Doing it without telling users their batteries were expired and causing their phone to slow down was the wrong thing to do.
Whether that merits a $27m fine is debatable.
Why do I think it is important to be told? My old iPad has almost overnight slowed right down and it is unusable - utterly pointless using it. Why do you think that it slowed down? A new update? Maybe. Or maybe it is the battery. Let me go check... yes, the battery has an issue. Only because I know where to check means that I know how to resolve the issue. And I know that the battery replacement cost will be ridiculously expensive. If I didn't know this then I would buy something else. That's pretty bad.
Someone should tell that to Apple, throwing devices and buying new ones their strategy when the same devices can easily be repaired but repairing things is not encouraged by Apple.
I used the original Pixel for 3 and a half years and at this point it's gotten completely unbearable to use. If it wasn't so I wouldn't have felt forced to upgrade to a phone lacking the features I wanted. Maps takes half a minute to load, the share dialogue is O(n) since the list of targets is regenerated every time you open it, the screen runs at 30FPS or something, taking pictures has several seconds of delay between shutter presses and a quarter of them come out as a solid green, and there's just general slowness of several seconds on nearly every app. And that was after I downgraded to LineageOS from Android 10, when I was getting four hours of standby time (!) and a hole burnt in my pocket.
The thing was as smooth as the OnePlus 7 Pro I'm using now at the time I got it. It was criticized at the time for being overly expensive and an iPhone clone. And now, using it in 2020 feels like using a $20 knockoff device. It was released in 2016. Three years isn't terribly long in the span of human life - at this rate I'll have to buy about 17 new phones if I live another 50 years just to be able to use them at a bearable level of performance. (Certainly a lot of potential money to be extracted for the manufacturers.)
Three years later I'll have to remember this post to see if this still holds true for this new phone.
Also there are practical reasons for this besides social ones (the insistence that OS and hardware refreshes are pushed out yearly or so at the cost of increased CPU and battery usage for existing devices). Flash memory has a limited lifespan and I would imagine it's incredibly cumbersome to replace. It's one of those things where you would just buy a new phone with the money it would cost.
Reusability in the phone market is severely lacking. I run Linux on a ThinkPad manufactured a decade ago and have zero issues running 2020 software. You can't realistically expect to do the same on a smartphone that old. PostmarketOS can't become polished soon enough - I just need to be able to make calls and can't do so using it yet.
The specs are perfectly sufficient to run anything modern. Granted, I don't play games. But browsing, navigating, chatting, watching silly videos, they all work flawlessly. So far, the battery has been holding up, too, even though I use dashcharge all the time.
So that's just that, two data points. I do believe a lot of people could probably fix their phones by hard reset or using Lineage — in turn, that puts the burden on the OEMs to produce good OSs for long-term use. They don't want to, obviously. I don't think the mobile market is FUBAR, but I do agree it's not in the best state. That's not due to the phone per se, it's due to the ridiculous vendor/OS situation we're in with Android.
And don't get me started on security patches…
I did have an awful experience with the original Google Nexus phone and its updates.
Having to install LineageOS just to be able to keep using it invalidates the "first-party" argument though.
Replaceable batteries come with their own trade-offs, namely water intrusion through failing seals. I'd rather pay occasionally for someone skilled to replace the battery than replace the entire phone after a drop in the sink.
These phones were unusable with the throttling. I switched to Android because my iPhone 6 was unusable less than 3 years after getting it.
This is like saying that an appropriate fix for a car manufacture is to limit the maximum speed of a car to 25 miles per hour. It breaks so many use cases that the car becomes worthless.
Would you prefer the car simply turn off entirely while driving at highway speeds? Because phones with this issue would turn off entirely below certain charge levels, when the batteries had this issue.
A more appropriate analogy would be that your car's fuel pump could randomly fail at highway speeds when below 1/2 tank, so the manufacturer just started arbitrarily limiting the car to drive 25mph to avoid the pump shutting off, when it detected this issue.
Point being, the real problem is not the mitigation they employed, but the fact that they didn't tell users in any way, users just saw a slower phone (equivalent to a slower car.) If my car detected a fuel pump issue for me and said "Fuel pump needs replacing, car is limited to 25mph when below half-tank to avoid catastrophic failure, please take to service center", it would be acceptable. Arbitrarily limiting to 25mph without any indication why, not so much.
Unlike a car, a phone doesn’t pose a threat to my safety so I’d like to at least turn the throttling on/off according to my needs - given that Apple provides accurate information about the implications.
In retrospect throttling might look like a good idea, but back then it was outright bizarre.
Some people were already suspecting that older models don’t get along with newer software, but there was no certainty.
I remember I avoided some iOS updates without being sure it’s helping my phone - all until Whatsapp (or some other critical app) stopped working and I had to upgrade.
This Apple situations has a good analogy in car industry history: the Ford Pinto.
Speaking of car industry, Apple might have gone through a cost-benefit analysis reminiscent of the Pinto Memo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Cost%E2%80%93benefi...
Ford converted the likely injuries and deaths that would be caused by an unfixed issue into a dollar amount, and the compared that dollar amount to the cost of fixing the flaw in every vehicle.
Apple might have done the same sort of cost-benefit analysis: as in, just let the throttling cover up the flaw so the phone doesn't abruptly shut off, and then we only have to deal with the lower cost that comes from any complaints about performance, from those who notice.
If the vehicle's age is only the equivalent of a phone being two or three years old, I would prefer a real fix, free of charge, in addition to any safety mitigation. I wouldn't want the mitigation to be regarded as the fix.
People have decade-old phones that aren't throttled and still have usable battery life at the same time.
Nobody’s saying their initial fix wasn’t flawed, I’m only saying that “throttling is bad” is an ill-thought-out knee-jerk reaction.
So, Apple could instead have had a "battery EOL" warning, sold batteries and specs to 3rd party market, and ensured batteries were easily replaceable.
Oh, why didn't they do that I wonder, maybe because they've spent the last decade making their stuff hard to repair and ensuring parts aren't available in order to encourage upgrades instead of repairs? Surely not, not Apple, they hate sacrificing the welfare of others for the sake of their profit!
If the idea that Apple would rig this didn't fit perfectly in the rest of their narrative then perhaps the judgement wouldn't have come.
It’s been established many times, my argument is not about their initial response, but what they implemented in the next iOS version. A battery control center that tells you your battery’s health, a warning when it’s in bad enough shape that it’s being throttled and needs replacing, the ability to control whether it’s throttled, and a recall/replacement program for affected models.
The initial fix was to throttle the phones, but we all (including myself) agree that was insufficient. But I also believe engineering resources are finite, and I have trouble believing apple would have been able to do the whole control center/notification thing as the first emergency fix.
I thought that instead of telling people they'd just underclocked all the systems secretly?
Do you have a reference for what the on-screen warnings looked like?
I don’t know why this is so hard to understand: their initial response was wrong, but they corrected it. Everyone who says “why didn’t they do X” is ignoring that they did the right thing, eventually.
Implementing the battery control panel the first time would have been the best route, but developing such a thing takes time, and with sudden shutdowns happening for a large percentage of customers, they did a stopgap that was questionable. Is it really so evil to make a quick hack at first and make a better solution in a software update? I feel like the whole industry does this.
Can't us computer people just agree to stop using car analogies?
And good luck getting operating system updates after only two years on Android.
Crucially, I never once left it plugged in all night - I believe not constantly fully charging the battery massively extends the useful life.
Which is the bigger problem here. iOS devices are completely impossible to downgrade, so if an update slows down your phone, you're stuck.
It's hugely wasteful. iOS isn't substantially more capable than it was five years ago—why is it so much heavier?
France fines Apple €25 million for slowing iPhone software
France's consumer watchdog slapped on the fine two years after Apple admitted its iOS software slowed down the performance of older phones.
Then a huge photo.
The failure to notify thing is fine - Apple should notify folks that
a) they may be using a non-apple battery if they can detect that - was a common scam to replace the battery with a junker just before resale to show full battery for those checking
b) showing battery life for batteries they know are legit
c) warning users (and/or giving the user an option) to extend battery life by running phone slower.
It'd be funny if the US turned around and started fining French electronics that have this same functionality - it'd lay bare the double standards being applied here.
Where do I collect my $27M?
It's also a bit nefarious that the slowdown coincided with a new product launch, so side-by-side comparisons show that the new devices are much, much "faster" than the old ones (which were slowed down without any notification). It's borderline fraudulent.
Good thing we've got people like you standing up for the trillion dollar companies of the world, though. They really need your help.
They could've given users the choice to enable that "protection" from the beginning or leave it off at the end, but instead they chose to implement something that looks suspiciously like it was designed to make people replace their devices way prematurely. We call that planned obsolescence and I believe in France it is illegal.
I don't buy this for a second. They've been throttling devices for many years and conveniently never mentioned it or built features that allowed control of it until they were forced to. It was always their fallback excuse in the event they got caught.
Their next strategy is building hardware that forces devices to constantly hold full battery charges at all times so it kills the (un-replaceable) battery faster which leads to a faster re-purchase (i.e. airpods).
Is there a statement from them to this point ? I couldn't find it in the article.
But this isn't the point anyway really.
The users were not told. > IPhone owners were not informed that installing iOS updates (10.2.1 and 11.2) could slow down their devices
This means that the users would definitely just assume their phones were now in need of upgrade.
Also as for the trade-off between performance and optimisation, thats fine. That was there previously also.
[0]: https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-slows-down-older-iphone-batt...
I'm sort of conflicted about the fine hitting now, as a result. If they were still being intransigent about the issue, sure, but they've already fixed it...
It seems right to me. It's a relatively small fine; Apple makes a few hundred Euros in profit per phone. I'm not sure how many iPhones are in France, but I'd venture to guess this is less than 2 Euros per device.
My 2015 MacBook Pro has the issue of shutting down or turning off when still at 20% or 30% battery and I find it immensely frustrating (I assume it’s a similar issue of an old battery not being consistent). I’d much rather it be throttled and be reliable.
Almost no other line of phones has this issue.
It is amazing how people twist this situation to make Apple the hero for saving "old" phones.
The phones absolutely did not behave like that when new. And, if the battery is replaced, they go back to their original performance.
"Less than a year after release, iOS 12 has reached 88% of all active iOS devices" [0]
By contrast, Android has an insane amount of fragmentation, though the link is outdated, at the time, Marshmellow 6.0 had the most users, at 16.9% of all Android users, while Android 9 had just 10.4% (this was 10 months after Android 9 had been released) [1]
I know this comparison isn't perfect by any means. Apart from the differing time frames, Android has more use cases than just mobile devices. Nonetheless, the difference is staggering.
[0] https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/ios-distribution-news/
[1] https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html
Preventing ecosystem fragmentation is well and good, but it's orthogonal to publicizing that the OS does CPU throttling on devices with batteries whose power delivery is compromised by age, and making clear that a cheap battery replacement will do as much to solve that problem as an expensive new phone will.
(I do my own refurbs, so I can vouch from experience for a battery replacement solving throttling. There's no deliberate derating of older devices qua older devices that I can see, but it's reasonable that people believe there is, because Apple has done a terrible job of making clear what's actually going on. One of many cases where their habitual allergy to transparency has harmed them and their userbase alike; it's hard to blame kremlinologists for being kremlinologists when that's the only way to try to figure out what the hell your company is doing.)
11.3 in March of 2018 added the override UI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_11#11.3
Or to encourage users spending $500-$1,000 to upgrade their slowing devices.
>Apple should just have phones in France run full clock at all times to comply with this regulation.
Why does tech always seem to have the attitude of "we know whats best for you" and if you challenge us we will make things as bad as possible just to prove our point? Is there not a common sense approach of giving users the ability to throttle their own devices to manage power/battery trade-off?
With modern power management, the system constantly makes decisions on throttling up and down at the sub-millisecond level, balancing performance, power usage, battery lifetime and thermal constraints which affect component lifetimes. There are probably hundreds of combinations of criteria it uses to decide what to do and when.
This has nothing to do with Apple versus Android or open versus closed. All modern phone systems do this, the Android device makers face exactly the same issues. There isn't a single modern smartphone on the market that doesn't throttle the CPU in order to preserve device lifetime, because that's a big part of what thermal management is about. It's why people overclocking their CPUs are taking a risk. That running older batteries hotter and harder degrades them rapidly and risks device outages is simply a fact of physics. Painting these practices as 'planned obsolescence' is, frankly, incredibly ignorant.
I can try to start this conversation with my grandmother, but as soon as I say "throttling," her eyes glaze over - and just says "can you do it for me?"
Apple is trying to cut out that middleman. Even Android is getting on the "smart battery management" AI train, as no one outside of experts wants to do this.
And what do you mean - ‘make things as bad as possible to prove our point’? Where is that coming from?
Though it’s not like companies are in the habit of communicating their CPU scheduling strategy to their customers. The customers don’t care nor can the comprehend that information.
It still boggles my mind how many people I know refuse to get batteries replaced. The price is totally reasonable from all manufacturers, way more so than plunking down another $700 on a phone. They just want a new phone at that point because who doesn’t like new things? In a lot of ways Apple was responding to customer behavior - customers allow their phones to limp along with cracked screens and dead batteries and Apple was essentially helping them do so for as long as possible without disruptions, but it also looks like planned obsolescence.
A lot of the people who essentially say that a random shutdown due to lack of supplied voltage is preferable to throttling are flat out wrong.
Agreed. My iPhone SE running iOS 13 has randomly shutdown (I guess due to cold? In London, and in my jeans pocket?) about a dozen times in the last 2 months. It's really annoying. I'd much rather throttling. Apparently, this is what Apple does already though, just not well enough it seems.
Battery health is marked as 88% and peak performance capable though, so yay?
I think nobody’s talking about publishing their actual scheduling or CPU throttling algorithm, just about saying "we're slowing the phone down to save battery life, which it seems nearly everybody would understand.
There’s no conspiracy here. This was almost certainly just a well-intentioned part of their power management design that affected the performance of older phones more than anyone in a position of leadership intended or realized.
Bug report comes in: phone shuts down unpredictably when the battery is aged. Engineer see the issue, tweaks some values to make sure the peak power draw is kept in check when voltage drops, closes bug. How anyone who’s ever worked as an engineer in a large organization thinks this was some intentional decision to sell a handful more phones at the cost of upsetting customers is a mystery to me.
Nobody is perfect. Apple is far better than most.
It would be the same if an ISP silently slowed a user's internet when detecting their ISP provided router is getting flacky. That's not the right way of handling this, users should be warned of the issue so they can act accordingly, and not stay in the dark until someone discovers the hack.
Case in point, when Apple explained the issue and their hack, people got way more interested in checking the state of their battery (wether they were affected or not), and there was a rush to replace used up batteries.
I tried to replace mine 2 months after the announcement, there was still a 3 weeks backlog of replacements.
Also to note: those phones were still turning off in some circumstances. It wasn't like Apple's hack completely removed the need to replace the faulty battery.
What part of this sentence did you not understand?
It's about WARNING the user before they do the upgrade so they 1) know what will happen and 2) know how they could fix it.
You do lose X horsepower every 1000 miles. You get it back with your tuneup. Which involves changing the oil.
You lose X MHz every Y% of battery discharge capacity lost. You get it back with your tuneup. Which involves changing the battery.
You don't need to detune maliciously to get the effect Apple is getting here. The system just needs to self-calibrate to a depleting battery... Which is super good for the battery because it won't actually get worse as fast. Discharge cycles, especially close to the discharge limit, puts strain on cells, which have voltage sag closer to end of life.
Again, this is all semantics. The whole point is apple never told people they were throttling. And you've got two groups saying "Oh they are so nice, they did it so you could keep using your phone, how nice of them" and then the "my phone is slow I guess I need to buy a new one".
My iPhone X is 3 years old, and feels just as fast as when it was new.
If you want a reference that proves that NAND performance degrades over write cycles: then I will only list one, but there are hundreds, at least.
But is there any evidence that translates into an appreciable impact on device performance?
Perhaps it doesn’t, and this is why nobody is talking about it.
Would you guess, this is actually what's happening.
ECUs constantly adjusts for current conditions (EGR, variable gem turbo, o2/fuel ratio, fuel inlet timing, combustion timing, variable cam timing and phase, knock sensor...). As the engine is used, wear makes its performance degrade over time, and the ECU adjusts in real time for that. Maintenance such as timely oil change mitigate that, some parts may have to be replaced at some point (from spark plugs to turbo), and over time the engine itself wears out.
Here's a very specific example: all those cars with hypermiling downsized engines turbocharged to compensate perform brilliantly, but when the turbo is dead they can barely crawl themselves in 1st gear. In less extreme situations, turbo wear will put you relatedly anywhere within that [perfect, broken] range, and the ECU will do its best to compensate, unbeknownst to you.
It's more like, "Imagine if for reduced horsepower when your engine was at risk of overheating, and would not function properly at the standard horsepower".
But I still think they should have implemented this how it is now (being able to turn it off). And inform the users that their phone is being slowed down. I can‘t tell if this was an oversight or deliberately done so users would switch to a new phone. To me a slower phone is better than s crashing or no phone but if I don‘t know why it‘s getting slower I‘m probably more tempted to buy a new phone instead of replacing the battery.
IMHO, Apple’s “crime” here is bad communication.
And battery replacement has been made to be as inconvenient as possible. 15 years ago, swapping the battery was a 15-second task that required no tools. Pull off the backing, pull out the battery, push in a new battery. Before Apple's response to bad press, it was $80 to have a battery swapped. Aftermarket kits were $30, so that is $50 on labor and markup. $50 to do what used to take 15 seconds by an untrained user.
This is a problem of Apple's making, by their design decisions.
The same can be said of SSD media. It's well-known that flash memory is under-provisioned to allow for inevitable degradation: Defective sectors are flagged and re-mapped. This so that your 500GB SSD still has 500GB in 5 years.
This can be applied to battery tech as well. However, that would require either thicker, heavier phones, or less run-time between charges.
I would say Apple's "crime" is producing hardware where one particular component has a well-known failure mode that makes the entire device virtually useless after 3 years of moderate to heavy use.
Next thing they will be telling phone companies what types of cords to use....
No they didn't. The software updates didn't properly work on phones with the older batteries, so this was their work around. The options they had were: 1. not allow the updates on those phones, 2. allow the updates and have users deal with potentially having the phones shut down. 3. Offer battery upgrades. 4. Jerry rig a hack to deal with it.
They went with the most subversive option. They were not being benevolent here.
Apple should just have phones in France run full clock at all times to comply with this regulation. These types of things don't recognize that phone design is a CONSTANT power management / speed tradeoff. If you demand things run 100% speed at all times - poof - your batter life is gone.