>The part that gets me is that they didn't decide to instead allow folks to set a max battery charge to extend their battery life.

That's a fairly unusual feature to have for a consumer device. Support for it is spotty on laptops, and on androids the only way of doing it (I'm aware of) involves rooting your phone.

My AirPod Pros have notified me that based on usage they would only charge to 80%, but that is modifiable.

iPhones also have that feature, but they're both introduced fairly recently. Furthermore, it's not a general "max charge %" limiter, it's a system that's supposed to automagically guess when you're not going to use your phone (eg. at night), and won't charge to full during that time, but will otherwise charge to 100% (eg. in the morning).

The alternative is that the phone shuts off spontaneously and reboots if power draw gets too high, which also degrades the consumer’s experience and looks a lot scarier and more obviously broken to most people.

Are these really the two options? What about displaying a plainly worded message that explains the situation to the owner, then gives them the choice?

Or would that be too confusing and scary for Apple customers?

Crashing has implications for data integrity which laypeople do not fully understand to this day, despite it having been a problem for the entire history of computing. I don’t think giving users a choice between potentially catastrophic failure and inconvenience is wise. Notifying them of the slowdown is a good idea, and these days you can go into the settings to turn off the slowdown manually, but I think making people look for it is a good idea.

Even if you think customers shouldn't be given a choice, there is still no excuse for not informing the users of the situation.

Apple is not a victim here.

Did I say Apple was a victim? No. They should have notified people. But the conspiracy theories are silly, as are people who act like there isn’t a clearly correct default behavior in this case.

Okay, then we agree the comment I responded to presented a false dichotomy.

You said that their decision obviously degrades the user experience. They were dealing with an engineering trade off and picked the side that didn’t risk data loss. I contend that that’s better than the alternative, irrespective of whether or not they tell people what’s going on.

You're ignoring the point that these weren't the only two choices - even after both 'invisible' and 'bigbubba' suggested alternatives (admittedly not as profitable for Apple).

I’m really not. I said they should have notified people. You’re ignoring that there’s no solution to this problem that doesn’t degrade the user experience in one way or another, which is the point I was making.

The reason for the lawsuits and bad PR wasn't that user experience was degraded, but that it was done in a way that was close to planned obsolesce. Apple had ways to avoid this.

There’s no other way to fix the spontaneous shutdowns though. And I will repeat that they should have told people it might slow their phone down.

Technically speaking, they could have designed the battery differently so it's much more likely to last the full service life.

Acting this way was a choice, which may have been fine with had Apple not denied the issue and allowed replacing bad batteries under warranty.

I'm pretty sure they ran an exchange program for affected models of the 6s: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2016/12/06/apple-says-ip...

There's only so much you can do to make lithium batteries last forever. These days the phone tries to figure out when you need it charged by in the morning so it's not sitting on the charger at 100% for eight hours overnight, and this is supposed to help.

That replacement program was for a different problem, not battery degradation per se but a manufacturing error; The throttling affected other models too (and replaced 6s batteries after enough time I guess).

It's true that battery degradation can't be avoided eventually; but there's a reason why these complaints are rarer on high-end Androids (Also low-end, but it's likely users have appropriately lower expectations for these).

The battery degradation is inevitable though.

Apple doesn't manufacture the batteries. And you can't magically make batteries that perform identically. Every battery made has variation in it and that variation can't be seen until it starts causing failures.

The change would have been to simply advertise the service life was shorter than it actually was, to account for various worse batteries, but the long tail of worse off batteries would have still been there regardless.

That's what they added. There's now a full Battery section in the Settings app which shows you your current battery health, whether the life has declined to the point where it is limiting performance, and an optimized charging setting which is enabled by default so the phone won't charge past 80% unless it's at a time of day where your usage history suggests you'll need the full charge.

It is far more likely that these CPUs have the capability to throttle power usage instantaneously. If the battery monitor detects a problematic energy draw, it should have the capability to correct it before the CPU shuts down.

Indeed! They do throttle instantaneously. Which slows everything down, and stops the device from halting. This is what is being complained about.

Or slow the phone down and inform the customer their phone is running in "Reduced mode" or whatever due to their battery being old. It's honestly not that hard.

Which is more or less what they’ve now done.

It actually makes most sense that they weren't being malicious. Half the posts on this thread don't even understand what the problem is. Namely throttling to prevent the device from shutting off as if it was some kind of anti-consumer feature when it was actually pro-consumer.

Exactly this. As someone who experienced the unexpected shutdowns (described my experience elsewhere in these comments), the throttling fixed my issue until I ended up getting my battery replaced by a third party.

I think what a lot of people miss is that it was not just a restart, but a shutdown that would then require a charger be connected before the phone could be turned on again, even though it would then report similar charge to before the shutdown.

If you were out of the house and did not have a charger readily accessible, it was equivalent to the phone randomly turning into a brick for several hours at a time.

I can’t speak for everyone on this thread, but the combination of “hiding” and “degrading” are what make this anti-consumer. If your car wouldn’t go over 30mph and the manufacturer wouldn’t disclose why, how would you feel?

From the article:

>Apple, the most valuable company in the world, acted deceptively by hiding the shutdown and slowdown issues, according to the court filing.

>"Many consumers decided that the only way to get improved performance was to purchase a newer-model iPhone from Apple," Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich wrote...