3 ms·

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.
        luuurker 3y ago
        There was a communication problem, but the main problem was the slow iPhones. I bought the phone and Apple then made it slow and laggy. I wouldn't be here complaining if they added a setting to disable the throttling (which I probably didn't yet need at the time as the phone had never shutdown before the update).
- Angostura 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 I'm an avid reader of pop-ups and release notes. They didn't tell people.
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.

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.
      - luuurker 3y ago
        There was a communication problem, but the main problem was the slow iPhones. I bought the phone and Apple then made it slow and laggy. I wouldn't be here complaining if they added a setting to disable the throttling (which I probably didn't yet need at the time as the phone had never shutdown before the update).
Angostura 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 I'm an avid reader of pop-ups and release notes. They didn't tell people.

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.