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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 f

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.
      - Dylan16807 2y ago
        > Did it, though? Did it break? Yes. I'm counting super slowdown as breaking. Was it unrelated to updates? I can't be 100% sure but your description of what happened sounds like it was unrelated to updates. Is that what you're asking? I'm confused.
        genewitch 2y ago
        So unrelated to updates. The tablet just slowed down enough to be unusable while plugged in. sure is a coincidence that this mirrors other people's experiences. i still have the nexus. I can mail it to you and you can then diagnose it and be 100% certain that it wasn't updates. Then you can be correct on the internet. or, here, i am wrong. It wasn't updates. It was crap "google" hardware and planned obsolescence. Or stray gamma rays. You're right!
        Dylan16807 2y ago
        I don't understand why you're acting like a hardware failure is a ridiculous idea. At least I think you are? You're being so hostile out of nowhere that it makes your comments hard to follow.
        genewitch 2y ago
        what i'm being is sarcastic in the face of someone who refuses to step back from my single tablet to everyone else in this thread mentioning the same thing and like i said, you're welcome to my tablet, i'll mail it to you, then you can be certain you are correct.
        Dylan16807 2y ago
        You made a post that was entirely about your tablet. But when I respond with a post that's also about your tablet in particular, that makes me unreasonable? And this idea that I'm super insisting on being right about your tablet... you pulled that out of nowhere. Do you do this any time someone disagrees with you?
  - alistairSH 2y ago
    But the OP talking about an iPhone? I’m sure some devices get bricked (for real) by updates. The iPhone slowdown wasn’t that (though it still should have been optional and/or well advertised)
    - genewitch 2y ago
      the term of art is "Planned Obsolescence" and manufacturers have been designing stuff this way since the 80s, around when credit cards were introduced. I'm sure these two things are unrelated.
  - vel0city 2y ago
    The flash memory on the Nexus tablet was pretty poor quality. Like many Android devices of the era, eventually you get higher and higher rates of read failures which makes the error correction try again and again to get a good read massively reducing disk performance. It's hardware falling apart. I've had several Android devices from several manufacturers experience the same issues whether or not they got updates.
    - genewitch 2y ago
      Is there some way i can tell if this is the issue, rather than a software issue? root it and install a terminal emulator and start looking in /proc? was the flash quality poor on purpose? that's planned obsolescence, too.
- ryao 2y ago
  The update was intended to keep power draw within what the battery could sustain, since the battery’s peak power output drops as it ages.
bigtimesink 2y ago
I had one of these phones that would crash under load and the update fixed it. The technical fix was sound. Batteries can't supply full power as they age, and the CPU needs high power when it runs faster. It's an annoying reality of battery powered devices that looks like a conspiracy to boost sales.
- brokenmachine 2y ago
  Imagine a world with replaceable batteries.
  - Syonyk 2y ago
    Imagine the tradeoffs, though. A "user-serviceable battery," by requirements, is going to be a hard shell plastic sort of thing - which means a decent fraction of the "total battery space" is a protective layer, not active cell components - so some significantly reduced capacity compared to having a "non-replaceable" battery ("slightly more difficult to replace"). You also end up having to devote space to whatever mechanisms keep the rear shell in place, and may have a harder time waterproofing it as a result (which seems to be standard anymore - the number of people I see at the gym using their phones in the hot tub or sauna is boggling). Batteries, under light use of phones not kept in pockets, last a very long time - 3-5 years isn't unreasonable, and many will last longer. Batteries, under heavy use of a phone kept in a pocket and run hard, will still typically last 1.5-2 years. So in exchange for "slightly more inconvenience less than annually," you get a good bit more capacity and runtime. Apple, in general, hasn't made their batteries nonsensically hard to replace. They've used the "pull tab sticky" sort of thing for some while, which is far nicer than "glue the whole thing down," and their newer devices are using some sort of electrically released magic (apply 9V to the adhesive, battery pops out). There's no such thing as a free lunch.
    - rpcope1 2y ago
      That's a whole lot of words to just carry water for a bunch of anti-user stuff Apple continues to inflict on their Stockholm Syndrome afflicted customers. The whole water proofing thing is dumb--why is it that every digital watch I've ever owned is simultaneously unbelievably easier to service and also manages to survive being under water way better than any phone I've seen, Apple or otherwise? It's like gasket technology doesn't exist. You could have your shiny metal back and just have it secured with a handful of machine screws. And as far as their batteries not being a pain, they're way harder than a Motorola, for example, and again frankly needlessly so. It's so weird that we just come to expect to be screwed on these phones, when if it was anything else, especially the sort of devices that are more commercially focused than consumer, you'd demand better.
crazygringo 2y ago
> whether they actually did it for the reason of trying to save failing batteries It did for me. I had a phone that would suddenly die whenever I used it for anything too intensive, especially whenever the battery was under 40%. The update fixed it.
- InvertedRhodium 2y ago
  The update mitigated it, it didn’t fix it. Being able to replace the battery would be an actual solution.
  - pzo 2y ago
    Even that was handled badly. In my case when I went to authorized shop in central London. The guy did some test and said everything is ok and I didn't quality to change of battery (I tested using coconutBattery.app battery health was below 80% and I still was on warranty). I asked for battery replacement and pay for it out of my pocket and he also said he cannot do it because they are not allowed to change battery if their tooling said everything is ok. Had to buy 3rd party battery and replace myself.
    - nicoburns 2y ago
      For these kind of things (common repairs that are easy (for a specialist with the right tooling) to do), you're often better going to the cheap local phone repair place rather than the official store.
    - josephg 2y ago
      Heh. Here in Australia, after that debacle Apple offered cheap battery replacements to anyone who wanted one for a year. I took my 3yr old iPhone 6S in and had them replace the battery. After I got it back, GPS stopped working. So I took it back in and they replaced the whole phone free of charge with a new (well factory refurbished) phone. It was annoying coming and going to the Apple Store. But hey - replacing my 3yr old phone with a new refurb for $30? That was a great deal.
  - 2y ago
eastbound 2y ago
Apple may slow down iPhones just because they keep adding features and layers to iOS architecture. Good architecture is removing old code, but most software tenda to be write-only.
vladvasiliu 2y ago
Anecdotally, the iPhone in my post did have its battery wear down to the point that it had the "slowdown" thing enabled (can't recall what it was actually called). It was somewhat slower, but I wouldn't call it unusable. Maybe it depends on what people actually do with the phone. Google Maps, web browsing and such didn't seem to be that different. I then went ahead and disabled that thing and, sure enough, it started randomly crashing when the battery wasn't full. I then went in and changed the battery for the same price as my previous Samsung's battery would have cost (plus the annoying fact of having to schedule the visit). It did get somewhat faster (not sure whether placebo or not) for another 2-3 years until the battery started swelling and I replaced the phone (I need it to be relatively waterproof, since I use it often as a GPS on my motorbike). I do concede that I did find it weird and user hostile that, once you'd disable the "protection" mode, you wouldn't be able to turn it back on. Just like I find it odd that that specific model couldn't do the "trickle charge overnight" thing. And that my current iphone14 pro can't be told to stop charging at 80%, whereas newer models can.
- ryao 2y ago
  It becomes worse as the battery continues to degrade.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
noirscape 2y ago
I think it's specifically a combination of 2 things for Apple, one of which Apple will absolutely never admit to, but it's something that I've definitely noticed back when I still got Apple devices. I was into jailbreaking at the time and that often meant deliberately not upgrading the main OS, which often made my phone last much longer compared to others of the same model who were running the last version of iOS. The first is that Apple forbids you from downgrading the iPhone to a lower firmware. They're not the only device maker that does this, but this is mostly unique in the realm of "personal computing devices" - I can downgrade most Android phones to a prior Android version through fastboot if I wanted to and usually the only thing blocking you from installing older Windows versions is a lack of driver support for them (same deal with Linux distros). Even macOS at least in the past used to make sure that if you booted from the Recovery partition, it'd contain the installer for the version of macOS you got with the computer. Apple claims it's in name of security, which is probably true (although I do believe that a company like Apple should just maintain at least the last two major versions of it's software at a bare minimum and let users freely move between every version they've ever released - voided warranty is acceptable for this), but it leads into the next point. Which is that I suspect Apple deliberately "overspecs" the burden of running basic iOS with newer devices. Basically, the iPhone 4 (yes I'm going back this far) last supported iOS 7.1.2, but if you read reports at the time, the actual most performant version of the phone at the time was iOS 6, not iOS 7, which was mostly characterized as being a slow mess on iPhone 4's that Apple only barely patched up to not be device crippling. I've from personal experience seen this pattern repeated over and over until I just switched to Android (with the main reason for doing so being the fact that Apple killed a bunch of older phone games I was playing by killing 32bit support in iOS). By doing this, they can essentially force people to move to new devices, simply by making the last supported version borderline unusable for regular use. "Batterygate" was essentially the main consequence of this practice, but it was a symptom coming from Apple's support practices, not the cause. It's just something they boiled the frog with (because after the iphone 4, it stopped being reported, although I can personally attest to all their devices that hit EOL in the years afterwards having the exact same issue.)
chii 2y ago
> The only debate point is whether they actually did it for the reason of trying to save failing batteries it's not a debate. The option should be given to the user to select - if they want batteries to not fail (as claimed), they can opt in.

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.
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      > Did it, though? Did it break? Yes. I'm counting super slowdown as breaking. Was it unrelated to updates? I can't be 100% sure but your description of what happened sounds like it was unrelated to updates. Is that what you're asking? I'm confused.
      - genewitch 2y ago
        So unrelated to updates. The tablet just slowed down enough to be unusable while plugged in. sure is a coincidence that this mirrors other people's experiences. i still have the nexus. I can mail it to you and you can then diagnose it and be 100% certain that it wasn't updates. Then you can be correct on the internet. or, here, i am wrong. It wasn't updates. It was crap "google" hardware and planned obsolescence. Or stray gamma rays. You're right!
        Dylan16807 2y ago
        I don't understand why you're acting like a hardware failure is a ridiculous idea. At least I think you are? You're being so hostile out of nowhere that it makes your comments hard to follow.
        genewitch 2y ago
        what i'm being is sarcastic in the face of someone who refuses to step back from my single tablet to everyone else in this thread mentioning the same thing and like i said, you're welcome to my tablet, i'll mail it to you, then you can be certain you are correct.
        Dylan16807 2y ago
        You made a post that was entirely about your tablet. But when I respond with a post that's also about your tablet in particular, that makes me unreasonable? And this idea that I'm super insisting on being right about your tablet... you pulled that out of nowhere. Do you do this any time someone disagrees with you?
- alistairSH 2y ago
  But the OP talking about an iPhone? I’m sure some devices get bricked (for real) by updates. The iPhone slowdown wasn’t that (though it still should have been optional and/or well advertised)
  - genewitch 2y ago
    the term of art is "Planned Obsolescence" and manufacturers have been designing stuff this way since the 80s, around when credit cards were introduced. I'm sure these two things are unrelated.
- vel0city 2y ago
  The flash memory on the Nexus tablet was pretty poor quality. Like many Android devices of the era, eventually you get higher and higher rates of read failures which makes the error correction try again and again to get a good read massively reducing disk performance. It's hardware falling apart. I've had several Android devices from several manufacturers experience the same issues whether or not they got updates.
  - genewitch 2y ago
    Is there some way i can tell if this is the issue, rather than a software issue? root it and install a terminal emulator and start looking in /proc? was the flash quality poor on purpose? that's planned obsolescence, too.
ryao 2y ago
The update was intended to keep power draw within what the battery could sustain, since the battery’s peak power output drops as it ages.

bigtimesink 2y ago

I had one of these phones that would crash under load and the update fixed it. The technical fix was sound. Batteries can't supply full power as they age, and the CPU needs high power when it runs faster. It's an annoying reality of battery powered devices that looks like a conspiracy to boost sales.

brokenmachine 2y ago
Imagine a world with replaceable batteries.
- Syonyk 2y ago
  Imagine the tradeoffs, though. A "user-serviceable battery," by requirements, is going to be a hard shell plastic sort of thing - which means a decent fraction of the "total battery space" is a protective layer, not active cell components - so some significantly reduced capacity compared to having a "non-replaceable" battery ("slightly more difficult to replace"). You also end up having to devote space to whatever mechanisms keep the rear shell in place, and may have a harder time waterproofing it as a result (which seems to be standard anymore - the number of people I see at the gym using their phones in the hot tub or sauna is boggling). Batteries, under light use of phones not kept in pockets, last a very long time - 3-5 years isn't unreasonable, and many will last longer. Batteries, under heavy use of a phone kept in a pocket and run hard, will still typically last 1.5-2 years. So in exchange for "slightly more inconvenience less than annually," you get a good bit more capacity and runtime. Apple, in general, hasn't made their batteries nonsensically hard to replace. They've used the "pull tab sticky" sort of thing for some while, which is far nicer than "glue the whole thing down," and their newer devices are using some sort of electrically released magic (apply 9V to the adhesive, battery pops out). There's no such thing as a free lunch.
  - rpcope1 2y ago
    That's a whole lot of words to just carry water for a bunch of anti-user stuff Apple continues to inflict on their Stockholm Syndrome afflicted customers. The whole water proofing thing is dumb--why is it that every digital watch I've ever owned is simultaneously unbelievably easier to service and also manages to survive being under water way better than any phone I've seen, Apple or otherwise? It's like gasket technology doesn't exist. You could have your shiny metal back and just have it secured with a handful of machine screws. And as far as their batteries not being a pain, they're way harder than a Motorola, for example, and again frankly needlessly so. It's so weird that we just come to expect to be screwed on these phones, when if it was anything else, especially the sort of devices that are more commercially focused than consumer, you'd demand better.

crazygringo 2y ago

> whether they actually did it for the reason of trying to save failing batteries It did for me. I had a phone that would suddenly die whenever I used it for anything too intensive, especially whenever the battery was under 40%. The update fixed it.

InvertedRhodium 2y ago
The update mitigated it, it didn’t fix it. Being able to replace the battery would be an actual solution.
- pzo 2y ago
  Even that was handled badly. In my case when I went to authorized shop in central London. The guy did some test and said everything is ok and I didn't quality to change of battery (I tested using coconutBattery.app battery health was below 80% and I still was on warranty). I asked for battery replacement and pay for it out of my pocket and he also said he cannot do it because they are not allowed to change battery if their tooling said everything is ok. Had to buy 3rd party battery and replace myself.
  - nicoburns 2y ago
    For these kind of things (common repairs that are easy (for a specialist with the right tooling) to do), you're often better going to the cheap local phone repair place rather than the official store.
  - josephg 2y ago
    Heh. Here in Australia, after that debacle Apple offered cheap battery replacements to anyone who wanted one for a year. I took my 3yr old iPhone 6S in and had them replace the battery. After I got it back, GPS stopped working. So I took it back in and they replaced the whole phone free of charge with a new (well factory refurbished) phone. It was annoying coming and going to the Apple Store. But hey - replacing my 3yr old phone with a new refurb for $30? That was a great deal.
- 2y ago

eastbound 2y ago

Apple may slow down iPhones just because they keep adding features and layers to iOS architecture. Good architecture is removing old code, but most software tenda to be write-only.

vladvasiliu 2y ago

Anecdotally, the iPhone in my post did have its battery wear down to the point that it had the "slowdown" thing enabled (can't recall what it was actually called). It was somewhat slower, but I wouldn't call it unusable. Maybe it depends on what people actually do with the phone. Google Maps, web browsing and such didn't seem to be that different. I then went ahead and disabled that thing and, sure enough, it started randomly crashing when the battery wasn't full. I then went in and changed the battery for the same price as my previous Samsung's battery would have cost (plus the annoying fact of having to schedule the visit). It did get somewhat faster (not sure whether placebo or not) for another 2-3 years until the battery started swelling and I replaced the phone (I need it to be relatively waterproof, since I use it often as a GPS on my motorbike). I do concede that I did find it weird and user hostile that, once you'd disable the "protection" mode, you wouldn't be able to turn it back on. Just like I find it odd that that specific model couldn't do the "trickle charge overnight" thing. And that my current iphone14 pro can't be told to stop charging at 80%, whereas newer models can.

ryao 2y ago
It becomes worse as the battery continues to degrade.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

noirscape 2y ago

I think it's specifically a combination of 2 things for Apple, one of which Apple will absolutely never admit to, but it's something that I've definitely noticed back when I still got Apple devices. I was into jailbreaking at the time and that often meant deliberately not upgrading the main OS, which often made my phone last much longer compared to others of the same model who were running the last version of iOS. The first is that Apple forbids you from downgrading the iPhone to a lower firmware. They're not the only device maker that does this, but this is mostly unique in the realm of "personal computing devices" - I can downgrade most Android phones to a prior Android version through fastboot if I wanted to and usually the only thing blocking you from installing older Windows versions is a lack of driver support for them (same deal with Linux distros). Even macOS at least in the past used to make sure that if you booted from the Recovery partition, it'd contain the installer for the version of macOS you got with the computer. Apple claims it's in name of security, which is probably true (although I do believe that a company like Apple should just maintain at least the last two major versions of it's software at a bare minimum and let users freely move between every version they've ever released - voided warranty is acceptable for this), but it leads into the next point. Which is that I suspect Apple deliberately "overspecs" the burden of running basic iOS with newer devices. Basically, the iPhone 4 (yes I'm going back this far) last supported iOS 7.1.2, but if you read reports at the time, the actual most performant version of the phone at the time was iOS 6, not iOS 7, which was mostly characterized as being a slow mess on iPhone 4's that Apple only barely patched up to not be device crippling. I've from personal experience seen this pattern repeated over and over until I just switched to Android (with the main reason for doing so being the fact that Apple killed a bunch of older phone games I was playing by killing 32bit support in iOS). By doing this, they can essentially force people to move to new devices, simply by making the last supported version borderline unusable for regular use. "Batterygate" was essentially the main consequence of this practice, but it was a symptom coming from Apple's support practices, not the cause. It's just something they boiled the frog with (because after the iphone 4, it stopped being reported, although I can personally attest to all their devices that hit EOL in the years afterwards having the exact same issue.)

chii 2y ago

> The only debate point is whether they actually did it for the reason of trying to save failing batteries it's not a debate. The option should be given to the user to select - if they want batteries to not fail (as claimed), they can opt in.