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It's choosing the lesser of two evils. The two options are to have the phone run slower, or have the phone shut down unexpectedly with shorter battery life. Pe
by l4yao 9y ago
It's choosing the lesser of two evils. The two options are to have the phone run slower, or have the phone shut down unexpectedly with shorter battery life.
Personally, I agree with Apple's call on this one.
- wslh 9y agoThere is an obvious third option: replacing your battery with a new one instead of playing this planned obsolescence game.
- curiousgal 9y agoMake it an option? Plus, having the phone shutdown would force users to upgrade out of necessity without feeling swindled.
- l4yao 9y ago>Make it an option? Hmm, that could work, but I feel like that might go against Apple's ethos. Not malicious, they just seem to like telling the user what's best and surfacing fewer options. I feel like the average user doesn't want to have to make this decision >Plus, having the phone shutdown would force users to upgrade out of necessity without feeling swindled. I'd disagree, but may be in the minority. I would hate having to upgrade because my battery life is shot. A large reason I chose iPhone was the battery life
- BoorishBears 9y agoAs the owner of an iPhone 6 that was degraded enough that even with the mitigation I had the issue, I agree. Any time my phone was under ~15% battery, it would randomly crash during demanding tasks. I'd think the battery had died, but turning it back on would work immediately and my battery wouldn't be at 1%/0%. At that point the battery capacity might as well be 85% of the already degraded value since the phone stops being stable.
- rconti 9y agoMy 6 would die at 30% with some regularity, even though supposedly only the 6S was impacted and hence only the 6S got free repairs.
- strictnein 9y agoThe right call is actually targeting performance at a level that would allow for longer consistent performance state. If they're having to go to measures this drastic to keep their phones from shutting down, their batteries are underspec'd and their processors are overspec'd.
- minimaxir 9y agoThe issue only affected the 6/6S generation (EDIT: with overwatch for the 7); presumably Apple identified and fixed the issue for the 8 onwards.
- strictnein 9y agoNo, that's not what is being stated here. The iPhone 7 came out a year ago. iPhone 7 users are also being offered the $29 battery replacement.
- minimaxir 9y agoFixed comment with clarity.
- mmcnl 9y agoAre you sure? I bet the iPhone 7 batteries simply haven't aged enough.
- l4yao 9y agoI agree, and imagine they probably tried. Maybe it's a new supplier, maybe newer apps are more power hungry than predicted?
- jasonlotito 9y agoThe other option would have been to alert the user this was going on. This didn't always happen. They were degrading users phones while showing the battery as fine. That's the problem, you can't just start degrading performance without telling people why. When you have people running 3rd party apps to determine whether their phones are still running fine, and then going to get battery replacements and finding performance returning, and nothing the OS told them indicated anything was wrong, that's a problem.
- michaelt 9y agoThat's a false dichotomy; Apple has many options other than slowing down the phone and having it randomly restart. For example, they could have altered the calibration of the battery indicator so 0% charge corresponds to the charge level where random restarts/throttling starts to occur.
- MBCook 9y agoDepending on how bad the battery is that me end up giving someone 30 to 60 minutes of battery life. That seems almost useless. Certainly worse than having a slower phone that has hours of battery life.
- Posibyte 9y agoBut it could prompt them to see an Apple Care Rep and get a new battery, which would fix the ultimate issue according to them.
- l4yao 9y agoWhat are some other options? Calibrating for a new "0%" effectively lead to a "shorter battery life". I don't know the intricacies of these options, but I can make a guess. The point which a phone resets isn't accurately predicted. Some user actions may cause larger voltage drops than others. For which action do you calibrate to 0%? What if you only do that action once a day? Is this trade off worth sacrificing 1% of your full capacity? What about 10% or 30%?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- flamedoge 9y agoThere is an obvious third option - have the phone run slower but tell user about it, that it's running in limp mode because of deteriorated battery.