> - 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.
- 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?