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iPhone 6 slows down by 28% after just 4 months use
- hnarayanan 9y agoCache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:gaYTRe-jJhoJ:https://simplyfixit.co.uk/iphone-battery-slow-benchmarks/ https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:gaYTRe...
- bluedino 9y agoI don't see the actual age of the battery mentioned
- ricardobeat 9y agoIt's estimated from the number of cycles.
- achamayou 9y agoNor the operating conditions (temperature in particular), which as Apple mentioned rightly in their press release can have quite a substantial impact on how quickly capacity degrades.
- toomuchtodo 9y agoWould the type of case used contribute to premature wear? Thinking Otterbox rugged type cases causing the battery to retain excessive heat while charging.
- kipari 9y agoI know that this article states a well-known fact at this point, but I can't overlook that it is on the homepage of a company that sells battery replacement services for iPhones. EDIT: Also note that Apple as of today is offering battery replacement services themselves at $29. [1] [1]: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/12/30/29-battery-replacements https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/12/30/29-battery-repl...
- Nullabillity 9y agoBetter that people give their money to a third party, than to the company that created the problem in the first place.
- ianlevesque 9y agoApple invented battery physics now?
- TallGuyShort 9y agoBattery physics? No. But they're definitely pioneers in the field of covert downclocking.
- Cyph0n 9y agoNo, Apple invented crippling phone performance without informing its users.
- stordoff 9y agoThey did invent a workaround to them that impacts other features without informing users though. I'd also query the batteries more directly anyway though - if throttling is needed this aggressively, that _may_ indicate they aren't really up to the task (e.g. they don't have enough capacity to allow for the natural dip without it being an issue / Apple are claiming battery life figures that are basically unattainable in the real world, and propping them up by slowing the device).
- AndrewUnmuted 9y agoI agree and I'm not sure why you're being down voted for this remark. Apple should have been upfront about the issue from the start, with a solution that didn't involve third parties to fix from the beginning. Apple has always relied on third parties to make their platforms viable and useful to consumers. The relationship is symbiotic, not destructive. Apple should be encouraging stronger cooperation between it and these third parties.
- plorkyeran 9y ago
- icegreentea2 9y agoHow did they generate this data? The screenshots say that all of the benchmarks were made within an hour of each other, and out in order of the charge cycles. Are they swapping out batteries?
- pasbesoin 9y agoI don't know about 28% in four months. But this whole controversy reminds me of a few years ago. When people were very happy with their iPhones (including some of my friends), because they manifested and maintained "battery life" that their friends' Android phones did not. Maybe Apple shouldn't have hidden what they're doing. Maybe it's arguably a legitimate trade secret (I'd hardly be in favor of "patenting" the functionality). Anyway, now Apple's "shit" for how they manage battery degradation. A couple of years ago, or whenever, before all this upset: They were "the shit" with respect to battery durability -- as perceived by users in their charge lifetimes. At least, among some of my friends. And some press, IIRC. And whatever. Apple's not magic. Their batteries degrade, too. On the other hand, the vertical integration and efficiencies they are engineering into their newer chipsets? Pretty amazing. P.S. I'm no Apple Fanboy. Just recalling how perspectives change.
- viraptor 9y agoI think you're making a mistake of treating users of X as a homogenous group. Some users were not happy with how the performance and the battery degraded. Some were happy with the power usage over time. Some were happy to point out how they're better than the users of Y. All of that is still the case. What changed is that "I think my iPhone is getting slower, but I'm going to replace it with a new one anyway" is not interesting news, but "it's been proven why it's getting slower, now I feel ripped off because I didn't actually need to upgrade the whole phone, just the battery" is interesting.
- pasbesoin 9y agoRegarding the first, Apple has -- since its renaissance -- consistently had a limited number of products. Limited product lines. They themselves lump users together, to some degree; and many argue for this advantage: High quality products that "just work", and don't make me choose between fifty-odd variations. Regarding the latter, I generally agree. I'd much rather know what's going on and have the choice of spending circa $100 (supposedly formerly $80, now $30 for a year), to replace the battery. (And a separate pox on "thin" making all these batteries unremovable; but I guess that's my personal preference.) Maybe Apple knowingly benefited from uninformed user upgrading. How much of that was battery/throttling, and how much of that was Apple users wanting to have the latest and greatest -- for functionality and performance, or just for status? We may never know. But, as I mentioned, the perceived charge lifetime and durability of same, were -- as far as I saw -- major marketing/selling points of iPhones. And I recall myself grumbling about how my Android phones' charge lifetimes were decreasing, mere months into the devices lives. I don't know whether this could have been patented (like stupid rounded-corners patents and so many other things). But, it wasn't. Was Apple obligated to reveal this "secret sauce"? I don't know. For most people, the implementation seemed to work out fine. Friends with 3 and 4 year old iPhones, while many Android users could barely make it to 2 years (for multiple factors, not just charge lifetime -- e.g. timely and ongoing updates, anyone?). I wish there was a phone that wasn't so wholly owned by big corporations. As opposed to its users. But it seems to be the nature of our world.
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y agoDo bear in mind the issue in question is voltage spikes (which cause unexpected shutdown), that's what Apple is trying to prevent. Most of the time there'll be no performance impact, it would just lower how far the phone can boost clock speed when it needs it, I'm guessing? So it would affect the peak (and therefore mean) performance, but not the mode or median, I think? Correct me if I'm wrong.
- icegreentea2 9y agoModern CPUs will pretty much always try to boost as long as they have the thermal and power headroom to do so (see race to sleep). Talking about mean, median, and 'mode' of performance is going to be tricky because it'll be heavily dependent on how the tests are being run. Things like, is there enough time to rebuild thermal headroom between iterations, or does a single iteration ever actually run enough to exhaust its thermal headroom will effect the results of multiple runs. So returning to the base point, any reduction in boost frequency in -normal- usage (seperate from benchmarking) will cause (machine) measureable (but maybe not perceived) performance loss because everything is built around trying to crank out work as quickly as possible for as short of a time as possible.
- cjsuk 9y agoI call bullshit. Reading the cached version, this is poorly disguised marketing lies for a third battery replacement service. The test scenario was not described, this is only one sample which could have been selected and the source is not credible. After 12 months of heavy daily usage on my 6s, I'm seeing 87% battery capacity left as an example after over 312 cycles. I am also seeing the same benchmark as the day I got it.
- styfle 9y agoWhen can you find battery capacity?
- twistiti 9y agoYou can use coconutBattery.
- phete 9y agoI'm using https://itunes.apple.com/se/app/battery-life-doctor/id1165930552?l=en&mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/se/app/battery-life-doctor/id116593...
- knolan 9y agoThere are various apps on the App Store. The data is available in a public API. I won’t recommend any particulat App because I don’t trust any of them.
- matthewmacleod 9y agoYeah, I'm sort of getting the same whiff of bullshit. My dev iPhone shows 611 cycles and 86% capacity, with the same GeekBench scores around 1500/2600. I know that's just one data point, but I'm super-sceptical given all of the misinformation that's been floating around about this topic.
- turtlebits 9y agoMy 6s plus is almost 2 years old and the battery life app is showing 76%. Have not benchmarked it but it was only slow for a week or two after upgrading to iOS 11 and seems fine now. Did not notice slowdowns when using iOS 10 (which was when throttling was introduced)
- throwaway12351 9y agoEveryone defending Apple's behavior is missing the point completely. Yes, it's a reasonable way to manage degrading battery life and related electronic issues. What's NOT reasonable is Apple CONCEALING this behavior. This led people to believe that they needed a new $1000 phone, instead of a $79 battery replacement.
- CydeWeys 9y agoMy phone gives me a warning notification if performance might be getting degraded because the storage is getting full, and provides suggested actions to delete stuff stored locally. Something about replacing the battery would have been perfectly reasonable for Apple to have suggested similarly, since we know the hardware can detect poor battery performance. Of course, we know why they didn't do this; it would cut into sales of new models.
- JacobJans 9y agoIronically, I regularly get a warning on my Macbook Pro that I am running out of disk space, even when I have over half left. The kicker? They try really hard to sell me on paying for iCloud. Scammy? Absolutely. Someone who is NOT computer literate will likely pay for iCloud storage based on false information.
- matthewmacleod 9y agoDo you, though? That sounds like a bug. I have also seen that warning, but only when I have about 10% free space.
- JacobJans 9y agoDo I what? I have a 512gb disk. It has over 300gb free.
- 1123581321 9y agoYour problem is so unusual that I don’t see how it can be deliberate on Apple’s part.
- brentis 9y agoForced obsolescence.. so many other things could have been done. A battery saver option could let users pick their performance options, but no, just get a new iPhone for $800...
- LoSboccacc 9y agothe problem is not performance vs power usage, the problem is the cpu faults and the device reboots because they fucked up completely on engineering safe voltage margin into the thing all cpu faults if undervolted. tipically the more the clock speed, the higher the voltage needed so that transistor keep working correctly. on a mobile device battery degradation is normal, with that comes less viable battery life but also a lower voltage when you put togheter the two things you just need to plan accordingly. that's what was the whole kerfuffle: they didn't it doesn't help that they use short lived batteries in iphones (go check it, ipads are rated twice the cycles) but the whole issue comes from bad engineering of the cpu/gpu or whatever they put into that doesn't work with the degrading battery output the device should have been built to cope with
- snissn 9y agoShouldn't this study take 4 months to complete?
- viraptor 9y agoNot for a company getting multiple iPhones of various age every day in for repair. If they can do a check on some percentage of their customers, they're likely to get tens/hundreds of data points a day and be able to graph an average age-vs-slowdown relation. If they started after the original forum post, they should have a pretty good idea already.
- knolan 9y agoGeekbench CPU scores from the release iPhone 7 running iOS 10 show scores of around 3400/5500. My 14 month old iPhone 7 running 11.2 reports around 3500/5900. So no slow down on this model. Battery capacity it as 87%.
- lukewrites 9y agoI have an iPhone 6 that’s about a year and a half old, and although I experience frequent & noticeable slowdowns while using it, and although my battery life has noticeably decreased since I started using it, the Geekbench score for the phone is higher than the average iPhone 6. It makes me wonder what’s going on.
- knolan 9y agoGPU and CPU being run separately perhaps?
- KKKKkkkk1 9y agoI dunno. I've been using my iPhone 6s for 1.5 years. Maybe it's slowed down, but it's not anything that I've noticed.
- 1337biz 9y agoIs there some data on iPads as well?
- p0wn 9y agoI have an android phone - the nexus 5 and it's a total shitbag right now. It seems like it's slowed down massively. I can't imagine this is only apple.
- rhizome 9y agoI also still use a stock N5 and I've noticed it really taking a nosedive over the past few months.
- post_break 9y agoThe nand memory could be degrading.
- viraptor 9y agoThere's an issue with earlier nexus phones and nand degradation. Lack of TRIM really killed them over time unfortunately. Running some write/read benchmark app and comparing the results against published numbers (like http://www.androidpolice.com/2014/11/20/anandtech-posts-side-by-side-nand-performance-for-nexus-6-encrypted-vs-unencrypted-its-not-pretty/ http://www.androidpolice.com/2014/11/20/anandtech-posts-side... ) could (dis-)prove that's the case.
- exabrial 9y agoDoes it even bother anyone at Apple that their company has a problem with ethics? It would seem as an engineer, if your boss told you to write code that intentionally slowed a user's device down (for ANY reason), wouldn't the proper response be "Will do, but how do we inform the user so they can avoid it?" What frustrates me most is Apple won't learn a lesson from this, they just merely "got caught" this time.
- czardoz 9y agoI agree. To me, this is indicative of a deeper cultural problem. It sometimes happens if engineers don't speak up and get involved with the product. This causes a culture of engineers turning into executers, where they just execute the feature or the bugfix, without even _trying_ to think of the end user, or possible repercussions. Not that the engineers are the ones at fault, it just seems that a culture change is needed to get everyone to care more about the customer.
- crispinb 9y ago> a culture change is needed to get everyone to care more about the customer I think they care a great deal, but arrogance (as so often) leads them to lack judgement. Their ‘care’ has become a patrician “we know what’s best” (cf. not permitting MacBook Pro customers to have real keyboards because wanky Ikeabot Jony Ive finds them messy).
- comex 9y agoWell, all phones intentionally slow themselves down (throttle) when they get too hot; peak CPU performance can only be maintained for a certain amount of time until it cools back down. I don't think any mobile OS directly exposes this to the user. Lowering peak performance in the long term is different, but I suspect they didn't see it as all that different.
- exabrial 9y agoI think the difference is that the user will notice their phone is hot and running slow, so there's some sort of feedback available.
- starsinspace 9y agoThere's absolutely no good reason why iPhone batteries are not easily user-replaceable. All the reasons usually given are weak excuses for an essentially consumer-hostile hardware design.
- hamandcheese 9y agoI certainly don’t miss the days where if I dropped my phone the battery door and battery would come out and shoot across the floor.
- stordoff 9y agoI don't think those things are mutually exclusive though. My Lumia 950 has a user-replaceable battery, and I've dropped it multiple times. The back has never come off as a result.
- sbuk 9y agoStrawman.
- starsinspace 9y agoHow so? If the battery was easily replaceable, then I doubt there would be much outrage about this issue. But with the iPhone, device and battery are fused together and are thus seen as a single unit.
- j45 9y agoThis is making an interesting case for using an external battery case to keep the phone at 100% more often and reduce charge cycles. I wonder if the comparable battery performance gaps perceived by for many Android users will be seen as closer than we thought - of Android devices secretly dialed down its devices would they have much better battery life.
- jug 9y agoI don't think this is true beyond benchmarks. They stress test the CPU and that's when the throttling hits the hardest. It's throttling peaks in CPU usage, and a benchmark is all peak. So this sounds like a worst case scenario. Actual use can be completely different. Not defending Apple though. This complete lack of communication over an obviously controversial choice is amateurish. So much of this could have been easily avoided by clearly mentioning it in a Beta release, along with of course implmenting an on/off switch!
- nofilter 9y agoIt's funny that most everyone I know with 6 or 6s has problems (slow, bad battery) and everyone I know (including mysel) with 7 has no problems what-so-ever. Maybe 6 was just a bad product?
- williamstein 9y agoI have a 6 plus. I broke the screen a few months ago, so they replaced it with a brand new 6 plus (hence new battery). It is very slow in much the same way that many other people describe -- it will just pause for a long time (a minute or more) in some weird stuck state. The old phone that I broke had the same problem. I have the minimum apps installed, and background refresh disabled. My wife and mother both have 6 pluses, which exhibit the same weird long pause slowdown behavior. After trial and error, the best hack to get around it is: (1) when it happens, immediately turn the phone off and on with the upper right power button, then (2) immediately after the phone turns back on, close all running or suspended apps. If you don't do (1), then you're just completely stuck for a long time. I've had this problem before and after iOS 11, and with my new and old phones.
- kayoone 9y agoI have had a 6 Plus for 3 years, my girlfriend has a 6 as well but none of us have the issues you describe. Yes it got quite slow with iOS 11, but it's just a bit laggy at times, no long pauses that require a reboot.
- LinaLauneBaer 9y agoI always wonder if slowing down the phone is a good solution. By slowing down the CPU the CPU needs less energy. But at the same time the user has to wait much longer in order to finish what he was trying to do. Thus the screen is on for a longer period of time. Isn't the screen one of the main energy consumers in an iPhone? Launching apps on my iPhone 6 (which needs a new battery) takes for ages (even when compared to my older but less used iPhone 5S). I can't imagine that the extended "screen lit"-time does not have a big impact as well. Also: I am one of the few users who would be totally fine with the iPhone shutting down at 20% or so (if I have the full performance as I used to) because my iPhone is rarely going near 20%. At work I can charge. At home I can charge. When I am on the go I usually am not using the phone that much... However playing hearthstone when I am in bed, loading the phone, everything takes much longer as well which makes playing games less fun...
- matthewmacleod 9y agoThe issue is not specifically about battery life, but about the ability of the battery to provide a stable voltage under load. The voltage of the cells sags more under high current draw as the battery ages; reducing the current draw by throttling the maximum SoC frequency seems to be intended to avoid the problem where the voltage dips to a level that causes the SoC to shut down suddenly.
- __init 9y agoAs I understand it, the main issue is that the power output of the batter decreases as it degrades, not just its total capacity. Apple claims that the throttling is needed in order to prevent the processor from automatically shutting off because it can't draw as much power as it requires -- not just to prevent the battery from draining faster.
- jmull 9y agoEdit: I see others have addressed this in the very long time it took me to express myself! As I understand it, as batteries degrade it's not only the total capacity that drops, but also the voltage the battery can deliver and the CPU requires a certain voltage to run at a higher frequency. So, a fully charged, yet degraded battery, may have the overall energy needed to run a CPU at normal Mhz, but may not be able to deliver that energy fast enough.
- spiderfarmer 9y agoI bought a new iPhone every 2 or 3 years because of the slowdowns. I would have paid 29 euros for a new battery had I known that it would restore performance. Shit like this makes me hate the iPhone X I’m typing this on. I was thinking of getting an Apple watch but I will not buy it because I don’t trust them anymore. They better restore trust or it will cost them a lot of sales in the long run. Making phones with replacable batteries would be a good start.
- cptskippy 9y agoReplaceable batteries are going to be the revolutionary new feature on the iPhone 8. It's going to be insanely great and you're going to wonder why everyone doesn't do this with their phones. With the technological advances of recent years they might even be able to do it on MacBooks too. /Sarcasm
- jmull 9y agoIt looks like the CPU-slowdown-for-old-battery thing was only introduced about a year ago. So you can probably blame your X purchase on this (especially if you came from a 6 or maybe 6S -- a 7 should not have been significantly affected unless there is a bigger battery issue with it), but before then your older phone were probably "naturally" slow.
- spiderfarmer 9y agoAt this point how do we know Apple doesn’t make intentional decisions that slowdown older phones? Maybe CPU benchmarking tools where given all CPU power in the past and they forgot to implement it now, just like the GPU manufacturers were caught cheating.
- spiderfarmer 9y agoApple kept silent everytime the slowdowns were discussed. They could have come forward many years ago, but it’s only after they took it a step too far with the iPhone 6 and people had definate proof that they came forward. I gave my iPhone 6 away out of frustration with it’s performance, while it was easily worth a hundred or more dollars, even taking the battery costs into account. I’m really, really pissed right now.
- kayoone 9y agoI just tested my own iPhone 6 Plus that i bought in early 2015 and that i have been using daily ever since. Single Core Score 1518, Multicore 2607 These are better than the 0 day scores in that article, which seems weird. My phone must have close to 900 charging cycles by now, if not more.
- drinchev 9y agoInteresting for me is that my iPhone 4 is much faster than my iPhone 5S. And the battery lasts much longer on my 4. I think what Apple changed these days is that the latest version of iOS works both on 5+, while I remember my iPhone 4 was stuck with old version and I was never able to upgrade it.
- bane 9y agoSo, - Apple makes phones that have batteries normal owners can't replace. - When the battery degrades the phone's performance degrades. - Users either pay for a new phone or were paying $80 for new batteries. - Apple admits the ruse, lowers the replacement cost to $30, basically admitting that $50 was profit. - Turns out another company already did replacements for $30 and was probably making money on it. So Apple's still likely making money on it. - Users get upset but line up around the block to buy whatever Apple puts out anyways -- sight unseen. We get the behavior we incentivize. In this case we get planned obsolescence and shakedowns for repair. Until consumers vote with their wallets, all this kvetching doesn't mean shit.
- mcphage 9y ago> another company already did replacements for $30 £30, which is $40.
- misio 9y agoUtter crap, marketing rubbish. I'm pretty critical of apple but this is incredibly off.