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I’ve always thought the coverage of this issue got things completely backwards. Apple had an issue with old phones unexpectedly shutting down. They determined

• kylec 7y ago
  The problem is that there was a narrative for years that Apple was intentionally slowing down older phones with software updates, but there wasn't any proof. The fact that they were caught doing it in this case was considered validation of the broader theory, which is why it's been blown out of proportion.
  • dntrkv 7y ago
    > The problem is that there was a narrative for years that Apple was intentionally slowing down older phones with software updates, but there wasn't any proof. Except that is not what they were doing. There is a huge difference between pushing out updates around the time of a new phone release to push users onto the new phones (what people proposed Apple was doing) compared to slowing down your phone so it stays usable after its battery becomes unable to support the factory level of performance. I would say Apple was doing the opposite of what people suggested since slowing the phones down made them usable for a longer period of time.
    • mthoms 7y ago
      Meanwhile, if you complained to Apple Care that your phone was slower, Apple's employee would tell you that you were wrong. That you were imagining it. Or that the newer OS's were ever-more complex so a slower feeling phone was just an inevitable part of progress. Still don't see the problem?
      • zepto 7y ago
        No problem. These things can be true as well, and none of them imply that Apple intentionally slowed phones to boost sales.
        • mthoms 7y ago
          I agree it's inconclusive as to whether the whole thing was to increase sales in the short term. But keeping it a secret from your own staff is highly suspect. Like I said, they had their own support staff regularly telling their best customers (some of whom paid extra for Applecare) that they were basically imagining things. All allegedly because people are too dense to understand the concept that rechargeable batteries degrade over time? I learned this fact some 30 years ago as a child playing with toys. So, maybe it wasn't to increase sales in the short term but it certainly was done to protect Apple's brand. Which, in turn increases the company value.
          • zepto 7y ago
            This is true, but it’s also true that it wasn’t in a vacuum. People were already trying to damage Apple’s brand by making the case that they were intentionally slowing phones down to force upgrades, long before there was any substance to the concept. I’m not saying they made good choices, but it’s not clear that they had good options.
    • kylec 7y ago
      The narrative existed because there was a span of several years where successive updates did make iPhones a bit slower, by virtue of adding more features and complexity. Since Apple makes money by selling you a new phone, some people assumed that it was a way to gaslight you into upgrading. When these people learned of a circumstance where it was definitively shown that Apple did slow down older devices, they took it as proof that their gaslighting theory was true.
• dirkdigles 7y ago
  They didn’t tell retail. They also didn’t tell customers why their phones were slow. Customers called/came in complaining of slow phones, and often times assumed it was because their phone was “old.” Many new iPhones were likely sold as the result, as retail/customer service couldn’t give an explanation for slowness. Malicious or not, they profited, likely heavily, from the lack of communication/transparency.
  • gowld 7y ago
    If Apple used materials that degraded after a few years, like most consumer appliances, phones would fail due to "old age". Is a phone battery different? If Apple let the phones crash, as old electronics often do, and told people their phones were "old", would that be better?
    • strbean 7y ago
      > If Apple let the phones crash, as old electronics often do citation please?
  • manfredo 7y ago
    > Malicious or not, they profited, likely heavily, from the lack of communication/transparency. How so? If Apple didn't mitigate lower battery voltage than customers' phones would have been unusable. A customer with a phone crashing so often it's unusable is more likely to replace it than one that is slowed down. How does extending the usable life of the phone result in more sales?
    • strbean 7y ago
      Consumers could have replaced the battery, a practice that has been universal in consumer electronics for, well, the entire history of battery-powered consumer electronics. If consumers were aware that their phones were actually suffering from degraded performance due to a design failure by Apple, instead of being gaslighted into believing that their phones simply seemed slower because they were older, they might have switched away from Apple. All of this chicanery is really about getting consumers comfortable with the idea of disposable gadgets that must be replaced every year. When you expose the fact that a LIPO powered phone is probably going to need a new battery after 1-2 years, consumers start to wonder why they are charged an exorbitant fee to replace the battery in the first place.
• bgentry 7y ago
  It's shocking to me that even in a technical audience like HN, so many people don't understand the fairly simple story that you've outlined here. Look around this thread and see how many people spread the narrative like "Apple intentionally slowed phones down" or even "Apple tried to extend battery life at the cost of performance". Reiterating the summary: - Some iPhones in this generation began randomly shutting down as their batteries aged. - While looking into this, Apple determined it happened because certain aged batteries could no longer deliver enough current to sustain peak workloads (computers use more current when performing more intensive tasks). This is probably due to Apple underprovisioning the battery capacity in this generation, but that's not something they could fix in existing devices. - Apple added a mechanism to detect when these random shutdowns occurred on a specific device due to insufficient power from the battery. - Once the random shutdown had been detected on a specific device, that specific phone would instead throttle its CPU when the system was under heavy load to prevent the random shutdown from occurring. In short, your phone was not affected unless your battery had already degraded and was experiencing power-related random shutdowns. The changes Apple made to deal with this were an unequivocally user-friendly change to work around a hardware shortcoming and keep peoples' phones working well for longer than they otherwise would have. The mistakes Apple made were: - Designing the phone hardware with barely enough battery capacity, such that some moderately old phones might not be able to keep working properly when the batteries decayed. - Not being transparent with the hardware design flaw above, such as proactively replacing any customer whose device was being affected by this flaw while still under warranty. - Not going far enough with the software changes to initially add something like the battery health info they later added in response to this PR fiasco. That's about it, I think?
  • klingonopera 7y ago
    > it happened because certain aged batteries could no longer deliver enough current to sustain peak workloads Where exactly is the difference in this to a new battery that's not fully charged?
    • TheSoftwareGuy 7y ago
      the difference is that a brand new battery would be able to deliver enough current to sustain the peak workloads, even when at 1% battery remaining. An aged battery would not be able to do this.
• bubblethink 7y ago
  >There is no magic solution here The solution is to let people do whatever the fuck they want with their devices and replace broken parts as they see fit. You can't have it both ways. This sort of a strawman is more baffling than the actual issue.
  • avalys 7y ago
    Apple doesn’t design their products as a bundle of parts and components to be independently monitored and maintained by their users. They do their best to hide all those details from you and handle it themselves. In part, this integrated and maintenance-free experience is what many people pay for! What “both ways” are you referring to?
    • zeusk 7y ago
      What if your car tomorrow suddenly had only half power but no check engine light/service engine light? Yes, that's better than the car unexpectedly shutting down but you'd still expect to have the core issue rectified instead of hiding it from the user.
  • gowld 7y ago
    iPhone batteries are replaceable.
• totalZero 7y ago
  I don't see intentional performance degradation as a "feature." Companies don't usually hide "features" from customers. Companies don't usually pay fines for hiding "features."
  • unishark 7y ago
    perhaps you'd prefer the word "workaround".
• hinkley 7y ago
  In an earlier thread I said I think their only (proverbial) crime was that they should have added that feature in an OS update that included performance improvements. Nobody would have been any the wiser.
• oauea 7y ago
  Why not simply let me take out the battery and put in a new one? They created these locked down devices. Let them feel the pain.
  • colejohnson66 7y ago
    An unpopular opinion, but if you don’t like non removable batteries, don’t buy devices utilizing them. That’s how you hurt them. There’s nothing anti competitive about non removable batteries. Also: iPhone, iPod, and iPad batteries are replaceable; just not easily. There’s literally a connector that seperates the battery from the logic board. If they wanted to prevent you from replacing it, they’d solder them together.
    • daniel-cussen 7y ago
      > don't buy devices utilizing them. That's the absolute least effective way of discouraging the practice. It's the strategy companies want you to take, but it influences companies the least. Collective action by consumers is a much better way of effecting change, including politically or legally, as they did here. It definitely is anti-competitive to have none-removable batteries: it stops your old product from competing with your new product. Finally, as a matter of fact, the battery in my mid 2015 iPod nano is literally soldered together, like you say, and that has stopped me from putting in a new one, like I did myself with an iPhone 3G.
    • oauea 7y ago
      I don't and I don't understand why anyone would. That's why I'm happy to see Apple having to pay for this ridiculous practice.
• gumby 7y ago
  I agree. I want this functionality for my old phone. If anything Apple could include a switch (like "low power mode" but for old batteries) and let people upset with it disable the feature.
  • chooseaname 7y ago
    I want for them to have designed a better power supply system so that they didn't have to do this.
    • gumby 7y ago
      Well sure I’d like that too but from what I know about battery chemistry and charging systems* I don’t think that’s meaningfully possible. * basic EE from my time in the renewables biz; not an expert
      • chooseaname 7y ago
        That's part of it. They paired a high performance CPU with an inadequate power supply (battery).
        • gumby 7y ago
          People who care can always use an auxiliary battery. It's pretty common. I guess this is an argument for both our points.
• ballenf 7y ago
  > they obviously would’ve been raked over the coals also. There is no magic solution here. It’s weird that your defense comes down to “there was no way for Apple to avoid reputational damage so it was ok.” No one is suggesting that there is always a win-win. The “magic” solution here was simply transparency. Even if people aren’t going to like the message.
  • unishark 7y ago
    Depends on how likely they are to be found out, and whether trying to do it secretly actually incurs a larger penalty. If transparency guarantees being raked over the coals, while the alternative leads to an equally-bad result only if they are exposed, then the decision every time will be against transparency.
• bsder 7y ago
  > So I never saw any indication that this was malicious on Apple’s part. The problem is that if Apple admitted to the fact that old batteries were the problem they would get a class-action lawsuit to force them to allow batteries to be replaced ... like every other bloody phone. Apple absolutely deserves this. They hid it intentionally because they knew what the followup was going to be and they didn't want to do it.
• SkyBelow 7y ago
  >From my perspective, this demonstrated real dedication to customer care and old device support from Apple. Lack of ability to replace the battery seems to suggest otherwise. >There is no magic solution here. Replaceable battery with a message indicating when battery health is low enough it needs to be replaced seems close enough to a magic fix.
  • rhinoceraptor 7y ago
    The batteries are replaceable, just not (without a few tools and knowledge) end-user replaceable. And even if they did make the batteries user replaceable, that is of pretty questionable value for the consumer. First, a lot of people are going to buy $5 replacement batteries on Ali Express and their phone is going to get bricked or catch fire. Related to that, most people are unaware of how dangerous handling loose lithium batteries can be. Second, it makes the phones much more vulnerable to liquid damage, as well as much physically larger.
    • mrguyorama 7y ago
      Except user replaceable batteries were the norm until recently, and we did not have the situation that you describe. More importantly, user replaceable batteries also allows mobile phone stores to offer dirt cheap replacement services, equivalent to jewelry stores offering to replace watch batteries.
      • rhinoceraptor 7y ago
        Those replaceable batteries were also much lower power (in terms of capacity and max current) than the batteries of today. My iPhone today has roughly the equivalent of an 18650, compared to the Razr I had 15 years ago, which has roughly the equivalent of a AA. For sure, I would love it if my phone had replaceable batteries. I carry a couple 18650s and 16340s in my backpack for my flashlights. But there are a ton of downsides to having them, particularly in a smartphone.
  • jasonlfunk 7y ago
    Apple decided this didn’t fit with their design. People know this when they buy the phone. If they want a removable battery, buy a different phone.
• SilasX 7y ago
  I think it would have shown more dedication to customer care if successive updates to iOS weren't increasingly CPU-intensive for the same functionality and/or weren't mandatory.
• flavor8 7y ago
  > They added a software feature in an iOS update that throttled the CPU in this condition to prevent a crash, at the expense of lower peak CPU performance. The user friendly approach would have been to pop up a warning message on next boot: "Hey Avalys, We detected that your battery has degraded, and so your phone's performance has been lowered to prevent your phone from crashing. To restore performance please take your phone to the apple store to get your battery reset. Give them code AH534 to get $25 off battery replacement. Offer is valid for the next 14 days."
• seemslegit 7y ago
  "There is no magic solution here." You gonna want to sit down for this one: a standardized battery that can be replaced by the user without having to disassemble the device, maybe through a removable back cover or something like that.
  • zepto 7y ago
    Have you heard of the concept of a trade-off?
    • seemslegit 7y ago
      Sure, in this case the tradeoff is between something that is valuable for the user (replaceable commodity battery, ability to completely power-off the phone) and something that is valuable for the vendor (obsolescence driver, always powered because reasons).
      • zepto 7y ago
        Can you not imagine that there are consumer benefits to a non-replaceable battery? Benefits that consumers may be choosing?
        • seemslegit 7y ago
          Imagine yes, believe that this is in fact the case - not so much. If only because they do not in fact have the ability to choose on this.
          • zepto 7y ago
            They had the ability to choose for a long time while Samsung attempted to compete on this feature. Consumers overwhelmingly opted for phones without replaceable batteries, which is why they stopped being made.
            • seemslegit 7y ago
• sov 7y ago
  > So I never saw any indication that this was malicious on Apple’s part. They intentionally slowed down all iPhones in the face of more user-friendly options to fix an issue a minuscule percentage of people had. I think you can choose to view this as a solution, but I'm leery of anyone who thinks this was an appropriate solution. > They determined this happened because aged batteries were not capable of delivering peak current anymore and the CPU was “browning out” under heavy load. This is kinda true but ultimately more misleading than insightful. It makes it sound like it's just the batteries' fault and nothing can be done. Aged batteries are perfectly capable of delivering all the peak power necessary for operation. The only time it's possibly an issue for the LiCo oxides the iPhone uses is at a low SoC after a relaxation period (which is amplified if the battery itself is physically cold). So, in a perfect storm of events you'll have a phone that will die from 10% SoC. But then your SoC isn't really at 10%, innit? Your SoH is actually lower, so your SoC needs to diminish faster to accurately map to your reduced capacity. SoC isn't a mystery either. Because this issue is prevalent after a relaxation period on the LiCo batteries, you can get pretty accurate SoCs from simply reading OCV. Remember, OCV:SOH mapping is only difficult for non-Cobalt Lithium chemistries, and even then often only in the middle range. Reductions in SoH speed up passage along the OCV:SOC curve, not chop the ends off--and the ends are the most prominent. > A phone that is moderately slower is still more valuable than one that randomly crashes. There are other things Apple could have done. Like, actually accurately report the SoC. Or reduce screen brightness at lower SoCs. Further, it's not "randomly crashing"--it's shutting off at low charge% (but higher than people would expect). I don't know if it was malicious, but if not, it's a surprisingly stupid fix from an otherwise brilliant engineering team, and it seems the judge agreed.
• AlisdairO 7y ago
  > People latched onto the fact that Apple did this “secretly” - but Apple has never exposed this sort of implementation detail, and they’ve never wanted battery replacement to be part of the normal user experience for their devices. If Apple had shipped an iOS update that started telling people “Your battery is degraded, pay us to replace it to stop the crashes!” they obviously would’ve been raked over the coals also. There is no magic solution here. Oh come on. Macs tell you you need to replace your battery and I've never heard anyone complain about this. I have no idea if this behaviour was malicious, but a slowdown without any indication of technical issues is a horrible experience that just invites phone replacement. I'd much rather have random crashes than a non-notified slowdown- at least then I know something is wrong, rather than just my hardware is aging out and I need to get a new phone.