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Apple and Samsung fined for deliberately slowing down phones

256 points by charlysl 8y ago

kodablah 8y ago
> Samsung told owners of its Galaxy Note 4 phone to install a new version of Google’s Android operating system intended for the more recent Galaxy Note 7, but which rendered the old model sluggish. Likewise, Apple told iPhone 6 owners to install an operating system designed for the iPhone 7, leading to problems for owners of the older mode A bit of a scary precedent. The 5m fine on Apple for intentionally reducing resource usage to such a large extent without notification seems kinda reasonable. But the 5m fine for both Apple and Samsung for their updates causing slowdown on older devices is a different issue. If I were a company fearing that suggesting an OS upgrade for an older phone would cause slowdown on that older phone, I am now incentivized to not suggest that update. We might want companies to support old OSs forever or stop adding resource-intensive features or feature gate them or whatever. But short of legislating that specifically, all this does is make old phones even more of a liability than they already were.
- kingnothing 8y ago
  This doesn't seem that much different than Microsoft or any given corporate linux vendor continuing to provide security updates, but not new features, to older but still supported versions of their OS. Why should mobile operating systems not be held to the same expectation?
  - kodablah 8y ago
    A few things here. First, as a consumer I might hold them to that expectation, but that is not the same as the law holding them to it. Second, it's a bit backwards to use Microsoft as an example of not sunsetting old versions or having newer versions that are slower or don't work [as well] on older machines. Third, this is about locked down software environments by hardware manufacturers, a completely different situation from software manufacturers providing the freedom to run on lots of hardware.
    - Aelius 8y ago
      This is just blither. They were right: Microsoft and corporate Linux provide security patches for older operating systems for quite a long time. Your obvious animosity for Microsoft has no bearing on that fact.
- freehunter 8y ago
  Yeah, you really have three options now. Either (1) never introduce features that require more processing power but newer phones are capable of handling, (2) have those new features but lock older phones out of being able to use them, or (3), stop supporting older phones with your updates. The problem with (1) is now you've completely stagnated the market, and if your competitors choose either of the other options you're left lagging behind and you lose sales. The problem with (2) is now customers of older phones will be upset that they didn't get the full upgrade for reasons they don't understand. The iPhone 4S and Siri or the iPhone X and Animoji show the reaction you should expect. The problem with (3) is now you have planned obsolescence and old phones just become throw-away leading to an ecological disaster. None of these are good options.
  - simion314 8y ago
    2 is a good option, give users security fixes, if you promised to deliver new features to them then do so but make sure you did not made the OS and core apps worse.
  - garmaine 8y ago
    Option (4): give the user a choice to opt into the new features. A checkbox isn't that hard.
    - kodablah 8y ago
      > A checkbox isn't that hard A naive assumption. In fact, each checkbox exponentially increases the number of possible runtime environments you have to maintain and test.
      - smichel17 8y ago
        Alternatively, a choice of whether to install the update. "Installing this update will give you access to feature X, but will slow down your phone." For comparison, my AT&T Samsung Galaxy S6 forces me to install updates, which I hate. Wasn't my choice to get this particular phone, wouldn't do it again.
- garmaine 8y ago
  > or stop adding resource-intensive features or feature gate them or whatever That's not what's at issue here though. The update was literally along the lines of "if (old phone) then { set_cpu_throttle_threshold(lower); }". Now the intentions were good, even if paternalistic in that the newer features were more demanding on older devices and throttling in theory was supposed to provide a better user experience with the device under high demand--freezing for 5s instead of crashing and rebooting. But still it was literally a patch to make old devices run slower, which regardless of intention should not be allowed.
  - kodablah 8y ago
    > That's not what's at issue here though. The update was literally along the lines of "if (old phone) then { set_cpu_throttle_threshold(lower); }". If that's true, it reduces my fear. I know that's true wrt Apple's batteries. But what I read for the OS updates is that they suggested/shipped newer software they knew would degrade the performance as opposed to intentionally degrading it. As for intentions, while they may have been good (I think it's just easier maintenance to keep one running stable branch), if they were that consumer friendly they would have been more open to the user about the harms of upgrading.
    - larkost 8y ago
      It was not `if (old phone)` it was `if (worn out battery on specific phones with a problem)`, the specific models with the problem happened to be slightly older. They worked fine with new batteries (and did not throttle), including replacements. Apple obviously was not intending to harm users here (I don't know the Samsung case well enough to comment), they absolutely messed up the messaging by not making a notice about their work-around front-and-center, but I disagree with the precedent that this fine is setting.
      - garmaine 8y ago
        No, it was old phones in general. I had a brand new iPhone 7 that was gimped by the iOS 12 update and experienced 3-5s delays in user actions simply because it was older hardware. The crashes which were being avoided would only have happened on bad batteries. But the throttling happened in all instances, bad battery or not.
- the_clarence 8y ago
  The updates were not "suggested". They were quite forced on you.
- hrktb 8y ago
  I think making company think twice before offering the "update" is kind of the point. There is two parts to consider I think: - iOS updates are not reversible (technically it can be done, but for lambda users it's a lost cause). - Apple is very aggressive towards making users upgrade, nagging indefinitely if there is any available newer version So, users are very aggressively pushed towards the newer version, can't go back, but their phone becomes less useable, for new features they might not care about. As it is now, not offering the major update to old phones will be a grace in a number of cases. It would still be nice if users wanting to upgrade can have a path forward, understanding the trade-offs. But users should be less complaining if their device keeps working basically the same way as when they bought it years ago.
  - Nullabillity 8y ago
    Also don't forget their SDKs' lack of compatibility in either direction.
    - FigBug 8y ago
      What do you mean by this?
  - Fnoord 8y ago
    Not just that, often the new update is the only way to stay secure, at the cost of new interface/software/etc. Backporting security and reliability updates is all I expect; not new interface/software/etc. I didn't pay for these. I don't feel entitled to receive those to keep my device functioning. The precedent is neither scary nor controversial. The European law says a device should keep functioning for a reasonable amount of time. A car completely breaking apart after 25 months is not normal. A smartphone being insecure is not normal either. Especially not considering how much personal data these contain.
    - TomMarius 8y ago
      The European law also states that general warranty of consumer electronics is 24 months. No court would rule that someone should support a device such as phone longer, the precedent (the law + previous rulings regarding consumer electronics all around EU) is too strong.
- tw04 8y ago
  >If I were a company fearing that suggesting an OS upgrade for an older phone would cause slowdown on that older phone, I am now incentivized to not suggest that update. We might want companies to support old OSs forever or stop adding resource-intensive features or feature gate them or whatever. But short of legislating that specifically, all this does is make old phones even more of a liability than they already were. You're leaving out the easy solution though - allow users to "downgrade"! The reason this is such a huge issue isn't that they're giving customers the option to upgrade, it's that they refuse to let you go back if you find out the new version is slow. Additionally, when they break functionality on the old version (looking at you facetime) they need to fix it without forcing you to upgrade to a whole new release. (Issue a patch for JUST THAT).
  - azinman2 8y ago
    Which becomes a QA nightmare. What happens when you have new features that migrated all kinds of data, further adding new types of data, then go back to a major OS or two ago? And then if you want to go forward again because you’re missing said data? It also means you lose security updates, and generally hold your platform back. Part of what makes iOS so much better to develop for is the general availability of modern APIs to most of the user base. If you increase those on older versions, then you hold back development of the platform as a whole. iOS 12 was a major step forward in performance and battery consumption. Moves like that — making it a company priority - are a better way forward than allowing people to go backward.
    - tw04 8y ago
      I mean, that's a great argument if we pretend there's no way to save your data prior to upgrading. If you tell me to take a full backup prior to upgrade, and I take a full backup prior to upgrade, there is 0 reason to not let me go back. 0. This isn't a technology or a QA problem, it's vendors refusing to acknowledge that customers own their devices.
      - azinman2 8y ago
        So you as a user are going to take a backup of os version N, then upgrade to N+1, live on it for a long time, then both want to pay/keep the storage costs of N AND potentially months later downgrade and lose all new data to go back to N? It sounds like a terrible user experience. If you told me it was a fresh OS with no ability to recover your old data, then maybe I could see it. But even then we’re assuming you didn’t use any cloud services that migrated your data once all devices had been upgraded, which isn’t true for either major platform. We’re also assuming that you can downgrade all firmware that’s changed successfully (which is expensive new QA). I’d rather just have companies really prioritize performance to begin with.
- solomatov 8y ago
  I think deliberate slowdown is one thing but slowdown due to new features is another. I am okay with the latter but not with the former.
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    But then you make a loophole - ah, yes we know we crippled all old phones but we found people wanted us to benchmark their system simultaneously with each user action. 90% of people asked wanted us to check their devices performance!
wyldfire 8y ago
Gee, I wonder if this is really deliberate/by design. Apple and Samsung seem to be legitimately committed to delivering high performance products. And it's great that they're providing software updates -- imagine the flip side, that would be planned obsolescence for sure. I've worked at places that do performance regression tests and there's usually some small threshold that's tolerated (<1% or something, let's say). The cumulative effect of these might be enough to have significant impact. But another problem is that they're probably doing more target testing on the new designs than the old designs and they might not notice/care enough about the impact of features on old targets' performance. If they're not maintaining independent software branches for the ease of delivering updates, then they risk introducing performance regressions on old targets.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  They could easily release full details of their development process to demonstrate their good faith to their customers.
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hutattedonmyarm 8y ago
> Apple was fined an additional €5m for failing to give customers clear information about “essential” characteristics of lithium batteries, including their average life expectancy, how to maintain them or eventually replace them in the firm’s iPhones. Huh, so this[0] doesn't count? It provides an expected lifespan (80% performance after 500 cycles) and info on how to maintain them [0] https://www.apple.com/batteries/ https://www.apple.com/batteries/
- simion314 8y ago
  Apple tried to avoid having people ask for battery replacement by hiding the issue. I am also expecting that the battery life will decrease not that it will not be able to keep the phone running.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    Assuming that the battery performed well for the first year while it was still under warranty, why wouldn't Apple want customers to ask for a new battery? They would replace the battery at a profit and get them into the Apple Store where they could try to upsell them on a new phone.
    - cma 8y ago
      Because it would be easier to upsell them when they came to the store with getting a new phone in mind due to theirs being mysteriously slow.
      - scarface74 8y ago
        Wouldn’t it be easier just not to upgrade older phones and not allow phones running older OS’s to download the last compatible version of an app? Around the time of iOS 7, Apple started letting older versions of iOS download older version of apps that were compatible. Even today you can take a first gen iPad running iOS 5 and download apps that have since been upgraded but where there is an older version available. I reset my old iPad 1 about two years ago and redownloaded Netflix, Hulu, Spotify etc. They all still work.
TomMarius 8y ago
Say goodbye to OS updates on old devices
- honestoHeminway 8y ago
  If someday it may happen, that a victim must be found, i got a little list, of society offenders, who might as well be under ground. God how is wish there was a rollback-button on android. Out of this steaming hot mess, that destroyed UX, those unnecessary features and horrific, shoehorned crap. Imagine, if you could even go further back to vanilla. Bye,bye bixbye, byebye horric camera controll, farewell, ruined app-selection screen. If it was possible, i would publicly display the rejection rate of updates, just to show- how BAD those updates are. How unnecessary, how much User-work regarding learning is thrown away, how annoying the little extra-steps are, to tripple around those brilliant marketing features. They had it coming, from orbit high, and certainly not out of a clear sky. And no, they can not take the usual hostages of device security and bugfixes, to hold the users for ransom- and hope for stockholm to set in.
izzydata 8y ago
I don't understand why they can't write their OS updates to work properly on a few generations of older models. I work as a SQA at a decently big company and we verify that any update works properly on any hardware that is capable of receiving it. We have more than 20 different hardware models and Apple is struggling with 2?
- gcb0 8y ago
  Money. If your clients do not care about security updates for older models, and happily buy new models which carry a 300+% profit margin, why on earth would they justify not doing what they are doing. It is money, plain and simple. And this minuscule fine will only make it worse. Because now they know the low cost of continuing to do that.
  - the_clarence 8y ago
    FWIW the last update actually made things better.
- ubernostrum 8y ago
  We have more than 20 different hardware models and Apple is struggling with 2? iOS 12 officially supports the following devices, per Apple. iPhones: XS, XS Max, XR, X, 8, 8 Plus, 7, 7 Plus, 6S, 6S Plus, 6, 6 Plus, SE, 5S iPads: 12.9" Pro 2nd gen, 12.9" Pro 1st gen, 10.5" Pro, 9.7" Pro, 6th gen, 5th gen, Air 2, Air, mini 4, mini 3, mini 2 iPods: touch 6th gen That's 26 different base models, of I don't care to count how many different physical form factors, each of which was/is offered in multiple configurations and has different onboard hardware and capabilities. Incidentally: I don't understand why they can't write their OS updates to work properly on a few generations of older models They support 8 generations of iPhones, 11 generations of iPads, and one generation of iPod, with the oldest supported devices dating to 2013.
  - izzydata 8y ago
    The article stated that the updates negatively impacted devices as early as 1 generation old. I don't consider that working properly. Either they tested this scenario and intentionally ignored that it made the product worse or they didn't test it.
nathan_long 8y ago
> It is a crime under French law to intentionally shorten the life of any product in order to promote sales. The French consumer protection agency has the power to fine up to 5% of annual turnover or impose a jail term. Nice law.
- megaman8 8y ago
  normally i'm against heavy handed government, but in the case of cell phones and other electronic devices being slowed down by companies/made unusable I am greatly in favor of this!
  - Illniyar 8y ago
    Why? Seems like a perfect thing for "market forces" to decide - if people don't like what apple are doing they should buy something else or downgrade, there are many alternatives
    - nathan_long 8y ago
      > Seems like a perfect thing for "market forces" to decide I'm not sure about that. Consumers can easily tell which phone is less expensive, which one has more storage, etc. It is much harder to know, much less decide based on, which ones will last a long time. Especially since by the time we can confidently say "these last 5 years", you can't buy that model anymore. This is a problem with nearly anything more complex than a kitchen knife.
      - Illniyar 8y ago
        Good point.
      - AzMoo_ 8y ago
        I think you are underestimating kitchen knives tbh.
    - ken 8y ago
      Because a smartphone is a conglomeration of billions of design decisions, and there's only a couple product choices today when it comes to smartphone ecosystems. If your answer is "market forces" for even 3 different attributes of the phone, then the market simply cannot support being able to control them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_(cybernetics)#Law_of_Requisite_Variety https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_(cybernetics)#Law_of_R... The Invisible Hand worked great when you had 1000 people making hammers and sewing pants and harvesting wheat. It doesn't work so well when you've got 2 multi-national companies producing handheld supercomputers. Writing a regulation or law is how the market (i.e., the people collectively) tell an industry that it needs to do something, always. The industry can't just hide behind "I'm going to do things A and B that you hate, because I'm also doing things C, D, and E that you can't live without".
lathiat 8y ago
While in fairness I haven't read the actual case and maybe I am mising some real facts; From the Apple Side, this is stupid. Call me an anti conspiracy theorist but I doubt one bit Apple intends this behaviour in any way. The original law this is under to intentionally "shorten the life" in order to promote sales is going to have been written for a totally different case. i.e. intentionally having devices be disposable. Right? If anything, Apple is the opposite. They consistently provide both security and feature updates for devices several years longer than the majority of competitors. You can see this from http://iossupportmatrix.com/ http://iossupportmatrix.com/ (there are other source) - the majority of the cases you have 5 years of iOS support - 4 years after the initial release. Most competitor devices barely update things after 2 years even for security let alone features. The cynic in us might assume that's why the spent time intentionally making iOS 12 faster on older devices - I'd like to think they decided to do that anyway. But either way while that is a great, this ruling seems crazy to me.
- lathiat 8y ago
  The outcome of this is likely much worse for Android devices than Apple. I would suggest that Apple have the engineering resources to make newer iOS releases "as fast" on older devices if they want to. And maybe you could argue that's a great outcome. But you can be pretty sure most Android OEMs just won't bother to provide any updates at the risk of this. This is of course muddied by the battery-related performance changes, to stop unexpected shutdowns, which were sadly not Apple's finest moment. The fix is good, but not reporting that to the end user originally was probably a mis-step on Apple's part in my view. And ideally that change might have been added before the next major version iOS update which made it more of a conspiracy than it needed to be - though you can understand how that comes about. Ugh.
  - AgentOrange1234 8y ago
    > But you can be pretty sure most Android OEMs just won't bother to provide any updates at the risk of this. So everything stays the same as before? :)
    - 8y ago
kjullien 8y ago
What the hell is everybody on about? How can you defend Apple (I don't know much about Samsung so can't comment on their behavior) This was clearly done to promote sales of newer generation products. I can prove that in 1 sentence. Apple does not let you downgrade to an older version of iOS if you find out that the new version you installed slows your phone down. It's as easy as this. They actively go out of their way to prevent customers from rolling back to a stable and fast release, try and find a justification for that... (inb4 "its for security/privacy") edit: I'm going to get downvoted to oblivion for this comment and I could not care less, I'm tired of Apple fanboys on hn
- lolsal 8y ago
  Why is 'security/privacy' not a valid answer? A separate anecdote: My company requires the same thing for on-prem installs - you can't downgrade. Data/schema migrations for our single application become a pain in the butt if we allow downgrades. For an OS and lots of applications, I can see it being a UX/support nightmare. We disallow downgrades for this reason because we don't wish to tackle the technical challenge of enabling it, but primarily we disallow downgrades because of the security liability.
  - kjullien 8y ago
    Say I BOUGHT an iPhone 5 years ago, I think I should be allowed to run the software that came with it 5 years ago. I could not care less about security or privacy or the illusion thereof, all I care about is being able to use the device I paid for, and to be able to actually use it, not simply have a paper holder that acts as a constant reminder that I need to get the iPhone 123 XLSE or whatever version is out these days if I want to have the same experience I had with the phone when I took it out of the box 5 years ago. Not a worse one. It is absolutely not a technical challenge to downgrade as I remember fairly vividly (some years ago) that a simple Jailbreak was enough to allow you to restore to any version you could want. I don't care about data loss. The last thing is that this would not be the path the average consumer would take, it would simply be a possibility for people who do not want to trade "privacy" and "security" for usability. They have the technology, they have the resources, everything that could possibly be needed for this is already in place and has been since the iPhone 3G. The only reason you cannot do it today is that Apple has servers that tell iTunes whether or not this image is allowed to be flashed onto the device. So the only reason is probably a text file hosted somewhere with contents along these lines : Allowed: >= 12 Disallowed: < 12
Isamu 8y ago
>Apple acknowledged in December that it had intentionally slowed iPhones with degraded batteries through software updates to avoid sudden shutdown problems, but denied it had ever done anything to intentionally shorten the life of a product. >The company later apologised for its actions and reduced the cost of battery replacements. It also added battery health information to iOS and allowed users to turn off the slowing down of the iPhone’s processor. On the other hand, Apple would be sued over the sudden shutdowns because of the battery degradation, or over the battery degradation because of the cost of battery replacement, or ... etc. Class action suits are a cost of Apple doing business in giant volumes. They (and every company) are making tradeoffs with their products and I know from my own experience that making tradeoffs is an art and not a exact calculus. So Apple can deal with the legal actions - they have the money. But of course this is another high barrier of entry from anybody else looking to get into the business.
- jsilence 8y ago
  yeah, why again are the batteries not replaceable anymore?
  - Isamu 8y ago
    Eh? The batteries are replaceable. In-warranty it is free. Out-of-warranty cost varies. Check here: https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/battery-power https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/battery-power What is true is that third-party replacements may not work out, I don't know.
    - the_clarence 8y ago
      That's a money grab. Battery replacement used to e so cheap
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dixie_land 8y ago
Well now I'm raged that Microsoft isn't also fined since they slowed down Windows Server 2016 on my 20 year old Celeron.
rbrtdrmpc- 8y ago
I was laughing when they started the procedure months ago. First of all I'm more keen to the "Apple should be less paternalistic" idea, but despite what i think about their behaviour i need to explain to all non-italian folks around here that the AGCOM (Autorità per le garanzie nelle comunicazioni/Authority for Communications Guarantees) is a crappy authority, it is really a joke and I'll list a couple of cases to highlight its quality: - Fined tv journalists for how they managed their airing time every year in different ways, most of the time the decision is based on who's leading the current government - Wanted to fine WhatsApp\Telegram\Etc because they were "free to use" despite the mobile carriers were STILL charging for goddamn TXTs - It developed an antediluvian software to misure your internet bandwidth and line quality that used to work only on Windows, that should have been left alone without interfering for 24/48 hours and most of the time was not working (instead of asking for fucking *DSL minimum attenuance/SNR/QoS levels by law) Believe me, they are just trying to abuse of their power for some juice and I hope Apple and Samsung will go via EU legal routes just to let everything fall apart p.s. I really hope our cousins from the other side of the Alps will do much better, no matter what's the stake
wycy 8y ago
Recent iOS updates turned off the throttling of phones with old batteries. Apple initially said this throttling was necessary to prevent unexpected shutdowns of older phones. Now that the throttling is gone, have we seen a rash of unexpected shutdowns? I haven't heard of this happening, which leads me to believe the excuse was bs in the first place. EDIT: To be clear, I know that iPhones have always been known to unexpectedly shut down. Throttling performance was ostensibly meant to prevent these unexpected shutdowns. My question is whether or not the incidence of unexpected shutdowns increased once Apple lifted the throttle.
- matchbok 8y ago
  Just one experience here, but my old 6s used to shut down quite a bit once it neared the lower end of the battery life.
- overcyn 8y ago
  Heres a 31 page macrumors thread on it. https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/iphone-6s-turning-off-at-10-20.1954530/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/iphone-6s-turning-off-a... https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/4vne2w/does_anyone_elses_iphone_randomly_die_at_around_20/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/4vne2w/does_anyone_e... And Apple cut the price of battery replacement from $79 -> $29 in response to it. https://www.apple.com/iphone-battery-and-performance/ https://www.apple.com/iphone-battery-and-performance/
  - wycy 8y ago
    The linked MacRumors thread is from before this scandal even came to light, while Apple was still throttling. The thread begins in 2016 and ends in 2017. iOS 11.3 came out March 2018, removing the throttle. Unfortunately I can't check the reddit thread at the moment, as its blocked at work. EDIT: Reddit thread is also from prior to lifting the throttle.
    - overcyn 8y ago
      The throttle was not lifted in 11.3. They added a switch so users could disable it. https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/7/16984234/how-to-iphone-throttling-ios-11-3 https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/7/16984234/how-to-iphone-thr...
Animats 8y ago
It is a crime under French law to intentionally shorten the life of any product in order to promote sales. The French consumer protection agency has the power to fine up to 5% of annual turnover or impose a jail term. Yes!
brennankreiman 8y ago
Separating security updates from general new feature updates would be the key for old phone updates but that is unlikely to happen.
microcolonel 8y ago
Hot damn, this is a bad precedent. A legal chilling effect on improving the performance of software (because god forbid it gets slower in the future). I'd be interested to see how they established that the slowdown was "intentional" and not simply negligent or uncaring.
TwoBit 8y ago
My Verizon Galaxy S7 performance tanked a few months ago all at once, coinciding with some update. I've found that if I run it in airplane mode then the perf is OK.
paulmd 8y ago
I was figuring this was going to be about Apple gimping the Qualcomm modems in their phones down to the speeds that the Intel modems can deliver. (presumably so that people don't try to return their iphones to get "the good kind" like when the Samsung/TSMC SOCs affected battery life) https://www.fudzilla.com/news/mobile/42177-apple-crippled-qualcomm-modem-to-make-it-work-like-intel-s https://www.fudzilla.com/news/mobile/42177-apple-crippled-qu... https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/11/15255318/qualcomm-sues-apple-iphone-countersue-intel https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/11/15255318/qualcomm-sues-ap...
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256 points by charlysl 8y ago

> Samsung told owners of its Galaxy Note 4 phone to install a new version of Google’s Android operating system intended for the more recent Galaxy Note 7, but which rendered the old model sluggish. Likewise, Apple told iPhone 6 owners to install an operating system designed for the iPhone 7, leading to problems for owners of the older mode A bit of a scary precedent. The 5m fine on Apple for intentionally reducing resource usage to such a large extent without notification seems kinda reasonable. But the 5m fine for both Apple and Samsung for their updates causing slowdown on older devices is a different issue. If I were a company fearing that suggesting an OS upgrade for an older phone would cause slowdown on that older phone, I am now incentivized to not suggest that update. We might want companies to support old OSs forever or stop adding resource-intensive features or feature gate them or whatever. But short of legislating that specifically, all this does is make old phones even more of a liability than they already were.

kingnothing 8y ago
This doesn't seem that much different than Microsoft or any given corporate linux vendor continuing to provide security updates, but not new features, to older but still supported versions of their OS. Why should mobile operating systems not be held to the same expectation?
- kodablah 8y ago
  A few things here. First, as a consumer I might hold them to that expectation, but that is not the same as the law holding them to it. Second, it's a bit backwards to use Microsoft as an example of not sunsetting old versions or having newer versions that are slower or don't work [as well] on older machines. Third, this is about locked down software environments by hardware manufacturers, a completely different situation from software manufacturers providing the freedom to run on lots of hardware.
  - Aelius 8y ago
    This is just blither. They were right: Microsoft and corporate Linux provide security patches for older operating systems for quite a long time. Your obvious animosity for Microsoft has no bearing on that fact.
freehunter 8y ago
Yeah, you really have three options now. Either (1) never introduce features that require more processing power but newer phones are capable of handling, (2) have those new features but lock older phones out of being able to use them, or (3), stop supporting older phones with your updates. The problem with (1) is now you've completely stagnated the market, and if your competitors choose either of the other options you're left lagging behind and you lose sales. The problem with (2) is now customers of older phones will be upset that they didn't get the full upgrade for reasons they don't understand. The iPhone 4S and Siri or the iPhone X and Animoji show the reaction you should expect. The problem with (3) is now you have planned obsolescence and old phones just become throw-away leading to an ecological disaster. None of these are good options.
- simion314 8y ago
  2 is a good option, give users security fixes, if you promised to deliver new features to them then do so but make sure you did not made the OS and core apps worse.
- garmaine 8y ago
  Option (4): give the user a choice to opt into the new features. A checkbox isn't that hard.
  - kodablah 8y ago
    > A checkbox isn't that hard A naive assumption. In fact, each checkbox exponentially increases the number of possible runtime environments you have to maintain and test.
    - smichel17 8y ago
      Alternatively, a choice of whether to install the update. "Installing this update will give you access to feature X, but will slow down your phone." For comparison, my AT&T Samsung Galaxy S6 forces me to install updates, which I hate. Wasn't my choice to get this particular phone, wouldn't do it again.
garmaine 8y ago
> or stop adding resource-intensive features or feature gate them or whatever That's not what's at issue here though. The update was literally along the lines of "if (old phone) then { set_cpu_throttle_threshold(lower); }". Now the intentions were good, even if paternalistic in that the newer features were more demanding on older devices and throttling in theory was supposed to provide a better user experience with the device under high demand--freezing for 5s instead of crashing and rebooting. But still it was literally a patch to make old devices run slower, which regardless of intention should not be allowed.
- kodablah 8y ago
  > That's not what's at issue here though. The update was literally along the lines of "if (old phone) then { set_cpu_throttle_threshold(lower); }". If that's true, it reduces my fear. I know that's true wrt Apple's batteries. But what I read for the OS updates is that they suggested/shipped newer software they knew would degrade the performance as opposed to intentionally degrading it. As for intentions, while they may have been good (I think it's just easier maintenance to keep one running stable branch), if they were that consumer friendly they would have been more open to the user about the harms of upgrading.
  - larkost 8y ago
    It was not `if (old phone)` it was `if (worn out battery on specific phones with a problem)`, the specific models with the problem happened to be slightly older. They worked fine with new batteries (and did not throttle), including replacements. Apple obviously was not intending to harm users here (I don't know the Samsung case well enough to comment), they absolutely messed up the messaging by not making a notice about their work-around front-and-center, but I disagree with the precedent that this fine is setting.
    - garmaine 8y ago
      No, it was old phones in general. I had a brand new iPhone 7 that was gimped by the iOS 12 update and experienced 3-5s delays in user actions simply because it was older hardware. The crashes which were being avoided would only have happened on bad batteries. But the throttling happened in all instances, bad battery or not.
the_clarence 8y ago
The updates were not "suggested". They were quite forced on you.
hrktb 8y ago
I think making company think twice before offering the "update" is kind of the point. There is two parts to consider I think: - iOS updates are not reversible (technically it can be done, but for lambda users it's a lost cause). - Apple is very aggressive towards making users upgrade, nagging indefinitely if there is any available newer version So, users are very aggressively pushed towards the newer version, can't go back, but their phone becomes less useable, for new features they might not care about. As it is now, not offering the major update to old phones will be a grace in a number of cases. It would still be nice if users wanting to upgrade can have a path forward, understanding the trade-offs. But users should be less complaining if their device keeps working basically the same way as when they bought it years ago.
- Nullabillity 8y ago
  Also don't forget their SDKs' lack of compatibility in either direction.
  - FigBug 8y ago
    What do you mean by this?
- Fnoord 8y ago
  Not just that, often the new update is the only way to stay secure, at the cost of new interface/software/etc. Backporting security and reliability updates is all I expect; not new interface/software/etc. I didn't pay for these. I don't feel entitled to receive those to keep my device functioning. The precedent is neither scary nor controversial. The European law says a device should keep functioning for a reasonable amount of time. A car completely breaking apart after 25 months is not normal. A smartphone being insecure is not normal either. Especially not considering how much personal data these contain.
  - TomMarius 8y ago
    The European law also states that general warranty of consumer electronics is 24 months. No court would rule that someone should support a device such as phone longer, the precedent (the law + previous rulings regarding consumer electronics all around EU) is too strong.
tw04 8y ago
>If I were a company fearing that suggesting an OS upgrade for an older phone would cause slowdown on that older phone, I am now incentivized to not suggest that update. We might want companies to support old OSs forever or stop adding resource-intensive features or feature gate them or whatever. But short of legislating that specifically, all this does is make old phones even more of a liability than they already were. You're leaving out the easy solution though - allow users to "downgrade"! The reason this is such a huge issue isn't that they're giving customers the option to upgrade, it's that they refuse to let you go back if you find out the new version is slow. Additionally, when they break functionality on the old version (looking at you facetime) they need to fix it without forcing you to upgrade to a whole new release. (Issue a patch for JUST THAT).
- azinman2 8y ago
  Which becomes a QA nightmare. What happens when you have new features that migrated all kinds of data, further adding new types of data, then go back to a major OS or two ago? And then if you want to go forward again because you’re missing said data? It also means you lose security updates, and generally hold your platform back. Part of what makes iOS so much better to develop for is the general availability of modern APIs to most of the user base. If you increase those on older versions, then you hold back development of the platform as a whole. iOS 12 was a major step forward in performance and battery consumption. Moves like that — making it a company priority - are a better way forward than allowing people to go backward.
  - tw04 8y ago
    I mean, that's a great argument if we pretend there's no way to save your data prior to upgrading. If you tell me to take a full backup prior to upgrade, and I take a full backup prior to upgrade, there is 0 reason to not let me go back. 0. This isn't a technology or a QA problem, it's vendors refusing to acknowledge that customers own their devices.
    - azinman2 8y ago
      So you as a user are going to take a backup of os version N, then upgrade to N+1, live on it for a long time, then both want to pay/keep the storage costs of N AND potentially months later downgrade and lose all new data to go back to N? It sounds like a terrible user experience. If you told me it was a fresh OS with no ability to recover your old data, then maybe I could see it. But even then we’re assuming you didn’t use any cloud services that migrated your data once all devices had been upgraded, which isn’t true for either major platform. We’re also assuming that you can downgrade all firmware that’s changed successfully (which is expensive new QA). I’d rather just have companies really prioritize performance to begin with.
solomatov 8y ago
I think deliberate slowdown is one thing but slowdown due to new features is another. I am okay with the latter but not with the former.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  But then you make a loophole - ah, yes we know we crippled all old phones but we found people wanted us to benchmark their system simultaneously with each user action. 90% of people asked wanted us to check their devices performance!

wyldfire 8y ago

Gee, I wonder if this is really deliberate/by design. Apple and Samsung seem to be legitimately committed to delivering high performance products. And it's great that they're providing software updates -- imagine the flip side, that would be planned obsolescence for sure. I've worked at places that do performance regression tests and there's usually some small threshold that's tolerated (<1% or something, let's say). The cumulative effect of these might be enough to have significant impact. But another problem is that they're probably doing more target testing on the new designs than the old designs and they might not notice/care enough about the impact of features on old targets' performance. If they're not maintaining independent software branches for the ease of delivering updates, then they risk introducing performance regressions on old targets.

pbhjpbhj 8y ago
They could easily release full details of their development process to demonstrate their good faith to their customers.

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hutattedonmyarm 8y ago

> Apple was fined an additional €5m for failing to give customers clear information about “essential” characteristics of lithium batteries, including their average life expectancy, how to maintain them or eventually replace them in the firm’s iPhones. Huh, so this[0] doesn't count? It provides an expected lifespan (80% performance after 500 cycles) and info on how to maintain them [0] https://www.apple.com/batteries/ https://www.apple.com/batteries/

simion314 8y ago
Apple tried to avoid having people ask for battery replacement by hiding the issue. I am also expecting that the battery life will decrease not that it will not be able to keep the phone running.
- scarface74 8y ago
  Assuming that the battery performed well for the first year while it was still under warranty, why wouldn't Apple want customers to ask for a new battery? They would replace the battery at a profit and get them into the Apple Store where they could try to upsell them on a new phone.
  - cma 8y ago
    Because it would be easier to upsell them when they came to the store with getting a new phone in mind due to theirs being mysteriously slow.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      Wouldn’t it be easier just not to upgrade older phones and not allow phones running older OS’s to download the last compatible version of an app? Around the time of iOS 7, Apple started letting older versions of iOS download older version of apps that were compatible. Even today you can take a first gen iPad running iOS 5 and download apps that have since been upgraded but where there is an older version available. I reset my old iPad 1 about two years ago and redownloaded Netflix, Hulu, Spotify etc. They all still work.

TomMarius 8y ago

Say goodbye to OS updates on old devices

honestoHeminway 8y ago
If someday it may happen, that a victim must be found, i got a little list, of society offenders, who might as well be under ground. God how is wish there was a rollback-button on android. Out of this steaming hot mess, that destroyed UX, those unnecessary features and horrific, shoehorned crap. Imagine, if you could even go further back to vanilla. Bye,bye bixbye, byebye horric camera controll, farewell, ruined app-selection screen. If it was possible, i would publicly display the rejection rate of updates, just to show- how BAD those updates are. How unnecessary, how much User-work regarding learning is thrown away, how annoying the little extra-steps are, to tripple around those brilliant marketing features. They had it coming, from orbit high, and certainly not out of a clear sky. And no, they can not take the usual hostages of device security and bugfixes, to hold the users for ransom- and hope for stockholm to set in.

izzydata 8y ago

I don't understand why they can't write their OS updates to work properly on a few generations of older models. I work as a SQA at a decently big company and we verify that any update works properly on any hardware that is capable of receiving it. We have more than 20 different hardware models and Apple is struggling with 2?

gcb0 8y ago
Money. If your clients do not care about security updates for older models, and happily buy new models which carry a 300+% profit margin, why on earth would they justify not doing what they are doing. It is money, plain and simple. And this minuscule fine will only make it worse. Because now they know the low cost of continuing to do that.
- the_clarence 8y ago
  FWIW the last update actually made things better.
ubernostrum 8y ago
We have more than 20 different hardware models and Apple is struggling with 2? iOS 12 officially supports the following devices, per Apple. iPhones: XS, XS Max, XR, X, 8, 8 Plus, 7, 7 Plus, 6S, 6S Plus, 6, 6 Plus, SE, 5S iPads: 12.9" Pro 2nd gen, 12.9" Pro 1st gen, 10.5" Pro, 9.7" Pro, 6th gen, 5th gen, Air 2, Air, mini 4, mini 3, mini 2 iPods: touch 6th gen That's 26 different base models, of I don't care to count how many different physical form factors, each of which was/is offered in multiple configurations and has different onboard hardware and capabilities. Incidentally: I don't understand why they can't write their OS updates to work properly on a few generations of older models They support 8 generations of iPhones, 11 generations of iPads, and one generation of iPod, with the oldest supported devices dating to 2013.
- izzydata 8y ago
  The article stated that the updates negatively impacted devices as early as 1 generation old. I don't consider that working properly. Either they tested this scenario and intentionally ignored that it made the product worse or they didn't test it.

nathan_long 8y ago

> It is a crime under French law to intentionally shorten the life of any product in order to promote sales. The French consumer protection agency has the power to fine up to 5% of annual turnover or impose a jail term. Nice law.

megaman8 8y ago
normally i'm against heavy handed government, but in the case of cell phones and other electronic devices being slowed down by companies/made unusable I am greatly in favor of this!
- Illniyar 8y ago
  Why? Seems like a perfect thing for "market forces" to decide - if people don't like what apple are doing they should buy something else or downgrade, there are many alternatives
  - nathan_long 8y ago
    > Seems like a perfect thing for "market forces" to decide I'm not sure about that. Consumers can easily tell which phone is less expensive, which one has more storage, etc. It is much harder to know, much less decide based on, which ones will last a long time. Especially since by the time we can confidently say "these last 5 years", you can't buy that model anymore. This is a problem with nearly anything more complex than a kitchen knife.
    - Illniyar 8y ago
      Good point.
    - AzMoo_ 8y ago
      I think you are underestimating kitchen knives tbh.
  - ken 8y ago
    Because a smartphone is a conglomeration of billions of design decisions, and there's only a couple product choices today when it comes to smartphone ecosystems. If your answer is "market forces" for even 3 different attributes of the phone, then the market simply cannot support being able to control them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_(cybernetics)#Law_of_Requisite_Variety https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_(cybernetics)#Law_of_R... The Invisible Hand worked great when you had 1000 people making hammers and sewing pants and harvesting wheat. It doesn't work so well when you've got 2 multi-national companies producing handheld supercomputers. Writing a regulation or law is how the market (i.e., the people collectively) tell an industry that it needs to do something, always. The industry can't just hide behind "I'm going to do things A and B that you hate, because I'm also doing things C, D, and E that you can't live without".

lathiat 8y ago

While in fairness I haven't read the actual case and maybe I am mising some real facts; From the Apple Side, this is stupid. Call me an anti conspiracy theorist but I doubt one bit Apple intends this behaviour in any way. The original law this is under to intentionally "shorten the life" in order to promote sales is going to have been written for a totally different case. i.e. intentionally having devices be disposable. Right? If anything, Apple is the opposite. They consistently provide both security and feature updates for devices several years longer than the majority of competitors. You can see this from http://iossupportmatrix.com/ http://iossupportmatrix.com/ (there are other source) - the majority of the cases you have 5 years of iOS support - 4 years after the initial release. Most competitor devices barely update things after 2 years even for security let alone features. The cynic in us might assume that's why the spent time intentionally making iOS 12 faster on older devices - I'd like to think they decided to do that anyway. But either way while that is a great, this ruling seems crazy to me.

lathiat 8y ago
The outcome of this is likely much worse for Android devices than Apple. I would suggest that Apple have the engineering resources to make newer iOS releases "as fast" on older devices if they want to. And maybe you could argue that's a great outcome. But you can be pretty sure most Android OEMs just won't bother to provide any updates at the risk of this. This is of course muddied by the battery-related performance changes, to stop unexpected shutdowns, which were sadly not Apple's finest moment. The fix is good, but not reporting that to the end user originally was probably a mis-step on Apple's part in my view. And ideally that change might have been added before the next major version iOS update which made it more of a conspiracy than it needed to be - though you can understand how that comes about. Ugh.
- AgentOrange1234 8y ago
  > But you can be pretty sure most Android OEMs just won't bother to provide any updates at the risk of this. So everything stays the same as before? :)
  - 8y ago

kjullien 8y ago

What the hell is everybody on about? How can you defend Apple (I don't know much about Samsung so can't comment on their behavior) This was clearly done to promote sales of newer generation products. I can prove that in 1 sentence. Apple does not let you downgrade to an older version of iOS if you find out that the new version you installed slows your phone down. It's as easy as this. They actively go out of their way to prevent customers from rolling back to a stable and fast release, try and find a justification for that... (inb4 "its for security/privacy") edit: I'm going to get downvoted to oblivion for this comment and I could not care less, I'm tired of Apple fanboys on hn

lolsal 8y ago
Why is 'security/privacy' not a valid answer? A separate anecdote: My company requires the same thing for on-prem installs - you can't downgrade. Data/schema migrations for our single application become a pain in the butt if we allow downgrades. For an OS and lots of applications, I can see it being a UX/support nightmare. We disallow downgrades for this reason because we don't wish to tackle the technical challenge of enabling it, but primarily we disallow downgrades because of the security liability.
- kjullien 8y ago
  Say I BOUGHT an iPhone 5 years ago, I think I should be allowed to run the software that came with it 5 years ago. I could not care less about security or privacy or the illusion thereof, all I care about is being able to use the device I paid for, and to be able to actually use it, not simply have a paper holder that acts as a constant reminder that I need to get the iPhone 123 XLSE or whatever version is out these days if I want to have the same experience I had with the phone when I took it out of the box 5 years ago. Not a worse one. It is absolutely not a technical challenge to downgrade as I remember fairly vividly (some years ago) that a simple Jailbreak was enough to allow you to restore to any version you could want. I don't care about data loss. The last thing is that this would not be the path the average consumer would take, it would simply be a possibility for people who do not want to trade "privacy" and "security" for usability. They have the technology, they have the resources, everything that could possibly be needed for this is already in place and has been since the iPhone 3G. The only reason you cannot do it today is that Apple has servers that tell iTunes whether or not this image is allowed to be flashed onto the device. So the only reason is probably a text file hosted somewhere with contents along these lines : Allowed: >= 12 Disallowed: < 12

Isamu 8y ago

>Apple acknowledged in December that it had intentionally slowed iPhones with degraded batteries through software updates to avoid sudden shutdown problems, but denied it had ever done anything to intentionally shorten the life of a product. >The company later apologised for its actions and reduced the cost of battery replacements. It also added battery health information to iOS and allowed users to turn off the slowing down of the iPhone’s processor. On the other hand, Apple would be sued over the sudden shutdowns because of the battery degradation, or over the battery degradation because of the cost of battery replacement, or ... etc. Class action suits are a cost of Apple doing business in giant volumes. They (and every company) are making tradeoffs with their products and I know from my own experience that making tradeoffs is an art and not a exact calculus. So Apple can deal with the legal actions - they have the money. But of course this is another high barrier of entry from anybody else looking to get into the business.

jsilence 8y ago
yeah, why again are the batteries not replaceable anymore?
- Isamu 8y ago
  Eh? The batteries are replaceable. In-warranty it is free. Out-of-warranty cost varies. Check here: https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/battery-power https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/battery-power What is true is that third-party replacements may not work out, I don't know.
  - the_clarence 8y ago
    That's a money grab. Battery replacement used to e so cheap

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dixie_land 8y ago

Well now I'm raged that Microsoft isn't also fined since they slowed down Windows Server 2016 on my 20 year old Celeron.

rbrtdrmpc- 8y ago

I was laughing when they started the procedure months ago. First of all I'm more keen to the "Apple should be less paternalistic" idea, but despite what i think about their behaviour i need to explain to all non-italian folks around here that the AGCOM (Autorità per le garanzie nelle comunicazioni/Authority for Communications Guarantees) is a crappy authority, it is really a joke and I'll list a couple of cases to highlight its quality: - Fined tv journalists for how they managed their airing time every year in different ways, most of the time the decision is based on who's leading the current government - Wanted to fine WhatsApp\Telegram\Etc because they were "free to use" despite the mobile carriers were STILL charging for goddamn TXTs - It developed an antediluvian software to misure your internet bandwidth and line quality that used to work only on Windows, that should have been left alone without interfering for 24/48 hours and most of the time was not working (instead of asking for fucking *DSL minimum attenuance/SNR/QoS levels by law) Believe me, they are just trying to abuse of their power for some juice and I hope Apple and Samsung will go via EU legal routes just to let everything fall apart p.s. I really hope our cousins from the other side of the Alps will do much better, no matter what's the stake

wycy 8y ago

Recent iOS updates turned off the throttling of phones with old batteries. Apple initially said this throttling was necessary to prevent unexpected shutdowns of older phones. Now that the throttling is gone, have we seen a rash of unexpected shutdowns? I haven't heard of this happening, which leads me to believe the excuse was bs in the first place. EDIT: To be clear, I know that iPhones have always been known to unexpectedly shut down. Throttling performance was ostensibly meant to prevent these unexpected shutdowns. My question is whether or not the incidence of unexpected shutdowns increased once Apple lifted the throttle.

matchbok 8y ago
Just one experience here, but my old 6s used to shut down quite a bit once it neared the lower end of the battery life.
overcyn 8y ago
Heres a 31 page macrumors thread on it. https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/iphone-6s-turning-off-at-10-20.1954530/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/iphone-6s-turning-off-a... https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/4vne2w/does_anyone_elses_iphone_randomly_die_at_around_20/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/4vne2w/does_anyone_e... And Apple cut the price of battery replacement from $79 -> $29 in response to it. https://www.apple.com/iphone-battery-and-performance/ https://www.apple.com/iphone-battery-and-performance/
- wycy 8y ago
  The linked MacRumors thread is from before this scandal even came to light, while Apple was still throttling. The thread begins in 2016 and ends in 2017. iOS 11.3 came out March 2018, removing the throttle. Unfortunately I can't check the reddit thread at the moment, as its blocked at work. EDIT: Reddit thread is also from prior to lifting the throttle.
  - overcyn 8y ago
    The throttle was not lifted in 11.3. They added a switch so users could disable it. https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/7/16984234/how-to-iphone-throttling-ios-11-3 https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/7/16984234/how-to-iphone-thr...

Animats 8y ago

It is a crime under French law to intentionally shorten the life of any product in order to promote sales. The French consumer protection agency has the power to fine up to 5% of annual turnover or impose a jail term. Yes!

brennankreiman 8y ago

Separating security updates from general new feature updates would be the key for old phone updates but that is unlikely to happen.

microcolonel 8y ago

Hot damn, this is a bad precedent. A legal chilling effect on improving the performance of software (because god forbid it gets slower in the future). I'd be interested to see how they established that the slowdown was "intentional" and not simply negligent or uncaring.

TwoBit 8y ago

My Verizon Galaxy S7 performance tanked a few months ago all at once, coinciding with some update. I've found that if I run it in airplane mode then the perf is OK.

paulmd 8y ago

I was figuring this was going to be about Apple gimping the Qualcomm modems in their phones down to the speeds that the Intel modems can deliver. (presumably so that people don't try to return their iphones to get "the good kind" like when the Samsung/TSMC SOCs affected battery life) https://www.fudzilla.com/news/mobile/42177-apple-crippled-qualcomm-modem-to-make-it-work-like-intel-s https://www.fudzilla.com/news/mobile/42177-apple-crippled-qu... https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/11/15255318/qualcomm-sues-apple-iphone-countersue-intel https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/11/15255318/qualcomm-sues-ap...

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