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Reducing the battery replacement by $50 is a great move. While I think this is a completely manufactured scandal, this will definitely take away the last argume

Reducing the battery replacement by $50 is a great move. While I think this is a completely manufactured scandal, this will definitely take away the last argument people have against them. I'm sure some people will still hate them for something, though.

greggarious 9y ago
Personally I think this is great news. I like my 6s. I like my headphone port. I don't do anything CPU intensive on the phone. As long as security updates continue to be issued, I don't see a need to upgrade. I got lucky and wasn't affected by the battery shutdown issue even though my serial # was eligible for a free battery replacement, so I was able to put off the free battery replacement for a couple years and get a new one free. In another 2 years I'll probably swap it again for 25 bucks :D
- bluedino 9y ago
  Same here. I already had my battery replaced under that replacement plan, and for $25 why not get it replaced at some point this coming year and hopefully get another year out it.
  - jwineinger 9y ago
    > for anyone with an iPhone 6 or later whose battery needs to be replaced I'm guessing they'll have some criteria on that
    - mewse 9y ago
      Apple has criteria for whether or not they'll replace your phone's battery at all. I assume that eligibility for the lower battery replacement price will be identical to the eligibility test they're already doing for the battery replacement service. When you take your phone in, they'll do a test on the battery's current capacity and status, using a custom app. If the battery has reported errors, or if the reported capacity is low enough (below 80% capacity remaining, as I recall), then they'll agree to replace the battery. Takes a couple minutes to run the test, and then about an hour to swap the battery. (Caveat: I was last through this process on my old iPhone 5, about six months ago. I assume that the procedure and policies are basically the same for newer iPhones, and haven't changed substantively since then. My battery's remaining capacity was below 40%, and was reporting errors, when I had it replaced.)
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
    - garmaine 9y ago
      Health needs to be under 80%. Sadly my iPhone 7 device is at 87% and nevertheless suffering from frequent 5-10s UI freezes when doing anything as complicated as opening an app, responding to a notification, or switching IMEs. As reported by so many others, this happened immediately after the iOS 11 update. And by immediately I mean within seconds of booting right after installing the update. I stupidly waited for 11.1 hoping it would address the issue rather than revert while it was still possible. Apple will not replace my battery even under this new program, as it’s still considered healthy by their standard. However an iPhone 7 with 87% battery health is unable to run iOS 11 without frequent UI freezes or sudden power loss, as I’ve found out, due most likely to the fact that I’m running iOS 11 on hardware designed for iOS 10. I’d be okay with that if there was some way to revert, but there is not.
- caio1982 9y ago
  I understand the promotional cost of swapping it is valid until December 2018 as per the article (though I am not a native speaker of english so perhaps I got it wrong).
  - TheCapn 9y ago
    You are correct in how you understood the article. But I get the impression from the parent poster that he will use a "DIY" solution which costs $25 to get the same result.
mtgx 9y ago
If this is an issue that affects every iPhone say past 2 years (although I think I've heard reports of the issue affecting much newer iPhones), then wouldn't a much better solution (for the future) be to make iPhones with user-replaceable batteries? Why do people have to come in to the Apple Store to replace their batteries? Is Apple just counting on the fact that not too many will take them up on it?
- reaperducer 9y ago
  > Why do people have to come in to the Apple Store to replace their batteries? You don't. Thousands of people replace their own iPhone batteries every week. Even I've done it, and I'm not especially dexterous. Just go to Amazon or Google and search for a $20 replacement kit. Or, if you're not a DIY person, where I live there are places on every other streetcorner that will replace your battery for you.
- MBCook 9y ago
  > Why do people have to come in to the Apple Store to replace their batteries? That’s how Apple tends to handle almost all warranty issues. Either that or you can mail it in. iPhones are not exactly designed to be easily opened and messed with by normal people. It’s part of how they get them so thin (insert various other theories that may or may not apply here).
dilap 9y ago
I don't think it's a completely manufactured scandal, although most of the reporting was deceptive (as is, I'm starting to suspect, most reporting, full stop). I think the non-manufactured part of the scandal is having your phone throttle itself w/o telling you it's doing that is pretty annoying. You're left wondering, is my phone running slower or is my mind playing tricks on me? I think Apple's response here is great.
- matt4077 9y ago
  > (as is, I'm starting to suspect, most reporting, full stop). Don't hate on all journalism (or anything, really) just because of some bad apples. Even if it were true (which it isn't), it takes away all motivation for people in that industry to do the right thing. Why bother spending time on well-researched reporting, if all you get back is "fake news" or "all journalists are corrupt and produce clickbait"-hate on Twitter? More specifically, here's a Q&A, and a previous article, discounting Apple conspiracy theories by The New York Times: "Is Apple Slowing Down Old iPhones? Questions and Answers": https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/21/technology/iphone-battery-problem-slow.html?mtrref=www.google.com https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/21/technology/iphone-battery... "A New Phone Comes Out. Yours Slows Down. A Conspiracy? No.": https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/15/technology/personaltech/new-iphones-slow-tech-myth.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/15/technology/personaltech/n...
  - reaperducer 9y ago
    > Don't hate on all journalism (or anything, really) just because of some bad apples Unfortunately, since these days anyone with a smartphone can call themselves a "journalist," it's become like the lawyer situation — the 90% bad ones give the 10% good ones a bad name.
  - tomcam 9y ago
    “Bad apples.” hehe
  - alangpierce 9y ago
    I've also seen news reporting be frustratingly inaccurate on plenty of occasions, but I guess the right approach is to apply some amount of skepticism and think about the limitations of news reporting and the signs that the reporting is biased or editorialized. In this case, I saw lots of headlines like "Apple admits it deliberately slowed down old phones". To me, the word "admits" is a big red flag. It's a loaded term that you can apply to pretty much any public statement, and it suggests (but doesn't directly imply) that Apple is admitting to wrongdoing. Phrasing like that signals to me that the reporting is untrustworthy.
netsharc 9y ago
I like this comment referring to someone else's (Linus Sebastian of Linus Tech Tips) opinion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16013565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16013565 How is it "completely manufactured"? Apple programmed (and hid) the slowdown because it knows the batteries it is shipping with its phones won't last more than a year. Linus compared it to a car performing worse after 1 year of usage..
- MBCook 9y ago
  > because it knows the batteries it is shipping with its phones won't last more than a year. There is no evidence for this. Plenty of people use iPhones for two or three years and don’t have an issue, and didn’t before any of the iOS changes that “hid” them. Some people are just really hard on phone batteries. I have a few relatives that way. I’m not sure I’ve ever had an issue using the phone for 2+ years but I don’t tend to drain it down near the bottom much.
- reaperducer 9y ago
  > Linus compared it to a car performing worse after 1 year of usage I hate to break it to him, but a one-year-old car will perform worse than a brand new car. A car is a hugely more robust piece of machinery than a telephone, so the degradation is less noticeable, but it's there. Why do you think the car depreciates the second you drive it off the lot?
  - viraptor 9y ago
    Good point until: > Why do you think the car depreciates the second you drive it off the lot? Because of the dealership and "new car" markup. There's next to no difference between the car that left the parking lot and a "new" one. If you don't care about this silly game, you can save a lot by buying an ex-display model with a few hundred/thousand km done.
    - berbec 9y ago
      Tip of the year! I bought a "used" one-year-old Cadillac ATS with 6,000 miles on it. It had AWD, the V6 engine, and every option available except the rear-seat BluRay entertainment system. It was priced at 60% of new. It was a great deal and I challenge anyone to tell the car wasn't brand new without checking the odometer.
jsnk 9y ago
How is this a "completely manufactured scandal"? Tens of millions of old iPhone users were left in the dark why all of a sudden the phone was slowing down to the point where it was becoming unusable. Millions of people probably spent hundreds of dollars otherwise they wouldn't need to spend if they know this was something they can fix with a new battery. I personally have been using iPhone 6 for 3 years until this CPU-Battery disaster struck. So I ended up buying an Android phone. I love my Android phone now, but it's still money I wouldn't have had to spend. This is a huge scandal. I like the response by Apple, but it's too late and millions of people already spent money they could've avoided spending. Good bye iPhone. I won't be coming back.
- MBCook 9y ago
  If Apple hadn’t made this change those phones would have randomly turned off instead. Those people probably would’ve gone and bought either a new were iPhone or switch to android like you did. On the whole I don’t think this would have caused anyone to spend money they wouldn’t have otherwise. Perhaps they would have stayed with their phone longer. It’s hard to tell, and this is certainly worse than if they had just told people about the battery in the first place (although I imagine THAT would’ve become a scandal two).
  - krutzger 9y ago
    >If Apple hadn’t made this change those phones would have randomly turned off instead. Why is apple the only company with this problem?
    - yen223 9y ago
      Plenty of non-Apple phones suffer from random shutdowns and restarts due to faulty batteries.
    - hk__2 9y ago
      > Why is apple the only company with this problem? It’s the only one people care about enough. Apple gets a major "scandal" almost each year about something that affects every single smartphone company on the planet. Think of the antenna-gate or the bending issues. Lots of non-Apple phones have shown these issues, and the random shutdowns are no exception [1]. [1]: http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/12/20/some-nexus-6ps-have-developed-a-battery-early-shutoff-problem-and-its-becoming-a-safety-issue/ http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/12/20/some-nexus-6ps-have-... (updated to add a link)
pacala 9y ago
Props to Apple for doing the right thing. Sad that it took a manufactured scandal for iOS to provide elementary transparency into the behavior of known-to-degrade battery component. > Early in 2018, we will issue an iOS software update with new features that give users more visibility into the health of their iPhone’s battery, so they can see for themselves if its condition is affecting performance.
draw_down 9y ago
Framing this in terms of “hate” is really dismissive and juvenile. Your comment is in part a comment on the tone of internet discourse- consider that you are not helping.
blensor 9y ago
I could not care less about which company did this, it could have just as easily been Samsung, LG, <put your favorite brand here> BUT, what I do very much care about is that the company who did this does not get away with it without losing some feathers, because they did intentionally hide something from the user that did affect them quite noticeably and if they would not have been called out could have had even more serious effects in the long run. Imagine the following scenario. The battery of your phone is happily degrading and the manufacturer of your phone puts in some serious effort to develop a strategy so you as the user don't notice it. You keep using your phone thinking everything is fine, all the while your battery keeps degrading faster and faster. Then some day you actually need the power (in terms of processing power and in terms of stored energy) because, let's say you are taking a longer high quality video of a wedding. But since your phone is now running on full throttle your battery keeps discharging uncharacteristically fast because it is already in a bad state, or the software can't keep up with the data compression and has to start dropping frames and the video of the event you wanted to keep in good memory now looks awful. Sure, this is only a very benign scenario but it still illustrates that the manufacturer should not try to hide such important information from the user. And as I have mentioned in another thread, no one can tell me that not a single Apple engineer during this whole process has stepped up and said "Hey maybe it's also a good idea to tell the user that we are throttling the whole system so it may live a few months longer"
baby 9y ago
If you're ready to dismiss other people's complaint because you don't have one fuck you

greggarious 9y ago

Personally I think this is great news. I like my 6s. I like my headphone port. I don't do anything CPU intensive on the phone. As long as security updates continue to be issued, I don't see a need to upgrade. I got lucky and wasn't affected by the battery shutdown issue even though my serial # was eligible for a free battery replacement, so I was able to put off the free battery replacement for a couple years and get a new one free. In another 2 years I'll probably swap it again for 25 bucks :D

bluedino 9y ago
Same here. I already had my battery replaced under that replacement plan, and for $25 why not get it replaced at some point this coming year and hopefully get another year out it.
- jwineinger 9y ago
  > for anyone with an iPhone 6 or later whose battery needs to be replaced I'm guessing they'll have some criteria on that
  - mewse 9y ago
    Apple has criteria for whether or not they'll replace your phone's battery at all. I assume that eligibility for the lower battery replacement price will be identical to the eligibility test they're already doing for the battery replacement service. When you take your phone in, they'll do a test on the battery's current capacity and status, using a custom app. If the battery has reported errors, or if the reported capacity is low enough (below 80% capacity remaining, as I recall), then they'll agree to replace the battery. Takes a couple minutes to run the test, and then about an hour to swap the battery. (Caveat: I was last through this process on my old iPhone 5, about six months ago. I assume that the procedure and policies are basically the same for newer iPhones, and haven't changed substantively since then. My battery's remaining capacity was below 40%, and was reporting errors, when I had it replaced.)
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - garmaine 9y ago
    Health needs to be under 80%. Sadly my iPhone 7 device is at 87% and nevertheless suffering from frequent 5-10s UI freezes when doing anything as complicated as opening an app, responding to a notification, or switching IMEs. As reported by so many others, this happened immediately after the iOS 11 update. And by immediately I mean within seconds of booting right after installing the update. I stupidly waited for 11.1 hoping it would address the issue rather than revert while it was still possible. Apple will not replace my battery even under this new program, as it’s still considered healthy by their standard. However an iPhone 7 with 87% battery health is unable to run iOS 11 without frequent UI freezes or sudden power loss, as I’ve found out, due most likely to the fact that I’m running iOS 11 on hardware designed for iOS 10. I’d be okay with that if there was some way to revert, but there is not.
caio1982 9y ago
I understand the promotional cost of swapping it is valid until December 2018 as per the article (though I am not a native speaker of english so perhaps I got it wrong).
- TheCapn 9y ago
  You are correct in how you understood the article. But I get the impression from the parent poster that he will use a "DIY" solution which costs $25 to get the same result.

mtgx 9y ago

If this is an issue that affects every iPhone say past 2 years (although I think I've heard reports of the issue affecting much newer iPhones), then wouldn't a much better solution (for the future) be to make iPhones with user-replaceable batteries? Why do people have to come in to the Apple Store to replace their batteries? Is Apple just counting on the fact that not too many will take them up on it?

reaperducer 9y ago
> Why do people have to come in to the Apple Store to replace their batteries? You don't. Thousands of people replace their own iPhone batteries every week. Even I've done it, and I'm not especially dexterous. Just go to Amazon or Google and search for a $20 replacement kit. Or, if you're not a DIY person, where I live there are places on every other streetcorner that will replace your battery for you.
MBCook 9y ago
> Why do people have to come in to the Apple Store to replace their batteries? That’s how Apple tends to handle almost all warranty issues. Either that or you can mail it in. iPhones are not exactly designed to be easily opened and messed with by normal people. It’s part of how they get them so thin (insert various other theories that may or may not apply here).

dilap 9y ago

I don't think it's a completely manufactured scandal, although most of the reporting was deceptive (as is, I'm starting to suspect, most reporting, full stop). I think the non-manufactured part of the scandal is having your phone throttle itself w/o telling you it's doing that is pretty annoying. You're left wondering, is my phone running slower or is my mind playing tricks on me? I think Apple's response here is great.

matt4077 9y ago
> (as is, I'm starting to suspect, most reporting, full stop). Don't hate on all journalism (or anything, really) just because of some bad apples. Even if it were true (which it isn't), it takes away all motivation for people in that industry to do the right thing. Why bother spending time on well-researched reporting, if all you get back is "fake news" or "all journalists are corrupt and produce clickbait"-hate on Twitter? More specifically, here's a Q&A, and a previous article, discounting Apple conspiracy theories by The New York Times: "Is Apple Slowing Down Old iPhones? Questions and Answers": https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/21/technology/iphone-battery-problem-slow.html?mtrref=www.google.com https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/21/technology/iphone-battery... "A New Phone Comes Out. Yours Slows Down. A Conspiracy? No.": https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/15/technology/personaltech/new-iphones-slow-tech-myth.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/15/technology/personaltech/n...
- reaperducer 9y ago
  > Don't hate on all journalism (or anything, really) just because of some bad apples Unfortunately, since these days anyone with a smartphone can call themselves a "journalist," it's become like the lawyer situation — the 90% bad ones give the 10% good ones a bad name.
- tomcam 9y ago
  “Bad apples.” hehe
- alangpierce 9y ago
  I've also seen news reporting be frustratingly inaccurate on plenty of occasions, but I guess the right approach is to apply some amount of skepticism and think about the limitations of news reporting and the signs that the reporting is biased or editorialized. In this case, I saw lots of headlines like "Apple admits it deliberately slowed down old phones". To me, the word "admits" is a big red flag. It's a loaded term that you can apply to pretty much any public statement, and it suggests (but doesn't directly imply) that Apple is admitting to wrongdoing. Phrasing like that signals to me that the reporting is untrustworthy.

netsharc 9y ago

I like this comment referring to someone else's (Linus Sebastian of Linus Tech Tips) opinion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16013565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16013565 How is it "completely manufactured"? Apple programmed (and hid) the slowdown because it knows the batteries it is shipping with its phones won't last more than a year. Linus compared it to a car performing worse after 1 year of usage..

MBCook 9y ago
> because it knows the batteries it is shipping with its phones won't last more than a year. There is no evidence for this. Plenty of people use iPhones for two or three years and don’t have an issue, and didn’t before any of the iOS changes that “hid” them. Some people are just really hard on phone batteries. I have a few relatives that way. I’m not sure I’ve ever had an issue using the phone for 2+ years but I don’t tend to drain it down near the bottom much.
reaperducer 9y ago
> Linus compared it to a car performing worse after 1 year of usage I hate to break it to him, but a one-year-old car will perform worse than a brand new car. A car is a hugely more robust piece of machinery than a telephone, so the degradation is less noticeable, but it's there. Why do you think the car depreciates the second you drive it off the lot?
- viraptor 9y ago
  Good point until: > Why do you think the car depreciates the second you drive it off the lot? Because of the dealership and "new car" markup. There's next to no difference between the car that left the parking lot and a "new" one. If you don't care about this silly game, you can save a lot by buying an ex-display model with a few hundred/thousand km done.
  - berbec 9y ago
    Tip of the year! I bought a "used" one-year-old Cadillac ATS with 6,000 miles on it. It had AWD, the V6 engine, and every option available except the rear-seat BluRay entertainment system. It was priced at 60% of new. It was a great deal and I challenge anyone to tell the car wasn't brand new without checking the odometer.

jsnk 9y ago

How is this a "completely manufactured scandal"? Tens of millions of old iPhone users were left in the dark why all of a sudden the phone was slowing down to the point where it was becoming unusable. Millions of people probably spent hundreds of dollars otherwise they wouldn't need to spend if they know this was something they can fix with a new battery. I personally have been using iPhone 6 for 3 years until this CPU-Battery disaster struck. So I ended up buying an Android phone. I love my Android phone now, but it's still money I wouldn't have had to spend. This is a huge scandal. I like the response by Apple, but it's too late and millions of people already spent money they could've avoided spending. Good bye iPhone. I won't be coming back.

MBCook 9y ago
If Apple hadn’t made this change those phones would have randomly turned off instead. Those people probably would’ve gone and bought either a new were iPhone or switch to android like you did. On the whole I don’t think this would have caused anyone to spend money they wouldn’t have otherwise. Perhaps they would have stayed with their phone longer. It’s hard to tell, and this is certainly worse than if they had just told people about the battery in the first place (although I imagine THAT would’ve become a scandal two).
- krutzger 9y ago
  >If Apple hadn’t made this change those phones would have randomly turned off instead. Why is apple the only company with this problem?
  - yen223 9y ago
    Plenty of non-Apple phones suffer from random shutdowns and restarts due to faulty batteries.
  - hk__2 9y ago
    > Why is apple the only company with this problem? It’s the only one people care about enough. Apple gets a major "scandal" almost each year about something that affects every single smartphone company on the planet. Think of the antenna-gate or the bending issues. Lots of non-Apple phones have shown these issues, and the random shutdowns are no exception [1]. [1]: http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/12/20/some-nexus-6ps-have-developed-a-battery-early-shutoff-problem-and-its-becoming-a-safety-issue/ http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/12/20/some-nexus-6ps-have-... (updated to add a link)

pacala 9y ago

Props to Apple for doing the right thing. Sad that it took a manufactured scandal for iOS to provide elementary transparency into the behavior of known-to-degrade battery component. > Early in 2018, we will issue an iOS software update with new features that give users more visibility into the health of their iPhone’s battery, so they can see for themselves if its condition is affecting performance.

draw_down 9y ago

Framing this in terms of “hate” is really dismissive and juvenile. Your comment is in part a comment on the tone of internet discourse- consider that you are not helping.

blensor 9y ago

I could not care less about which company did this, it could have just as easily been Samsung, LG, <put your favorite brand here> BUT, what I do very much care about is that the company who did this does not get away with it without losing some feathers, because they did intentionally hide something from the user that did affect them quite noticeably and if they would not have been called out could have had even more serious effects in the long run. Imagine the following scenario. The battery of your phone is happily degrading and the manufacturer of your phone puts in some serious effort to develop a strategy so you as the user don't notice it. You keep using your phone thinking everything is fine, all the while your battery keeps degrading faster and faster. Then some day you actually need the power (in terms of processing power and in terms of stored energy) because, let's say you are taking a longer high quality video of a wedding. But since your phone is now running on full throttle your battery keeps discharging uncharacteristically fast because it is already in a bad state, or the software can't keep up with the data compression and has to start dropping frames and the video of the event you wanted to keep in good memory now looks awful. Sure, this is only a very benign scenario but it still illustrates that the manufacturer should not try to hide such important information from the user. And as I have mentioned in another thread, no one can tell me that not a single Apple engineer during this whole process has stepped up and said "Hey maybe it's also a good idea to tell the user that we are throttling the whole system so it may live a few months longer"

baby 9y ago

If you're ready to dismiss other people's complaint because you don't have one fuck you