8 ms·

This is so dumb. Apple has a lot of flaws but old hardware support certainly isn’t one of them. Firstly, they only slowed down older phones to prevent them from

• jonplackett 7y ago
  The problem is they didn't tell anyone they were doing it. So people thought their phone was just old and slow and bought a new one, when they could have just replaced the battery and made it fast again.
  • flatiron 7y ago
    Faster I’ve toggled the switch before on an iPhone. It’s not a night and day type difference. Feature creep kills it way more than battery throttling.
    • jonplackett 7y ago
      I had an iPhone 6S Plus. The most affected phone. I was genuinely considering replacing it because it got so slow. Then this happened, I replaced the battery and kept it another 2 years. I replaced the battery again and now my wife has it. Definitely was on the verge of replacing it. Yes feature creep plays its part but this was a big deal.
  • punnerud 7y ago
    And the solution was to replace the battery to get your old iPhone fast again, not to buy a new one. Not intuitive for most people.
    • jonplackett 7y ago
      Exactly. I'd always considered a battery replacement a waste of money up til that point. Now I replace batteries in everything! Good lesson to learn. My 6S has had 2 replacements so far and is still powering on!
      • krtong 7y ago
        It isn't intuitive to anyone, given that it's not the battery at all. It's a software update slowing down the phones. People replace a battery when the battery doesn't last. But Apple realizes if people replaced their battery then they would likely wait another iteration to replace their phones because they've sunk more cost into their existing phone, so they've extended the life of the battery by sacrificing performance. This way, people don't replace their batteries, and their phone is so much slower than the new phone that they're even more likely to buy a new one. Not only that but this is the second time Apple's being sued since they did the same thing to the 4 and 5. And the thing is, they pushed the update when they released the 6. I'm surprised (but not really) that they're still pulling this crap.
  • teddyuk 7y ago
    If you bought a top of the range machine for windows 95 and put windows 98 on it, it would have been slow.
    • oneeyedpigeon 7y ago
      Fortunately, you could've just reverted to a previous OS - unfortunately, that's another thing that isn't possible with an Apple phone.
      • DevKoala 7y ago
        No you couldn't, I remember this being a PITA. Unless you had done the backups of your data yourself and wiped the installation of the machine, you were screwed. This is the same situation for iOS. https://www.overclockers.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-28897.html?__cf_chl_captcha_tk__=70818cca5dd3d61f85f0a99c2952e57ecc85a8f4-1581120002-0-AZBn9NNMB0TejSDMOrXrdjtEHO9h5lQNM_rGF97PmVuFdMrkBRFOcT9NS34ysPHqWr-uwJ6eSHyWLFdAyz4MCCPcHvfI4yWGzmk9eZkgEvVn5tCwGjLF-XpwUARmR8zkba78KVWjp9jViRx_fLH7VWZmJFs1o_VX9IX17LS6ptV1a0zW5VC1OS5b55Kxbisd4zFJNHKdL0iXQfXpyo1c-bXXVr4AINM4H-0DmvHtLJnk4g61qb3oK-0QptdAVg2fPDHyehibhdZBbxJcfpluq02T0OAh0KK68-ySK0ZPfkkMp_WJSzqI4wvdCB73Bbh1C0mDW1QkexOc6hBPzPRInsnyBf-8coUDFQ4E2uSz0-Pa7fknBCJeYvD3CYSsE828R6BYCVoFwZOER7WWm13ctgWPY9ZULgTi7VGYgD1dzyTpOTZQ9JEN7tue3RpNNK3SOKA0jSlEZScYLHfYshU1PcEw_tQRY9nmBefXQaOUvD8u https://www.overclockers.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-2889...
        • toxican 7y ago
          What you're describing is just inconvenient. With iOS you literally cannot downgrade very far at all. For example, they stopped signing everything older than iOS 13.0 when 13.1.1 released. You've got a very narrow window of opportunity to downgrade and the options are few.
    • jonplackett 7y ago
      Pretty sure windows 98 was about the same speed as windows 95. (And this is from someone who still remembers their windows 98 25-digit key by heart!) But regardless, this is not the point. The point is they misled people and let them think it was that the new OS was slow, but it was not! When you replaced the battery the phone became very noticeably faster.
  • Bud 7y ago
    This is total bullshit. I would bet real money that a grand total of ZERO users "thought their phone was just old and slow and bought a new one" as a result of this issue. Zero.
    • jonplackett 7y ago
      I literally nearly did. It's what you normally do when the new phone comes out. I did it with my iPhone 3G when they put the new iOS on it. It became barely usable and i got an iPhone 4. That was real. The 3G was SLOW. This time it was not real.
    • exacube 7y ago
      I upgraded an iPhone 6S for this reason. I wouldn't so arrogantly claim to know how consumers spend their money on technology.
    • sequoia 7y ago
      I would very gladly take you up on this bet. You name the stakes. What do you think the average user thinks when their older phone performs worse after an OS update? "Aha, I bet the vendor is throttling the performance to preserve battery life, which I can fix by replacing with a new battery, a repair process which the vendor makes clear and easy!" This has not been my experience. I'm a technical iPhone user and I don't even research it this much, I just think "%#&* they updated the OS again and now my phone is slow again"
    • overgard 7y ago
      I have an iphone 7, and knowing this now I'll definitely replace the battery before I replace the phone. It probably added another year or two to its life for me.
    • escardin 7y ago
      My wife replaced her 6 plus with an 8 because it was crashing a lot before this feature was implemented.
  • tambourine_man 7y ago
    > The problem is they didn't tell anyone they were doing it. That’s called design. You have to make the decisions yourself. Customers are paying you to do that, not present them with a million checkboxes. Apple deserves a lot of criticism but this is a complete non issue. Having your phone slow down instead of shutting randomly down when the battery can’t supply the proper current is the best choice for the customer in pretty much every conceivable situation. There are a lot of other decisions they are making on your behalf without warning you. And that’s how it should be.
    • dirtydroog 7y ago
      Or, you know, the OS could have displayed a prompt screen to the user telling them that the battery needed to be replaced.
    • swsieber 7y ago
      Personally, I'd like to know when I can just fix something instead of getting an entirely new one. "This thing is mysteriously slow, so I guess I'll get a new one" is much more profitable for apple, and more user hostile than "You're phone is slow because the battery is old. It' x% slower now than at purchase". So in my view, it's a dark pattern.
    • function_seven 7y ago
      No need for checkboxes. Or offloading decisions on the customer. It's simple. Don't hide what you're doing. Either a notice in the UI, or even a press release at minimum. Something.
      • xmprt 7y ago
        There are probably thousands of design decisions that go into making a phone like this. Who is supposed to decide which ones get a notice and which ones don't? Apple probably already has some sort of organization that deals with these communication issues. Is this fine a reasonable punishment for getting one thing wrong?
        • 7y ago
  • manfredo 7y ago
    > The problem is they didn't tell anyone they were doing it. Then France should issue fines for every electronic device sold that had this functionality. Except that would have meant fines being issued for effectively every laptop, phone, and tablet sold in the last decade. What Apple did is a near-universal function in battery powered devices with powerful processors. It'd be funny id Apple disabled this functionality in France, thus bricking many old phones, and tell the French that they made this change to comply with French regulators.
    • catalogia 7y ago
      Going after big offenders first is just common sense. France did right to go after Apple first since that would make the biggest splash.
      • manfredo 7y ago
        Right. And between going after Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and now Apple one really has to wonder if "biggest offender" just coincidentally seems to mean the same thing as "non-European offender" or if there's a reason for this pattern.
        • catalogia 7y ago
          This seems like an American persecution complex more than anything else. Americans and their corporations seem to think that regulation is persecution.
          • manfredo 7y ago
            I really don't I made it clear how universal clock throttling is to account for unreliable power sources. Every tablet, laptop, and phone does this. Your device wouldn't be able to boot up in cold weather if it didn't. Your device would start crashing sporadically when your charge is low. This is basic battery management. If a phone didn't do this it would start to crash with a 1-2 year old battery instead of just slowing down. This outcome is strictly better than the alternative. The argument that customers should have been notified of functionality that strictly improves the usability of the product doesn't make any sense. How does extending the usable life of the phone (even if it is less powerful during the end of the usable life) making consumers more likely to buy new phones? Apple had acknowledged that old batteries could not drive the processor at the highest clock rate long before this became newsworthy. Like I said: if Apple pushed an update removing throttling it would lay bare just how absurd these penalties are.
• elicash 7y ago
  The fine, it appears, is because users "were not informed." They "committed the crime of deceptive commercial practice by omission." Not because they slowed it down, contrary to the headline.
• 88840-8855 7y ago
  This is true, however, their software is slowing down the phone. I recently compared the iPhone 7 with iOS10 vs iPhone 7 with iOS13: the camera app got slower and is shooting blurry pictures often, the gallery app is slower and less responsive, the keyboard takes a significant time to open now vs. always instantly available. The phones do "get slower" - and this is annoying af.
  • vbezhenar 7y ago
    The problem is only partly with slow OS. For me the real culprit is inability to downgrade OS and apps. I have iPhone 4S. It was amazing phone when it was running iOS 6. Now it's slow as molasses. May be it should not be one-click, as it causes security issues and user must understand the implications. But there must be a way for official downgrade.
    • chipotle_coyote 7y ago
      > Now it's slow as molasses Given that the iPhone 4s can't run iOS versions past 2015's iOS 9, "now" would seem to be fairly relative. Also, I'm not sure I'd describe iOS upgrades as "one-click"; IIRC, you need to click through at least one screen telling you about the new OS and enter your passcode before the install. A lot of people probably do breeze through that without really understanding they're going through a major OS upgrade, but that's awfully hard to address. (People tend to just breeze past any boilerplate-text dialog unless it looks threatening and dire.) I agree that Apple should make it much easier to downgrade the OS, though. (I'm not 100% sure it's even possible, although I think you may be able to do a clean install of an earlier version from iTunes if you've archived a backup.)
      • varenc 7y ago
        You can downgrade an iPhone's firmware IFF Apple is still signing that firmware version for your phone model. They don't make it easy to figure this out...but this site shows you what iOS versions are still being signed: https://ipsw.me/ https://ipsw.me/ You can see Apple is only signing iOS 7.1.2 for the iPhone 4. For the iPhone X (iPhone10,3) they're signing 13.3.1 and one version below it, iOS 13.3. So you could still downgrade to that. In practice, if you're currently on the latest version and you update to a new version as soon as it comes out, you can almost always downgrade back to what you just had. But of course, if you wait too long without downgrading and Apple stops signing the old version you want, you'll be stuck with what you got.
• kneel 7y ago
  Funny they always released software to slow down your phone the week before the new iphone released. They also denied they were slowing down old phones for several years.
  • Bud 7y ago
    No, they didn't. Please cite a source for this claim, or retract.
  • endorphone 7y ago
    New iOS releases usually come out with new phone launches. The SoC had only recently gotten powerful enough that it could spike past the instantaneous capacity of the battery. We know that throttling is real, and it has been well documented and was undoubtedly a communications failure of Apple, however it's remarkable how frequently throughout this discussion people are giving vague anecdotes about performance that should be easily verified and proven. Sometimes, though, our old phones feel slow only in a relative sense. When you experience a newer device it does often suddenly make your old device that once seemed silky smooth and magically performant now look like a piece of crap. That's just the march of technology.
• hinkley 7y ago
  This is less true now than it once was, but one of the things Apple used to be good at is producing a new OS for the last generation of hardware that made it faster. Most manufacturers unerringly make the old hardware slower. There's an old trick in software development, some of us learn it by example, others by experience: be conservative when rolling out performance improvements. If you have a feature you know will make things slower, pair it with changes to improve performance. If you make version 1.2 faster, and version 1.3 is as slow as 1.1, people will feel robbed (because performance is a feature and you just removed a new feature). Pulling this off can be problematic unless you happen to work on both features. What if one slips to the next release? One of the perks of being a generalist and having some seniority is that you have a degree of control over such things, where others might not. If Apple had wedded the clock throttling to a new major revision of the OS, people would hardly have noticed.
  • sjwright 7y ago
    Recent major iOS updates have been great for performance. Where they’re being let down is in robustness, particularly where cloud syncing is involved. The iOS updates most notorious for slowing down iPhones were generally slower for a good reason. Most famously, iOS 8 introduced whole-disk encryption and the oldest compatible phones ran like crap.
• eugeniub 7y ago
  It's a pretty tiny fine (0.04% of Apple's yearly revenue) for a pretty major offense: quietly slowing down old phones without telling customers that they could replace the battery to make it fast again. We can have a conversation as to whether this rises to the level of planned obsolescence, but this was absolutely not the correct way for Apple to handle this.
• atoav 7y ago
  Apple is not really known for their fantastic repairability and this is for sure a field in which they could do better work (as opposed to work against repairability).
• cptskippy 7y ago
  > Firstly, they only slowed down older phones to prevent them from crashing as they had less and less reliable battery draw. Yes, and they did this to avoid a recall of millions of iPhones because the batteries were unable to provide necessary current for designed operation less than 2 years after purchase. Then when they got caught, rather than issue a recall they instead offered replacement batteries at a discount from their normal price. Basically they sold a defective product, hid it with a behavioral change after launch that encouraged users to upgrade, and when caught swindling people managed to convince everyone to instead pay them to fix the issue.
• caycep 7y ago
  yes. I'm sitting here amused because a coworker is borrowing my 4 year old iPhone SE because her 3 year old ZTE is too slow and is not getting updates from Verizon...
• simion314 7y ago
  >Firstly, they only slowed down older phones to prevent them from crashing as they had less and less reliable battery draw If you put aside any fanboys and think the reasons why Apple did this behind the user backs: - maybe the user won't notice and ask for a free battery replacement - maybe the user feels that the phone is slow and buys a new one and Apple makes more money - fixes the PR issues that phones close unexpectedly Tell me any other reason Apple hid this from the users and from power users and the press(the issue is this thing was hidden and users did not know they had the right or option to get a new battery).
  • thirdsun 7y ago
    It seems as if you're trying very hard to accuse a company whose mobile devices tend to be supported way longer than their competitor's of intentional wrongdoing. It's an option the user shouldn't have to deal with. I'd say it's in any user's interest to keep their device running in stable conditions rather than preserving a slightly higher clock speed at all costs and risking random shutdowns.
• dcmlx 7y ago
  Sorry. I don’t buy this. I had an iPhone 6S+ that slowed down massively when I upgraded to iOS (can’t remember the major version). I had no battery issues prior to the upgrade. Then when they brought out the fix to reverse the issue, my phone was back to normal. They definitely throttled the CPU so consumers would upgrade.
• adwf 7y ago
  This is the most naive nonsense I've ever heard. "Only"? Of course a company doing good by its customers will try to hide the good PR for years - that it was just helping people by slowing their phones - nothing secretive there /s. Nothing weird about releasing slowdown patches the week before a new phone release. Nothing to do with pushing people to get the latest "faster" phone for $$$ when they only really needed to spend $ on a new battery if they'd known...
• sov 7y ago
  > Firstly, they only slowed down older phones to prevent them from crashing as they had less and less reliable battery draw I see this posted a lot and I honestly just don't buy it. Processor power draw for most high-priority OS tasks (eg: keyboard input) are virtually zilch compared to keeping the screen lit for that much longer. Everything says this happens to older phones, not phones with high usage. If you get the battery replaced--will Apple speed up the phone again? If I am on my iPhone 24/7 and constantly discharge down to 5% SOC, how come Apple doesn't slow down my phone more than someone with scarce use? Even unreliable power draw makes no sense. You may be not able to predict the SOC from the OCV of the cell as accurately as SOH diminishes than when it's 100%, but cell phones largely use lithium cobalt oxides which have well-defined OCV:SOC curves! There should be no need to guess how close to a low SOC you are--you can just read the OCV.
  • procinct 7y ago
    I definitely don’t know as much about batteries as you clearly do but yes, the phone will return to normal clock speed after a battery change. It keeps being reported as “older phones” but it’s really more like older batteries.
• beached_whale 7y ago
  I think it was only on old phones with faulty batteries too. Here you get a slower phone, but it still works. The alternative is the phone reboots
• jimmaswell 7y ago
  My old iPod Touch slowed down very noticeably after an iOS update.
• JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
  Is there any evidence that phones would crash due to less reliable battery draw? It sounds like an explanation that could have been posthumously invented after the performance degradation became public knowledge. Coupled with the fact that nobody was ever told about this functionality, one can wonder the true intent. For all we know, they A/B tested it, and found it got people to upgrade more frequently.
  • pilsetnieks 7y ago
    > Is there any evidence that phones would crash due to less reliable battery draw? Yes, it happened a lot. Do a quick search on Google, reddit, wherever with, say, "iphone crash", "6S crash" and there will be thousands of articles and posts about it, many from 2016 and 2017 when this problem was most pronounced. Anecdata, I know, but I also had a 6S that shut down almost as soon as I took it out in the cold, or when some power-hungry app was launched, and it all went away with the battery replacement. I suspect those replacement batteries were some kind of "old new stock" as it didn't really last all that long, it went pretty bad within a year.
  • moretti 7y ago
    They slow down the phone after an unexpected shutdown, when the battery is unable to deliver the necessary peak power.
  • rootusrootus 7y ago
    Mine did. It would get down around 30% or so, and then just randomly shut off with no warning.
• overgard 7y ago
  If apple was being honest they would have some interface to show the battery life. When I upgraded iOS recently I got a notification saying "hey we only charge your battery to 80% now to preserve its life." That was fine and appropriate! So it's not like Apple can't do that. But if my phone had just stopped charging to 100% with no notification I would have been annoyed. Same thing here, especially since theres a fairly obvious conflict of interest in that slowing down old hardware is very useful for continued revenue. I just want a screen that says, hey, you're running at 70% speed because your battery is now garbage.
  • RL_Quine 7y ago
    There’s literally an interface for this.
• anewguy9000 7y ago
  right. apple does everything it can to "prolong the life of old devices" lol
• lallysingh 7y ago
  They sent an update that slowed down many phones. They didn't tell anyone how to make it not slow. If their intent was customer happiness, they would have notified. But they didn't, and there was a lot of upgrade money to be had.
• Proven 7y ago
  We are so fortunate to have the Government to protect us... The $25 mil now becomes Apple's cost and needs to be passed on to customers. I actually need that feature and have it enabled on my phone. Some apps just draw too much battery power.
• _el 7y ago
  They slowed down old phones to get people to upgrade to newer models. Since the battery life stayed the same, why would anyone think to replace the battery to improve performance? For a faster phone, the obvious solution for most would be to upgrade.
• rrrrrrrrrrrryan 7y ago
  I think if Apple would have done any one of these individual things, it would have been okay: - Communicated via release notes that the newer iOS version may make their device slower to improve battery performance - Allowed users to downgrade their iOS version if they want to - Informed users that their batteries may have degraded, and can be replaced - Gave users a toggle (buried away in settings, if need be) - Admitted publicly that they're doing this instead of lying I actually don't think Apple had malicious intentions, but I do think they deserve the criticism because their communication was so tremendously sloppy here. They deserve the fine because the sloppiness happened to benefit their bottom line and sell more phones. France has decided that this shouldn't be an excuse for Apple, nor any actually malicious company in the future, and wants this kind of thing disclosed to consumers before it's rolled out.
• oceanghost 7y ago
  Look, boss. I've been to the "genius bar" half a dozen times, asking them to replace the battery on my phone, which would only last a few hours, and they refused not only warranty service but, could I just pay them to fix the phone? And they said no. In every case, my only option was to buy the newest phone. In once case, they blamed me for using Facebook too much for a faulty battery. Same with various iMac models I've owned that they refused to admit fault with until they were well out of warranty. I was, literally, the legal rep to Apple for a company with 500m a year in sales, and they would still bullshit me like this. I literally, had so much authority I could buy every single product at South Coast Plaza and have it billed to my company, and Apple wouldn't let me pay to have my battery replaced.
  • megablast 7y ago
    What phone? If they don’t have the parts, what do you expect them to do?
    • oceanghost 7y ago
      I expect any process to be "honest." Apple is not fundamentally honest.
    • oceanghost 7y ago
      Sorry, I realized I didn't answer your question. It wasn't that they didn't have the parts-- they REFUSED to service the phone because the "computer says the battery is ok" even though it only lasted 3 hours.