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these performance hungry "improvements" are forcefully introduced to legitimately slow down older devices and force the device refresh across the user base. I
by slt2021 1y ago
these performance hungry "improvements" are forcefully introduced to legitimately slow down older devices and force the device refresh across the user base.
I have been using 8 year old iPhone just fine, but features like these over time will make the experience slower and slower and slower, until I am forced to refresh my iphone
- mikestew 1y agoAnd you base your first sentence on…? Surely not the ol’ “my phone slows down when my battery is failing so that I’ll buy a new phone” canard? To be clear, these are new features that will likely have a setting to turn off. There’s no conspiracy, nothing “forcefully” added for the purpose of driving upgrades. (Ah, ninja edit): There’s not even a guarantee these features will be supported on an eight year old phone. EDIT: wait a minute...your eight year old phone won't even be supported. (EDIT: reworded first paragraph to account for the ninja edit.)
- hshdhdhj4444 1y agoWhat’s the exact canard here? It’s a legitimate concern even assuming good intent. But Apple has had to publicly admit bad intent specifically with their batteries and had to offer people money etc. Strange to criticize people for something Apple publicly admitted they did wrong.
- mikestew 1y agoApple publicly admitted they did wrong. When is the last time a company has admitted wrong-doing? No, Apple admitted to slowing down phones when the battery was shot so it wouldn’t just suddenly shut down. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate
- slt2021 1y agothe solution to old battery is $15 replacement battery, not the $1500 replacement iPhone. which I am doing exactly, but still new iOS version make my phone slower and slower and I cannot even opt out of updates. because some apps are forcing me to use the latest version of iOS (Authentication, Okta 2fa, etc)
- sanswork 1y agoYou can opt out of updates by not using new software. You want the best of both worlds.
- slt2021 1y agothe software forces me to update
- threeseed 1y agoApple provides a battery replacement program. And you can use third parties as well which Apple now officially supports. It is just a lie to say you need a new phone.
- HeatrayEnjoyer 1y agoWe don't need to carry water for greedy billionaires.
- bigyabai 1y agoJWZ was right about us the whole time.
- nerdsniper 1y agoI adamantly believe this was the right call for Apple to make. I frequently switch between Apple and Android phones across different generations. At the time I had an aging flagship Samsung that did NOT do this. My battery indicator would say "18%" and it would last however long that implies...if I didn't do anything remotely CPU-intensive. If I did anything that boosted the CPU, the current draw caused the battery voltage to fall off a cliff and the phone would instantly shut down without warning. The worst part was that during the boot sequence, the CPU ran at full-throttle for a few moments until the power-management components were loaded. So I couldn't restart it. As long as I didn't open a game or YouTube or a wonky website with super awful javascript, I could continue using the phone for another couple hours. But if the phone turned off, it couldn't be turned back on without charging it more ... even though it had "18%" battery left (as determined by voltage, not taking into account increased internal resistance in the battery as it ages). I was envious of iPhone users that got a real fix for this (Apple slowing down the phone when the internal voltage got low). I would have greatly preferred that Samsung had done the same for my phone too.
- ascagnel_ 1y agoI agree, it was the right call to make -- a temporarily-impaired device is always better than a temporarily-failed device, especially when you're talking about something you may need in an emergency situation. That said, Apple _significantly_ erred in not over-communicating what they were doing. At that point, the OS would pop warnings to users if the phone had to thermal throttle, and adding a similar notification that led the user to a FAQ page explaining the battery dynamics wouldn't have been technically hard to do.
- DecentShoes 1y agoThat was fake, tho. They slowed down old iPhones to make you buy a new one. My iPhone 7 wasn't auto shutting down, battery health was good, but they still made it so slow it was unusable the same week they released the iPhone X. There is literally a zero percent chance it was anything to do with batteries. This is not a conspiracy theory. It's an objective fact.
- Klonoar 1y agoRight, yes, your anecdotal experience is totally objective fact.
- sanswork 1y agoThey didn't admit bad intent. They admitted to doing something with good intent(the slowing was to stop crashes with near EOL batteries) but that they weren't transparent about it. I'd much rather us have progress and people with 8 year old phones suffer than ensure that everything continues to run smoothly on any old device for eternity.
- skywhopper 1y agoDisagree. I much preferred my phone running slightly slower to shutting down randomly. Maybe that’s just me.
- DecentShoes 1y agoSo why did they slow down iPhones that weren't shutting down randomly?
- tatersolid 1y agoTo prevent random shutdowns. Apple absolutely effed up by not communicating the specifics well, but that’s corporate policy. Apple docs have always been targeted at the non-technical user and therefore inadequate for others.
- wolpoli 1y agoI would prefer to be told that my battery is weak so I could make a decision on if I want to replace the battery, replace the phone, live with the phone shutting down randomly when battery is low, or continue with a slower phone. That's just me.
- baybal2 1y ago[dead]
- sanswork 1y agoIn the late 90s/early 2000s desktop computing was moving at such a pace that an 8 year old PC was near unusable. Overtime progress slowed and its not unusual to have a decade old desktop now. The problem is thinking that mobile has slowed that much too. Mobile is still progressing quite rapidly so yeah an almost decade old device is going to feel slow. You have what an iPhone 6? 1GB of RAM vs 8GB for modern devices, the first A chip came out 2 generations after yours as has 2% of the power of a current chip so modern chips are likely close to 100x as powerful as your phone. Why should we hold back software to support extreme outliers like you?
- slt2021 1y agoI am totally fine if I stop getting software updates. In general I prefer not to update software either, because every new version brings only bloat
- lurk2 1y ago> Why should we hold back software to support extreme outliers like you? What are apps and mobile sites doing differently today besides loading up unnecessary animations and user tracking? How has user experience improved for those operating on devices fast enough to make up for developer laziness?
- sanswork 1y agoGames are dramatically bigger in scale and graphics quality. I can now do on-device transcription without issue, security improvements at the chip level, HD graphics for video streaming, etc.
- worthless-trash 1y agoRight, but you choose when to play the games right ? You can't choose when to use your OS, and you need to 'update your os' to stay secure.
- slt2021 1y agoif I want to play games, I will buy the latest iPhone. If I want to a smartphone with couple simple primitive apps that just send JSON and call REST APIs in the cloud, I don’t want to be forced to shell out $1500 every couple years
- cosmic_cheese 1y agoI think probably a much bigger problem is app bloat. Devs are usually using very recent if not brand new top end devices to test and develop against which naturally makes several types of performance degradation invisible to them (“works on my machine”). Users on old and/or low end devices on the other hand feel all of those degradations. If we want to take increasing device lifetimes seriously we need to normalize testing and development against slow/old models. Even if such testing is automated, it’d do wonders for keeping bloat at bay.
- dmix 1y agoNo matter what happens in the world someone will blame it on a top down conspiracy decided in some smoke filled back room.
- slt2021 1y agoif conspiracy makes hundreds of billions $$$ then nothing stops people really. like Charlie Munger have said: "Show me the incentives and I will tell you the outcome"
- whynotminot 1y agoI don’t think your overall take is wrong (it’s about money), but maybe the simplicity of it is. Reality is that designers, product managers, engineers — they all wanna build cool things, get promoted, make money etc. You don’t do that by shipping plain designs, no matter how tried and true. The pressure to create something new and interesting is ever present. And look we have these powerful Apple silicon chips that can capably render these neat effects. So no I don’t think it’s a shadowy conspiracy to come after your iPhone 8. Just the regular pressure of everyday men and women to build new and interesting things that will bring success.
- DecentShoes 1y agoBut this one is true. Apple obviously puts out slowdown updates right as they release a new phone. They made my iPhone 7 unusable the same week they released the iPhone X.
- inquirerGeneral 1y ago[dead]
- dkarl 1y agoMore likely it's a result of pressure to ship highly visible "improvements," combined with a lack of ideas that could improve the experience in a meaningful way. What do you do in that situation? Ship an obvious UI update that wouldn't have performed on the last gen hardware.
- Someone 1y agoI haven’t used the new UI, so don’t assume this to be an endorsement of it, but even if you have good ideas about UI improvements and implement them, there still is pressure to make the UI look different because that, at a glance, shows users that they get something new. And yes, “looking different” doesn’t have to mean “requires faster hardware”, but picking something that requires faster hardware makes it less likely that you will be accused of being a copy-cat of some other product’s UI.