I don't think Screen on Time is the concern (though I admit that article isn't extremely clear). Given that devices were shutting down at 40% capacity I think it was more of a brown-out condition, where the device shut down despite having more energy left in the battery.
Given:
1. Battery voltage decreases as charge decreases.
2. Battery voltage sags as current draw increases, due to internal resistance.
3. Internal resistance increases with battery wear.
4. If battery voltage drops too low the phone will turn off.
a moment of high current draw could cause a device to suddenly shut down. Since this issue was endemic to 6S devices, perhaps some unusually large number of those batteries had unusually high internal resistance due to wear.
If this were the case the fix would be to reduce peak power draw and thus peak performance. This change would be especially evident in geekbench, but could also affect regular usage since mobile devices typically try to alternate (sleep) -> (high performance) -> (sleep).
There aren’t only two solutions to this problem.
(Technically you can still replace the iPhone battery, unfortunately it isn’t trivial like in the bad old days when phones didn’t have high def touch screens.)
So I’d argue it’s both a solution and a tradeoff.
1. Allow performance to degrade
2. Allow longevity to degrade
3. Allow the battery to be replaced
4. Some revolutionary battery technology that doesn't degrade??
What solutions are you thinking of?
So if you did that and instead of a battery combined it with a (relatively large) capacitor (or some sort of amazing spring) you could have the iPhone equivalent of a shake and shine flashlight. (One bonus being that there would be absolutely no holes, as it would not be possible to charge it via a wall outlet).
It would be completely impractical, but there wouldn't be a battery, so the battery wouldn't degrade. The alternative storage mechanism might degrade, and who knows what all of the shaking would do to the delicate electronics, likely nothing good.
Anyway, I think it'll catch on. I look forward to watching young people on the train shake their iPhone vigorously before making a silly face and taking a picture of themselves in 10 years time.
Wrong company, pal. Apple historically decides for the user. Heck, they still do it with their App Store. Often that may go right, but not always.
Imagine that some cars allow the gas tank to be changed by the user. But this one doesn't.
Imagine the company that makes the car never mentions the shrinkage or the gradual reduction in top speed, and has no program or system that allows you to fix this - beyond buying a newer car.
To try to salvage your analogy, I'll put forth an anecdote. Last year I restored my deceased father's 1988 Bronco II. One of the issues it had was low fuel pressure, which I narrowed down to the in-tank fuel pump (the Bronco was over-engineered and had two pumps, one in the tank and one on the frame). It wasn't able to push fuel fast enough for the engine to run at top performance. Sound familiar? So I had two choices, replace it myself or take it to a shop, kind of like how you can attempt to replace your phone's battery if you know what you're doing, or take it to a repair shop and let a pro do it for a fee. I'm a competent shadetree mechanic, so I did it myself and saved a few hundred dollars, and it is back to normal operation again.
I've bought dozens of Android replacement batteries and the only batteries worth the cost of shipping were actual real OEM ones. And those always cost >$60. Knockoffs would start out decent and then die within a few weeks to months.
Apple's approach gets my vote. You get the upside of built-in battery and the peace of mind when you do need a replacement.
[Just to balance that, let me be clear that Apple's choice with regard to crippling my phone pisses me off. I just replaced an iPhone 6 that felt painfully slow and now I know why (I had tested the battery and it was at 75% -- I didn't realize replacing it would speed up the phone).]
The easiness of replacing the battery has gone up with iPhone 7/8/X compared to iPhone 6. You can verify this on iFixit guides. The iPhone 6 is _relatively_ easy to replace because you don't need say a heatgun. You do need some special screwdrivers which you gotta buy. You can, on iFixit. I just bought a whole kit (on sale during Black Friday).
> I've bought dozens of Android replacement batteries and the only batteries worth the cost of shipping were actual real OEM ones. And those always cost >$60.
20 EUR for mine: https://shop.fairphone.com/en/spare-parts/fairphone-2-batter...
Replacing any parts on my phone is very easy. Only thing is that the main module with CPU board etc is ~300 EUR.
It really is DIY. There are thousands of guide that can be followed successfully.
Now, I completely agree with the design decisions of the iPhone. The completely sealed body is great for water resistance and having the battery replaced is still pretty cheap, especially if you use (I usually just let someone replace with a 3rd party battery for cheap, as this usually takes place after warranty expired).
The battery needs to have extra space (or bad things will happen) so it effectively has to be fixed on one side inside the body. Gluing it is a pretty cheap solution to that problem.
My iPhone 5 also did that, after a while, it worsened so much that the screen colors became affected. I took it to an apple store, paid the fee and had them replace the battery.
IMHO a swollen battery is a huge risk, and apple should have replaced my phone without charge.
Anyways, be careful and if the battery is swollen, it's time for yet another battery change :)
A great way to increase the odds of an explosion near your face or office desk!
With a good heat gun and toolkit, it's doable in anything from 15-30 min (more if the case is bent or damaged from falls).
In most Android phones (the ones I have used, at least), replacing the battery took less than one minute.
People don’t want to lose battery life? Ok, we can adjust so it doesn’t change much over the life of the phone.
Of course that just lead to ‘Apple slows your phone down’.
You’re right, it’s a tough spot.
I’m sure that would go over GREAT.
Most people don't understand that the degraded battery is the cause of the performance issues (its not very intuitive), so they should explicitely say that.
For laptops, as part of their hardware test they had a chart for the battery. The expected cycle count was listed in quite a few places (it was 200 for removable batteries and jumped to 1000 when they started making them non-removable). X was the cycle count and Y was the battery's maximum charge (I tried to find pics, but couldn't). The chart had a diagonal red line marked "defective." They replaced your battery if it was within the defective range, but not if your cycle count was too high.
Phones aren't any different, they're just more hand-wavy about the battery (they don't show or mention cycle-counts).
Your phone battery has been abused for years and you expect it to hold a charge?!
It’s a much much better decision to slow it down than let the phone die.
This would be a non educated (and possibly excessive) reaction, but - given the success of the iPhone - what happens in reality is that another (still non educated and still excessive) reaction happens:
“this phone sucks the battery dies in 10 minutes zomg I’ll go and buy the new x phone!”.
A better option is a larger battery, but without that, I think they make more customers happy than I'd they did the alternative.
On balance, the expected behavior for an aging phone is to suffer from decreased battery life as total battery cycles increase. Apple instead has chosen to decrease system performance to hide diminished battery life, and failed to disclose this. This kind of behavior wouldn't be tolerated in other market segments. Can you imagine the public backlash against an auto manufacturer that shipped a vehicle which intentionally decreased performance as its fuel tank drained in order to boost their 'maximum range' metric, but never disclosed this 'feature' to the public?
https://www.quora.com/Why-does-my-car-feel-more-powerful-aft...
A couple of people there speculate that's what happens to them.
I doubt there would be much backlash - stranding a driver with an empty tank is about the worst thing that could happen short of a breakdown. "Yes of course we do everything we can to help you get to a fuel stop"
Familiarity with electronics doesn't matter. We can't allow vendors to simply simply cover up what are normal behaviors from components given typical operating conditions.
Nobody wants a DVD player which throws up an error and stops playing if the disk is scratched, compared to retrying then skipping on a few frames.
Nobody wants a streaming video which stops playing if there's temporary bandwidth problems instead of pixelating briefly and coming back.
Nobody wants ECC memory or hard disk error correction or parity bits removed and corrupt data to become more common because it's "normal behaviour".
Nobody wants fanless video cards that overheat and break permanently instead of slowing down a bit and staying working.
People do want run-flat tyres because they'd rather keep going instead of getting normal behaviour of hitting something sharp.
People do want sat nav which recalculates the route in the case of "typical operating conditions" of making a wrong turn, covering up the normal behaviour of "giving bad directions from then on" with much more useful behaviour of "giving good directions".
Apple does have an alternative. The battery issue is neither irreversible nor has any permanent ramifications to the remedy of just replacing the f-ing battery. In fact I have no problem with graceful degradation as a stopgap. Explicit Power Saving modes already do that.
But the issue at hand is completely orthogonal and has to do with why Apple refuses to, at the same time as undervolting, also signal to the user the one sane action to take, which is to obtain a battery replacement. By not signaling such and misdirecting (whether intentional or not), they are passive-aggressively telling the user to replace the entire phone. How else would a typical user interpret this situation? In what way could they know the appropriate action to take from observation? You think a company that prides itself on every meticulous detail of the UX just "missed" this?
Yes it would be great if everyone went to Shenzhen and made their own iPhone from scratch but I’d much rather Apple handle the details for me and my parents and grandparents...
I’m the only one that would be slightly entertained by the harsh realities of batteries being used under duress.
They already let you choose lower mode on charge < 20%, why not extend it for older devices.
... unless they would rather I just buy a new device.
These batteries can be replaced but Apples absolute refusal to enable customer or 3rd party repair make all of this infinitely more difficult.
(It's not just screen-on time, a naturally expected decline in operating time. As the batteries age resistance goes up and peak currents decline, so in some circumstances the device would actually hard turn off)
As others have pointed out in this thread the batteries aren’t hard to replace; this is just not something you can do directly as a user. That probably makes sense; it’d be difficult to make a super-thin smartphone while at the same time provide an easy way to replace each part.
In the best case you get one that works properly, if you're unlucky you might get one that has lower capacity, and if you're very unlucky you might just get one that puffs up and catches on fire.
Not really! iFixit and others have done the hard work for you there (I work at iFixit).
Those are guesses, which is why I used "probably" and "it’d be". Glueing parts together takes less space so it makes sense they use that to make phones thinner. I’ve yet to find a single smartphone with the iPhone 7’s thickness and a replaceable battery. The Fair Phone has a replaceable battery, but it’s thicker than every iPhone since the 3GS from 8 years ago.
If you need a reference: https://www.cnet.com/news/its-time-to-kiss-that-removable-sm...
I wish there were phones built like the old IBM thinkpads. Bulky, square, ugly but also indestructible and fully user servicable with replaceable batteries.
Thinness is just a side-effect of lightness, because the alternative—a “hollow” unevenly-dense phone—would be awkward and unbalanced in the hand. You make a phone lighter, keep the screen size the same, repack it to an even density to keep its center of gravity the same... oops, it’s thinner now.
An interesting thought, but is it true? I cant really think of people complaining of arm fatigue from holding up a ~150-200g phone -- the effort of holding up your arm and hand alone are going to be substantially more than additional weight of the phone.
I also dont really see any evidence of phone manufacturers decreasing weight over the years, at least with a quick review of Apple's iPhones, which have definitely increased in weight over the past decade.
And increasing the length of a phone use-session is important, because it "unlocks" experiences people wouldn't otherwise bother with, that might then increase their total satisfaction with the ecosystem, and so increase brand loyalty. For example, some people just don't want to read books on their phones... but hand them a lighter phone, and they suddenly change their minds. They don't realize that that's the difference; it just is. And this might be the first device that got them to read e-books—which means they now associate the positive feelings of reading books in situations they wouldn't have otherwise been reading, with your device.
> which have definitely increased in weight over the past decade
They do increase, but only to a point; far less than if it weren't an optimization problem between increasing battery mass to power the features promised, vs. decreasing total mass.
Also of note is the fact that as phones are made more durable, people use cases less, which decreases total in-hand weight. So switching various pieces from plastic to aluminum, or one type of glass to another, may be a win even if it increases the base mass of the phone, as long as it decreases the probability that the user will feel the need to buy a case.
The iPhone X is significantly heavier than any previous (non-plus) iPhone, which is by far my biggest complaint about it.
I wonder what percentage people who buy those razorthin phones end up adding a millimeter or more to their phones by adding tempered glass screen protectors and cases over them. IMO, that defeats the purpose of the thinness.
I thought my thinkpad x201 was like a tank, but then random shutdowns became more frequent. I disassambled the laptop 4-5 times, replaced thermal paste, checked connections, replaced all software (including BIOS), couldn't find a solution. Then I stumbled upon a 45 page thread at the lenovo support forum. Many people were claiming the existence of the exact problem, but the only solution was to "replace the motherboard".
At least, apple offers world-wide decent for their products. With used thinkpads, you're basically on your own, no matter how tech-savvy you are.
If I were to purchase another laptop for on-the-go usage I will think twice before opting out for a thinkpad for it's durability.
Thinkpads are marvelous machines, but in my experience not all that glitters is gold :).
I switched from a MBP to a ThinkPad because of Apple's decisions with product design; performance sacrificed for purely aesthetic reasons.
Having e.g. 50% more battery wouldn't do anything for me. It would save me that one day per year when I'm using a ton of GPS/video and actually run out of battery before I go to bed, but that's about it. I'd still have to remember to charge it every night.
But the problem is that the iPhones seems to last a day only when they are new-ish and there is no safety buffer down the road. If it is fine on release day it will not be fine after 2 years if there additional capacity build in.
I'm all for that - I do want all the power of the hardware and a full days charge, for the whole lifetime of the phone.
Unfortunately it's very much in the sellers interest to not do this. If they make it last 100% of a dayt on release they can instead make it cheaper/lighter/more powerful, AND if they throttle or make it behave worse some other way after 2 years, they also make it obsolete at just the right point in time.
They’ve obviously determined that it’s not worth it on the regular iPhone. I guess their surveys and stuff show that their customers would rather have the thin phone, on the whole.
And if they do find a way, they'll just make the phone even thinner instead.
It's not about Apple not being able to do it. It's about their priorities. And in this case their priorities seem to coincide (as if by magic) with getting people to upgrade the phones faster.
It's especially silly when you consider that Apple, a design-focused company, is making phones thinner despite using very obvious camera bumps on their phones -- a clear sign that maybe their phones shouldn't be that thin.
I wouldn't want to have a user replacable battery behind a hatch if it made the phone worse in any way (less water sealed, less sturdy etc).
iOS could do the same, scaling down those useless effects and transparencies, boosting performance and guaranteeing a more qualitative experience.
If iPhone X lasted 5 years with the same perf and battery life with two $100 battery replacements, I would happily shell out $1200 for it. But I know it won't last more than 2 years (like almost every other phone at this point), and then the math doesn't work out for me.
http://www.jiayu-store.com/jiayu-g5-quad-core-mtk6589-4-5-in...
https://www.gizchina.com/2013/11/07/jiayu-g5-unboxing-hands-...
The Jiayu also has dual SIM, microSD, USB, and costs a fraction of the Apple while having a more rigid and expensive housing (stainless steel, not aluminium.) Apple could, if they wanted to, make a phone with as much user-friendly features if not more, but they deliberately chose not to.
I'm guessing this is why my previous Samsung phone used to unexpectedly restart, and semi-predictably do so when I activated the torch. I never realised it could have been due to the battery output dropping.
In effect, right now, on old devices, Low Power Mode is always either fully-enabled, or half-enabled, but never fully-disabled. All they'd have to do is to change it from a binary switch (between enabled and {disabled, secretly half-enabled}) to a three-level switch.
- Do you degrade performance but leave screen-on time relatively unchanged?
- Do you degrade screen-on time but leave performance relatively unchanged?
Most Android devices seem to do the opposite (lose screen-on time, but keep performance relatively unchanged). Different people will have a different perspective on what the "right" strategy is for this, but I think we can all agree that better transparency and maybe even leaving it to the consumer to make the choice would be welcome.
PS - "Planned obsolescence" only applies if Apple was doing this artificially. It seems like if they didn't degrade performance you'd lose screen-on time instead, so you'd still likely replace the handset and perhaps even sooner (since core services e.g. calling, texting, etc, work even with lower performance but not on a phone out of juice).