Tens of millions of old iPhone users were left in the dark why all of a sudden the phone was slowing down to the point where it was becoming unusable. Millions of people probably spent hundreds of dollars otherwise they wouldn't need to spend if they know this was something they can fix with a new battery.
I personally have been using iPhone 6 for 3 years until this CPU-Battery disaster struck. So I ended up buying an Android phone. I love my Android phone now, but it's still money I wouldn't have had to spend.
This is a huge scandal. I like the response by Apple, but it's too late and millions of people already spent money they could've avoided spending. Good bye iPhone. I won't be coming back.
On the whole I don’t think this would have caused anyone to spend money they wouldn’t have otherwise. Perhaps they would have stayed with their phone longer.
It’s hard to tell, and this is certainly worse than if they had just told people about the battery in the first place (although I imagine THAT would’ve become a scandal two).
The idea I’m arguing against is that Apple either did nothing or purposefully made it worse. They tried to fix one bad problem (random shutdowns) and it caused a different, although less severe, problem.
Apples move to retard performance to keep the phone from suddenly dying was a GOOD move. It wasn’t a scam as some others have claimed.
But obviously they should have communicated to the user that they knew there was a battery issue.
It is a scam if they're not making it clear to the users why their phone is suddenly being slowed down. The fact is, even if battery issues are a perfectly fine reason to be doing this, by not making that clear to users and instead leaving them in the dark with a now extremely slow phone (Just in time for their new releases!) they are scamming their users.
If you took your car into a dealership, and instead of telling you that you had a bad battery (That they've known was already going bad in similar cars) they told you that they don't know what's wrong with it, but that they have lots of other cars you can buy, would you consider that a scam? I certainly would.
Why is apple the only company with this problem?
It’s the only one people care about enough. Apple gets a major "scandal" almost each year about something that affects every single smartphone company on the planet. Think of the antenna-gate or the bending issues. Lots of non-Apple phones have shown these issues, and the random shutdowns are no exception [1].
[1]: http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/12/20/some-nexus-6ps-have-...
(updated to add a link)
It's all about expectations.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=cz2ghoxghk3&sort=byPopularity&...
If Apple hadn't redlined the CPU to hit benchmarks the battery wouldn't have been in such a poor state to need to be shut down/throttled so early in its lifecycle.
They are 100% to blame this situation and have taken the least consumer focused choice up until this point.
That doesn’t seem like a reasonable solution.
But if it is that reasonable than surely there is a long list of electronic devices that do such a thing...
The implication that I keep getting from people seems to be that Apple is running their phones at 140% and when the battery can’t keep up they then slow it down to make up for the CPU being underprovisioned on battery.
I think it’s far more likely that Apple is running the phone at 100% of what it was designed for. When the battery ages they were running into problems with the phones having to shut themselves down (perhaps the newer chips were more sensitive to power fluctuations?) so they’ve started throttling to under 100%.
In a desktop analogy: I don’t think this is the equivalent of some company selling overclocked CPUs and lying about how fast they were. I think this is closer to a case of the computers just ended a clogged with lots of dust and had to throttle to prevent serious damage after a few years.
Obviously they should’ve told the user but I don’t think they set out from a malicious standpoint.
Note that this problem only occurred on devices where Apple fully designed the chips (iPhone 6 and later). "Off the shelf" chips, and those used for Android, simply have a lot more of a voltage window.
Were the phones really slowed down by that much?
My phone's remaining battery life is above 80%.
In some cases, yeah. It’s bad.
After that awful experience I would rather get a kick in my genitalia than an android phone.
Enough with the hyperbole already. Yes, a few (rather outspoken) users had this issue. For everyone else, slowdowns were noticeable, but they barely made the phones "unusable".
That's why this is a manufactured scandal. Yes, Apple could have (and should have) been more transparent. But their decision to throttle the CPU was based on sound engineering principles, rather than a nefarious attempt to get people to upgrade.
I think the non-manufactured part of the scandal is having your phone throttle itself w/o telling you it's doing that is pretty annoying.
You're left wondering, is my phone running slower or is my mind playing tricks on me?
I think Apple's response here is great.
I have bought a device of a certain performance, fully expecting that the battery will degrade and hold a smaller and smaller charge, but NOT expecting the performance of the device to suffer. I was given absolutely no warning that, come a certain age or use-pattern, the performance of the device will degrade. Apple went behind my back and installed software that prevented device lockup, and gave me no info about it.
What if I was entitled to a warranty replacement of the battery, but the software hid that from me by devaluing my purchase? This is not 'great', it's sleazy. Apple is essentially getting away with installing lower performance batteries and/or reducing it's warranty costs compared to competitors. The behavior itself is good from an engineering point of view, the communication was deceptive and fraudulent; the feature should be made optional, enabled at the user's discretion to extend the life of terminals that are outside of warranty and start to lock up, or the customer should be thoroughly informed at the time of purchase that the performance of the terminal will significantly degrade.
their response is
- an apology
- a promise to update the software so you know when you're getting throttled
- cheap battery replacements
i think that's pretty solid.
- They make no promise of the target lifespan of their devices. It appears that their internal culture believes that devices that last only 1 year is acceptable. They do not say if they want to deviate from this.
- No transparency on the expected battery degradation and performance impact over time.
more generally the useful lifespan of iphones is definitely more than a year. i was recentlu able to sell still-perfectly-functioning iphonr 7 for almost half it's cost new. my 3-year-old ipad mini only started feeling slow a couple months ago. this seems better than what my friends with android experience, anecodotally.
If you have a laptop then I have bad news; your CPU throttles itself. Especially if you play games.
It gets too hot and slows itself down to prevent damage. There’s not even a direct way to detect this. Which I do admit is annoying.
Apple deserves this PR egg on their face. But they aren’t doing anything super wrong. Additional battery life info will go a long ways towards doing things right.
the laptop always does this; it's not something where it magically (and mysteriously) gets slower as it ages. it's also obvious when this is happening, even if not directly indicated: the fan will be cranking and the laptop will be really hot to the touch.
and, there's also somehow more of a feeling that a phone is a controlled system that will "just work," whereas computers/laptops are always screwing up in one way or another...
In some ways that does happen. As computers get more lint in them that often start heading thermal barrier’s and automatically throttling themselves without telling the user.
As for whether the fan makes it obvious I guess that depends on how loud the fan is. Or this could happen to a desktop that you just have placed out of the way enough that you can’t hear it well.
I'm not sure what you mean by this, but you can run software that will give you these details and much, much more about the state of the CPU.
https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2013/08/06/defective-heat-...
It is normal to be suspicious. My battery did not wear out overnight.
when you updated your software, it started throttling.
per that theory, a new battery should put you right again. (or wait for a future software update, which will tell you for sure if it was throttling.)
i think there is a little more going on, though, because my old ipad mini is slow a.f. w/ the new software update, and it shouldn't be affected by this throttling. my guess is it's simply lazy software engineering: apple doesn't seem to try to target good performance on old devices.
I’m not sure what it is but there can be some sort of “gremlin“ on a few old installs. It’s possible that’s your issue if the problem is especially severe.
It may depend on various factors, but I know someone with an iPhone 6+ that is ridiculously slow. At times it can’t keep up with typing terribly well. Or you’ll go to open a simple app and it will take a couple of seconds.
And iPhone 6 that one of their relatives purchased on the same exact day does not exhibit this behavior. At least not to a noticeable degree.
The phone is three years old and has had a hard life. It gets discharged down to 10% pretty often.
As soon as the articles about this started to come out it fit perfectly. We’ll find out when they try and replace the battery, but I suspect this is the issue.
However this is also probably one of the worst cases. I mean if my phone was throttled 10 or 15% I’m not sure I would really notice. If things get bad and it starts being 40%+ I can see how it would be noticeable.
However the battery would’ve been deteriorating that time, and it’s starting to get quite cold here which would only make things worse. I think I remember hearing that it would randomly shut off before that so I’m totally willing to believe the battery already had small problems.
A $50 battery replacement for 2.5 years of service is totally reasonable.
I made the same mistake, which someone else pointed out to me.
There are a lot of companies that make their money fixing iPhone batteries for $30. If this isn’t a limited time offer they’re in deep trouble.
It is.
> starting in late January and available worldwide through December 2018.
Don't hate on all journalism (or anything, really) just because of some bad apples. Even if it were true (which it isn't), it takes away all motivation for people in that industry to do the right thing. Why bother spending time on well-researched reporting, if all you get back is "fake news" or "all journalists are corrupt and produce clickbait"-hate on Twitter?
More specifically, here's a Q&A, and a previous article, discounting Apple conspiracy theories by The New York Times:
"Is Apple Slowing Down Old iPhones? Questions and Answers": https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/21/technology/iphone-battery...
"A New Phone Comes Out. Yours Slows Down. A Conspiracy? No.": https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/15/technology/personaltech/n...
Unfortunately, since these days anyone with a smartphone can call themselves a "journalist," it's become like the lawyer situation — the 90% bad ones give the 10% good ones a bad name.
In this case, I saw lots of headlines like "Apple admits it deliberately slowed down old phones". To me, the word "admits" is a big red flag. It's a loaded term that you can apply to pretty much any public statement, and it suggests (but doesn't directly imply) that Apple is admitting to wrongdoing. Phrasing like that signals to me that the reporting is untrustworthy.
BUT, what I do very much care about is that the company who did this does not get away with it without losing some feathers, because they did intentionally hide something from the user that did affect them quite noticeably and if they would not have been called out could have had even more serious effects in the long run.
Imagine the following scenario. The battery of your phone is happily degrading and the manufacturer of your phone puts in some serious effort to develop a strategy so you as the user don't notice it. You keep using your phone thinking everything is fine, all the while your battery keeps degrading faster and faster. Then some day you actually need the power (in terms of processing power and in terms of stored energy) because, let's say you are taking a longer high quality video of a wedding. But since your phone is now running on full throttle your battery keeps discharging uncharacteristically fast because it is already in a bad state, or the software can't keep up with the data compression and has to start dropping frames and the video of the event you wanted to keep in good memory now looks awful.
Sure, this is only a very benign scenario but it still illustrates that the manufacturer should not try to hide such important information from the user. And as I have mentioned in another thread, no one can tell me that not a single Apple engineer during this whole process has stepped up and said "Hey maybe it's also a good idea to tell the user that we are throttling the whole system so it may live a few months longer"
I got lucky and wasn't affected by the battery shutdown issue even though my serial # was eligible for a free battery replacement, so I was able to put off the free battery replacement for a couple years and get a new one free. In another 2 years I'll probably swap it again for 25 bucks :D
I'm guessing they'll have some criteria on that
When you take your phone in, they'll do a test on the battery's current capacity and status, using a custom app. If the battery has reported errors, or if the reported capacity is low enough (below 80% capacity remaining, as I recall), then they'll agree to replace the battery. Takes a couple minutes to run the test, and then about an hour to swap the battery.
(Caveat: I was last through this process on my old iPhone 5, about six months ago. I assume that the procedure and policies are basically the same for newer iPhones, and haven't changed substantively since then. My battery's remaining capacity was below 40%, and was reporting errors, when I had it replaced.)
As reported by so many others, this happened immediately after the iOS 11 update. And by immediately I mean within seconds of booting right after installing the update. I stupidly waited for 11.1 hoping it would address the issue rather than revert while it was still possible.
Apple will not replace my battery even under this new program, as it’s still considered healthy by their standard. However an iPhone 7 with 87% battery health is unable to run iOS 11 without frequent UI freezes or sudden power loss, as I’ve found out, due most likely to the fact that I’m running iOS 11 on hardware designed for iOS 10. I’d be okay with that if there was some way to revert, but there is not.
How is it "completely manufactured"? Apple programmed (and hid) the slowdown because it knows the batteries it is shipping with its phones won't last more than a year. Linus compared it to a car performing worse after 1 year of usage..
I hate to break it to him, but a one-year-old car will perform worse than a brand new car. A car is a hugely more robust piece of machinery than a telephone, so the degradation is less noticeable, but it's there. Why do you think the car depreciates the second you drive it off the lot?
> Why do you think the car depreciates the second you drive it off the lot?
Because of the dealership and "new car" markup. There's next to no difference between the car that left the parking lot and a "new" one. If you don't care about this silly game, you can save a lot by buying an ex-display model with a few hundred/thousand km done.
I bought a "used" one-year-old Cadillac ATS with 6,000 miles on it. It had AWD, the V6 engine, and every option available except the rear-seat BluRay entertainment system. It was priced at 60% of new.
It was a great deal and I challenge anyone to tell the car wasn't brand new without checking the odometer.
How many people complain that their new car is slowing down significantly after less than a year, or becomes inexplicably unusable around the time the year+1 model appears?
This is very much not the case with the iPhone slowdown, where a lot of people were noticing issues, on a product which already has a pitiful and barely practical battery life.
There is no evidence for this. Plenty of people use iPhones for two or three years and don’t have an issue, and didn’t before any of the iOS changes that “hid” them.
Some people are just really hard on phone batteries. I have a few relatives that way. I’m not sure I’ve ever had an issue using the phone for 2+ years but I don’t tend to drain it down near the bottom much.
The car analogy is not great. First off, new cars cost way more than phones, and are built out of very different types of components. Secondly, cars absolutely need maintenance, and generally more than $29 a year.
Around the release of iOs 11 (not sure exactly when because it was gradual and I was also on the iOs 11 beta) my 6s became incredibly slow, almost unbearable, until last month I decided to upgrade to an X because of how slow it was. Was planning a year more but I just couldn't see myself using it 1 year more.
Now I see via CPU Dasher and Geekbench that my 6s with a battery less than a year old (95,7% original capacity, 406 cycles) is running at 1400-900Mhz, (almost always between 1200-1000Mhz) instead of 1800Mhz.
Actually, it's an 8% decrease starting after the first year. But go ahead and keep on spreading the FUD. Your HTC stock should catch up soon.
Because stock price is an indicator of how well a company's products are engineered!
Meanwhile until a month ago; username: root, password: none (no password, not the word "none"). Try it twice, get administrator access!
> Early in 2018, we will issue an iOS software update with new features that give users more visibility into the health of their iPhone’s battery, so they can see for themselves if its condition is affecting performance.
That’s how Apple tends to handle almost all warranty issues. Either that or you can mail it in.
iPhones are not exactly designed to be easily opened and messed with by normal people. It’s part of how they get them so thin (insert various other theories that may or may not apply here).
You don't. Thousands of people replace their own iPhone batteries every week. Even I've done it, and I'm not especially dexterous.
Just go to Amazon or Google and search for a $20 replacement kit. Or, if you're not a DIY person, where I live there are places on every other streetcorner that will replace your battery for you.
I'm sure some people will still hate them for something, though.