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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
by 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 agoFaster 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 agoI 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 agoAnd 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 agoExactly. 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 agoIt 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 agoIf you bought a top of the range machine for windows 95 and put windows 98 on it, it would have been slow.
- oneeyedpigeon 7y agoFortunately, you could've just reverted to a previous OS - unfortunately, that's another thing that isn't possible with an Apple phone.
- DevKoala 7y agoNo 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 agoWhat 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 agoPretty 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 agoThis 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 agoI 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 agoI upgraded an iPhone 6S for this reason. I wouldn't so arrogantly claim to know how consumers spend their money on technology.
- sequoia 7y agoI 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 agoI 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 agoMy 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 agoOr, you know, the OS could have displayed a prompt screen to the user telling them that the battery needed to be replaced.
- swsieber 7y agoPersonally, 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 agoNo 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 agoThere 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 agoGoing 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 agoRight. 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 agoThis seems like an American persecution complex more than anything else. Americans and their corporations seem to think that regulation is persecution.
- manfredo 7y agoI 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.