They just don’t provide products full of modular junk. They mostly try not to serve the junk market altogether. And sure, that skews their prices higher, and limits what you can do after buying the device. But they’re serving mostly mid-high end markets who would rather pay more than repair or replace. People who voluntarily accept the limitations they place on their devices.
A better criticism of their place in the market is how they distort “externalities”. Manufacturing labor costs and treatment, mining impact. The places they are renowned for outplaying every competitor.
That’s where their abuse lies. They don’t care if you swap out a battery, they just don’t care if you can either. They care about offering consumer-luxury products no one else can. If you follow that money, it’s their supply chain who hurts, not their clientele.
https://www.npr.org/2020/11/18/936268845/apple-agrees-to-pay...
But this about more than just Apple. It is about corporates in general. I don't think a "corporates are evil" mantra explains everything - or even anything useful.
Product Designers are humans, CEOs are humans, all the employees are humans.(Unless ... Aliens ... :-) ) Some humans are better at whatever task than others, but all are operating under their motivational influences.
Get enough people together under one banner, someone will do something poor under that banner's name.
...which if you bothered to read even the article you linked, you'd know had to do with ensuring that battery voltage wouldn't drop low enough for the device to randomly shut itself off, a result which itself became a problem due to the actual longevity of their devices.
You can certainly argue that they should have communicated this with their customers, though I'd argue that the vast majority would not notice nor care, while a lot more people would certainly notice their devices randomly shutting off.
>If you're among those affected, your phone will randomly shut down and completely die, even though your battery indicator might have said you had plenty of juice left. It's not a simple system crash, because your phone will stay dead until you connect it to a charger
https://android.gadgethacks.com/news/nexus-6p-battery-random...
Instead of fixing the issue, Google's solution was to tell you to buy a new phone.
My point was that Apple is a corporation and so deserves the same suspicion as all the rest.
You've just added another data point to "corporations can't be trusted". Yep, Google is a corporation and can't be trusted either.
You seem to be saying Apple is better than [insert other corporation here] in some way. I see that as irrelevant.
I am saying that corporations - in the larger picture - can't be trusted.
Apple, and in this case Google, behaving poorly reflects that.
Google, on the other hand, lost it's court case after refusing to fix a known defect that had Nexus phones die while reporting they had more than a 50% charge remaining, and staying dead until you connected them to a charger.
>Nexus 6P owners eligible for up to $400 from Huawei and Google in class action settlement
https://www.androidcentral.com/nexus-6p-owners-eligible-400-...
Apples approach to "assuming everyone's device behaves the same way" (quotes because I don't honestly think any qualified engineer would make that assumption.) was wrong.
Some people use their phones less. My father doesn't turn his phone ON unless he wants to make a call.(Frustrating though that is...)
This makes a difference to battery performance as they don't just age out sitting in a box but through use as well. But here's Apple's take: https://www.apple.com/au/batteries/why-lithium-ion/
" For instance, you might use 75 per cent of your battery’s capacity one day, then recharge it fully overnight. If you use 25 per cent the next day, you will have discharged a total of 100 per cent, and the two days will add up to one charge cycle. It could take several days to complete a cycle. The capacity of any type of battery will diminish after a certain amount of recharging. "
Some people used their phone a lot and had batteries replaced - either through Apple or not.
And some human within Apple signed off on a solution to effectively make everyones older phone worse.
What else could they have done? Well, from my original NPR link: "Starting in 2018, iPhone users have been able to better control an iPhone's battery life and check on the health of the battery, along with allowing users to turn off iPhone battery throttling"
Make no mistake, Apple acted poorly. But they do better now. Whether that is because they were caught or not, we will never know.
I like many of the things Apple does. I have a lot of respect for their trailblazing. Screens seemed stuck in 1920x1080 hell until Apple unplugged screen development again.
But they are a corporation like any other and can't be trusted.
There is plenty of things to be critical of Apple and any corporation for and you don't need to spread misinformation in order to do so. You can even be critical about how they approached this, but your original claim that you doubled down on is simply false.
With yourself and a coincidental comment making such reasonable corrections I investigated further.
Posted below for posterity, not necessarily you.
The reddit post that started it all: https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/7inu45/psa_iphone_s...
Finally, from the horses mouth:https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208387
"iOS 11.3 and later improve this performance management feature"
and
"iPhone 8 and later use a more advanced hardware and software ..[snip].. As a result, the impacts of performance management may be less noticeable on iPhone 8 and later."
My conclusion: It is true that Apple was only targeting phones with dodgy(to a degree of approximation) batteries.
OTOH, Apple does a better job now. Both in execution and communication.
Whether Apple would have reached this achievement without batterygate is unknowable.
My apologies for spreading misinformation, thank you for your patience.
You've literally just proved the point the parent comment was making.
The same outcome is not always equal to the same behaviour. The devices throttled themselves because worn batteries could not handle the sudden power spike needed by the CPU. You can very easily verify this by turning off the software fix on an affected phone—start pushing it and it literally just shuts off.
Apple still behaved deplorably here: as soon as this software kludge was triggered, it should have popped up a warning saying "hey your battery is no good, go get it replaced. Your phone will perform way slower in the meantime".
They undoubtedly sold more iPhones by not doing so. But they didn't slow down perfectly functional old phones, they slowed down phones which were effectively faulty.
Apple was held up as some kind of paragon exception to this. It isn't.
1. slowing devices without telling anyone what they were doing.
2. assuming all their older devices were in the same state or had the same use cases. Replaced your phone battery recently? Who cares, you go slow anyway.
The combination of 1+2 combined with a loyal fanbase (or trapped in the ecosystem depending on your views) does seem awfully suspicious regarding manipulated obsolescence and worth investigation.
The article linked has Apple losing a court case in this regard.
So the point still stands, don't trust corporations, including Apple.
If you want to say that Apple is better than other corporations. Well that is a different point. You still can't trust them.
Sorry to be nitpicky, but this is actually not the case.
The whole reason this was initially discovered was because someone on reddit ran Geekbench before and after a battery replacement and got a huge performance increase. Not telling users is inexcusable, but phones where the battery was fully functional continued to run at full speed regardless of age.
> You still can't trust them
On this point I 100% agree!
Posted below for posterity, not necessarily you.
The reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/7inu45/psa_iphone_s...
Finally, from the horses mouth:https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208387
"iOS 11.3 and later improve this performance management feature"
and
"iPhone 8 and later use a more advanced hardware and software ..[snip].. As a result, the impacts of performance management may be less noticeable on iPhone 8 and later."
My conclusion: It is true that Apple was only targeting phones with dodgy(to a degree of approximation) batteries.
OTOH, Apple does a better job now. Both in execution and communication.
Whether Apple would have reached this achievement without batterygate is unknowable.
My apologies for spreading misinformation, thank you for your patience.
Edit:snipped some bits for conciseness.
Battery life vs speed vs reliability. Different people cut it different ways.
I think the issue was that everyone got the one solution without Apple telling them. So for a lot of people, it was perceived as worse.
What the hell has to happen for you to realize corporations are not your friends and 'mah free market' becomes mafia without law enforcement.