could be configured to both extend short-term battery life (daily cycles), and decrease long-term battery life. The uproar is strictly re: long-term battery life.
  - chrisper 9y ago
    It's like overclocking your CPU very close to the limits of your cooling ability. You will get great benchmark scores, but your CPU will also last a lot less as well (though with CPUs it doesn't matter if they now run for 20 years or 32 years, but if you push it a lot more you might damage it. But hey, at least you got great benchmark points).
    - amelius 9y ago
      Wouldn't you also get more hardware errors, causing e.g. sudden kernel panics and stuff like that? And wouldn't that damage the brand more than the speed improvement is worth?
      - chrisper 9y ago
        Yeah. One could argue that if you are getting hardware errors you are already at the red line (and not just close to it). Regarding damage: It depends what your goal is. Some people want to get as much performance out of the CPU as possible since they maybe upgrade after a year or two anyway. Some people even try to set records by using crazy cooling systems.
- simonbarker87 9y ago
  If Apple slowed the phone down upfront then people would complain that Apple were throttling as the user is “too dumb to look after their battery properly” so instead they are doing when they can point to a proven need to throttle the device. This feels like a no win situation for Apple unless they had/will put in “throttle my phone so it doesn’t go weird” switch in settings. Side note: we’ve known for years that hammering a battery day in day out causes problems, my wife and I have had our 6S phones for the same amount of time - I plug mine in as much as possible (over charging is not a problem anymore) and she runs hers into the red all the time. After 2 years my phone runs fine and, when needed, I get a days charge out of it but she barely gets 4 hours and is noticeably slower. If people looked after their batteries better this would be less of a problem.
  - mplewis 9y ago
    On that note, it'd be nice if Apple were more user-friendly about battery cycle counts. I don't think there's a way for me to see battery health without installing an app, and I've never seen a message asking me to replace the battery in my two-year-old iPhone.
    - mdwrigh2 9y ago
      If the battery does degrade to the point of needing to be replaced, there is a message in the battery settings page: http://media.idownloadblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/iPhone-battery-servicing-warning.jpg http://media.idownloadblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/iP...
  - chrisper 9y ago
    LiOn is all about loading cycles. In the same amount of time (let's say 5 days) she has used up way more cycles than you did. You probably charged 5 * 20% while she maybe charged 5 * 90%. Obviously she is using up her load cycles much faster than you are. So no surprise her battery isn't very good anymore. I don't think you two are using the phone equally much (meaning using up the same loading cycles in the 5 days). Like for example, she charging 2 * 90% and you charging 4 * 20% and 1 * 10%.
- netsharc 9y ago
  For those interested this is Linus Sebastian (or his last name "Tech Tips"), not Torvalds... As the video was loading I was wondering if Torvalds had started commenting on general tech news.
  - szatkus 9y ago
    Well, Linus Torvalds posts at RWT.
- abalone 9y ago
  This is just sensationalist poorly sourced crap. > "they are making these devices that it's difficult to replace the battery for..." No. It's free under AppleCare and a whopping $79 out of warranty, and you can do it via mail. > "they are running them so close to the redline that they can only handle it for a year" No source cited for this. There is no indication that iPhones are regularly degrading beyond 80% within or shortly after one year. > [compares to volkswagen emissions cheat] Seems reasonable. :-/ It's ironic that this guy invokes the specter of benchmark cheating when Apple actually has been one of the only manufacturers that hasn't engaged in it.[1] [1] https://www.xda-developers.com/benchmark-cheating-strikes-back-how-oneplus-and-others-got-caught-red-handed-and-what-theyve-done-about-it/ https://www.xda-developers.com/benchmark-cheating-strikes-ba...
  - izacus 9y ago
    Many throttled 6S phones show up as "green" on Apple diagnostic which means that Apple stores will generaly refuse to do the battery swap.
  - jackvalentine 9y ago
    I'm one of the people defending Apple's charge for battery replacement as reasonable, but his point is it's actually a physically difficult thing to do, to replace the battery. It takes real skill to replace a modern iphone battery without ruining it. > "they are running them so close to the redline that they can only handle it for a year" As for this, he's citing the fact the iPhone 7 is affected - a phone that came out just over a year ago.
    - waterphone 9y ago
      It doesn't really take that much skill. I did it in 15 minutes for the first time with no advance reading/watching. The kits you can buy online come with a full set of tools and instructions.
      - jackvalentine 9y ago
        Counter anecdote: my housemate totally ruined his girlfriends phone trying.
- frik 9y ago
  Why is this news hidden? Every second interesting news gets hidden away these days
- specialist 9y ago
  I love this hack. It's awesome that a device was made adaptive to its context. Tunable. We can chip our cars to optimize performance. We can even remotely update satellites, probes, rovers to extend their lives. Awesome. Better would be a "check engine light" when a new battery is needed. Best would be full transparency. I want coconutBattery functionality on the iOS device. I want the option of running the diagnostic utilities the Genius Bar uses.
williamscales 9y ago
Can someone explain to me how this can reasonably be considered fraud? I don't think Apple makes any guarantees about the performance an iPhone will sustain over time.
- simion314 9y ago
  Usually in the user manual of product you get informed about the battery life decreasing with time, maybe Apple did not mention that also CPU performance will drop with time. From the article it seems that customers wanted to get a new battery from Apple if the current one degraded while in the warranty so phone shutdown but Apple decided to hide the problem with an update that slowdown the CPU.
  - izacus 9y ago
    Why would you want to live in a country where adding a blurb to user manual excuses your device being crippled after few short years? Even though the hardware functions perfectly well?
- kodablah 9y ago
  IANAL, but I would guess it's the implicit assumption that this is not done to your device without your knowledge/consent. Misdeeds can't be handwaved away with "we made no guarantees we wouldn't do that". It's the explicit choice to not be clear about intentionally hobbling devices and what consumers could have done to de-hobble them that has many up in arms (and spending lots more on a new phone as opposed to a new battery). I really look forward to discovery and evidence in these cases if they move forward. Surely engineers raised opacity concerns.
- duncanawoods 9y ago
  Apple's strategy has been to sell devices in an unstable overclocked state with marketing based on benchmarks and then secretly downgrade to a stable configuration later in life. Its ultimately a bait and switch deception driven by fraudulent marketing.
  - deleted 9y ago
dba7dba 9y ago
So apple iphone was not magically faster than other phones because of better engineering?
- 2muchcoffeeman 9y ago
  I don't think the is the case. The SOCs are faster. The batteries can't keep up. So they need to throttle the performance to draw less power if the batteries degrade too much. Which is why swapping out the old battery restores things. A new battery can provide enough power.
alecthomas 9y ago
My wife and I both just upgraded our iPhone 6's because they became unusably slow after iOS 11. Prior to the upgrade they had been running fine with no issues. We tried many things including disabling all background app usage, full wipe and restore, etc. My wife eventually took hers into the Apple store and they said they didn't know why it was slowing down but that she shouldn't have upgraded and that there was nothing they could do. So faced with unusably slow phones, and no resolution, what other choice is there? We both upgraded. She bought an iPhone X and I bought a Pixel 2 XL. We would have both been happy sticking with our iPhone 6's as they were under iOS 10. The crux of the matter is this: our phones were fine before iOS 11, then unusably slow. We upgraded because we were forced to (unknowingly at the time) by a software update.
- izacus 9y ago
  Well but you DID buy another iPhone right? Apple got exactly what they wanted - you spending another 700$+ to replace a perfectly functional device after just a few years. The iPhone now goes to the garbage bin adding to pollution even though it can run the OS just fine without being crippled via update.
  - blocked_again 9y ago
    Holy shit. You people just throw away the old iPhone after buying a new one? That is a luxury almost no one in my country has. So weird that the people get to live the life on basis of how well the seed generator of Universe performed during their birth.
    - ktta 9y ago
      Welcome to the concept of inequality. Most people in the world don't have the access to internet you have. And I would imagine some would say "Holy shit. You people browse message boards? I would rather spend that time on a MOOC". While it is weird looking at the affluence scale above, it is very depressing looking what's at the bottom of the scale. I don't mean to chastise you. It is just a realization I've come to.
hoodoof 9y ago
If it isn't fraud then it should be a user option. "Slow down phone as battery ages" yes/no
- zwily 9y ago
  Or “Randomly turn off with lots of charge as battery ages yes/no”?
izacus 9y ago
Note that this goes well with Apple fighting against right to repair and 3rd party repairers - if they can make your phone slow over time and prevent you from cheaply and easily replacing the battery, they essentially force you to replace your pocket computer every two years or so - the pesky "iPad Upgrade Problem" disappears for them. I think we shouldn't look at this issue in isolation - Apple (earning bulk their money with hardware sales) has tried quite hard to make planned obsolescence an accepted thing. Soldered components, special screws, lobbying against legislation to allow you to maintain electronics.
- mch82 9y ago
  $79 for a replacement battery seems reasonable, https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/battery-power https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/battery-power > If you're covered under AppleCare+, we'll replace your battery at no charge if it retains less than 80 percent of its original capacity. > If your iPhone needs battery replacement and it’s not covered, the service fee is $79. I agree that I wish it were easier to repair and upgrade Apple products.
  - izacus 9y ago
    Yes, of course it does. If you know that the battery is faulty. Doesn't really change the fact that Apple is actively fighting against any legislation that would make electronics repairable though.
wojcikstefan 9y ago
Before iOS 11 my 3 year old iPhone 6 behaved perfectly fine. After the upgrade it's so painfully slow it's basically unusable. For example, the Messages app maintains a lag of a few characters when typing, the Camera app freezes for ~5 seconds every time you open it, each tap on the screen has a perceivable delay, etc. My battery life hasn't been a problem over the last 3 years and I have not experienced my phone overheating or crashing (which I could interpret as signs of overclocking). I do not believe Apple shipped the slowdown to "protect my battery". Even if that truly was their desire, I'd much rather protect my UX instead and let the battery die (though, again, it didn't show any signs of severe degradation). This underclocking should at the very least be a customizable setting. Is there a reasonable chance Apple will revert this change after losing some of the lawsuits?
- scarlac 9y ago
  > I do not believe Apple shipped the slowdown to "protect my battery" So you believe they only slowed down your phone to have you buy a new phone and hoped not to get caught? My GF and I were affected by the voltage issue on iPhone 6 & 6S. If Apple can fix it by limiting voltage, it will give a better experience. Alternative is literal data loss which I consider much worse. BUT: They do need to tell users about this slow down. This is where they made a mistake. I don't see them reverting this change. I do see them paying a hefty fine for covertly downgrading, and being forced to inform their users of the downgrade. I do see them pushing software updates to refine the "battery management system" going forward.
  - wojcikstefan 9y ago
    > So you believe they only slowed down your phone to have you buy a new phone and hoped not to get caught? I don't feel comfortable speculating about their real intentions. Regardless, my main qualm is that they made my user experience worse without warning me about it during the upgrade nor providing the exact reason for it. I guess we can both agree then it's primarily a communication issue.
- zwily 9y ago
  The throttling code change happened in 10.2.1, not 11.
crypt1d 9y ago
As far as I'm concerned, this is a deal breaker. I've been an iOS user since 3GS and now I'm ready to jump ship. Apple has been disappointing me since few years now, and I've postponed migrating to Android mostly because I'm accustomed to its UX. But this is enough of a push for me to make an effort to give Android a try. I'm looking into Oneplus 5T and Pixel 2 XL. Any other suggestions?
- watmough 9y ago
  For $500, the Essential Phone may be worth a look. My wife seems pretty happy with hers.
  - goldenkey 9y ago
    Seems like we are being downvoted for giviing opinions on phones. Sometimes I don't understand this site...Thoughts?
  - crypt1d 9y ago
    interesting choice. doesn't ship to Europe though :/
- goldenkey 9y ago
  I have the Pixel 2 XL. Had the Pixel 1 XL before. Pixel 1 was great. But 2 is meh.. The screen quality is lackluster. The lack of a home button is annoying. Its not a great phone in terms of build quality especially for the high price. I dont know much about the OnePlus but I had a Galaxy Note beforehand and I absolutely loved it. Samsung has been making really great phones other than the battery explosion blip. If I was gonna buy a phone today Id probably buy a galaxy s or galaxy note.
  - SauciestGNU 9y ago
    I've been extremely happy with my Nexus 6p. So much so that I bought a Huawei laptop and would probably consider their flagship mobile device before even a pixel these days.
  - 9y ago
fredsted 9y ago
When I first heard about this, it was apparently due to Apple throttling the CPU when the battery started getting old and losing capacity. When the battery gets older, it keeps less charge and therefore, if you want the battery to last a reasonable amount of time, you'd need to lower the power usage. I recently got my iPhone 6S battery upgraded since it started shutting off randomly below 40%, especially in the cold. I got my battery changed for free due to the Apple 6S battery exchange program. Today the phone feels just as fast as I want it to. I have zero incentive to upgrade, and I'm even on iOS 11 which I've had zero problems with. I know of other people whose phones got faster after switching out the battery. In my opinion, after 2 years or so, you just need to change the battery. I wish Apple made it easier to see the health of the battery, and maybe a button that would send you a package with a return sticker so you could mail your phone in and get the battery changed in a day or two.
- specialist 9y ago
  coconutBattery.app (for the Mac) will show you the battery health of connected iOS devices. http://www.coconut-flavour.com/coconutbattery/ http://www.coconut-flavour.com/coconutbattery/ [Another commenter shared this trick after I voiced the same feature request. I had been using coconutBattery for a while, but didn't know it had added this feature.]
lapdanz 9y ago
The elephant in the room that no one addresses is that Apple offers 3 year extended warranty programs for which they refuse to fix the malfunctioning batteries by claiming that they pass their tests. This is despite the fact that the tests ran by the phone obviously fail (let's assume that Apple indeed checks the status of our batteries and is not applying blanket throttling) leading to the frequency limits.
- marklyon 9y ago
  I actually encountered this with my 6+, which I eventually upgraded. It was quickly depleting the battery, but the tests showed it was fine. The tech urged me to upgrade to the latest iOS, which I was hesitant to do, since I'd heard doing so would slow my phone. I didn't want a slow phone with a battery that died quickly. He assured me that the slowness had been addressed. Wanting to fix my phone, I upgraded. [0] Immediate slowness, to the point of being unusable, demonstrated to the in-store techs. Launching Twitter, for instance, would take minutes and crash half the time. I then found there was no supported method of reverting the upgrade, though one tech told me that if I browsed YouTube I could find a tutorial. I didn't want to DIY a downgrade and still have the short battery life, so I ended up selling my phone for a very low price and buying a new one. If I'd known replacing the battery would have revived it, I'd have happily done that. [0] https://i.imgur.com/OYZr7zd.png https://i.imgur.com/OYZr7zd.png
jackvalentine 9y ago
Now the cat is out of the bag I hope Apple adds a "your phone performance is being reduced because of a degraded battery" message to the settings app or something. Sad that they had to be sprung on this one and not more forthcoming though.
inertial 9y ago
On the "slowdown with old battery" issue, does an old iPhone speed up when it's connected to a charger. P.S. Just asking out of curiosity, in case someone has an old device and wants to run benchmarks.
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110 points by empressplay 9y ago

I really like Linus' (Sebastian, not Torvalds) thoughts about this: https://youtu.be/TJUeHmdzSx4?t=11m22s https://youtu.be/TJUeHmdzSx4?t=11m22s Basically, Apple chose to tune the phones to run at a dangerously high configuration to increase benchmarks, knowing that the battery will degrade like this (and that when the iphone X2 comes out, nobody will be talking about this, instead they'll be talking about how much faster the X2 is than the X). His exact quote is that "they are running them so close to the red line that surely they must know, when they're shipping these things (Because it's not like LiOn batteries are especially new tech at this point, and Apple has done TONS of research in this field), Apple knows pretty much exactly what's going to happen with this, pretty much perfectly, and they're making the conscious decision to do this" Before I heard this I thought "Oh come on, Apple truely is protecting your phone here", but after hearing his argument I changed my mind.

sa1f 9y ago
What does "running them close to the red line" mean? Do iPhone batteries degrade faster than other phones?
- chipperyman573 9y ago
  Optimizing for speed instead of device survivability. Basically, instead of running at 110% for the first year then throttling to much less so the device doesn't break, they should have shipped them running at 90-100% so they can last longer. (Those numbers are random but the point is still valid)
  - arcticbull 9y ago
    I don't think that's a fair representation of what's happening though. The reality is that running it at 110% (for whatever that means) is using a new battery at its maximum discharge rate. As the battery ages, its maximum discharge rate decreases, and would have whether run at 110% or 90%. You need to go way out of spec to prematurely age batteries by discharging too fast. They age mostly by being exposed to high temperatures, stored fully charged, and by being fully discharged (partial charge cycles are better). Artificially limiting performance to the post-degradation level can be seen as wasteful, can it not? Now the way Apple handled it, silently, throttling performance without a configuration option is interesting. I think the benchmarks may not be truly representative of what is happening, and it's probably closer to a TDP limit on the CPU where it runs real fast until it realizes it can't then it ... doesn't. That comes across as maximally efficient in real life but slow in benchmarks. This is all in the marketing. Either you can look at it as "iPhone find a way to squeeze every last bit of battery life out of both new and old devices" or you can look at it as "my phone slows down over time" -- the reality of the chemistry of lithium ion devices. IMO this should be handled with a configuration switch and a notification when performance starts to become limited, though how many would be totally confused by this? That hundreds of millions of users took years to notice should be an indication this whole thing worked pretty well IMO.
    - dsharlet 9y ago
      > That hundreds of millions of users took years to notice should be an indication this whole thing worked pretty well IMO. People absolutely have been noticing, this has been a very popular and long running issue. It took years for Apple to admit it, not for people to notice. I think this could have been better handled by throttling according to the actual condition of the battery, rather than controlling it via software updates. The former seems reasonable, the latter is pretty shady. (Maybe this is actually what is happening and the press has confused what is going on.)
      - garretraziel 9y ago
        They are throttling it according to battery's condition (but actual throttling apparatus was added via an update). If you replace old battery with a new one, phone starts running at full speed again.
      - mehrdada 9y ago
        > People absolutely have been noticing, this has been a very popular and long running issue. It took years for Apple to admit it, not for people to notice. The behavior in question was introduced in 10.2.1 which was first released in Feb 2017. So no, it was not a conspiracy going on for years. The annual slowdown was just poor unoptimized software. Occam's razor.
  - sa1f 9y ago
    Hmm, just a bit skeptical about that. I'm pretty sure that peak "110%" usage rarely happens throughout the day; Maybe during video playback or gaming. This is especially true since the iPhone 7, with its two low power cores who's entire purpose is to extend battery life.
    - thisacctforreal 9y ago
      IIUC the low power cores could be configured to both extend short-term battery life (daily cycles), and decrease long-term battery life. The uproar is strictly re: long-term battery life.
- chrisper 9y ago
  It's like overclocking your CPU very close to the limits of your cooling ability. You will get great benchmark scores, but your CPU will also last a lot less as well (though with CPUs it doesn't matter if they now run for 20 years or 32 years, but if you push it a lot more you might damage it. But hey, at least you got great benchmark points).
  - amelius 9y ago
    Wouldn't you also get more hardware errors, causing e.g. sudden kernel panics and stuff like that? And wouldn't that damage the brand more than the speed improvement is worth?
    - chrisper 9y ago
      Yeah. One could argue that if you are getting hardware errors you are already at the red line (and not just close to it). Regarding damage: It depends what your goal is. Some people want to get as much performance out of the CPU as possible since they maybe upgrade after a year or two anyway. Some people even try to set records by using crazy cooling systems.
simonbarker87 9y ago
If Apple slowed the phone down upfront then people would complain that Apple were throttling as the user is “too dumb to look after their battery properly” so instead they are doing when they can point to a proven need to throttle the device. This feels like a no win situation for Apple unless they had/will put in “throttle my phone so it doesn’t go weird” switch in settings. Side note: we’ve known for years that hammering a battery day in day out causes problems, my wife and I have had our 6S phones for the same amount of time - I plug mine in as much as possible (over charging is not a problem anymore) and she runs hers into the red all the time. After 2 years my phone runs fine and, when needed, I get a days charge out of it but she barely gets 4 hours and is noticeably slower. If people looked after their batteries better this would be less of a problem.
- mplewis 9y ago
  On that note, it'd be nice if Apple were more user-friendly about battery cycle counts. I don't think there's a way for me to see battery health without installing an app, and I've never seen a message asking me to replace the battery in my two-year-old iPhone.
  - mdwrigh2 9y ago
    If the battery does degrade to the point of needing to be replaced, there is a message in the battery settings page: http://media.idownloadblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/iPhone-battery-servicing-warning.jpg http://media.idownloadblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/iP...
- chrisper 9y ago
  LiOn is all about loading cycles. In the same amount of time (let's say 5 days) she has used up way more cycles than you did. You probably charged 5 * 20% while she maybe charged 5 * 90%. Obviously she is using up her load cycles much faster than you are. So no surprise her battery isn't very good anymore. I don't think you two are using the phone equally much (meaning using up the same loading cycles in the 5 days). Like for example, she charging 2 * 90% and you charging 4 * 20% and 1 * 10%.
netsharc 9y ago
For those interested this is Linus Sebastian (or his last name "Tech Tips"), not Torvalds... As the video was loading I was wondering if Torvalds had started commenting on general tech news.
- szatkus 9y ago
  Well, Linus Torvalds posts at RWT.
abalone 9y ago
This is just sensationalist poorly sourced crap. > "they are making these devices that it's difficult to replace the battery for..." No. It's free under AppleCare and a whopping $79 out of warranty, and you can do it via mail. > "they are running them so close to the redline that they can only handle it for a year" No source cited for this. There is no indication that iPhones are regularly degrading beyond 80% within or shortly after one year. > [compares to volkswagen emissions cheat] Seems reasonable. :-/ It's ironic that this guy invokes the specter of benchmark cheating when Apple actually has been one of the only manufacturers that hasn't engaged in it.[1] [1] https://www.xda-developers.com/benchmark-cheating-strikes-back-how-oneplus-and-others-got-caught-red-handed-and-what-theyve-done-about-it/ https://www.xda-developers.com/benchmark-cheating-strikes-ba...
- izacus 9y ago
  Many throttled 6S phones show up as "green" on Apple diagnostic which means that Apple stores will generaly refuse to do the battery swap.
- jackvalentine 9y ago
  I'm one of the people defending Apple's charge for battery replacement as reasonable, but his point is it's actually a physically difficult thing to do, to replace the battery. It takes real skill to replace a modern iphone battery without ruining it. > "they are running them so close to the redline that they can only handle it for a year" As for this, he's citing the fact the iPhone 7 is affected - a phone that came out just over a year ago.
  - waterphone 9y ago
    It doesn't really take that much skill. I did it in 15 minutes for the first time with no advance reading/watching. The kits you can buy online come with a full set of tools and instructions.
    - jackvalentine 9y ago
      Counter anecdote: my housemate totally ruined his girlfriends phone trying.
frik 9y ago
Why is this news hidden? Every second interesting news gets hidden away these days
specialist 9y ago
I love this hack. It's awesome that a device was made adaptive to its context. Tunable. We can chip our cars to optimize performance. We can even remotely update satellites, probes, rovers to extend their lives. Awesome. Better would be a "check engine light" when a new battery is needed. Best would be full transparency. I want coconutBattery functionality on the iOS device. I want the option of running the diagnostic utilities the Genius Bar uses.

williamscales 9y ago

Can someone explain to me how this can reasonably be considered fraud? I don't think Apple makes any guarantees about the performance an iPhone will sustain over time.

simion314 9y ago
Usually in the user manual of product you get informed about the battery life decreasing with time, maybe Apple did not mention that also CPU performance will drop with time. From the article it seems that customers wanted to get a new battery from Apple if the current one degraded while in the warranty so phone shutdown but Apple decided to hide the problem with an update that slowdown the CPU.
- izacus 9y ago
  Why would you want to live in a country where adding a blurb to user manual excuses your device being crippled after few short years? Even though the hardware functions perfectly well?
kodablah 9y ago
IANAL, but I would guess it's the implicit assumption that this is not done to your device without your knowledge/consent. Misdeeds can't be handwaved away with "we made no guarantees we wouldn't do that". It's the explicit choice to not be clear about intentionally hobbling devices and what consumers could have done to de-hobble them that has many up in arms (and spending lots more on a new phone as opposed to a new battery). I really look forward to discovery and evidence in these cases if they move forward. Surely engineers raised opacity concerns.
duncanawoods 9y ago
Apple's strategy has been to sell devices in an unstable overclocked state with marketing based on benchmarks and then secretly downgrade to a stable configuration later in life. Its ultimately a bait and switch deception driven by fraudulent marketing.
- deleted 9y ago

dba7dba 9y ago

So apple iphone was not magically faster than other phones because of better engineering?

2muchcoffeeman 9y ago
I don't think the is the case. The SOCs are faster. The batteries can't keep up. So they need to throttle the performance to draw less power if the batteries degrade too much. Which is why swapping out the old battery restores things. A new battery can provide enough power.

alecthomas 9y ago

My wife and I both just upgraded our iPhone 6's because they became unusably slow after iOS 11. Prior to the upgrade they had been running fine with no issues. We tried many things including disabling all background app usage, full wipe and restore, etc. My wife eventually took hers into the Apple store and they said they didn't know why it was slowing down but that she shouldn't have upgraded and that there was nothing they could do. So faced with unusably slow phones, and no resolution, what other choice is there? We both upgraded. She bought an iPhone X and I bought a Pixel 2 XL. We would have both been happy sticking with our iPhone 6's as they were under iOS 10. The crux of the matter is this: our phones were fine before iOS 11, then unusably slow. We upgraded because we were forced to (unknowingly at the time) by a software update.

izacus 9y ago
Well but you DID buy another iPhone right? Apple got exactly what they wanted - you spending another 700$+ to replace a perfectly functional device after just a few years. The iPhone now goes to the garbage bin adding to pollution even though it can run the OS just fine without being crippled via update.
- blocked_again 9y ago
  Holy shit. You people just throw away the old iPhone after buying a new one? That is a luxury almost no one in my country has. So weird that the people get to live the life on basis of how well the seed generator of Universe performed during their birth.
  - ktta 9y ago
    Welcome to the concept of inequality. Most people in the world don't have the access to internet you have. And I would imagine some would say "Holy shit. You people browse message boards? I would rather spend that time on a MOOC". While it is weird looking at the affluence scale above, it is very depressing looking what's at the bottom of the scale. I don't mean to chastise you. It is just a realization I've come to.

hoodoof 9y ago

If it isn't fraud then it should be a user option. "Slow down phone as battery ages" yes/no

zwily 9y ago
Or “Randomly turn off with lots of charge as battery ages yes/no”?

izacus 9y ago

Note that this goes well with Apple fighting against right to repair and 3rd party repairers - if they can make your phone slow over time and prevent you from cheaply and easily replacing the battery, they essentially force you to replace your pocket computer every two years or so - the pesky "iPad Upgrade Problem" disappears for them. I think we shouldn't look at this issue in isolation - Apple (earning bulk their money with hardware sales) has tried quite hard to make planned obsolescence an accepted thing. Soldered components, special screws, lobbying against legislation to allow you to maintain electronics.

mch82 9y ago
$79 for a replacement battery seems reasonable, https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/battery-power https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/battery-power > If you're covered under AppleCare+, we'll replace your battery at no charge if it retains less than 80 percent of its original capacity. > If your iPhone needs battery replacement and it’s not covered, the service fee is $79. I agree that I wish it were easier to repair and upgrade Apple products.
- izacus 9y ago
  Yes, of course it does. If you know that the battery is faulty. Doesn't really change the fact that Apple is actively fighting against any legislation that would make electronics repairable though.

wojcikstefan 9y ago

Before iOS 11 my 3 year old iPhone 6 behaved perfectly fine. After the upgrade it's so painfully slow it's basically unusable. For example, the Messages app maintains a lag of a few characters when typing, the Camera app freezes for ~5 seconds every time you open it, each tap on the screen has a perceivable delay, etc. My battery life hasn't been a problem over the last 3 years and I have not experienced my phone overheating or crashing (which I could interpret as signs of overclocking). I do not believe Apple shipped the slowdown to "protect my battery". Even if that truly was their desire, I'd much rather protect my UX instead and let the battery die (though, again, it didn't show any signs of severe degradation). This underclocking should at the very least be a customizable setting. Is there a reasonable chance Apple will revert this change after losing some of the lawsuits?

scarlac 9y ago
> I do not believe Apple shipped the slowdown to "protect my battery" So you believe they only slowed down your phone to have you buy a new phone and hoped not to get caught? My GF and I were affected by the voltage issue on iPhone 6 & 6S. If Apple can fix it by limiting voltage, it will give a better experience. Alternative is literal data loss which I consider much worse. BUT: They do need to tell users about this slow down. This is where they made a mistake. I don't see them reverting this change. I do see them paying a hefty fine for covertly downgrading, and being forced to inform their users of the downgrade. I do see them pushing software updates to refine the "battery management system" going forward.
- wojcikstefan 9y ago
  > So you believe they only slowed down your phone to have you buy a new phone and hoped not to get caught? I don't feel comfortable speculating about their real intentions. Regardless, my main qualm is that they made my user experience worse without warning me about it during the upgrade nor providing the exact reason for it. I guess we can both agree then it's primarily a communication issue.
zwily 9y ago
The throttling code change happened in 10.2.1, not 11.

crypt1d 9y ago

As far as I'm concerned, this is a deal breaker. I've been an iOS user since 3GS and now I'm ready to jump ship. Apple has been disappointing me since few years now, and I've postponed migrating to Android mostly because I'm accustomed to its UX. But this is enough of a push for me to make an effort to give Android a try. I'm looking into Oneplus 5T and Pixel 2 XL. Any other suggestions?

watmough 9y ago
For $500, the Essential Phone may be worth a look. My wife seems pretty happy with hers.
- goldenkey 9y ago
  Seems like we are being downvoted for giviing opinions on phones. Sometimes I don't understand this site...Thoughts?
- crypt1d 9y ago
  interesting choice. doesn't ship to Europe though :/
goldenkey 9y ago
I have the Pixel 2 XL. Had the Pixel 1 XL before. Pixel 1 was great. But 2 is meh.. The screen quality is lackluster. The lack of a home button is annoying. Its not a great phone in terms of build quality especially for the high price. I dont know much about the OnePlus but I had a Galaxy Note beforehand and I absolutely loved it. Samsung has been making really great phones other than the battery explosion blip. If I was gonna buy a phone today Id probably buy a galaxy s or galaxy note.
- SauciestGNU 9y ago
  I've been extremely happy with my Nexus 6p. So much so that I bought a Huawei laptop and would probably consider their flagship mobile device before even a pixel these days.
- 9y ago

fredsted 9y ago

When I first heard about this, it was apparently due to Apple throttling the CPU when the battery started getting old and losing capacity. When the battery gets older, it keeps less charge and therefore, if you want the battery to last a reasonable amount of time, you'd need to lower the power usage. I recently got my iPhone 6S battery upgraded since it started shutting off randomly below 40%, especially in the cold. I got my battery changed for free due to the Apple 6S battery exchange program. Today the phone feels just as fast as I want it to. I have zero incentive to upgrade, and I'm even on iOS 11 which I've had zero problems with. I know of other people whose phones got faster after switching out the battery. In my opinion, after 2 years or so, you just need to change the battery. I wish Apple made it easier to see the health of the battery, and maybe a button that would send you a package with a return sticker so you could mail your phone in and get the battery changed in a day or two.

specialist 9y ago
coconutBattery.app (for the Mac) will show you the battery health of connected iOS devices. http://www.coconut-flavour.com/coconutbattery/ http://www.coconut-flavour.com/coconutbattery/ [Another commenter shared this trick after I voiced the same feature request. I had been using coconutBattery for a while, but didn't know it had added this feature.]

lapdanz 9y ago

The elephant in the room that no one addresses is that Apple offers 3 year extended warranty programs for which they refuse to fix the malfunctioning batteries by claiming that they pass their tests. This is despite the fact that the tests ran by the phone obviously fail (let's assume that Apple indeed checks the status of our batteries and is not applying blanket throttling) leading to the frequency limits.

marklyon 9y ago
I actually encountered this with my 6+, which I eventually upgraded. It was quickly depleting the battery, but the tests showed it was fine. The tech urged me to upgrade to the latest iOS, which I was hesitant to do, since I'd heard doing so would slow my phone. I didn't want a slow phone with a battery that died quickly. He assured me that the slowness had been addressed. Wanting to fix my phone, I upgraded. [0] Immediate slowness, to the point of being unusable, demonstrated to the in-store techs. Launching Twitter, for instance, would take minutes and crash half the time. I then found there was no supported method of reverting the upgrade, though one tech told me that if I browsed YouTube I could find a tutorial. I didn't want to DIY a downgrade and still have the short battery life, so I ended up selling my phone for a very low price and buying a new one. If I'd known replacing the battery would have revived it, I'd have happily done that. [0] https://i.imgur.com/OYZr7zd.png https://i.imgur.com/OYZr7zd.png

jackvalentine 9y ago

Now the cat is out of the bag I hope Apple adds a "your phone performance is being reduced because of a degraded battery" message to the settings app or something. Sad that they had to be sprung on this one and not more forthcoming though.

inertial 9y ago

On the "slowdown with old battery" issue, does an old iPhone speed up when it's connected to a charger. P.S. Just asking out of curiosity, in case someone has an old device and wants to run benchmarks.

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