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Worth mentioning here is that this wasn't just about the "sneaky" fix for battery degradation, it was about doing this without notice, and having internal tooli

Worth mentioning here is that this wasn't just about the "sneaky" fix for battery degradation, it was about doing this without notice, and having internal tooling that would deny a replacement (even at full retail price) if the battery was above an arbitrary health threshold (but still low enough to cause throttling). Before Apple changed their tune, if you read about this, and went into an Apple store for a replacement, they absolutely would not give you one, even if you paid full retail for it. This left people in a no-win situation. The only way you could get a working device was to have a third party replacement done (and kill your warranty) or shell out for a new phone.

bgirard 6y ago
> it was about doing this without notice, and having internal tooling that would deny a replacement (even at full retail price) if the battery was above an arbitrary health threshold (but still low enough to cause throttling). Do you have a source for that? This would change my opinion on this story. Reminds me of hot coffee where it sounded a bit ridiculous until you got the full story.
- filoleg 6y ago
  They are correct in a sense that it was doing it "without notice". But they had a good reason to do the slowdowns, no malice needed, their one and only big mistake here was doing it without a notice. The reason they did it was to prevent battery degradation and bad battery life by throttling the CPU. Except back then, iPhone CPUs weren't overperforming monsters they are today, so the slowdown was fairly noticeable. And when done without a notice or reason, you get a perfect publicity shitstorm. In fact, this feature actually still exists for iPhones, except it now officially exists in settings and can be disabled. It throws a notification on yours screen and auto-activates if your battery degrades below certain level, but it can be disabled (so you can choose whether to prioritize performance or preventing battery from further degradation) by a simple click in a settings menu. And it also explains exactly and in very simple language what this feature does. It isn't hidden behind a million menus either, it is right there in settings => battery => battery health. EDIT: to clarify, Apple throttling was not only done to prevent it from holding less charge due to battery degradation. Battery degradation to a certain level also led to iPhones rebooting randomly. And apparently it was not that rare of an issue, because the reason I posted this edit in the first place was due to seeing more than a few comments in this thread mentioning that it had happened to them.
  - bgirard 6y ago
    Karunamon made a very specific claim in this thread that I quoted. Your response doesn't discuss this claim. I'm interested in what data we have backing that claim.
    - johnmaguire2013 6y ago
      Your quote mentioned "without notice", which was responded to. I would also like to see a response to this part of the quote: > and having internal tooling that would deny a replacement (even at full retail price) if the battery was above an arbitrary health threshold (but still low enough to cause throttling).
      - djmobley 6y ago
        I’ve described my experience of this elsewhere in the comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25144761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25144761
    - Karunamon 6y ago
      Nothing you'll be interested in, only very many stories of people taking their phones in once the throttling news dropped (IIRC, with accompanying geekbench scores showing the effect quantifiably), and being told to pound sand. A couple are downthread. Besides, it's not as if this is a strange policy. Apple never has arbitrarily replaced phone parts by user request, even with cash in hand, unless the techs could point to a specific problem. Try walking into an Apple store today and ask for a new screen without an obvious problem.. you will not get one.
- djmobley 6y ago
  > Do you have a source for that? This would change my opinion on this story. I can vouch for this. My iPhone 6 was under 2 years old and had 82% battery health according to the Apple diagnostics when I experienced the unexpected shutdowns. The shutdowns were frequent (at least once per day) and, because the phone had to be plugged in before it could be restarted, were incredibly frustrating. I took it to an Apple Store. The Genius refused to acknowledge any fault. They ran the diagnostics which showed 82% and refused to replace the battery, even if I paid, as it was above their 80% threshold for replacement. I spoke to the manager, and they stood firm. No replacement, even if I paid. I was extremely persistent and they simply would not budge. The throttling resolved my shutdown problem.
  - crazygringo 6y ago
    That's very strange, I had an opposite experience twice with my original SE (Apple store in NYC). It similarly showed 80+% battery health, but I showed them the battery charge history in Settings (dropped from 40% to 0% instantly) and they replaced it under warranty. Happened a year and a half later, exact same scenario, and paid the ~$30 to get it replaced. I suspect they didn't have any monitoring to detect or log the shutdowns at the time. But I find it extremely confusing why different Apple stores would have such different policies or manager discretion.
    - Spooky23 6y ago
      All of these anecdotes are hard because people tend to leave out or forget key details. I'd guess the date is a key factor, as I'm sure thousands of people showed up at the Apple store because they heard on CNN that their battery was broken.
      - djmobley 6y ago
        The experience I described was in Oct 2016, before the iOS update in Feb 2017 which introduced the throttling, and fixed the unexpected shutdowns for me. At the time they just refused to even consider the possibility it was a genuine hardware issue. I got the lecture about batteries being consumable items, mine was somewhat degraded (82% health), etc. They suggested I do a software reset, etc. I like to think maybe in hindsight someone at Apple HQ looked at the diagnostics from my Genius Bar visit as part of the decision to introduce throttling, and realised they were wrong.
darksaints 6y ago
This was exactly what happened to me. My phone slowed down drastically after an update, and so I took it in. They confirmed to me that it was this update that throttled everything if the battery health was degraded "in order to prevent further battery degradation". But when I pointed out to them that my phone was less than a year old and still under warranty, they tested it again and told me my battery didn't meet the threshold for warranty replacement. I pointed out the absurdity of their double standard, and resolved to never buy an apple device ever again.
- epistasis 6y ago
  This is an absolutely terrible customer service story, and IMHO there should definitely be compensation for that. But it also undercuts the "they are trying to make people upgrade" story, because I think nearly any sane person would abandon shop rather than put up with this sort of big-Corp idiocy.
  - SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
    How many people didn't bring it to a store and instead thought "Ah my phone is slow, thats what happens when they get old, the new one is meant to be way faster"
- meowster 6y ago
  I'm not a lawyer, but it sounds like you would have had a slam-dunk case in small claims court.
aetherspawn 6y ago
Hi, Battery engineer here at an electric vehicle company. The crux of it is this: when you draw high current from a small battery, the voltage will sag (1). The manufacturer has an on-board battery management system that MUST turn off the battery if it goes below a certain voltage threshold. As the battery ages, the sag effect increases significantly, up to 2-3x. Thus, when your phone clearly indicates say 20% battery remaining, if a high load were to be applied, the last 20% would be inaccessible because the battery sag from the spontaneous high load would cause a reboot. Thus, Apple acted in good faith to maximize the battery life on these older devices. The reason is technical, so it's hard to communicate this in a way that all consumers can understand. Yes, they failed at this. Look at all the confusion. (1) Exercise: Suppose no-load 3.4V corresponds to 20% remaining. Suppose that the battery cut-off is set to 3.2V. The battery % is usually derived from a current sensor (coulomb counting), NOT from the measured voltage. But the battery cut-off is a safety feature and needs to be measured hard against the voltage (and the current sensor needs to be ignored due to cumulative error). On a new phone, fully loaded voltage drop = 0.1V On a used phone, fully loaded voltage drop = 0.3V Low-load condition, @20% = 3.4V, OK Full-load condition, @20% = 3.4 - 0.3 = 3.1V, Emergency OFF.
- cheeze 6y ago
  I agree about the confusion, btu the issue AFAICT is more about the fact that they didn't offer consumers any way to rectify the issue
  - sthnblllII 6y ago
    Have the plaintiffs requested some kind of battery notification? Their angle has always been accusing Apple of planned obsolescence, which seems laughable compared to how little long-term support Android phones get.
    - Karunamon 6y ago
      I think they added that around the time the lawsuit was initially filed. You'll get a popup notice when throttling is applied, you have an option to disable throttling (at risk of shutdowns at low charge), and the health metric is exposed in settings now.
meowster 6y ago
> third party replacement done (and kill your warranty) Just a reminder to everyone in the U.S., it is illegal for a company to revoke an item's warranty if you open it up, have a third party fix it, etc. It's the exact same law that applies to cars: The Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act If you're in a state where one-party consent audio recording is legal, it's a good idea to always record your conversations with customer service.
ksec 6y ago
Exactly. It is not about the technical or physics, it is the way they deal with it, and how they handle it. And Tim Cook was blaming the user for not reading the release note of an iOS update. ( He did it in one of the many TV Interviews ) The only thing we got out of this, is the Official battery replacement from Apple are now slightly cheaper at $69 for iPhone X+, and $49 for iPhone 8 and below.
GeekyBear 6y ago
Let's compare to a Google phone of that era with the same issue. >If you're among those affected, your phone will randomly shut down and completely die, even though your battery indicator might have said you had plenty of juice left. It's not a simple system crash, because your phone will stay dead until you connect it to a charger. We've seen reports of the battery dying from a charge as high as 67% to as low as 15% on both Android Marshmallow and Android Nougat. So it's not a problem with the recent Android update, and it's not as simple as the battery meter just being off by a few percentage points. https://android.gadgethacks.com/news/nexus-6p-battery-randomly-dying-its-not-just-you-0175625/ https://android.gadgethacks.com/news/nexus-6p-battery-random... Google simply refused to fix the issue and settled their own lawsuit over it. https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/11/16/nexus-6p-early-shutdown-fixed/ https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/11/16/nexus-6p-early-shut... So which is better for the consumer? A phone that was never fixed or one that was?

bgirard 6y ago

> it was about doing this without notice, and having internal tooling that would deny a replacement (even at full retail price) if the battery was above an arbitrary health threshold (but still low enough to cause throttling). Do you have a source for that? This would change my opinion on this story. Reminds me of hot coffee where it sounded a bit ridiculous until you got the full story.

filoleg 6y ago
They are correct in a sense that it was doing it "without notice". But they had a good reason to do the slowdowns, no malice needed, their one and only big mistake here was doing it without a notice. The reason they did it was to prevent battery degradation and bad battery life by throttling the CPU. Except back then, iPhone CPUs weren't overperforming monsters they are today, so the slowdown was fairly noticeable. And when done without a notice or reason, you get a perfect publicity shitstorm. In fact, this feature actually still exists for iPhones, except it now officially exists in settings and can be disabled. It throws a notification on yours screen and auto-activates if your battery degrades below certain level, but it can be disabled (so you can choose whether to prioritize performance or preventing battery from further degradation) by a simple click in a settings menu. And it also explains exactly and in very simple language what this feature does. It isn't hidden behind a million menus either, it is right there in settings => battery => battery health. EDIT: to clarify, Apple throttling was not only done to prevent it from holding less charge due to battery degradation. Battery degradation to a certain level also led to iPhones rebooting randomly. And apparently it was not that rare of an issue, because the reason I posted this edit in the first place was due to seeing more than a few comments in this thread mentioning that it had happened to them.
- bgirard 6y ago
  Karunamon made a very specific claim in this thread that I quoted. Your response doesn't discuss this claim. I'm interested in what data we have backing that claim.
  - johnmaguire2013 6y ago
    Your quote mentioned "without notice", which was responded to. I would also like to see a response to this part of the quote: > and having internal tooling that would deny a replacement (even at full retail price) if the battery was above an arbitrary health threshold (but still low enough to cause throttling).
    - djmobley 6y ago
      I’ve described my experience of this elsewhere in the comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25144761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25144761
  - Karunamon 6y ago
    Nothing you'll be interested in, only very many stories of people taking their phones in once the throttling news dropped (IIRC, with accompanying geekbench scores showing the effect quantifiably), and being told to pound sand. A couple are downthread. Besides, it's not as if this is a strange policy. Apple never has arbitrarily replaced phone parts by user request, even with cash in hand, unless the techs could point to a specific problem. Try walking into an Apple store today and ask for a new screen without an obvious problem.. you will not get one.
djmobley 6y ago
> Do you have a source for that? This would change my opinion on this story. I can vouch for this. My iPhone 6 was under 2 years old and had 82% battery health according to the Apple diagnostics when I experienced the unexpected shutdowns. The shutdowns were frequent (at least once per day) and, because the phone had to be plugged in before it could be restarted, were incredibly frustrating. I took it to an Apple Store. The Genius refused to acknowledge any fault. They ran the diagnostics which showed 82% and refused to replace the battery, even if I paid, as it was above their 80% threshold for replacement. I spoke to the manager, and they stood firm. No replacement, even if I paid. I was extremely persistent and they simply would not budge. The throttling resolved my shutdown problem.
- crazygringo 6y ago
  That's very strange, I had an opposite experience twice with my original SE (Apple store in NYC). It similarly showed 80+% battery health, but I showed them the battery charge history in Settings (dropped from 40% to 0% instantly) and they replaced it under warranty. Happened a year and a half later, exact same scenario, and paid the ~$30 to get it replaced. I suspect they didn't have any monitoring to detect or log the shutdowns at the time. But I find it extremely confusing why different Apple stores would have such different policies or manager discretion.
  - Spooky23 6y ago
    All of these anecdotes are hard because people tend to leave out or forget key details. I'd guess the date is a key factor, as I'm sure thousands of people showed up at the Apple store because they heard on CNN that their battery was broken.
    - djmobley 6y ago
      The experience I described was in Oct 2016, before the iOS update in Feb 2017 which introduced the throttling, and fixed the unexpected shutdowns for me. At the time they just refused to even consider the possibility it was a genuine hardware issue. I got the lecture about batteries being consumable items, mine was somewhat degraded (82% health), etc. They suggested I do a software reset, etc. I like to think maybe in hindsight someone at Apple HQ looked at the diagnostics from my Genius Bar visit as part of the decision to introduce throttling, and realised they were wrong.

darksaints 6y ago

This was exactly what happened to me. My phone slowed down drastically after an update, and so I took it in. They confirmed to me that it was this update that throttled everything if the battery health was degraded "in order to prevent further battery degradation". But when I pointed out to them that my phone was less than a year old and still under warranty, they tested it again and told me my battery didn't meet the threshold for warranty replacement. I pointed out the absurdity of their double standard, and resolved to never buy an apple device ever again.

epistasis 6y ago
This is an absolutely terrible customer service story, and IMHO there should definitely be compensation for that. But it also undercuts the "they are trying to make people upgrade" story, because I think nearly any sane person would abandon shop rather than put up with this sort of big-Corp idiocy.
- SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
  How many people didn't bring it to a store and instead thought "Ah my phone is slow, thats what happens when they get old, the new one is meant to be way faster"
meowster 6y ago
I'm not a lawyer, but it sounds like you would have had a slam-dunk case in small claims court.

aetherspawn 6y ago

Hi, Battery engineer here at an electric vehicle company. The crux of it is this: when you draw high current from a small battery, the voltage will sag (1). The manufacturer has an on-board battery management system that MUST turn off the battery if it goes below a certain voltage threshold. As the battery ages, the sag effect increases significantly, up to 2-3x. Thus, when your phone clearly indicates say 20% battery remaining, if a high load were to be applied, the last 20% would be inaccessible because the battery sag from the spontaneous high load would cause a reboot. Thus, Apple acted in good faith to maximize the battery life on these older devices. The reason is technical, so it's hard to communicate this in a way that all consumers can understand. Yes, they failed at this. Look at all the confusion. (1) Exercise: Suppose no-load 3.4V corresponds to 20% remaining. Suppose that the battery cut-off is set to 3.2V. The battery % is usually derived from a current sensor (coulomb counting), NOT from the measured voltage. But the battery cut-off is a safety feature and needs to be measured hard against the voltage (and the current sensor needs to be ignored due to cumulative error). On a new phone, fully loaded voltage drop = 0.1V On a used phone, fully loaded voltage drop = 0.3V Low-load condition, @20% = 3.4V, OK Full-load condition, @20% = 3.4 - 0.3 = 3.1V, Emergency OFF.

cheeze 6y ago
I agree about the confusion, btu the issue AFAICT is more about the fact that they didn't offer consumers any way to rectify the issue
- sthnblllII 6y ago
  Have the plaintiffs requested some kind of battery notification? Their angle has always been accusing Apple of planned obsolescence, which seems laughable compared to how little long-term support Android phones get.
  - Karunamon 6y ago
    I think they added that around the time the lawsuit was initially filed. You'll get a popup notice when throttling is applied, you have an option to disable throttling (at risk of shutdowns at low charge), and the health metric is exposed in settings now.

meowster 6y ago

> third party replacement done (and kill your warranty) Just a reminder to everyone in the U.S., it is illegal for a company to revoke an item's warranty if you open it up, have a third party fix it, etc. It's the exact same law that applies to cars: The Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act If you're in a state where one-party consent audio recording is legal, it's a good idea to always record your conversations with customer service.

ksec 6y ago

Exactly. It is not about the technical or physics, it is the way they deal with it, and how they handle it. And Tim Cook was blaming the user for not reading the release note of an iOS update. ( He did it in one of the many TV Interviews ) The only thing we got out of this, is the Official battery replacement from Apple are now slightly cheaper at $69 for iPhone X+, and $49 for iPhone 8 and below.

GeekyBear 6y ago

Let's compare to a Google phone of that era with the same issue. >If you're among those affected, your phone will randomly shut down and completely die, even though your battery indicator might have said you had plenty of juice left. It's not a simple system crash, because your phone will stay dead until you connect it to a charger. We've seen reports of the battery dying from a charge as high as 67% to as low as 15% on both Android Marshmallow and Android Nougat. So it's not a problem with the recent Android update, and it's not as simple as the battery meter just being off by a few percentage points. https://android.gadgethacks.com/news/nexus-6p-battery-randomly-dying-its-not-just-you-0175625/ https://android.gadgethacks.com/news/nexus-6p-battery-random... Google simply refused to fix the issue and settled their own lawsuit over it. https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/11/16/nexus-6p-early-shutdown-fixed/ https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/11/16/nexus-6p-early-shut... So which is better for the consumer? A phone that was never fixed or one that was?