5 ms·

It bothers me a little the way people are assuming active malice where passive indifference and normal progressions of technology and features is sufficient to

by lotu 9y ago

It bothers me a little the way people are assuming active malice where passive indifference and normal progressions of technology and features is sufficient to cause what we are seeing. Apple could be inserting code to slow down phones in a very controlled and deliberate effort: if (version <= iPhone7) { wait_ms(100); } This is what I think of when someone says Apple is deliberately slowing down phones but I don't find this credible. For this specific case Apple's explanation, they started throttling down CPUs based on battery age to prevent unexpected phone shutdowns make sense. I do have issue with how this was initially messaged (a.k.a. it wasn't) but I understand why, consumer tech news tends to be very low information. It doesn't make sense for Apple to try to explain to users the details of every tweak to power management settings, and if they did it would either be lost on most consumers or be transformed in to negative headlines about how updating your phone makes it slower, in large part because the headline "Will the New iOS Update Slow Down your iPhone?" gets more clicks than "Apple makes Incremental Improvements to Power Management of iPhones as Part of Long-Term Strategy". So I understand the strategy of saying nothing. Furthermore I expect most of the actual (not perceived) slow down is from dozens of conversations like happening: Eng: New feature FooBar is awesome we should include it in the next iOS release. QA: FooBar isn't passing latency tests on our latest iPhone so you can't include it. Eng: Darn :( <2 years later> Eng: I still think Foobar is awesome, and look it very snappy on my current phone. QA: It works on our latests phones too, and users like it. Okay it is in! Eng: Yay. This is fundamental to how software has been developed forever. We make faster hardware to be able to run more complex taxing software and than means older hardware will be slower in comparison.

slededit 9y ago
Throttling happens in well under 2 years which is the normal use period for most people. If they were doing this in much older phones then maybe you could chalk it up to altruism, but with it happening to phones still in their normal service life its clearly an under spec'd battery if this is what they are forced to resort to.
- MagnumOpus 9y ago
  If it were due to battery lifetime, Apple wouldn't slow down the devices when they are plugged in. (Of course then the slowdown when running on battery would have been obvious.)
  - CharlesW 9y ago
    > If it were due to battery lifetime… It's not due to battery lifetime, it's due to older batteries' reduced ability to deliver high power quickly enough. > …Apple wouldn't slow down the devices when they are plugged in. No, because power is always pulled from the battery.
    - slededit 9y ago
      A charging circuit has to provide power to the same battery terminals with which power is drawn from. The effect should be cumulative.
      - pas 9y ago
        Should. But my old OnePlus One started to reboot when I plug in a charger. Sometimes it reboots multiple times. Of course I have no idea how iPhones are wired.
- rikkus 9y ago
  It happened on my 6s after less than a year. Despite what's said about how it was only done 'during intensive operations' or something like that, it was apparent and a major pain all the time, making every operation seem slow.
  - murukesh_s 9y ago
    I tested my friends 6s after it was noticeably slow in even basic built-in interface navigation like settings or msgs, I did an antutu benchmark and he got half the score of published antutu results for the then flagship phone. It's ridiculous how far many people are going to defend the worlds biggest company when things are so obvious. My wife's xiaomi note is still going strong after a year without any performance degradation and/or battery issues. I wonder even if apple is not deliberately slowing it down they realised its happpening and never bothered to improve the battery life - the result? Billions of additonal revenue when users feel their phone is slow for the latest software and upgrade the hardware without any benefits for them other than removing restrictions forced by Apple. It's a shame and the company deserves to be shamed! P.s the CPU and GPU scores both were noticeably lower (almost half) for otherwise perfect phone. Remember it's once benchmark score could still beat most Android flagships if not for the artificially introduced throttling by Apple..
pxeboot 9y ago
If you go back and look at some 3rd party testing done on this, it was clearly shown that an iPhone could operate at the expected speed with a new battery and much slower when an older battery was reinstalled.
dwc 9y ago
> For this specific case Apple's explanation, they started throttling down CPUs based on battery age to prevent unexpected phone shutdowns make sense. At best it's a complete botch on Apple's part. I got that update and my phone was noticeably slower, right off the charger at 100%. My typical usage pattern has me plugging in my phone at night with usually more than 50% and rarely around 40%. I'm never in danger of unexpected shutdown. The way things used to work, I'd drain an iOS device and somewhere around 20% I'd get a popup to switch to power saving mode, with a choice to do it or not. This is quite reasonable, usable, and the device remains fast until you're in the danger zone. Wanna tweak it? Move from 20% to 25%. Done. Worried that people won't switch to power saving mode and then have a shutdown? Make the switch mandatory at 20-25% or whatever. But slowing down older phones all the time... it's hard not to be suspicious of motives.
- snowwrestler 9y ago
  If you go back to how this was originally discovered, it was in public aggregate benchmarks: https://www.geekbench.com/blog/2017/12/iphone-performance-and-battery-age/ https://www.geekbench.com/blog/2017/12/iphone-performance-an... The thing to note here is that even in the charts of older devices, by far the largest peak is at max performance. In other words, most older phones, even running the new code, were not being slowed down when they were benchmarked. There's no evidence I know of that every older iPhone is being slowed down, all the time. Now, I certainly believe it's possible that your phone slowed down across the board after an iOS update, but there are a lot of reasons that could happen. See for example this story, where a customer went into an Apple Store on suspicion of a battery issue, but the performance problems were actually fixed by a backup and restore: http://mglenn.com/blog/2017/12/22/apples-bungled-battery-feature http://mglenn.com/blog/2017/12/22/apples-bungled-battery-fea...
- chrisballinger 9y ago
  The issue is that the peak power consumption could exceed the maximum power that the battery could deliver, not that the batteries were running out of charge. By throttling power consumption you can prevent unexpected shutdowns at the expense of maximum performance. This is especially problematic in colder climates where phones were shutting down because the cold battery couldn’t deliver enough juice, regardless of its charge level.
wycy 9y ago
Is there anything new in iOS 11 compared to iOS 7 that one could point to to show a major new feature that would justifiably be significantly slower than the iOS 7 days? I can't think of anything that makes sense as a new FooBar feature that would make iOS 11 run significantly slower than any previous version of iOS dating back to iOS 7 (when the entire UI last changed).
TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
Personally, I don't really care if the changes were intentionally malicious or just negligent. Consumers bought a product with the expectation that it would perform in the same or very similar manner throughout its lifetime, and Apple screwed them. The company advertised the smooth UI, then slowed the phones to the point where the UI and user experience were no longer smooth. It's like buying a Tesla because of its incredible acceleration and smooth ride, but then in two years, that acceleration gets throttled to be similar to a Toyota Corolla to "maintain battery longevity." But hey, the new Tesla has even _more_ acceleration... It just seems like a dirty sales tactic.
- wang_li 9y ago
  > ...Apple screwed them. The "slow-down" that no one talks about, which in my opinion is much more offensive, is that Apple creates new OSes that target a particular hardware platform and then push that same OS out to older handsets that don't have anywhere near enough horsepower to handle it. In particular I have an iPhone 4 running the last supported iOS. The device is effectively unusable. Everything is less than half as fast as it was out of the box. Gestures have to be done very slowly or the device misses them. Pressing the home button is not detected over 50% of the time. I don't use this device having upgraded handsets twice, but it'd be nice if apple would put older iOS versions into maintenance and provide bug fixes sans feature updates so that customers aren't given the choice of buggy and insecure software vs. effectively unusable hardware.
  - ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
    I get what your saying but this is a very hard balancing act for Apple. I have an iMac from 2008 that is still working really well. I love what a fantastic machine they built, and for almost 10 years I could continue to upgrade the OS to get all the new features they developed. With the "High Sierra" update I found out my computer was too old to receive the new OS. This made me really upset at first, because there are a few apps I want that I can never have on that machine. But at some point if they continue to allow me to run the new OS it will result in an unusable device, like you are experiencing. But on either side of the fence you will have angry customers. Apple can protect customers from updates that won't work correctly on their devices, or it can deny them access to new apps and features they want on old devices. Either way the customers will be disappointed.
oldcynic 9y ago
Topical with the discussion that's just come up about editor latency: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16267202 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16267202 I'm not looking at Apple here. It's everywhere. What seems to be missing is the continuation of your QA conversation that appears never to happen: QA: "Foobar is truly painful on 3 year old hardware. You need to see if you can get it snappier, those handsets are still in support after all" While we're about it we're also missing the QA conversation involving testing under poor and highly intermittent signal. The more cores, GHz and mbs we get the worse it often seems to get.
bitmapbrother 9y ago
>For this specific case Apple's explanation, they started throttling down CPUs based on battery age to prevent unexpected phone shutdowns make sense Then perhaps Apple should have been transparent about what they were doing and told their customers who complained about the obvious slowdowns and were ignored by Apple. It was only until it was proven, without a doubt, that Apple was deliberately slowing down their CPU's did they finally admit to what they were doing. Additionally, Apple has known about this issue for some time so they had ample time to correct the issue. Unfortunately, having the fastest mobile CPU on the market was more important than the side effects of a battery that could no longer provide the voltage required to hit those Geekbench scores.
- gaius 9y ago
  the side effects of a battery that could no longer provide the voltage required to hit those Geekbench scores The thinnest device is also an Apple thing. The decision to have a smaller battery to achieve that is also very obviously deliberate
skrowl 9y ago
I think it's a question of intent here. You're BELIEVING Apple when they say they only did it to help customers. You can't say FOR SURE that their intent wasn't to drive upgrades. I, for one, think their intent was (at least partially) to drive upgrades, but without proof, we'll never know.
- skygazer 9y ago
  Hanlon's razor? [1] "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." 1: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
- tajen 9y ago
  And it’s not the first time it happens, and it’s very visible. Every time we upgraded (even iOS 7 and 9, macOS, ...), everything went slower. Transparency, 3D, probably reduced swap space or cache sizes calculated for models with more RAM, etc. Given upgrades are mandatory (user is spammed until he upgrades), given those features are planned without a flag to turn it off for older phones/iPads, and given it’s the only way to receive maintenance for the phone (i.e. security updates), it’s planned obsolescence. Think every time you brought your car to a repairshop they would load it with unused equipment designed for bigger models, both clogging your trunk and making your car so heavy it loses 80% of its speed. Wow, didn’t think the comparison would be so accurate.
drngdds 9y ago
How incredibly convenient for them that their choice to use underpowered batteries leads to a situation functionally identical to planned obsolencense having a valid technical justification.
- skygazer 9y ago
  Perhaps they incompetently underspecified the battery for the long term needs of their processor, more than a year before the embarrassing insufficient current shutdown effects became painfully obvious, and instead of admitting to the costly blunder, they found a software bandaid they foolishly thought wouldn't bite them in the ass in yet another year.

by lotu 9y ago

slededit 9y ago

Throttling happens in well under 2 years which is the normal use period for most people. If they were doing this in much older phones then maybe you could chalk it up to altruism, but with it happening to phones still in their normal service life its clearly an under spec'd battery if this is what they are forced to resort to.

MagnumOpus 9y ago
If it were due to battery lifetime, Apple wouldn't slow down the devices when they are plugged in. (Of course then the slowdown when running on battery would have been obvious.)
- CharlesW 9y ago
  > If it were due to battery lifetime… It's not due to battery lifetime, it's due to older batteries' reduced ability to deliver high power quickly enough. > …Apple wouldn't slow down the devices when they are plugged in. No, because power is always pulled from the battery.
  - slededit 9y ago
    A charging circuit has to provide power to the same battery terminals with which power is drawn from. The effect should be cumulative.
    - pas 9y ago
      Should. But my old OnePlus One started to reboot when I plug in a charger. Sometimes it reboots multiple times. Of course I have no idea how iPhones are wired.
rikkus 9y ago
It happened on my 6s after less than a year. Despite what's said about how it was only done 'during intensive operations' or something like that, it was apparent and a major pain all the time, making every operation seem slow.
- murukesh_s 9y ago
  I tested my friends 6s after it was noticeably slow in even basic built-in interface navigation like settings or msgs, I did an antutu benchmark and he got half the score of published antutu results for the then flagship phone. It's ridiculous how far many people are going to defend the worlds biggest company when things are so obvious. My wife's xiaomi note is still going strong after a year without any performance degradation and/or battery issues. I wonder even if apple is not deliberately slowing it down they realised its happpening and never bothered to improve the battery life - the result? Billions of additonal revenue when users feel their phone is slow for the latest software and upgrade the hardware without any benefits for them other than removing restrictions forced by Apple. It's a shame and the company deserves to be shamed! P.s the CPU and GPU scores both were noticeably lower (almost half) for otherwise perfect phone. Remember it's once benchmark score could still beat most Android flagships if not for the artificially introduced throttling by Apple..

pxeboot 9y ago

If you go back and look at some 3rd party testing done on this, it was clearly shown that an iPhone could operate at the expected speed with a new battery and much slower when an older battery was reinstalled.

dwc 9y ago

> For this specific case Apple's explanation, they started throttling down CPUs based on battery age to prevent unexpected phone shutdowns make sense. At best it's a complete botch on Apple's part. I got that update and my phone was noticeably slower, right off the charger at 100%. My typical usage pattern has me plugging in my phone at night with usually more than 50% and rarely around 40%. I'm never in danger of unexpected shutdown. The way things used to work, I'd drain an iOS device and somewhere around 20% I'd get a popup to switch to power saving mode, with a choice to do it or not. This is quite reasonable, usable, and the device remains fast until you're in the danger zone. Wanna tweak it? Move from 20% to 25%. Done. Worried that people won't switch to power saving mode and then have a shutdown? Make the switch mandatory at 20-25% or whatever. But slowing down older phones all the time... it's hard not to be suspicious of motives.

snowwrestler 9y ago
If you go back to how this was originally discovered, it was in public aggregate benchmarks: https://www.geekbench.com/blog/2017/12/iphone-performance-and-battery-age/ https://www.geekbench.com/blog/2017/12/iphone-performance-an... The thing to note here is that even in the charts of older devices, by far the largest peak is at max performance. In other words, most older phones, even running the new code, were not being slowed down when they were benchmarked. There's no evidence I know of that every older iPhone is being slowed down, all the time. Now, I certainly believe it's possible that your phone slowed down across the board after an iOS update, but there are a lot of reasons that could happen. See for example this story, where a customer went into an Apple Store on suspicion of a battery issue, but the performance problems were actually fixed by a backup and restore: http://mglenn.com/blog/2017/12/22/apples-bungled-battery-feature http://mglenn.com/blog/2017/12/22/apples-bungled-battery-fea...
chrisballinger 9y ago
The issue is that the peak power consumption could exceed the maximum power that the battery could deliver, not that the batteries were running out of charge. By throttling power consumption you can prevent unexpected shutdowns at the expense of maximum performance. This is especially problematic in colder climates where phones were shutting down because the cold battery couldn’t deliver enough juice, regardless of its charge level.

wycy 9y ago

Is there anything new in iOS 11 compared to iOS 7 that one could point to to show a major new feature that would justifiably be significantly slower than the iOS 7 days? I can't think of anything that makes sense as a new FooBar feature that would make iOS 11 run significantly slower than any previous version of iOS dating back to iOS 7 (when the entire UI last changed).

TheAdamAndChe 9y ago

Personally, I don't really care if the changes were intentionally malicious or just negligent. Consumers bought a product with the expectation that it would perform in the same or very similar manner throughout its lifetime, and Apple screwed them. The company advertised the smooth UI, then slowed the phones to the point where the UI and user experience were no longer smooth. It's like buying a Tesla because of its incredible acceleration and smooth ride, but then in two years, that acceleration gets throttled to be similar to a Toyota Corolla to "maintain battery longevity." But hey, the new Tesla has even _more_ acceleration... It just seems like a dirty sales tactic.

wang_li 9y ago
> ...Apple screwed them. The "slow-down" that no one talks about, which in my opinion is much more offensive, is that Apple creates new OSes that target a particular hardware platform and then push that same OS out to older handsets that don't have anywhere near enough horsepower to handle it. In particular I have an iPhone 4 running the last supported iOS. The device is effectively unusable. Everything is less than half as fast as it was out of the box. Gestures have to be done very slowly or the device misses them. Pressing the home button is not detected over 50% of the time. I don't use this device having upgraded handsets twice, but it'd be nice if apple would put older iOS versions into maintenance and provide bug fixes sans feature updates so that customers aren't given the choice of buggy and insecure software vs. effectively unusable hardware.
- ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
  I get what your saying but this is a very hard balancing act for Apple. I have an iMac from 2008 that is still working really well. I love what a fantastic machine they built, and for almost 10 years I could continue to upgrade the OS to get all the new features they developed. With the "High Sierra" update I found out my computer was too old to receive the new OS. This made me really upset at first, because there are a few apps I want that I can never have on that machine. But at some point if they continue to allow me to run the new OS it will result in an unusable device, like you are experiencing. But on either side of the fence you will have angry customers. Apple can protect customers from updates that won't work correctly on their devices, or it can deny them access to new apps and features they want on old devices. Either way the customers will be disappointed.

oldcynic 9y ago

Topical with the discussion that's just come up about editor latency: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16267202 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16267202 I'm not looking at Apple here. It's everywhere. What seems to be missing is the continuation of your QA conversation that appears never to happen: QA: "Foobar is truly painful on 3 year old hardware. You need to see if you can get it snappier, those handsets are still in support after all" While we're about it we're also missing the QA conversation involving testing under poor and highly intermittent signal. The more cores, GHz and mbs we get the worse it often seems to get.

bitmapbrother 9y ago

>For this specific case Apple's explanation, they started throttling down CPUs based on battery age to prevent unexpected phone shutdowns make sense Then perhaps Apple should have been transparent about what they were doing and told their customers who complained about the obvious slowdowns and were ignored by Apple. It was only until it was proven, without a doubt, that Apple was deliberately slowing down their CPU's did they finally admit to what they were doing. Additionally, Apple has known about this issue for some time so they had ample time to correct the issue. Unfortunately, having the fastest mobile CPU on the market was more important than the side effects of a battery that could no longer provide the voltage required to hit those Geekbench scores.

gaius 9y ago
the side effects of a battery that could no longer provide the voltage required to hit those Geekbench scores The thinnest device is also an Apple thing. The decision to have a smaller battery to achieve that is also very obviously deliberate

skrowl 9y ago

I think it's a question of intent here. You're BELIEVING Apple when they say they only did it to help customers. You can't say FOR SURE that their intent wasn't to drive upgrades. I, for one, think their intent was (at least partially) to drive upgrades, but without proof, we'll never know.

skygazer 9y ago
Hanlon's razor? [1] "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." 1: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
tajen 9y ago
And it’s not the first time it happens, and it’s very visible. Every time we upgraded (even iOS 7 and 9, macOS, ...), everything went slower. Transparency, 3D, probably reduced swap space or cache sizes calculated for models with more RAM, etc. Given upgrades are mandatory (user is spammed until he upgrades), given those features are planned without a flag to turn it off for older phones/iPads, and given it’s the only way to receive maintenance for the phone (i.e. security updates), it’s planned obsolescence. Think every time you brought your car to a repairshop they would load it with unused equipment designed for bigger models, both clogging your trunk and making your car so heavy it loses 80% of its speed. Wow, didn’t think the comparison would be so accurate.

drngdds 9y ago

How incredibly convenient for them that their choice to use underpowered batteries leads to a situation functionally identical to planned obsolencense having a valid technical justification.

skygazer 9y ago
Perhaps they incompetently underspecified the battery for the long term needs of their processor, more than a year before the embarrassing insufficient current shutdown effects became painfully obvious, and instead of admitting to the costly blunder, they found a software bandaid they foolishly thought wouldn't bite them in the ass in yet another year.