- Some iPhones in this generation began randomly shutting down as their batteries aged.
- While looking into this, Apple determined it happened because certain aged batteries could no longer deliver enough current to sustain peak workloads (computers use more current when performing more intensive tasks). This is probably due to Apple underprovisioning the battery capacity in this generation, but that's not something they could fix in existing devices.
- Apple added a mechanism to detect when these random shutdowns occurred on a specific device due to insufficient power from the battery.
- Once the random shutdown had been detected on a specific device, that specific phone would instead throttle its CPU when the system was under heavy load to prevent the random shutdown from occurring.
In short, your phone was not affected unless your battery had already degraded and was experiencing power-related random shutdowns. The changes Apple made to deal with this were an unequivocally user-friendly change to work around a hardware shortcoming and keep peoples' phones working well for longer than they otherwise would have.
The mistakes Apple made were:
- Designing the phone hardware with barely enough battery capacity, such that some moderately old phones might not be able to keep working properly when the batteries decayed.
- Not being transparent with the hardware design flaw above, such as proactively replacing any customer whose device was being affected by this flaw while still under warranty.
- Not going far enough with the software changes to initially add something like the battery health info they later added in response to this PR fiasco.
That's about it, I think?
> - Designing the phone hardware with barely enough battery capacity, such that some moderately old phones might not be able to keep working properly when the batteries decayed.
Indeed! This was (and still is) very much a design flaw. People like to say, all phones have this issue, but where are the examples? Also, look at the iPads which are just scaled up iPhones. They don't have this issue because they don't suffer the same design flaw.
Apple put a bandage on the issue and people throw praise at them.
The examples are, literally, every device that uses a lithium ion battery. Take any phone or tablet, repeatedly charge and discharge the battery fully (better yet, do so in a hot climate) and eventually it will not put out sufficient voltage. This will either trigger CPU throttling, or your device will start crashing. The iPhone was the most widely publicized example, but this is a fundamental issue with battery chemistry that all battery powered devices are subject to.
It's not a question of if it's a question of when. All battery powered devices are subject to the limits of battery chemistry. Some phones have a bigger safety margin than others, but use the battery for long enough and it will put out less voltage than the device requires. As other commenters pointed out, other phones do indeed hit this limit.
That's a good point and Apple's phones failed much, much sooner than any other phones. Thus the reason we don't hear of the others.
Apple designed about a years worth of battery capacity into a phone most people expected to keep 2 or more years. And clearly they put too powerful CPUs into the phones because they "fix" is to throttle them!
The non-Apple choice is ... well, we all know the trade-offs there.
Are there any other phones out there that are supported with software updates as long as the iPhone? If there is an Android phone that's been used for 3+ years, it will be ba good data point.
Afaik, Android phone OEMs don't try to make a device last as long.
It's the same issue.
The experience of old hardware feeling slow after a bunch of use and software updates is common. The experience of hardware slowing down with no notification when the battery is getting old is not. I'd actively prefer random shutdowns over non-notified slowdowns-at least the former indicates that tech support is required.
Where exactly is the difference in this to a new battery that's not fully charged?
A battery may have 2,000 milliwatts of charge, but can only deliver 500 milliwatts per hour; thus, it could run at full blast for ~4 hours or half at ~8 hours if the power density is not dependent on the charge. Batteries normally have a power curve, the amount of power you can draw depending on the charge in the battery. When you over draw the power on a battery, the tendency is for the voltage to quickly drop.
Cycling the battery and age both play in lowering the energy and power densities, but they are not one-to-one correlated. This is why you'll see people who say that their battery will last to 40% and die. The battery's voltage is used to gauge how much charge is left in the battery; however, at that level, the power density has dropped such that any significant draw on the battery causes the voltage to plummet and the phone shuts off.
It's bad enough journalists confusing watts and power and energy but better not in the middle of a post explaining the difference between energy and power!
You basically have a voltage divider - with some of the resistance being the load (phone electronics) and some being the internal resistance of the battery. The voltage from the battery is split across these resistances. Normally the load gets almost all of the voltage.
When the battery is old and the peak current demand comes through the battery “sees” this as a lower resistance. The larger internal resistance causes a bigger voltage drop internally in the battery and the load therefore gets a lower voltage. When this is lower than the phone needs you get a brownout/reset.
Also, if you could make batteries last longer just by using more finely stranded wire, somebody would have done that.
Not only that, but a crack doesn't lower resistance by much because the length of the current path is so short that the narrower cross-section hardly affects resistance over the whole length of a conductor.
An unavoidable issue with all lithium ion batteries is plating during charging. This process increases the output impedance of the battery reducing its ability to deliver power to a load, regardless of how much energy is inside it.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/09/140903105638.h...
just over a year ago, the then 3-year-old battery on my 6s was experiencing very occasional instant shutdowns, usually when the battery indicator was under 10%.
so i got a new (presumably undegraded) battery through the free replacement program, thinking it would improve things, but random shutdowns are worse and now my battery indicator goes to 1% for hours at a time.
So, at least anecdotally, there's more to the story here....
They covertly slow down your phone yo mask that it is defective and needs a new battery.
This way they avoid having to deal with warranty and bad press.
Or design a phone with removable battery or at least a decent battery.
So Apple should have juts let iPhones with old batteries become unusable?
> Or design a phone with removable battery or at least a decent battery.
Increasing battery size means increasing phone size - and Apple wants the iPhone to be sleek. Removable batteries also have certain design implications that increase the bulk of the device. Apple's products are at the top end of the market, where form factor is more important than serviceability. Mercedes' are more laborious to service than Toyotas. iPhones are more laborious to service than cheaper devices.
A better battery would also lead to a phone that lasts longer. And that's bad if you are apple.
Bad for Apple? No.
In any case the way they went about it and just pretended all is fine certainly is worth investigating. And as shifty as Apple has been in the past with such things - see planned obsolence, lack of possibility to replace parts/batteries, the throw-away airpods that even apple itself can't fix - it just does not sound to me like apple would really make user friendly decisions. Their only concern has (from all the evidence I've seen) been to protect profits. Even when apple was forced to do battery replacements they still charged for it.
Therefore I honestly doubt this story unless some third party can corroborate it.
There's a section titled 'Peak Performance Capability' which will say "This iPhone has experienced an unexpected shutdown because the battery was unable to deliver the necessary peak power. Performance management has been applied to help prevent this from happening again." if that specific device had an unexpected shutdown related to battery health.
That's how it worked both before and after the controversy; the only thing that changed was that Apple added the battery health UI along with an option to disable the performance management features.
Batteries are consumable products. That they degrade over use is a given.
No phone company states the expected useful life of their batteries in a way people can understand or the expected loss of performance due to degradation.
I don’t fault Apple for this alone. Apple seems no worse than anyone else. The entire industry is shady when it comes to batteries.
Malicious or not, they profited, likely heavily, from the lack of communication/transparency.
How so? If Apple didn't mitigate lower battery voltage than customers' phones would have been unusable. A customer with a phone crashing so often it's unusable is more likely to replace it than one that is slowed down. How does extending the usable life of the phone result in more sales?
If consumers were aware that their phones were actually suffering from degraded performance due to a design failure by Apple, instead of being gaslighted into believing that their phones simply seemed slower because they were older, they might have switched away from Apple.
All of this chicanery is really about getting consumers comfortable with the idea of disposable gadgets that must be replaced every year. When you expose the fact that a LIPO powered phone is probably going to need a new battery after 1-2 years, consumers start to wonder why they are charged an exorbitant fee to replace the battery in the first place.
Or maybe explain why you think such a denial is in any way relevant?
They saw that battery life was causing problems in their phones, and they quietly band-aided the problem without informing users. If I kill someone and bury them in the back yard, and then get caught years later, I hope you'll jump to my defense with the line "Can you show me where he denied killing that guy?!"
Obviously silently masking battery life issues without telling anyone is... well... masking the fact that your product suffers from battery life issues.
Here you write that gaslighted (denied) customers regarding the battery's impact on performance.
> If consumers were aware that their phones were actually suffering from degraded performance due to a design failure by Apple, instead of being gaslighted into believing that their phones simply seemed slower because they were older, they might have switched away from Apple.
> Or maybe explain why you think such a denial is in any way relevant?
Because such a claim is counterfactual.
> They saw that battery life was causing problems in their phones, and they quietly band-aided the problem without informing users. If I kill someone and bury them in the back yard, and then get caught years later, I hope you'll jump to my defense with the line "Can you show me where he denied killing that guy?!"
This is a comparison so far fetched that I'm dubious it's even made in good faith. Throttling clock speeds when voltages are insufficient is something that many, perhaps even most, electronics do. Because the alternative a device that crashes. Slow is strictly better than non-functional.
> Obviously silently masking battery life issues without telling anyone is... well... masking the fact that your product suffers from battery life issues.
Yes, in the same way that literally every car company "silently masks" that their cars' power will degrade over time. The same way that realtors "silently mask" that a house's paint will fade or that its pipes will rust. Products degrade over time. Obviously, companies don't deliberately advertise this fact. But unless they're actually denying that this degradation will happen, they're not masking anything.
It's in the fucking article!
> Apple attributed the problems mainly to temperature changes, high usage and other issues, and said its engineers worked quickly and successfully to address them. Analysts sometimes refer to the slowing of iPhones as "throttling."
* Temperature changes
* High usage
* Other issues
How are customers supposed to decipher that the problem is the battery from that statement? This is straight up denying the actual problem.
Not to mention that when I took my old 6s to the store to see what was the slowing down about they told me it was perfectly fine and was running at the same speed as new.
I don't deny your individual experiences at the Apple store, but the claim that Apple denied that battery life can cause phones to slow down remains unsubstantiated.
I'll do one better, I'll dig Apple post before they changed to a non-apology one:
https://web.archive.org/web/20171229000007/https://www.apple...
First paragraph:
> We’ve been hearing feedback from our customers about the way we handle performance for iPhones with older batteries and how we have communicated that process. We know that some of you feel Apple has let you down. We apologize.
Apple wrote this letter to appease customers, because they don't understand battery chemistry and the canard that Apple was slowing down phones was proliferating and they needed to make some gesture.
> We’ve been hearing feedback from our customers about the way we handle performance for iPhones with older batteries and how we have communicated that process. We know that some of you feel Apple has let you down.
This is a far cry from what was initially alleged: that Apple denied that battery life caused phones to slow down. This "apology" essentially amounts to "we're sorry you don't understand battery chemistry".
If Apple let the phones crash, as old electronics often do, and told people their phones were "old", would that be better?
citation please?
Except that is not what they were doing. There is a huge difference between pushing out updates around the time of a new phone release to push users onto the new phones (what people proposed Apple was doing) compared to slowing down your phone so it stays usable after its battery becomes unable to support the factory level of performance. I would say Apple was doing the opposite of what people suggested since slowing the phones down made them usable for a longer period of time.
Still don't see the problem?
These things can be true as well, and none of them imply that Apple intentionally slowed phones to boost sales.
All allegedly because people are too dense to understand the concept that rechargeable batteries degrade over time? I learned this fact some 30 years ago as a child playing with toys.
So, maybe it wasn't to increase sales in the short term but it certainly was done to protect Apple's brand. Which, in turn increases the company value.
People were already trying to damage Apple’s brand by making the case that they were intentionally slowing phones down to force upgrades, long before there was any substance to the concept.
I’m not saying they made good choices, but it’s not clear that they had good options.
edit: To be clear I would have preferred them not force the upgrade on me. I still would have likely purchased a new phone, but instead I purchased an android phone.
It’s weird that your defense comes down to “there was no way for Apple to avoid reputational damage so it was ok.”
No one is suggesting that there is always a win-win.
The “magic” solution here was simply transparency. Even if people aren’t going to like the message.
If anything Apple could include a switch (like "low power mode" but for old batteries) and let people upset with it disable the feature.
* basic EE from my time in the renewables biz; not an expert
I guess this is an argument for both our points.
The user friendly approach would have been to pop up a warning message on next boot:
"Hey Avalys,
We detected that your battery has degraded, and so your phone's performance has been lowered to prevent your phone from crashing. To restore performance please take your phone to the apple store to get your battery reset.
Give them code AH534 to get $25 off battery replacement. Offer is valid for the next 14 days."
Oh come on. Macs tell you you need to replace your battery and I've never heard anyone complain about this. I have no idea if this behaviour was malicious, but a slowdown without any indication of technical issues is a horrible experience that just invites phone replacement. I'd much rather have random crashes than a non-notified slowdown- at least then I know something is wrong, rather than just my hardware is aging out and I need to get a new phone.
The solution is to let people do whatever the fuck they want with their devices and replace broken parts as they see fit. You can't have it both ways. This sort of a strawman is more baffling than the actual issue.
What “both ways” are you referring to?
Yes, that's better than the car unexpectedly shutting down but you'd still expect to have the core issue rectified instead of hiding it from the user.
Companies don't usually hide "features" from customers.
Companies don't usually pay fines for hiding "features."
They intentionally slowed down all iPhones in the face of more user-friendly options to fix an issue a minuscule percentage of people had. I think you can choose to view this as a solution, but I'm leery of anyone who thinks this was an appropriate solution.
> They determined this happened because aged batteries were not capable of delivering peak current anymore and the CPU was “browning out” under heavy load.
This is kinda true but ultimately more misleading than insightful. It makes it sound like it's just the batteries' fault and nothing can be done. Aged batteries are perfectly capable of delivering all the peak power necessary for operation. The only time it's possibly an issue for the LiCo oxides the iPhone uses is at a low SoC after a relaxation period (which is amplified if the battery itself is physically cold). So, in a perfect storm of events you'll have a phone that will die from 10% SoC.
But then your SoC isn't really at 10%, innit? Your SoH is actually lower, so your SoC needs to diminish faster to accurately map to your reduced capacity. SoC isn't a mystery either. Because this issue is prevalent after a relaxation period on the LiCo batteries, you can get pretty accurate SoCs from simply reading OCV. Remember, OCV:SOH mapping is only difficult for non-Cobalt Lithium chemistries, and even then often only in the middle range. Reductions in SoH speed up passage along the OCV:SOC curve, not chop the ends off--and the ends are the most prominent.
> A phone that is moderately slower is still more valuable than one that randomly crashes.
There are other things Apple could have done. Like, actually accurately report the SoC. Or reduce screen brightness at lower SoCs. Further, it's not "randomly crashing"--it's shutting off at low charge% (but higher than people would expect).
I don't know if it was malicious, but if not, it's a surprisingly stupid fix from an otherwise brilliant engineering team, and it seems the judge agreed.
Nobody would have been any the wiser.
They created these locked down devices. Let them feel the pain.
Also: iPhone, iPod, and iPad batteries are replaceable; just not easily. There’s literally a connector that seperates the battery from the logic board. If they wanted to prevent you from replacing it, they’d solder them together.
That's the absolute least effective way of discouraging the practice. It's the strategy companies want you to take, but it influences companies the least. Collective action by consumers is a much better way of effecting change, including politically or legally, as they did here.
It definitely is anti-competitive to have none-removable batteries: it stops your old product from competing with your new product.
Finally, as a matter of fact, the battery in my mid 2015 iPod nano is literally soldered together, like you say, and that has stopped me from putting in a new one, like I did myself with an iPhone 3G.
Lack of ability to replace the battery seems to suggest otherwise.
>There is no magic solution here.
Replaceable battery with a message indicating when battery health is low enough it needs to be replaced seems close enough to a magic fix.
And even if they did make the batteries user replaceable, that is of pretty questionable value for the consumer. First, a lot of people are going to buy $5 replacement batteries on Ali Express and their phone is going to get bricked or catch fire. Related to that, most people are unaware of how dangerous handling loose lithium batteries can be.
Second, it makes the phones much more vulnerable to liquid damage, as well as much physically larger.
For sure, I would love it if my phone had replaceable batteries. I carry a couple 18650s and 16340s in my backpack for my flashlights. But there are a ton of downsides to having them, particularly in a smartphone.
You gonna want to sit down for this one: a standardized battery that can be replaced by the user without having to disassemble the device, maybe through a removable back cover or something like that.
Consumers overwhelmingly opted for phones without replaceable batteries, which is why they stopped being made.
No of course there were no identical products only differing by whether the battery was replaceable.
But that is irrelevant. If it was important to people, phones without replaceable batteries would have been slower to sell and manufacturers would have adapted.
Samsung threw hundreds of designs against the wall looking for an edge, and they all failed except for the ones closest to the iPhone in design or bigger than the iPhone.
Customers did have a preference for larger phones, which Apple was forced by the market to concede, but not for replaceable batteries.
The problem is that if Apple admitted to the fact that old batteries were the problem they would get a class-action lawsuit to force them to allow batteries to be replaced ... like every other bloody phone.
Apple absolutely deserves this. They hid it intentionally because they knew what the followup was going to be and they didn't want to do it.
Apple had an issue with old phones unexpectedly shutting down. They determined this happened because aged batteries were not capable of delivering peak current anymore and the CPU was “browning out” under heavy load.
They added a software feature in an iOS update that throttled the CPU in this condition to prevent a crash, at the expense of lower peak CPU performance.
From my perspective, this demonstrated real dedication to customer care and old device support from Apple. A phone that is moderately slower is still more valuable than one that randomly crashes. Intuitively, I’d expect that this would decrease sales of replacement iPhones, not increase them.
People latched onto the fact that Apple did this “secretly” - but Apple has never exposed this sort of implementation detail, and they’ve never wanted battery replacement to be part of the normal user experience for their devices. If Apple had shipped an iOS update that started telling people “Your battery is degraded, pay us to replace it to stop the crashes!” they obviously would’ve been raked over the coals also. There is no magic solution here.
So I never saw any indication that this was malicious on Apple’s part.