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Apple implemented this to help users extend life of older devices. Apple should just have phones in France run full clock at all times to comply with this regu

Apple implemented this to help users extend life of older devices. Apple should just have phones in France run full clock at all times to comply with this regulation. These types of things don't recognize that phone design is a CONSTANT power management / speed tradeoff. If you demand things run 100% speed at all times - poof - your batter life is gone.

dangus 7y ago
It’s definitely a multifaceted issue, especially because Apple’s communication was so poor. Though it’s not like companies are in the habit of communicating their CPU scheduling strategy to their customers. The customers don’t care nor can the comprehend that information. It still boggles my mind how many people I know refuse to get batteries replaced. The price is totally reasonable from all manufacturers, way more so than plunking down another $700 on a phone. They just want a new phone at that point because who doesn’t like new things? In a lot of ways Apple was responding to customer behavior - customers allow their phones to limp along with cracked screens and dead batteries and Apple was essentially helping them do so for as long as possible without disruptions, but it also looks like planned obsolescence. A lot of the people who essentially say that a random shutdown due to lack of supplied voltage is preferable to throttling are flat out wrong.
- supergarfield 7y ago
  > Though it’s not like companies are in the habit of communicating their CPU scheduling strategy to their customers. The customers don’t care nor can the comprehend that information. I think nobody’s talking about publishing their actual scheduling or CPU throttling algorithm, just about saying "we're slowing the phone down to save battery life, which it seems nearly everybody would understand.
  - stouset 7y ago
    “Slowing down the phone to save battery life” is happening during 90%+ of your phone’s life, even from day one. There’s no conspiracy here. This was almost certainly just a well-intentioned part of their power management design that affected the performance of older phones more than anyone in a position of leadership intended or realized. Bug report comes in: phone shuts down unpredictably when the battery is aged. Engineer see the issue, tweaks some values to make sure the peak power draw is kept in check when voltage drops, closes bug. How anyone who’s ever worked as an engineer in a large organization thinks this was some intentional decision to sell a handful more phones at the cost of upsetting customers is a mystery to me. Nobody is perfect. Apple is far better than most.
- oarsinsync 7y ago
  > A lot of the people who essentially say that a random shutdown due to lack of supplied voltage is preferable to throttling are flat out wrong. Agreed. My iPhone SE running iOS 13 has randomly shutdown (I guess due to cold? In London, and in my jeans pocket?) about a dozen times in the last 2 months. It's really annoying. I'd much rather throttling. Apparently, this is what Apple does already though, just not well enough it seems. Battery health is marked as 88% and peak performance capable though, so yay?
post_break 7y ago
Imagine if ford started to detune your engine as you added miles to the car, but DIDNT TELL YOU. You lost X horsepower every 1,000 miles.
- neohaven 7y ago
  Imagine if, to avoid damage to engine parts, engines would keep their heat limits in safe zones to not blow up when friction goes up. Imagine if, when you don't tune up your car, it starts running, factually, with less horsepower. You do lose X horsepower every 1000 miles. You get it back with your tuneup. Which involves changing the oil. You lose X MHz every Y% of battery discharge capacity lost. You get it back with your tuneup. Which involves changing the battery. You don't need to detune maliciously to get the effect Apple is getting here. The system just needs to self-calibrate to a depleting battery... Which is super good for the battery because it won't actually get worse as fast. Discharge cycles, especially close to the discharge limit, puts strain on cells, which have voltage sag closer to end of life.
  - willis936 7y ago
    What's annoying about this particular issue is that the problem that users don't like isn't Apple's battery saving measure, or even being lied to, it's phone performance slowing over time. That is what users care about. The battery peak load degrading over time is a factor, but even with battery replacements phones will feel more sluggish over time because the NAND is a disposable part. Fill up a higher percentage of your total storage? Feels slow. Take videos for a year? Feels slow. There is no reasonable oil change for this and it's something that is not being talked about anywhere.
    - zepto 7y ago
      Is there any reference at all for this? My iPhone X is 3 years old, and feels just as fast as when it was new.
      - willis936 7y ago
bilekas 7y ago
> Apple implemented this to help users extend life of older devices. Is there a statement from them to this point ? I couldn't find it in the article. But this isn't the point anyway really. The users were not told. > IPhone owners were not informed that installing iOS updates (10.2.1 and 11.2) could slow down their devices This means that the users would definitely just assume their phones were now in need of upgrade. Also as for the trade-off between performance and optimisation, thats fine. That was there previously also.
- rbritton 7y ago
  They did [0], and to me it's a legitimate course of action to extend device life and minimize support load a bit. However, it should be disclosed clearly and not covered up until it blows up. [0]: https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-slows-down-older-iphone-battery-issues/ https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-slows-down-older-iphone-batt...
  - kemayo 7y ago
    Yeah, they _eventually_ got to an acceptable balance where they announce it and show the current status in the battery settings. But that was only after the PR blowup about it. I'm sort of conflicted about the fine hitting now, as a result. If they were still being intransigent about the issue, sure, but they've already fixed it...
    - pflats 7y ago
      > I'm sort of conflicted about the fine hitting now, as a result. If they were still being intransigent about the issue, sure, but they've already fixed it... It seems right to me. It's a relatively small fine; Apple makes a few hundred Euros in profit per phone. I'm not sure how many iPhones are in France, but I'd venture to guess this is less than 2 Euros per device.
  - baby 7y ago
    They found a way to legitimize planned obsolescence at the eyes of the public. Apple should be celebrated for this, not sued. /s
cma 7y ago
Why not prompt the user that the battery is weak, opt in or out to slowness, and mention that they can get the battery changed by a third party for $30 instead of buying a new phone (at the expense of waterproofness rating).
- xuki 7y ago
  Exactly what they ended up doing (minus the 3rd party part).
  - cma 7y ago
    Only after legal pressure though right? Are they suing them for how things went, or how things are continuing to go forward?
eitland 7y ago
I think the message is that Apple (and everyone else) should deliver quality that lasts more than two years.
- ch4s3 7y ago
  They absolutely do, but batteries have physical limitations that result in lower power output over time. Under those conditions, the phone can either intermittently crash as older Android phones do, or adjust CPU power draw which will slow down the device. The only other options are to replace the battery or the device. There’s no free lunch to be had here. IMHO, Apple’s “crime” here is bad communication.
  - user1980 7y ago
    > They absolutely do, but batteries have physical limitations that result in lower power output over time. The same can be said of SSD media. It's well-known that flash memory is under-provisioned to allow for inevitable degradation: Defective sectors are flagged and re-mapped. This so that your 500GB SSD still has 500GB in 5 years. This can be applied to battery tech as well. However, that would require either thicker, heavier phones, or less run-time between charges. I would say Apple's "crime" is producing hardware where one particular component has a well-known failure mode that makes the entire device virtually useless after 3 years of moderate to heavy use.
  - MereInterest 7y ago
    > The only other options are to replace the battery or the device. And battery replacement has been made to be as inconvenient as possible. 15 years ago, swapping the battery was a 15-second task that required no tools. Pull off the backing, pull out the battery, push in a new battery. Before Apple's response to bad press, it was $80 to have a battery swapped. Aftermarket kits were $30, so that is $50 on labor and markup. $50 to do what used to take 15 seconds by an untrained user. This is a problem of Apple's making, by their design decisions.
    - manfredo 7y ago
pastor_elm 7y ago
>Apple implemented this to help users extend life of older devices. No they didn't. The software updates didn't properly work on phones with the older batteries, so this was their work around. The options they had were: 1. not allow the updates on those phones, 2. allow the updates and have users deal with potentially having the phones shut down. 3. Offer battery upgrades. 4. Jerry rig a hack to deal with it. They went with the most subversive option. They were not being benevolent here.
- zepto 7y ago
  What is subversive about their option?
hrktb 7y ago
Apple is punished for trying to push the issue under the rug, perpetuating a situation that was beneficial to their revenue. It would be the same if an ISP silently slowed a user's internet when detecting their ISP provided router is getting flacky. That's not the right way of handling this, users should be warned of the issue so they can act accordingly, and not stay in the dark until someone discovers the hack.
- azinman2 7y ago
  The alternative would be to have phones turn off when they requested more power than was available. What do you think would cause people to want to replace their phones faster?
  - RealStickman 7y ago
    > users should be warned of the issue so they can act accordingly, and not stay in the dark until someone discovers the hack. What part of this sentence did you not understand? It's about WARNING the user before they do the upgrade so they 1) know what will happen and 2) know how they could fix it.
    - azinman2 7y ago
      There’s no need to be condescending.
  - hrktb 7y ago
    Part of the issue was that replacing the phones was not needed, getting new batteries was enough (that was initially a 85$ replacement I think, that got down to 29$ after the issue was made public if my memory is correct. Don't quote me on this) Case in point, when Apple explained the issue and their hack, people got way more interested in checking the state of their battery (wether they were affected or not), and there was a rush to replace used up batteries. I tried to replace mine 2 months after the announcement, there was still a 3 weeks backlog of replacements. Also to note: those phones were still turning off in some circumstances. It wasn't like Apple's hack completely removed the need to replace the faulty battery.
lwkl 7y ago
They should have communicated better. I wanted a feature like this on my Android phone for years and this ended up being one of the reason that made me switch to an iPhone. But I still think they should have implemented this how it is now (being able to turn it off). And inform the users that their phone is being slowed down. I can‘t tell if this was an oversight or deliberately done so users would switch to a new phone. To me a slower phone is better than s crashing or no phone but if I don‘t know why it‘s getting slower I‘m probably more tempted to buy a new phone instead of replacing the battery.
tsukurimashou 7y ago
how about giving the OWNER of the device the choice instead of doing it silently and in the back of everyone?
throwaway_tech 7y ago
>Apple implemented this to help users extend life of older devices. Or to encourage users spending $500-$1,000 to upgrade their slowing devices. >Apple should just have phones in France run full clock at all times to comply with this regulation. Why does tech always seem to have the attitude of "we know whats best for you" and if you challenge us we will make things as bad as possible just to prove our point? Is there not a common sense approach of giving users the ability to throttle their own devices to manage power/battery trade-off?
- andai 7y ago
  I think on Android if you show developer tools, you can set the CPU governor mode.
- s3r3nity 7y ago
  Because for >80% of users, they DO know better. I can try to start this conversation with my grandmother, but as soon as I say "throttling," her eyes glaze over - and just says "can you do it for me?" Apple is trying to cut out that middleman. Even Android is getting on the "smart battery management" AI train, as no one outside of experts wants to do this.
  - progval 7y ago
    Then don't use the word "throttling". Just say Apple made it slower to make the battery last longer.
- zepto 7y ago
  There isn’t, because most users actually don’t know how to do things like regulate speed vs performance, and the whole point is that the throttling is dynamic to prevent shutdowns. What do you think the control should look like? An always present display of voltage levels, temperature, and throttling status? And what do you mean - ‘make things as bad as possible to prove our point’? Where is that coming from?
- simonh 7y ago
  > throttle their own devices to manage power/battery trade-off? With modern power management, the system constantly makes decisions on throttling up and down at the sub-millisecond level, balancing performance, power usage, battery lifetime and thermal constraints which affect component lifetimes. There are probably hundreds of combinations of criteria it uses to decide what to do and when. This has nothing to do with Apple versus Android or open versus closed. All modern phone systems do this, the Android device makers face exactly the same issues. There isn't a single modern smartphone on the market that doesn't throttle the CPU in order to preserve device lifetime, because that's a big part of what thermal management is about. It's why people overclocking their CPUs are taking a risk. That running older batteries hotter and harder degrades them rapidly and risks device outages is simply a fact of physics. Painting these practices as 'planned obsolescence' is, frankly, incredibly ignorant.
ogre_codes 7y ago
Apple throttling phones to preserve battery life was the right thing to do. Doing it without telling users their batteries were expired and causing their phone to slow down was the wrong thing to do. Whether that merits a $27m fine is debatable.
- outworlder 7y ago
  My pretty new phone will also throttle when the battery gets low (at close to 1%). It's very noticeable, but there's no warning. Where do I collect my $27M?
  - viklove 7y ago
    It doesn't matter if there's no warning when it hits 1%, it matters if the behavior of the device changes several years into the product's lifespan for the worse, and without any warning that it will change or has changed. It's also a bit nefarious that the slowdown coincided with a new product launch, so side-by-side comparisons show that the new devices are much, much "faster" than the old ones (which were slowed down without any notification). It's borderline fraudulent. Good thing we've got people like you standing up for the trillion dollar companies of the world, though. They really need your help.
- manfredo 7y ago
  I find it hard to see legitimate criticism of Apple for their state of charge management when this kind of technology is effectively universal for any substantial battery powered device. Almost every phone or laptop built in the last decade has functionality that lower clock rates when the battery is not outputting enough voltage. The alternative is crashing because the processor is not being supplied sufficient voltage. It'd be funny if the US turned around and started fining French electronics that have this same functionality - it'd lay bare the double standards being applied here.
- chadlavi 7y ago
  It's not, but a lot of people got really mad, so it makes the politicians look good to their constituents if they do something punitive to satisfy the mob's anger.
simion314 7y ago
if I pay say 500$ for 2Ghz and 3Gb RAM then Apple half it to 1Ghz and 1.5Gb RAM behind my back I would be upset, at least tell me what you did and if in warranty I expect you give me a new device and not try to trick me.
scarface74 7y ago
You mean the government full of non technical politicians make bad choices when regulating technology? Who would have thought? Next thing they will be telling phone companies what types of cords to use....
BubRoss 7y ago
Selling something and using your software updates to bait and switch people is not ok, whatever the rationalization is.

dangus 7y ago

It’s definitely a multifaceted issue, especially because Apple’s communication was so poor. Though it’s not like companies are in the habit of communicating their CPU scheduling strategy to their customers. The customers don’t care nor can the comprehend that information. It still boggles my mind how many people I know refuse to get batteries replaced. The price is totally reasonable from all manufacturers, way more so than plunking down another $700 on a phone. They just want a new phone at that point because who doesn’t like new things? In a lot of ways Apple was responding to customer behavior - customers allow their phones to limp along with cracked screens and dead batteries and Apple was essentially helping them do so for as long as possible without disruptions, but it also looks like planned obsolescence. A lot of the people who essentially say that a random shutdown due to lack of supplied voltage is preferable to throttling are flat out wrong.

supergarfield 7y ago
> Though it’s not like companies are in the habit of communicating their CPU scheduling strategy to their customers. The customers don’t care nor can the comprehend that information. I think nobody’s talking about publishing their actual scheduling or CPU throttling algorithm, just about saying "we're slowing the phone down to save battery life, which it seems nearly everybody would understand.
- stouset 7y ago
  “Slowing down the phone to save battery life” is happening during 90%+ of your phone’s life, even from day one. There’s no conspiracy here. This was almost certainly just a well-intentioned part of their power management design that affected the performance of older phones more than anyone in a position of leadership intended or realized. Bug report comes in: phone shuts down unpredictably when the battery is aged. Engineer see the issue, tweaks some values to make sure the peak power draw is kept in check when voltage drops, closes bug. How anyone who’s ever worked as an engineer in a large organization thinks this was some intentional decision to sell a handful more phones at the cost of upsetting customers is a mystery to me. Nobody is perfect. Apple is far better than most.
oarsinsync 7y ago
> A lot of the people who essentially say that a random shutdown due to lack of supplied voltage is preferable to throttling are flat out wrong. Agreed. My iPhone SE running iOS 13 has randomly shutdown (I guess due to cold? In London, and in my jeans pocket?) about a dozen times in the last 2 months. It's really annoying. I'd much rather throttling. Apparently, this is what Apple does already though, just not well enough it seems. Battery health is marked as 88% and peak performance capable though, so yay?

post_break 7y ago

Imagine if ford started to detune your engine as you added miles to the car, but DIDNT TELL YOU. You lost X horsepower every 1,000 miles.

neohaven 7y ago
Imagine if, to avoid damage to engine parts, engines would keep their heat limits in safe zones to not blow up when friction goes up. Imagine if, when you don't tune up your car, it starts running, factually, with less horsepower. You do lose X horsepower every 1000 miles. You get it back with your tuneup. Which involves changing the oil. You lose X MHz every Y% of battery discharge capacity lost. You get it back with your tuneup. Which involves changing the battery. You don't need to detune maliciously to get the effect Apple is getting here. The system just needs to self-calibrate to a depleting battery... Which is super good for the battery because it won't actually get worse as fast. Discharge cycles, especially close to the discharge limit, puts strain on cells, which have voltage sag closer to end of life.
- willis936 7y ago
  What's annoying about this particular issue is that the problem that users don't like isn't Apple's battery saving measure, or even being lied to, it's phone performance slowing over time. That is what users care about. The battery peak load degrading over time is a factor, but even with battery replacements phones will feel more sluggish over time because the NAND is a disposable part. Fill up a higher percentage of your total storage? Feels slow. Take videos for a year? Feels slow. There is no reasonable oil change for this and it's something that is not being talked about anywhere.
  - zepto 7y ago
    Is there any reference at all for this? My iPhone X is 3 years old, and feels just as fast as when it was new.
    - willis936 7y ago

bilekas 7y ago

> Apple implemented this to help users extend life of older devices. Is there a statement from them to this point ? I couldn't find it in the article. But this isn't the point anyway really. The users were not told. > IPhone owners were not informed that installing iOS updates (10.2.1 and 11.2) could slow down their devices This means that the users would definitely just assume their phones were now in need of upgrade. Also as for the trade-off between performance and optimisation, thats fine. That was there previously also.

rbritton 7y ago
They did [0], and to me it's a legitimate course of action to extend device life and minimize support load a bit. However, it should be disclosed clearly and not covered up until it blows up. [0]: https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-slows-down-older-iphone-battery-issues/ https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-slows-down-older-iphone-batt...
- kemayo 7y ago
  Yeah, they _eventually_ got to an acceptable balance where they announce it and show the current status in the battery settings. But that was only after the PR blowup about it. I'm sort of conflicted about the fine hitting now, as a result. If they were still being intransigent about the issue, sure, but they've already fixed it...
  - pflats 7y ago
    > I'm sort of conflicted about the fine hitting now, as a result. If they were still being intransigent about the issue, sure, but they've already fixed it... It seems right to me. It's a relatively small fine; Apple makes a few hundred Euros in profit per phone. I'm not sure how many iPhones are in France, but I'd venture to guess this is less than 2 Euros per device.
- baby 7y ago
  They found a way to legitimize planned obsolescence at the eyes of the public. Apple should be celebrated for this, not sued. /s

cma 7y ago

Why not prompt the user that the battery is weak, opt in or out to slowness, and mention that they can get the battery changed by a third party for $30 instead of buying a new phone (at the expense of waterproofness rating).

xuki 7y ago
Exactly what they ended up doing (minus the 3rd party part).
- cma 7y ago
  Only after legal pressure though right? Are they suing them for how things went, or how things are continuing to go forward?

eitland 7y ago

I think the message is that Apple (and everyone else) should deliver quality that lasts more than two years.

ch4s3 7y ago
They absolutely do, but batteries have physical limitations that result in lower power output over time. Under those conditions, the phone can either intermittently crash as older Android phones do, or adjust CPU power draw which will slow down the device. The only other options are to replace the battery or the device. There’s no free lunch to be had here. IMHO, Apple’s “crime” here is bad communication.
- user1980 7y ago
  > They absolutely do, but batteries have physical limitations that result in lower power output over time. The same can be said of SSD media. It's well-known that flash memory is under-provisioned to allow for inevitable degradation: Defective sectors are flagged and re-mapped. This so that your 500GB SSD still has 500GB in 5 years. This can be applied to battery tech as well. However, that would require either thicker, heavier phones, or less run-time between charges. I would say Apple's "crime" is producing hardware where one particular component has a well-known failure mode that makes the entire device virtually useless after 3 years of moderate to heavy use.
- MereInterest 7y ago
  > The only other options are to replace the battery or the device. And battery replacement has been made to be as inconvenient as possible. 15 years ago, swapping the battery was a 15-second task that required no tools. Pull off the backing, pull out the battery, push in a new battery. Before Apple's response to bad press, it was $80 to have a battery swapped. Aftermarket kits were $30, so that is $50 on labor and markup. $50 to do what used to take 15 seconds by an untrained user. This is a problem of Apple's making, by their design decisions.
  - manfredo 7y ago

pastor_elm 7y ago

>Apple implemented this to help users extend life of older devices. No they didn't. The software updates didn't properly work on phones with the older batteries, so this was their work around. The options they had were: 1. not allow the updates on those phones, 2. allow the updates and have users deal with potentially having the phones shut down. 3. Offer battery upgrades. 4. Jerry rig a hack to deal with it. They went with the most subversive option. They were not being benevolent here.

zepto 7y ago
What is subversive about their option?

hrktb 7y ago

Apple is punished for trying to push the issue under the rug, perpetuating a situation that was beneficial to their revenue. It would be the same if an ISP silently slowed a user's internet when detecting their ISP provided router is getting flacky. That's not the right way of handling this, users should be warned of the issue so they can act accordingly, and not stay in the dark until someone discovers the hack.

azinman2 7y ago
The alternative would be to have phones turn off when they requested more power than was available. What do you think would cause people to want to replace their phones faster?
- RealStickman 7y ago
  > users should be warned of the issue so they can act accordingly, and not stay in the dark until someone discovers the hack. What part of this sentence did you not understand? It's about WARNING the user before they do the upgrade so they 1) know what will happen and 2) know how they could fix it.
  - azinman2 7y ago
    There’s no need to be condescending.
- hrktb 7y ago
  Part of the issue was that replacing the phones was not needed, getting new batteries was enough (that was initially a 85$ replacement I think, that got down to 29$ after the issue was made public if my memory is correct. Don't quote me on this) Case in point, when Apple explained the issue and their hack, people got way more interested in checking the state of their battery (wether they were affected or not), and there was a rush to replace used up batteries. I tried to replace mine 2 months after the announcement, there was still a 3 weeks backlog of replacements. Also to note: those phones were still turning off in some circumstances. It wasn't like Apple's hack completely removed the need to replace the faulty battery.

lwkl 7y ago

They should have communicated better. I wanted a feature like this on my Android phone for years and this ended up being one of the reason that made me switch to an iPhone. But I still think they should have implemented this how it is now (being able to turn it off). And inform the users that their phone is being slowed down. I can‘t tell if this was an oversight or deliberately done so users would switch to a new phone. To me a slower phone is better than s crashing or no phone but if I don‘t know why it‘s getting slower I‘m probably more tempted to buy a new phone instead of replacing the battery.

tsukurimashou 7y ago

how about giving the OWNER of the device the choice instead of doing it silently and in the back of everyone?

throwaway_tech 7y ago

>Apple implemented this to help users extend life of older devices. Or to encourage users spending $500-$1,000 to upgrade their slowing devices. >Apple should just have phones in France run full clock at all times to comply with this regulation. Why does tech always seem to have the attitude of "we know whats best for you" and if you challenge us we will make things as bad as possible just to prove our point? Is there not a common sense approach of giving users the ability to throttle their own devices to manage power/battery trade-off?

andai 7y ago
I think on Android if you show developer tools, you can set the CPU governor mode.
s3r3nity 7y ago
Because for >80% of users, they DO know better. I can try to start this conversation with my grandmother, but as soon as I say "throttling," her eyes glaze over - and just says "can you do it for me?" Apple is trying to cut out that middleman. Even Android is getting on the "smart battery management" AI train, as no one outside of experts wants to do this.
- progval 7y ago
  Then don't use the word "throttling". Just say Apple made it slower to make the battery last longer.
zepto 7y ago
There isn’t, because most users actually don’t know how to do things like regulate speed vs performance, and the whole point is that the throttling is dynamic to prevent shutdowns. What do you think the control should look like? An always present display of voltage levels, temperature, and throttling status? And what do you mean - ‘make things as bad as possible to prove our point’? Where is that coming from?
simonh 7y ago
> throttle their own devices to manage power/battery trade-off? With modern power management, the system constantly makes decisions on throttling up and down at the sub-millisecond level, balancing performance, power usage, battery lifetime and thermal constraints which affect component lifetimes. There are probably hundreds of combinations of criteria it uses to decide what to do and when. This has nothing to do with Apple versus Android or open versus closed. All modern phone systems do this, the Android device makers face exactly the same issues. There isn't a single modern smartphone on the market that doesn't throttle the CPU in order to preserve device lifetime, because that's a big part of what thermal management is about. It's why people overclocking their CPUs are taking a risk. That running older batteries hotter and harder degrades them rapidly and risks device outages is simply a fact of physics. Painting these practices as 'planned obsolescence' is, frankly, incredibly ignorant.

ogre_codes 7y ago

Apple throttling phones to preserve battery life was the right thing to do. Doing it without telling users their batteries were expired and causing their phone to slow down was the wrong thing to do. Whether that merits a $27m fine is debatable.

outworlder 7y ago
My pretty new phone will also throttle when the battery gets low (at close to 1%). It's very noticeable, but there's no warning. Where do I collect my $27M?
- viklove 7y ago
  It doesn't matter if there's no warning when it hits 1%, it matters if the behavior of the device changes several years into the product's lifespan for the worse, and without any warning that it will change or has changed. It's also a bit nefarious that the slowdown coincided with a new product launch, so side-by-side comparisons show that the new devices are much, much "faster" than the old ones (which were slowed down without any notification). It's borderline fraudulent. Good thing we've got people like you standing up for the trillion dollar companies of the world, though. They really need your help.
manfredo 7y ago
I find it hard to see legitimate criticism of Apple for their state of charge management when this kind of technology is effectively universal for any substantial battery powered device. Almost every phone or laptop built in the last decade has functionality that lower clock rates when the battery is not outputting enough voltage. The alternative is crashing because the processor is not being supplied sufficient voltage. It'd be funny if the US turned around and started fining French electronics that have this same functionality - it'd lay bare the double standards being applied here.
chadlavi 7y ago
It's not, but a lot of people got really mad, so it makes the politicians look good to their constituents if they do something punitive to satisfy the mob's anger.

simion314 7y ago

if I pay say 500$ for 2Ghz and 3Gb RAM then Apple half it to 1Ghz and 1.5Gb RAM behind my back I would be upset, at least tell me what you did and if in warranty I expect you give me a new device and not try to trick me.

scarface74 7y ago

You mean the government full of non technical politicians make bad choices when regulating technology? Who would have thought? Next thing they will be telling phone companies what types of cords to use....

BubRoss 7y ago

Selling something and using your software updates to bait and switch people is not ok, whatever the rationalization is.