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The alternative is that the phone shuts off spontaneously and reboots if power draw gets too high, which also degrades the consumer’s experience and looks a lot
by jolux 6y ago
The alternative is that the phone shuts off spontaneously and reboots if power draw gets too high, which also degrades the consumer’s experience and looks a lot scarier and more obviously broken to most people.
- bigbubba 6y agoAre these really the two options? What about displaying a plainly worded message that explains the situation to the owner, then gives them the choice? Or would that be too confusing and scary for Apple customers?
- jolux 6y agoCrashing has implications for data integrity which laypeople do not fully understand to this day, despite it having been a problem for the entire history of computing. I don’t think giving users a choice between potentially catastrophic failure and inconvenience is wise. Notifying them of the slowdown is a good idea, and these days you can go into the settings to turn off the slowdown manually, but I think making people look for it is a good idea.
- bigbubba 6y agoEven if you think customers shouldn't be given a choice, there is still no excuse for not informing the users of the situation. Apple is not a victim here.
- jolux 6y agoDid I say Apple was a victim? No. They should have notified people. But the conspiracy theories are silly, as are people who act like there isn’t a clearly correct default behavior in this case.
- bigbubba 6y agoOkay, then we agree the comment I responded to presented a false dichotomy.
- jolux 6y agoYou said that their decision obviously degrades the user experience. They were dealing with an engineering trade off and picked the side that didn’t risk data loss. I contend that that’s better than the alternative, irrespective of whether or not they tell people what’s going on.
- yyyk 6y agoYou're ignoring the point that these weren't the only two choices - even after both 'invisible' and 'bigbubba' suggested alternatives (admittedly not as profitable for Apple).
- jolux 6y agoI’m really not. I said they should have notified people. You’re ignoring that there’s no solution to this problem that doesn’t degrade the user experience in one way or another, which is the point I was making.
- yyyk 6y agoThe reason for the lawsuits and bad PR wasn't that user experience was degraded, but that it was done in a way that was close to planned obsolesce. Apple had ways to avoid this.
- jolux 6y agoThere’s no other way to fix the spontaneous shutdowns though. And I will repeat that they should have told people it might slow their phone down.
- acdha 6y agoThat's what they added. There's now a full Battery section in the Settings app which shows you your current battery health, whether the life has declined to the point where it is limiting performance, and an optimized charging setting which is enabled by default so the phone won't charge past 80% unless it's at a time of day where your usage history suggests you'll need the full charge.
- Thetawaves 6y agoIt is far more likely that these CPUs have the capability to throttle power usage instantaneously. If the battery monitor detects a problematic energy draw, it should have the capability to correct it before the CPU shuts down.
- jolux 6y agoIndeed! They do throttle instantaneously. Which slows everything down, and stops the device from halting. This is what is being complained about.
- triceratops 6y agoOr slow the phone down and inform the customer their phone is running in "Reduced mode" or whatever due to their battery being old. It's honestly not that hard.
- jolux 6y agoWhich is more or less what they’ve now done.