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A comment on Apple’s $9 engineering marvel no one wants (2017). Parent comment

Re:Apple’s $9 engineering marvel no one wants (2017) by AnthonBerg on Monday April 08, 2019 @01:57PM (#19607488)
The battery was sufficiently large to start with. Then normal wear and tear caused the battery to be weaker. That’s fine. Throttling on a weak battery is sensible imo. The inexcusable part was that the throttling was silent. If there had been any sort of notification then it had been good design.
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Re:Apple’s $9 engineering marvel no one wants (2017) by jdietrich on Monday April 08, 2019 @03:08PM (#19608125)
>The battery was sufficiently large to start with. Then normal wear and tear caused the battery to be weaker.

Your second sentence contradicts your first.

Apple know that battery performance degrades over time. They knew that the batteries they were fitting to iPhones would be unable to supply sufficient current within the normal working life of the phone. They either didn't care about longevity, or chose to prioritise aesthetics. For a company that likes to brag about their environmental credentials and the quality of their devices, that's not a good look.

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Re:Apple’s $9 engineering marvel no one wants (2017) by jplayer01 on Monday April 08, 2019 @04:00PM (#19608507)
The problem isn't capacity. It's voltage. Old batteries are sometimes no longer able to provide adequate voltage at peak loads, leading to phones turning off when running on low battery (but before it's actually empty enough for it to turn off in normal circumstances). Until now I've assumed that this generally affects all li-ion batteries over time, but I'm honestly not sure why this issue hasn't cropped up in the Android camp in the same way. Maybe the only reason it became such a big deal was how Apple decided to fix the problem (silently throttling performance).
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Re:Apple’s $9 engineering marvel no one wants (2017) by jdietrich on Monday April 08, 2019 @04:51PM (#19608896)
>The problem isn't capacity. It's voltage.

It's not voltage, it's discharge rate, which is directly proportional to capacity. All else being equal, bigger batteries can supply more current. It hasn't cropped up in the Android camp because Android phones use bigger batteries.

https://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/what_is_the_c_ra...

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Re:Apple’s $9 engineering marvel no one wants (2017) by jhayward on Monday April 08, 2019 @05:35PM (#19609282)
> It hasn't cropped up in the Android camp

Samsung was fined for exactly the same thing Apple was doing.

https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-samsung-5-million-fine...

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Re:Apple’s $9 engineering marvel no one wants (2017) by jdietrich on Monday April 08, 2019 @06:17PM (#19609622)
According to The Register, Samsung were fined because they pushed Android Marshmallow to the Note 4, not because of any sort of battery-related throttling.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/10/24/apple_samsung_fined...

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Re:Apple’s $9 engineering marvel no one wants (2017) by Scoundreller on Monday April 08, 2019 @05:19PM (#19609142)
What about physics? A colder battery will have a slower chemical reaction and may not be able to supply enough current to avoid a crash without throttling.
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Re:Apple’s $9 engineering marvel no one wants (2017) by jdietrich on Monday April 08, 2019 @06:16PM (#19609612)
A phone should be able to operate reliably within it's thermal specifications. It's perfectly reasonable for a phone to occasionally throttle because it's unusually hot or cold, but it's exceedingly shoddy for throttling to be routinely used to mitigate an under-specified battery.
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Re:Apple’s $9 engineering marvel no one wants (2017) by AnthonBerg on Monday April 08, 2019 @03:22PM (#19608233)
No, there is no contradiction. We just don’t agree on what level of battery wear and tear we find acceptable. I had a phone that was affected. Batteries are a wear item, and they are replaceable. It was after a long service life and I was fine with the whole thing, including the throttling, except the unforgivable part, which was that they didn’t tell me they were throttling.
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Re:Apple’s $9 engineering marvel no one wants (2017) by nitrogen on Monday April 08, 2019 @04:53PM (#19608911)
Right, it's the lack of user messaging that was the problem.
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