7 ms·

> by reducing performance like Apple does with old iPhones What Apple did was clock down the CPU of iPhones with degraded batteries in order to reduce peak loa

by rekoil 3y ago

> by reducing performance like Apple does with old iPhones What Apple did was clock down the CPU of iPhones with degraded batteries in order to reduce peak load which would otherwise result in crashes that would have made the device borderline unusable below some charge percentage. Yes, they should have shipped the feature off by default and with a toggle, but the feature itself was amazing as it let already old phones last longer than they otherwise would have. Apple deserves a lot of shit for their bullshit surrounding replacement parts, but this particular topic is something they get an undeserved amount of shit for in my opinion.

actionfromafar 3y ago
They didn’t explain what it did. The feature was amazing, the presentation misleading.
- KennyBlanken 3y ago
  No, Samsung and others spread a bunch of FUD that Apple was crippling their phones to force people to upgrade, and Reddit and HN apple-haters ate it up. Still to this day people on HN repeat it like it's fact, and when you correct them, shift the goalposts to "well they didn't TELL people."
  - rat9988 3y ago
    This is not a goalpost shift. It's THE argument. I'm not sure what arguments are there for alternative narratives.
    - fingerlocks 3y ago
      Do we know they actually didn’t tell people? Does anyone read through the “What’s New” pop-ups after they upgrade the OS, or just blindly dismiss them? Apple provides a very comprehensive user manual that ships as a pre-installed app on every phone. There are large headings describing the latest features right when you open it. I don’t recall being unaware of this feature before it became a “scandal”, but I’m one of those weirdos that reads the release pop-ups.
      - luuurker 3y ago
        Let's say you read that "what's new" pop-up and still update your phone because you expect it to work like before, but it doesn't because you're one of the lucky ones that had the clock speeds cut in half. What do you do now? Your phone is laggy and there's no setting to disable the feature or a way to revert to an old iOS version. You go to the store and they don't tell you anything about a battery replacement, but instead suggest a new iPhone! The feature was useful, the implementation wasn't. The issues weren't caused by the user not reading the changelog.
        fkyoureadthedoc 3y ago
        > they don't tell you anything about a battery replacement, but instead suggest a new iPhone! You keep repeating this, but battery replacements were a thing before this whole debacle. I got them a few times, I think they were like $79 (yes definitely more money than the sus extended batteries I'd buy off eBay for my HTC Evo). I realize society collectively forgot about them once the back stopped coming off the phone, but surely a tech savvy hackernews would realize that they couldn't use the same battery forever without replacement.
        luuurker 3y ago
        To replace the battery you need to know there's a problem with the battery. But the iPhone didn't tell me the issue was the battery. It happened after a software update if I remember correctly, so I did everything from formatting it to reducing the graphics load by using the accessibility settings... nothing worked. When I went to the nearest Apple store, the guy told me that I should probably get a new one. I don't blame him for recommending a new phone, after all apparently Apple didn't inform all their stores about the change, so they probably had no idea that the fix was a cheap battery replacement.
        rekoil 3y ago
        I think it's equally possible Apple actually didn't know how many phones would be hit by the feature when they launched it. They knew that old devices (especially common with the well-selling iPhone 6) would fail at peak demand, and wanted to address that, but they probably didn't have an accurate figure of exactly how many devices would be covered by the feature as initially configured. That it took them as long as it did to react to the resulting situation is unfortunate, but could probably be explained by corporate culture at Apple, they don't generally like to admit mistakes (see the Trash Can Mac Pro press meeting a few years back). In the end it was just a huge PR fuckup, if they had properly considered how many devices would be affected they would have realised they needed to communicate more clearly, they could have avoided lawsuits and honestly if they had played their cards right from the get go they would probably have received praise instead of backlash, but instead here we are 7 years later still explaining how battery chemistry affects integrated circuits on technical forums.
    - culi 3y ago
      > It's THE argument From people I've talked to, it seems like the VAST majority of people are under the impression that Apple does this as a planned obsolescence practice. In fact, this thread is the first one I've come across where most people seem to get the point of the feature
      - mrguyorama 3y ago
        The planned obsolescence was when Apple put a small battery in a flagship phone that could no longer produce the required voltage and/or current to keep up with hardware demands despite being only moderately used. Apple is the same company that brags about forever years of software updates, but plenty of people were running into this issue after only a few years, including my own mother who's iPhone couldn't even make a single phone call despite the battery reporting 90% state of charge. Notably, this will no longer be an issue on modern iPhones because they have much more reasonable batteries. Apple underspecced the batteries in iPhones and then hid the software kludge they made to hide that fact. That's why the reaction is warranted.
        culi 3y ago
        This is a tangent to the original point, but I'll play. Apple iPhones have long had some of the highest battery lives of smartphones on the market despite having some of the smallest batteries. Since they only have to worry about a single OS, they can optimize away to achieve this. Smaller batteries means less environmental harm, lighter phones, and more space for other parts. There are endless reasons to bag on Apple, but the fact that they can achieve much better battery life with much smaller batteries is not one of them
    - kube-system 3y ago
      No, Apple's throttling to prevent crashes is no more "planned obsolescence" than how Samsung (or any) laptops thermal throttle when the heat sinks get dirty. Designing a product to fail gracefully is good engineering practice. Apple made the right decision to make the phone go slower instead of crashing. Somewhere out there, there's someone making a 911 call on an iPhone with an old battery.
  - close04 3y ago
    The fix had an impact on a core metric of the device: performance. This was the best technical solution to gain longevity, and it was in the interest of users. But doing it under the radar left everyone wondering if it had ulterior motives and let the rumor mill go crazy. Transparency is good even when everything is upsides & roses, and especially important when there are some compromises to be made.
    - rekoil 3y ago
      Very well put.
  - luuurker 3y ago
    My iPhone was affected by this. Let me tell you my experience, without "Samsung FUD": - The phone became slow, laggy animations, etc. - I had no idea what was causing the problem. - There was no way to return to an older iOS version or a way to disable the new behaviour. - I went to an Apple store and was told that I probably should get a new phone. I'm sure they had some good intentions, but in practice they degraded my experience too much and profited from new iPhone sales that didn't need to happen. Apple had to be sued first to add a setting to disable this feature and start offering cheap battery replacements (by then I had already moved on). From the implementation of this feature to the way they handled it, it was all Apple. Samsung had nothing to do with my bad experience. Not everyone was affected this much by the change, but some where. And that's a problem.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
bayindirh 3y ago
Apple's know-how in battery management is always a couple of generations ahead of its closest competitor. My 2008 MacBook Pro was able to detect battery problems one year before they started to manifest physically. They did it by adding another controller and an independent firmware to the battery itself, but there was no better tech at that time. M powered MacBooks added auto hold-off (discharge to 80%, keep it there) or postpone charge (because the battery is used too rarely), to the list of tricks they know, and these are just the visible ones to the user.
- pkolaczk 3y ago
  > discharge to 80%, keep it there Where? AFAIK this is a feature you need a third party app like Aldente for. The OS does not offer any way to control battery charging level. Yes, it tries to be smart and guess when you need full charge and sometimes decides to charge to only 80% but that doesnt work for all users except the ones with very regular routines and there is no manual control.
  - bayindirh 3y ago
    I meant the automatic one. My charge cycles are not very predictable, but periodically my Mac says that It'll hold-off charge, and uses battery until 80%, then uses power adapter. Then charges the battery fully later in the day if I'm connected. Sometimes it flat out refuses the charge. Then I disconnect and use the battery until 30% or so. Then charge when convenient (clarification: It'd possibly charge if I hit a certain percentage, but I always disconnected voluntarily, to give a good use to battery. I lasts a day. Why not?). My MacBook Air M1 has 165 cycles in 3 years, at 90% of design capacity. I think this is a very solid management of the battery for a computer used every day literally. My MacBook Pro is at ~85% after 8 years. I don't remember total cycles now.
    - dalore 3y ago
      > Why not? I find running on battery, lots of things are throttled or disabled. CPU is slower for example. That's probably a good reason for why not.
Reason077 3y ago
> "What Apple did was clock down the CPU of iPhones with degraded batteries in order to reduce peak load" It wasn't what Apple was doing that was the problem, it was the fact that they were initially quite secretive about it! People just started noticing their phones slowing down without explanation. Now days iOS tells if your battery no longer supports peak performance, which is the right thing to do. > "Yes, they should have shipped the feature off by default and with a toggle" Oh, it should always have been on by default. Most people would much rather their phone run a little slower than risk random crashes and shutdowns! But iOS should have told you about this from the start.
- TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
  I wonder how many products have components that downgrade under specific situations and they never explicitly tell the customer - and most customers don’t ask because it’s “complicated tech” they don’t want to know about it.
  - venj 3y ago
    I think a lot of laptops do this because their cooling system is too weak for the CPU. The Lenovo Thinkpad t480s comes to my mind: with factory settings, the CPU was unable to reach its advertised boost frequency nor maintain its max non-boost frequency for more than a few minutes. After 5 to 10 minutes, the machine was usually running at 300/400mhz under its advertised clock speed. Undervolting helped a lot but could not fix the issue completely, under clocking was the only solution to maintain a consistent clock speed.
    - sgarland 3y ago
      IMO, at least with x86, there is a point where it simply doesn’t make sense to cram higher clocks into a laptop. The last Intel MBP could be had with an i9, and IME if you left turbo enabled, even at idle the fans were annoyingly loud. If you pushed it, you’d get a quiet jet engine as they struggled to keep temps just below 95 C. It was usually less annoying for me to just disable turbo, and only turn it on if I really needed the boost.
Gloomily3819 3y ago
All the shit was deserved for altering phones without the consent of the consumer. I don't care how good they had in their hearts, get the user's consent first.
luuurker 3y ago
Some devices had a small performance hit, but some had had their clock speeds to less than half, making devices laggy even during normal usage. By itself this is already a problem, but they also decided to not allow you to disable the feature or reverse to an older iOS version. I don't think they informed their Apple store employees either, at least I was told to buy a new phone. They had to be sued first to add a simple setting, ffs! So yeah, I think the criticism is valid and deserved. I'm sure they had good intentions, but the implementation was shit and not only they created issues for some iPhone users, but also profited with new iPhone sales (not me, that was my last iPhone).
mrguyorama 3y ago
Except they only HAD to do that because the battery simply did not have the capability to continue providing enough voltage and/or current by the time it got to about 20% degraded, which for many people could happen in just a few years. This only happened because they were putting stupidly small batteries in their phones to shave another millimeter off of the size that nobody cared about. Either Apple did the proper QA of the battery to understand how it would behave as it got to end of life and knowingly put a battery into a $800 phone that wouldn't be functional before the phone would run out of software updates, or they FAILED to do proper longevity testing on the battery of a $800 phone. It wasn't planned obsolescence when they added that code to keep the older phones working. It WAS planned obsolescence when they put a pitiful and underspecced battery into their $800 phone.

by rekoil 3y ago

actionfromafar 3y ago

They didn’t explain what it did. The feature was amazing, the presentation misleading.

KennyBlanken 3y ago
No, Samsung and others spread a bunch of FUD that Apple was crippling their phones to force people to upgrade, and Reddit and HN apple-haters ate it up. Still to this day people on HN repeat it like it's fact, and when you correct them, shift the goalposts to "well they didn't TELL people."
- rat9988 3y ago
  This is not a goalpost shift. It's THE argument. I'm not sure what arguments are there for alternative narratives.
  - fingerlocks 3y ago
    Do we know they actually didn’t tell people? Does anyone read through the “What’s New” pop-ups after they upgrade the OS, or just blindly dismiss them? Apple provides a very comprehensive user manual that ships as a pre-installed app on every phone. There are large headings describing the latest features right when you open it. I don’t recall being unaware of this feature before it became a “scandal”, but I’m one of those weirdos that reads the release pop-ups.
    - luuurker 3y ago
      Let's say you read that "what's new" pop-up and still update your phone because you expect it to work like before, but it doesn't because you're one of the lucky ones that had the clock speeds cut in half. What do you do now? Your phone is laggy and there's no setting to disable the feature or a way to revert to an old iOS version. You go to the store and they don't tell you anything about a battery replacement, but instead suggest a new iPhone! The feature was useful, the implementation wasn't. The issues weren't caused by the user not reading the changelog.
      - fkyoureadthedoc 3y ago
        > they don't tell you anything about a battery replacement, but instead suggest a new iPhone! You keep repeating this, but battery replacements were a thing before this whole debacle. I got them a few times, I think they were like $79 (yes definitely more money than the sus extended batteries I'd buy off eBay for my HTC Evo). I realize society collectively forgot about them once the back stopped coming off the phone, but surely a tech savvy hackernews would realize that they couldn't use the same battery forever without replacement.
        luuurker 3y ago
        To replace the battery you need to know there's a problem with the battery. But the iPhone didn't tell me the issue was the battery. It happened after a software update if I remember correctly, so I did everything from formatting it to reducing the graphics load by using the accessibility settings... nothing worked. When I went to the nearest Apple store, the guy told me that I should probably get a new one. I don't blame him for recommending a new phone, after all apparently Apple didn't inform all their stores about the change, so they probably had no idea that the fix was a cheap battery replacement.
        rekoil 3y ago
        I think it's equally possible Apple actually didn't know how many phones would be hit by the feature when they launched it. They knew that old devices (especially common with the well-selling iPhone 6) would fail at peak demand, and wanted to address that, but they probably didn't have an accurate figure of exactly how many devices would be covered by the feature as initially configured. That it took them as long as it did to react to the resulting situation is unfortunate, but could probably be explained by corporate culture at Apple, they don't generally like to admit mistakes (see the Trash Can Mac Pro press meeting a few years back). In the end it was just a huge PR fuckup, if they had properly considered how many devices would be affected they would have realised they needed to communicate more clearly, they could have avoided lawsuits and honestly if they had played their cards right from the get go they would probably have received praise instead of backlash, but instead here we are 7 years later still explaining how battery chemistry affects integrated circuits on technical forums.
  - culi 3y ago
    > It's THE argument From people I've talked to, it seems like the VAST majority of people are under the impression that Apple does this as a planned obsolescence practice. In fact, this thread is the first one I've come across where most people seem to get the point of the feature
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      The planned obsolescence was when Apple put a small battery in a flagship phone that could no longer produce the required voltage and/or current to keep up with hardware demands despite being only moderately used. Apple is the same company that brags about forever years of software updates, but plenty of people were running into this issue after only a few years, including my own mother who's iPhone couldn't even make a single phone call despite the battery reporting 90% state of charge. Notably, this will no longer be an issue on modern iPhones because they have much more reasonable batteries. Apple underspecced the batteries in iPhones and then hid the software kludge they made to hide that fact. That's why the reaction is warranted.
      - culi 3y ago
        This is a tangent to the original point, but I'll play. Apple iPhones have long had some of the highest battery lives of smartphones on the market despite having some of the smallest batteries. Since they only have to worry about a single OS, they can optimize away to achieve this. Smaller batteries means less environmental harm, lighter phones, and more space for other parts. There are endless reasons to bag on Apple, but the fact that they can achieve much better battery life with much smaller batteries is not one of them
  - kube-system 3y ago
    No, Apple's throttling to prevent crashes is no more "planned obsolescence" than how Samsung (or any) laptops thermal throttle when the heat sinks get dirty. Designing a product to fail gracefully is good engineering practice. Apple made the right decision to make the phone go slower instead of crashing. Somewhere out there, there's someone making a 911 call on an iPhone with an old battery.
- close04 3y ago
  The fix had an impact on a core metric of the device: performance. This was the best technical solution to gain longevity, and it was in the interest of users. But doing it under the radar left everyone wondering if it had ulterior motives and let the rumor mill go crazy. Transparency is good even when everything is upsides & roses, and especially important when there are some compromises to be made.
  - rekoil 3y ago
    Very well put.
- luuurker 3y ago
  My iPhone was affected by this. Let me tell you my experience, without "Samsung FUD": - The phone became slow, laggy animations, etc. - I had no idea what was causing the problem. - There was no way to return to an older iOS version or a way to disable the new behaviour. - I went to an Apple store and was told that I probably should get a new phone. I'm sure they had some good intentions, but in practice they degraded my experience too much and profited from new iPhone sales that didn't need to happen. Apple had to be sued first to add a setting to disable this feature and start offering cheap battery replacements (by then I had already moved on). From the implementation of this feature to the way they handled it, it was all Apple. Samsung had nothing to do with my bad experience. Not everyone was affected this much by the change, but some where. And that's a problem.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

bayindirh 3y ago

Apple's know-how in battery management is always a couple of generations ahead of its closest competitor. My 2008 MacBook Pro was able to detect battery problems one year before they started to manifest physically. They did it by adding another controller and an independent firmware to the battery itself, but there was no better tech at that time. M powered MacBooks added auto hold-off (discharge to 80%, keep it there) or postpone charge (because the battery is used too rarely), to the list of tricks they know, and these are just the visible ones to the user.

pkolaczk 3y ago
> discharge to 80%, keep it there Where? AFAIK this is a feature you need a third party app like Aldente for. The OS does not offer any way to control battery charging level. Yes, it tries to be smart and guess when you need full charge and sometimes decides to charge to only 80% but that doesnt work for all users except the ones with very regular routines and there is no manual control.
- bayindirh 3y ago
  I meant the automatic one. My charge cycles are not very predictable, but periodically my Mac says that It'll hold-off charge, and uses battery until 80%, then uses power adapter. Then charges the battery fully later in the day if I'm connected. Sometimes it flat out refuses the charge. Then I disconnect and use the battery until 30% or so. Then charge when convenient (clarification: It'd possibly charge if I hit a certain percentage, but I always disconnected voluntarily, to give a good use to battery. I lasts a day. Why not?). My MacBook Air M1 has 165 cycles in 3 years, at 90% of design capacity. I think this is a very solid management of the battery for a computer used every day literally. My MacBook Pro is at ~85% after 8 years. I don't remember total cycles now.
  - dalore 3y ago
    > Why not? I find running on battery, lots of things are throttled or disabled. CPU is slower for example. That's probably a good reason for why not.

Reason077 3y ago

> "What Apple did was clock down the CPU of iPhones with degraded batteries in order to reduce peak load" It wasn't what Apple was doing that was the problem, it was the fact that they were initially quite secretive about it! People just started noticing their phones slowing down without explanation. Now days iOS tells if your battery no longer supports peak performance, which is the right thing to do. > "Yes, they should have shipped the feature off by default and with a toggle" Oh, it should always have been on by default. Most people would much rather their phone run a little slower than risk random crashes and shutdowns! But iOS should have told you about this from the start.

TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
I wonder how many products have components that downgrade under specific situations and they never explicitly tell the customer - and most customers don’t ask because it’s “complicated tech” they don’t want to know about it.
- venj 3y ago
  I think a lot of laptops do this because their cooling system is too weak for the CPU. The Lenovo Thinkpad t480s comes to my mind: with factory settings, the CPU was unable to reach its advertised boost frequency nor maintain its max non-boost frequency for more than a few minutes. After 5 to 10 minutes, the machine was usually running at 300/400mhz under its advertised clock speed. Undervolting helped a lot but could not fix the issue completely, under clocking was the only solution to maintain a consistent clock speed.
  - sgarland 3y ago
    IMO, at least with x86, there is a point where it simply doesn’t make sense to cram higher clocks into a laptop. The last Intel MBP could be had with an i9, and IME if you left turbo enabled, even at idle the fans were annoyingly loud. If you pushed it, you’d get a quiet jet engine as they struggled to keep temps just below 95 C. It was usually less annoying for me to just disable turbo, and only turn it on if I really needed the boost.

Gloomily3819 3y ago

All the shit was deserved for altering phones without the consent of the consumer. I don't care how good they had in their hearts, get the user's consent first.

luuurker 3y ago

Some devices had a small performance hit, but some had had their clock speeds to less than half, making devices laggy even during normal usage. By itself this is already a problem, but they also decided to not allow you to disable the feature or reverse to an older iOS version. I don't think they informed their Apple store employees either, at least I was told to buy a new phone. They had to be sued first to add a simple setting, ffs! So yeah, I think the criticism is valid and deserved. I'm sure they had good intentions, but the implementation was shit and not only they created issues for some iPhone users, but also profited with new iPhone sales (not me, that was my last iPhone).

mrguyorama 3y ago

Except they only HAD to do that because the battery simply did not have the capability to continue providing enough voltage and/or current by the time it got to about 20% degraded, which for many people could happen in just a few years. This only happened because they were putting stupidly small batteries in their phones to shave another millimeter off of the size that nobody cared about. Either Apple did the proper QA of the battery to understand how it would behave as it got to end of life and knowingly put a battery into a $800 phone that wouldn't be functional before the phone would run out of software updates, or they FAILED to do proper longevity testing on the battery of a $800 phone. It wasn't planned obsolescence when they added that code to keep the older phones working. It WAS planned obsolescence when they put a pitiful and underspecced battery into their $800 phone.