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I think it’s right to call for receipts here. It’s a common refrain that older devices getting updated causes performance to slow to a crawl but exceedingly rar

I think it’s right to call for receipts here. It’s a common refrain that older devices getting updated causes performance to slow to a crawl but exceedingly rare that someone is actually able to demonstrate with data that it was directly tied to an update. That’s not to say it doesn’t happen, but I treat any claim like that with a good deal of skepticism without anything other than anecdata

brokenmachine 2y ago
Apple admitted purposefully slowing down older devices with updates. They said it was to prolong battery life.
- Syonyk 2y ago
  It was more to prevent unexpected shutdowns. Which, I'll add, were a problem with Android devices at the time, and the Nexus 5, in particular, had three battery OEMs, one of which would only last a year before being unable to run the device in high demand situations (say, "taking a picture with the flash"). As lithium batteries age, their internal resistance goes up - you can model a battery as a voltage source and a series resistor accurately enough. Over time, that resistance goes up, which means, for a given current, you end up with less voltage "at the output." Most power supplies will compensate by pulling more current to provide the needed power, which will drop the voltage more until you slam into the low voltage protection circuitry that cuts power. The Nexus 5s are the ones I'm most familiar with, and they absolutely had this problem with one of the battery OEMs (the only way to tell which OEM you had was to pull the battery out, they were labeled on the back). The typical symptom was, "The phone shuts down when you try to take a picture," because camera modules are power hungry, the CPU was spinning hard to keep up with rendering the view from the camera (and possibly doing some pre/post frame capture to find the best frame, I don't recall when that showed up), and the flash pulls a LOT of current, very briefly. So everything would simply shut down when you hit the button to take the picture. Apple decided to attempt to limit this problem, and they locked out the highest tiers of CPU performance (which are the most power hungry), if the device was having brownout issues. It's a reasonable enough strategy. Where they failed (IMO) was in not alerting the users that it was happening, or that it was a battery health issue. The later iterations of it, where it tracks battery health, and will tell you if your battery is going bad and needs replacement, are what they should have rolled out, and didn't. My guess is that they didn't think it was going to be a major issue for many devices, so it was just a CYA sort of thing that would prevent shutdowns. Unfortunately, that also happened right around the same time that US carriers started dropping the "New phone every 2 years on contract!" thing, and so the iPhones of that era started being used rather substantially longer than the previously-expected 2 years, and, Apple, so drama for clicks. Had they just gone about telling users, "Hey, it looks like your battery is getting weak, would you like to schedule a replacement? Otherwise, we've limited performance slightly to prevent shutdowns." - I think it would have been fine. And they did settle on that eventually. It just took a few iterations.
  - cosmic_cheese 2y ago
    I experienced those shutdowns several years before that update was released when I was using an old worn out iPhone 4. Several times it died on me in the middle of an important call at 30-40% battery. I would’ve absolutely preferred it slowing itself down if it would’ve prevented that.
    - CamperBob2 2y ago
      If only it had occurred to Apple to ASK people what they wanted the phone to do under these conditions. What a concept!
      - cosmic_cheese 2y ago
        It wouldn’t have hurt to include a setting, but I think turning it on by default for devices under a certain threshold of battery health at least was the right call, both because of non-technical users who don’t understand it and wouldn’t turn it on or those who would leave it off and then attribute the crashes to unrelated things (“they put crashes in my phone to force me to buy a new one!”)
        CamperBob2 2y ago
        There was no need for anyone to guess what was happening when their phone crashed, and there was no need for any default behavior at all. Every time I let my battery SoC go below a certain percentage -- 5% or 10% -- a message pops up asking if I'd like to switch to low-power mode to extend the remaining charge. I appreciate that. Nobody ever objected to that. No lawsuits were filed, no outrage was farmed on Facebook, no hit pieces were published by Bloomberg. So why in the world didn't Apple do something similar following a crash? The dialog box practically writes itself. "Sorry! Your iPhone has just recovered from an oopsie-poopsie caused by a tired battery. Please choose an option: <Continue operating normally for as long as possible> <Reduce performance to extend battery life> <Schedule an appointment at your nearest Genius Bar to install a new battery (and check out the new iPhones!)>" It's utterly inexplicable the way they handled this. Someone should have been fired. But then we say that a lot about Apple around here, and it never seems to happen.
- behnamoh 2y ago
  > They said it was to prolong battery life. it's like google saying they removed uBlock because their own approach is better for performance and the end user.
jancsika 2y ago
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51413724 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51413724 Notice that Apple admits it did this, for the date that makes sense for what the user is claiming. The only debate point is whether they actually did it for the reason of trying to save failing batteries, or whether that was a smokescreen for incentivizing users to buy a new device. Given the evidence, I think it's wrong to call for receipts here.
- alistairSH 2y ago
  Slowed down to preserve battery is equal to “made unusable”? It was a pretty lame thing to do, but the phone still worked.
  - genewitch 2y ago
    I have a completely unusable nexus tablet. It sat with 50% charge for years, I tried to boot it up and it took minutes to do anything. So I flashed it with the latest image available, and it took minutes to do anything. When I put it up, it was fine. Compare this to an EeePC, where it happily runs a web browser in Gentoo, snappy. The EeePC is two or three years older, and cost half as much as the nexus.
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      It sounds like you're saying the nexus broke for reasons unrelated to updates?
      - genewitch 2y ago
        Did it, though? There was no reason for it to slow down. I used it plugged in to a beefy supply. If i said "i put it up in a cabinet because trying to watch youtube on it was becoming a hassle" would that change anything? I put it up for a reason, but i can't remember why. It wasn't because i bought another tablet, because i never have.
        2y ago
josephg 2y ago
I had a 2016 Intel MacBook Pro with integrated graphics. It was one of the first Apple laptops with a Retina display. Well. That machine got progressively slower with each major release of macOS. The graphics performance degraded most clearly. If you did the gesture to show the desktop, the animation was noticeably janky - like maybe 20fps or so. Maybe Apple was increasingly using less efficient / more complex compositing or something with each new macOS version and the little Intel integrated graphics chip couldn’t keep up. I almost forgot how bad it was - but then just before I sold it, I booted into recovery mode to wipe & reinstall the original OS. Turns out the recovery partition was still running whatever version of the OS that the machine shipped with - and holy cow performance was night and day. I’d almost thought I was making it up - but moving windows around was so delightfully snappy again! I don’t think it was malicious at all on Apple’s side. I think they just didn’t care enough to make sure each new version of macOS didn’t degrade performance. I’m sure their engineers were excited to add visual flourishes using metal - even if older machines struggled to render them. In retrospect I could have screen recording it or something for proof but I didn’t bother. I was getting rid of the machine anyway. Maybe I should have? But the difference was very real and very obvious. (And no, I didn’t have any 3rd party software clogging up my machine. The only thing that would routinely peg my cpu was - for no reason - photoanalysisd and the spotlight indexer. Both part of macOS itself.)

brokenmachine 2y ago

Apple admitted purposefully slowing down older devices with updates. They said it was to prolong battery life.

Syonyk 2y ago
It was more to prevent unexpected shutdowns. Which, I'll add, were a problem with Android devices at the time, and the Nexus 5, in particular, had three battery OEMs, one of which would only last a year before being unable to run the device in high demand situations (say, "taking a picture with the flash"). As lithium batteries age, their internal resistance goes up - you can model a battery as a voltage source and a series resistor accurately enough. Over time, that resistance goes up, which means, for a given current, you end up with less voltage "at the output." Most power supplies will compensate by pulling more current to provide the needed power, which will drop the voltage more until you slam into the low voltage protection circuitry that cuts power. The Nexus 5s are the ones I'm most familiar with, and they absolutely had this problem with one of the battery OEMs (the only way to tell which OEM you had was to pull the battery out, they were labeled on the back). The typical symptom was, "The phone shuts down when you try to take a picture," because camera modules are power hungry, the CPU was spinning hard to keep up with rendering the view from the camera (and possibly doing some pre/post frame capture to find the best frame, I don't recall when that showed up), and the flash pulls a LOT of current, very briefly. So everything would simply shut down when you hit the button to take the picture. Apple decided to attempt to limit this problem, and they locked out the highest tiers of CPU performance (which are the most power hungry), if the device was having brownout issues. It's a reasonable enough strategy. Where they failed (IMO) was in not alerting the users that it was happening, or that it was a battery health issue. The later iterations of it, where it tracks battery health, and will tell you if your battery is going bad and needs replacement, are what they should have rolled out, and didn't. My guess is that they didn't think it was going to be a major issue for many devices, so it was just a CYA sort of thing that would prevent shutdowns. Unfortunately, that also happened right around the same time that US carriers started dropping the "New phone every 2 years on contract!" thing, and so the iPhones of that era started being used rather substantially longer than the previously-expected 2 years, and, Apple, so drama for clicks. Had they just gone about telling users, "Hey, it looks like your battery is getting weak, would you like to schedule a replacement? Otherwise, we've limited performance slightly to prevent shutdowns." - I think it would have been fine. And they did settle on that eventually. It just took a few iterations.
- cosmic_cheese 2y ago
  I experienced those shutdowns several years before that update was released when I was using an old worn out iPhone 4. Several times it died on me in the middle of an important call at 30-40% battery. I would’ve absolutely preferred it slowing itself down if it would’ve prevented that.
  - CamperBob2 2y ago
    If only it had occurred to Apple to ASK people what they wanted the phone to do under these conditions. What a concept!
    - cosmic_cheese 2y ago
      It wouldn’t have hurt to include a setting, but I think turning it on by default for devices under a certain threshold of battery health at least was the right call, both because of non-technical users who don’t understand it and wouldn’t turn it on or those who would leave it off and then attribute the crashes to unrelated things (“they put crashes in my phone to force me to buy a new one!”)
      - CamperBob2 2y ago
        There was no need for anyone to guess what was happening when their phone crashed, and there was no need for any default behavior at all. Every time I let my battery SoC go below a certain percentage -- 5% or 10% -- a message pops up asking if I'd like to switch to low-power mode to extend the remaining charge. I appreciate that. Nobody ever objected to that. No lawsuits were filed, no outrage was farmed on Facebook, no hit pieces were published by Bloomberg. So why in the world didn't Apple do something similar following a crash? The dialog box practically writes itself. "Sorry! Your iPhone has just recovered from an oopsie-poopsie caused by a tired battery. Please choose an option: <Continue operating normally for as long as possible> <Reduce performance to extend battery life> <Schedule an appointment at your nearest Genius Bar to install a new battery (and check out the new iPhones!)>" It's utterly inexplicable the way they handled this. Someone should have been fired. But then we say that a lot about Apple around here, and it never seems to happen.
behnamoh 2y ago
> They said it was to prolong battery life. it's like google saying they removed uBlock because their own approach is better for performance and the end user.

jancsika 2y ago

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51413724 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51413724 Notice that Apple admits it did this, for the date that makes sense for what the user is claiming. The only debate point is whether they actually did it for the reason of trying to save failing batteries, or whether that was a smokescreen for incentivizing users to buy a new device. Given the evidence, I think it's wrong to call for receipts here.

alistairSH 2y ago
Slowed down to preserve battery is equal to “made unusable”? It was a pretty lame thing to do, but the phone still worked.
- genewitch 2y ago
  I have a completely unusable nexus tablet. It sat with 50% charge for years, I tried to boot it up and it took minutes to do anything. So I flashed it with the latest image available, and it took minutes to do anything. When I put it up, it was fine. Compare this to an EeePC, where it happily runs a web browser in Gentoo, snappy. The EeePC is two or three years older, and cost half as much as the nexus.
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    It sounds like you're saying the nexus broke for reasons unrelated to updates?
    - genewitch 2y ago
      Did it, though? There was no reason for it to slow down. I used it plugged in to a beefy supply. If i said "i put it up in a cabinet because trying to watch youtube on it was becoming a hassle" would that change anything? I put it up for a reason, but i can't remember why. It wasn't because i bought another tablet, because i never have.
      - 2y ago

josephg 2y ago

I had a 2016 Intel MacBook Pro with integrated graphics. It was one of the first Apple laptops with a Retina display. Well. That machine got progressively slower with each major release of macOS. The graphics performance degraded most clearly. If you did the gesture to show the desktop, the animation was noticeably janky - like maybe 20fps or so. Maybe Apple was increasingly using less efficient / more complex compositing or something with each new macOS version and the little Intel integrated graphics chip couldn’t keep up. I almost forgot how bad it was - but then just before I sold it, I booted into recovery mode to wipe & reinstall the original OS. Turns out the recovery partition was still running whatever version of the OS that the machine shipped with - and holy cow performance was night and day. I’d almost thought I was making it up - but moving windows around was so delightfully snappy again! I don’t think it was malicious at all on Apple’s side. I think they just didn’t care enough to make sure each new version of macOS didn’t degrade performance. I’m sure their engineers were excited to add visual flourishes using metal - even if older machines struggled to render them. In retrospect I could have screen recording it or something for proof but I didn’t bother. I was getting rid of the machine anyway. Maybe I should have? But the difference was very real and very obvious. (And no, I didn’t have any 3rd party software clogging up my machine. The only thing that would routinely peg my cpu was - for no reason - photoanalysisd and the spotlight indexer. Both part of macOS itself.)