Thank you. You just saved me 80$ from paying to replace it myself.
Now I can justify to myself that it pays to read hacker news ;)
No, not seeing that advertisement working.
And they get planned obsolescence too!
It's intentional.
Why not simply make the battery replacable?
Solid construction and mechanical fasteners are a feature. Servicing any part of an iPhone is not that hard; lack of serviceability is a myth.
Additionally, batteries are not the most commonly replaced part. So far my SE has had four screens and a lightning connector. I'll do the battery myself when I notice performance degrade, too.
have non-replaceable ram and cpu is one thing, but a part that is known to deteriorate with age and usage should be user replaceable.
Not to mention you take it to a technician who has the tools and you'd assume is doing a good job right? No, often it's some high school kid who is not invested in doing a good job but rather just getting it done. It's sloppier than if you were to do it yourself. So you have to resort to buying hundreds of dollars of tools and taking painstaking hours to get it done right and even then it might not turn out.
To the other posters who argue'd that we make a choice about this - no we really don't get a choice. If you want a cutting edge phone there are simply 0 options with replaceable batteries. This is planned obsolescence in an age where my several year old Motorola works just fine for my needs.
An informed decision might yield the same outcome though.
No, I'm not. 3 years is long enough for a smart phone, I probably would have replaced it anyways. And I like the X way more.
My guess is most people plan to replace their phones after 2 years, and few have this problem before that. So disclosing probably doesn't change more than a minute number of purchase decisions. Though I don't doubt that some marketing person at Apple influenced limiting disclosure of this fix because they thought it helped upgrade rates. If that person exists, they should be fired, because it damaged Apple's credibility.
Instead of a hard to find value in settings that tells you your battery needs replacement, they should have a one time warning when it's first detected that explains this behavior.
I understand your argument. I think I would be somewhat mad, or maybe it's better to say, disappointed. While I most likely would have bought a new phone anyway, I would despise that Apple took away my ability to make this call. It also means that I could not refurbish the phone and pass it on to parents/friends.
In the last years, I am somewhat disillusioned by Apple. Instead of engineering a better overall package, the innovations seem to be based on cheats (I would the /undisclosed/ cpu down-clocking as such), cutting corners in QC and questionable design decisions (touchbar - why not with some touch feedback? No headphone jack for reasons already disproved by android phones.)
I didn't buy in into the ios eco-system, but like the mbp and mac os. But the number of advantages get smaller, and the number of disadvantages grows.
Where does that leave us? People that must have newest and fastest are encouraged to upgrade every year. Others accept slow downs due to old batteries and new iOS.
This is definitely not 'planned obsolescence' because your phone still works. Maybe 'encouraged obsolescence' is a better term.
Regarding the slowing down of devices, underclocking the CPU allows for both less power and a lower peak voltage to be drawn from the battery and extends the real usable life of the phone. Others would simply not turn on or pass a hardware test by failing to POST. You are right about new software versions being 'encouraged obsolescence'- a company that pushes features to its older phones knowing they may not be able handle these alongside the older essential ones definitely has an interest in you purchasing a new phone. This could easily be fixed by not having the slimmest phone on the market and instead have a thicker and more easily user-replacable battery.
[0] http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_li...
This could have been avoided if they weren't so obsessed with thinness. I reckon that if it was thick enough to not have a camera protrusion, it would be the perfect balance of form and battery life.
In reality, it's probably some mix of both sides.
So a feature to throttle the CPU while I waited for a battery replacement on Android would have been great I think! It needs to be toggleable and it needs to clearly surface to the user what the long term fix is though (i.e., replace the battery). Apple's solution did neither of these, but if it did I think it would have been fine.
https://www.geekbench.com/blog/2017/12/iphone-performance-an...
If you do, are they even functional after the upgrade? Mine became couldn’t do anything because it is so slow after upgrade.
Only good thing was I had an unlocked boot loader and able to flash the original Android back
Please don’t act like Android is anything better. It is not.
It's an extremely infrequent service, but it's not difficult. Certainly much much easier than an oil change on a car, which is a frequent service. Instructions, third party supplies, and third party services are abundant for it. I don't think it's fair to call it anything but "easily-replaceable."
Yeah? Well that is peculiar. Here [1] [2] it says: "Difficulty: Moderate". I guess someone is wrong on the Internet, and I don't think its iFixit.
You see, the battery in my phone can be replaced in literally under half a minute. Without any special tools. Without any guide. The only thing is, I gotta buy the battery from the vendor, for 20 EUR.
That is, according to my reference point, "easily-replaceable" indeed (I could even do it whilst I'm hiking without any special tools), while the circus act you're going to have to put up (which includes all kind of non-standard tools (with additional price tag) which you can read about at [1] and [2]), clearly -without the shed of a doubt- makes it a lot more difficult to replace the bloody thing.
And let us be honest: that is entirely intended. Because else, Apple would use standard screws, and wouldn't use all kind of acts to use more obscure screws.
Fun fact: my mother, in her 60s, has changed oil numerous upon numerous times in her life. She's never replaced a battery in a phone though. Some people are scared opening up hardware. Heck, I bet she was scared refreshing oil the first time as well but my father guided her (he became blind, so couldn't do it anymore). Another one: the other day I was replacing a battery and reapplying thermal paste on my partner's MBP and my partner's sister complimented that I was doing that, even though it was my first time doing that and I was just using iFixit's guide. (I still managed to kill the iSight camera, even though the guide said I shouldn't worry about that connector. GG). That guide said Moderate difficulty as well IIRC. And I screwed it up. So... easy? Give me a break. Its tedious. And that, too, is way more difficult than opening up a ThinkPad T61.
Ergo, my point is that calling it "easily-replaceable" completely and utterly ignores how easy it used to be to replace your cellphone's battery. Call it a reality distortion field if you must.
So your reference point is yours, and mine is mine. We can call it there. I won't though; I want other people to take iFixit's reference point more serious than randomers because they are experts at defining the difficulty and their guides have been proofread and used. By many eyes.
[1] https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPhone+6+Battery+Replacement/29...
[2] https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPhone+6+Plus+Battery+Replaceme...
Apple is not slowing down devices to extend battery life. Apple is slowing down devices to prevent the thing from crapping out entirely ("unexpectedly shutting down"). Arguably, this does more to prevent obsolescence than plan it.
Agreed with @djrogers suggestion to alert the user to the situation. It should not be a user choice.
"Last year we released a feature for iPhone 6, iPhone 6s and iPhone SE to smooth out the instantaneous peaks only when needed to prevent the device from unexpectedly shutting down during these conditions [cold, low battery, battery age]."