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> I can't decide if I like that better or worse. It's a really good question. Let's think about it. As you've outlined it, Tesla's approach prioritizes the us

> I can't decide if I like that better or worse. It's a really good question. Let's think about it. As you've outlined it, Tesla's approach prioritizes the user's confidence in the product, rather than the user's knowledge about the product. Naturally, when a product is faulty, the user's confidence in the product is inversely proportional to their knowledge about the fault; the less I know about the fault, the more unshaken is my confidence in the product. So I guess it comes down to this: when a product fails, would you prefer to react with "wow, how unexpected" or "figures"?

e-clinton 5y ago
Apple went with the Tesla model and had a PR mess as well as lawsuits
- bgorman 5y ago
  Apple's solution was akin to taking a Tesla going 80 mph on a freeway, suddenly turning on "limp" mode and locking the car to 10 mph, all without informing the user anything abnormal was going on.
- teruakohatu 5y ago
  EV owners are conscious about range. Tesla would have said that they were limiting range until vehicles are repaired. Apple didn't tell anyone and a slower device is harder to quantify in normal use than not being able to drive the same distance between charges. The EV equivalent would be reducing acceleration slowly over the lifetime of the vehicle with the helpful (to the company) side-effect that new models seem a lot more responsive.
edge17 5y ago
Isn't this basically what Apple should have done to avoid their throttling lawsuit? Told their customers to change their behaviors?
- Closi 5y ago
  Nah, they should have just been transparent about the throttling. They still throttle now after the lawsuit, you can just stop it if you want to. Also an important difference with Apple is that the iPhone throttling wasn’t a safety concern.
  - retSava 5y ago
    The throttling was a reaction to poor battery performance at the technical endish-of-life part of the product. After X cycles the battery recharge ability was limited, couldn't be fully charged. It also had increased internal resistance, meaning an increased power draw (eg CPU/GPU load increase) can't be sustained. If too much current is drawn, the voltage drops, and the result may be a brown-out event (voltage too low -> shutdown/reboot). Since the battery couldn't deliver, Apple limited use of the battery so it doesn't run into those brown-outs. This is all sound and well and well-known, which is why you design in a safety factor so that you have plenty of margin even at end of life. Why didn't they? Since no internal Apple discussions surface, I can just speculate it's either, * incompetence, they didn't anticipate this * cost-driven decision, despite Apple products being top-dollar devices and even low-range devices work better in this aspect * design-driven decision, larger battery would mean a larger device I'm betting the last point. Someone (Jobs? Ive?) had a fixed upper size limit on the device, and at the same time a fixed minimum CPU/GPU performance limit to not feel sluggish.
    - jdsully 5y ago
      Around that time there were a ton of battery recalls for phones nowhere near the end of their life - mine was one. I think they just got a bad batch of batteries or were too aggressive cost optimizing and this was the fix. 5&6 era iPhones never had this problem and their batteries degraded just the same.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  They've tried that before, it turns out that "you're holding it wrong" isn't the best customer experience.
hanniabu 5y ago
> Tesla's approach prioritizes the user's confidence in the product More like Tesla prioritizes removing user error

e-clinton 5y ago

Apple went with the Tesla model and had a PR mess as well as lawsuits

bgorman 5y ago
Apple's solution was akin to taking a Tesla going 80 mph on a freeway, suddenly turning on "limp" mode and locking the car to 10 mph, all without informing the user anything abnormal was going on.
teruakohatu 5y ago
EV owners are conscious about range. Tesla would have said that they were limiting range until vehicles are repaired. Apple didn't tell anyone and a slower device is harder to quantify in normal use than not being able to drive the same distance between charges. The EV equivalent would be reducing acceleration slowly over the lifetime of the vehicle with the helpful (to the company) side-effect that new models seem a lot more responsive.

edge17 5y ago

Isn't this basically what Apple should have done to avoid their throttling lawsuit? Told their customers to change their behaviors?

Closi 5y ago
Nah, they should have just been transparent about the throttling. They still throttle now after the lawsuit, you can just stop it if you want to. Also an important difference with Apple is that the iPhone throttling wasn’t a safety concern.
- retSava 5y ago
  The throttling was a reaction to poor battery performance at the technical endish-of-life part of the product. After X cycles the battery recharge ability was limited, couldn't be fully charged. It also had increased internal resistance, meaning an increased power draw (eg CPU/GPU load increase) can't be sustained. If too much current is drawn, the voltage drops, and the result may be a brown-out event (voltage too low -> shutdown/reboot). Since the battery couldn't deliver, Apple limited use of the battery so it doesn't run into those brown-outs. This is all sound and well and well-known, which is why you design in a safety factor so that you have plenty of margin even at end of life. Why didn't they? Since no internal Apple discussions surface, I can just speculate it's either, * incompetence, they didn't anticipate this * cost-driven decision, despite Apple products being top-dollar devices and even low-range devices work better in this aspect * design-driven decision, larger battery would mean a larger device I'm betting the last point. Someone (Jobs? Ive?) had a fixed upper size limit on the device, and at the same time a fixed minimum CPU/GPU performance limit to not feel sluggish.
  - jdsully 5y ago
    Around that time there were a ton of battery recalls for phones nowhere near the end of their life - mine was one. I think they just got a bad batch of batteries or were too aggressive cost optimizing and this was the fix. 5&6 era iPhones never had this problem and their batteries degraded just the same.
smoldesu 5y ago
They've tried that before, it turns out that "you're holding it wrong" isn't the best customer experience.

hanniabu 5y ago

> Tesla's approach prioritizes the user's confidence in the product More like Tesla prioritizes removing user error