5 ms·

Three notable things in this article are: 1) wireless degrades by degree and is hard to debug 2) it fails silently or just in non-obvious ways 3) people gene

Three notable things in this article are: 1) wireless degrades by degree and is hard to debug 2) it fails silently or just in non-obvious ways 3) people generally have no idea how good it is supposed to work, until they experience it working properly I think there are many things, in life generally, but especially in tech, where these qualities conspire to give people a rotten time. People will complain when things fail, or take action. "Graceful degradation" seems like a feature, but it can keep you on a slippery slope of increasing tolerance toward ever worse performance. The complexity, and fuzzy "connection to everything" means that no one has to take responsibility. Maybe it's your neighbour? Or the trees? Or the alignment of Venus and swamp gas on a full moon? Unless you have a full spectrum RF field meter and other very expensive test gear microwaves are "black magic" to even great engineers. I'm sure when Apple met to discuss remotely degrading iPhone performance the words "They'll never notice" were spoken. Companies that sell complex services and oversell resources love this combo of fuzzy, hard to measure, diffuse, naturally erratic behaviour, broad tolerance, mixed with vague customer expectations. They prevent you from knowing, and comparing, what you should be getting, and what you are getting. Many recent development directions, 5G, secure enclaves, encrypted updates and exfiltration (telemetry), are set to increase the "random magic factor" and make gear even more precarious and mysterious to the end user.

mypalmike 4y ago
"I'm sure when Apple met to discuss remotely degrading iPhone performance the words "They'll never notice" were spoken. Companies that sell complex services and oversell resources love this combo of fuzzy, hard to measure, diffuse, naturally erratic behaviour, broad tolerance, mixed with vague customer expectations." I suspect Apple would prefer their products to be reliable rather than erratic.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  They quite deliberately decided to make them degraded (to prolong battery life). And they were fined for it [1]. Nobody mentioned erratic in that case. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51413724 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51413724
  - ChadNauseam 4y ago
    True, although longer battery life makes a battery-powered device more reliable too
  - jolux 4y ago
    Not just to prolong battery life, to prevent the device from overdrawing the battery and shutting down when it couldn't provide the same peak current as it could when new.
    - schwartzworld 4y ago
      Other possible solutions could include: making batteries easy to replace.
      - dijit 4y ago
        Not disagreeing. This was likely a compromise from that design decision. Since the slowdown was based on battery health and not absolute age of the device it was (and is) still possible to replace the battery. But “the market” (ugh) seems to have decided that it wants phones with integrated batteries, and touch screens, and no physical keyboard, that are too big to use with one hand. So that’s all we get. Unless it’s extremely niche.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
er4hn 4y ago
I think your posting of this comment may have had a "graceful degradation" for an improved user experience. Unfortunately it has appeared twice with people commenting different things on each thread ;) edit: disregard this, I don't see the other thread anymore. Maybe I was the one experiencing magic fuzz factors.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  I blame bad wifi. :)
jolux 4y ago
See, the alternative to what Apple did is having phones that randomly shut down at peak load. I have had this happen to me on a degraded battery in a cold Rochester winter. It’s not fun! It means I can’t even trust my phone to be a phone anymore. I think that is more of a “random magic factor” than things getting slower.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  The right solution would be to degrade performance and tell the user about it, not do so silently.
  - jolux 4y ago
    I agree. They should have told the user to replace the battery.
Nextgrid 4y ago
> Unless you have a full spectrum RF field meter and other very expensive test gear You actually have that, at least for the frequency range that matters: the wireless hardware in your computer. Your wireless card absolutely knows how good/bad the RF environment is - it wouldn't work without it. The problem is that none of this information is exposed to the user. The Wi-Fi "signal strength" meter is consistently useless on basically every device I've tried. In fact, I wonder what would it take to actually make it go down, since it's happy sitting at max level even if you can't get a single packet through. I guess it must be measuring RSSI, when the one that matters to the user is "how many packets am I actually missing" which can be obtained by keeping stats on TCP flows or pinging the default gateway.

mypalmike 4y ago

"I'm sure when Apple met to discuss remotely degrading iPhone performance the words "They'll never notice" were spoken. Companies that sell complex services and oversell resources love this combo of fuzzy, hard to measure, diffuse, naturally erratic behaviour, broad tolerance, mixed with vague customer expectations." I suspect Apple would prefer their products to be reliable rather than erratic.

nonrandomstring 4y ago
They quite deliberately decided to make them degraded (to prolong battery life). And they were fined for it [1]. Nobody mentioned erratic in that case. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51413724 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51413724
- ChadNauseam 4y ago
  True, although longer battery life makes a battery-powered device more reliable too
- jolux 4y ago
  Not just to prolong battery life, to prevent the device from overdrawing the battery and shutting down when it couldn't provide the same peak current as it could when new.
  - schwartzworld 4y ago
    Other possible solutions could include: making batteries easy to replace.
    - dijit 4y ago
      Not disagreeing. This was likely a compromise from that design decision. Since the slowdown was based on battery health and not absolute age of the device it was (and is) still possible to replace the battery. But “the market” (ugh) seems to have decided that it wants phones with integrated batteries, and touch screens, and no physical keyboard, that are too big to use with one hand. So that’s all we get. Unless it’s extremely niche.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

er4hn 4y ago

I think your posting of this comment may have had a "graceful degradation" for an improved user experience. Unfortunately it has appeared twice with people commenting different things on each thread ;) edit: disregard this, I don't see the other thread anymore. Maybe I was the one experiencing magic fuzz factors.

nonrandomstring 4y ago
I blame bad wifi. :)

jolux 4y ago

See, the alternative to what Apple did is having phones that randomly shut down at peak load. I have had this happen to me on a degraded battery in a cold Rochester winter. It’s not fun! It means I can’t even trust my phone to be a phone anymore. I think that is more of a “random magic factor” than things getting slower.

Nextgrid 4y ago
The right solution would be to degrade performance and tell the user about it, not do so silently.
- jolux 4y ago
  I agree. They should have told the user to replace the battery.

Nextgrid 4y ago

> Unless you have a full spectrum RF field meter and other very expensive test gear You actually have that, at least for the frequency range that matters: the wireless hardware in your computer. Your wireless card absolutely knows how good/bad the RF environment is - it wouldn't work without it. The problem is that none of this information is exposed to the user. The Wi-Fi "signal strength" meter is consistently useless on basically every device I've tried. In fact, I wonder what would it take to actually make it go down, since it's happy sitting at max level even if you can't get a single packet through. I guess it must be measuring RSSI, when the one that matters to the user is "how many packets am I actually missing" which can be obtained by keeping stats on TCP flows or pinging the default gateway.