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Re:Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their ke... by ceejayoz on Monday December 13, 2021 @03:16PM (#29544056)
The alternative in cold, old batteries was an unexpected shutoff of the device.

https://9to5mac.com/2017/12/20/apple-statement-iphone-perfor...

> Lithium-ion batteries become less capable of supplying peak current demands when in cold conditions, have a low battery charge or as they age over time, which can result in the device unexpectedly shutting down to protect its electronic components.

They fucked up not notifying people when it's happening, but technologically the feature itself is entirely the right call. (You can also turn it off, and accept that it'll just die randomly if you do something CPU intensive in the cold.)

Regardless of which setting you choose, there's hardly a monthly fee for it.

Re:Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their ke... by dkonofalski on Monday December 13, 2021 @03:31PM (#29544229)
They did notify people. It was just in the patch notes that most people don't read.
Re:Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their ke... by ceejayoz on Monday December 13, 2021 @03:33PM (#29544259)
That's not "when it's happening"; I think the new approach they've taken of a dialog popping up is far more transparent and user-friendly. I've gotten used to patch notes saying stuff like "Every week we fix bugs and add improvements!"
Re:Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their ke... by dkonofalski on Tuesday December 14, 2021 @04:05PM (#29557728)
How is that not "when it's happening"? I would agree that they communicated that change better but to say that they didn't communicate it when it happened is false.
Re:Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their ke... by dkonofalski on Monday December 13, 2021 @03:31PM (#29544222)
That is absolutely false. They didn't try to coerce people to buy the new model. It's quite the contrary - they were extending the battery life of devices where the overdrawn power would cause them to shut down completely. They also communicated this in the patch notes but most people don't read those.

Your comment is completely ignorant.

Re:Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their ke... by mrlonglong on Monday December 13, 2021 @04:02PM (#29544603)
Apple still got fined millions in France for doing that.
Re:Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their ke... by dkonofalski on Tuesday December 14, 2021 @04:04PM (#29557713)
They did not. They did get fined in France but not for what you're claiming.
Re:Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their ke... by outworlder on Monday December 13, 2021 @06:18PM (#29546040)
All they needed to do was to display a "battery degraded" message (or, like on this very Mac I'm using - "Service Recommended".

The behavior they implemented was definitely the right call. And it's still there in other situations - if I have disregarded the "10% battery warning" I'll often notice my device being sluggish at 1%, at which point I'll plug in if I can. The alternative would be for the device to have less runtime, and I'm ok with the implementation.

Had they warned they were doing this, then customers would replace the battery in most cases.

By and large, Apple does NOT do what you are suggesting. As far back as my old iPod touch they released an iOS version that supported wallpapers. It didn't support my device. I thought they were trying to force me to upgrade, so I jailbroke it and enabled the feature anyway. Guess what, the GPU was not enough to display wallpapers, and the home screen had a bad framerate. Rather than giving the subpar experience, they disabled the feature. They could have also simply marked the device as unsupported. iOS (and OSX) updates work on a surprising number of old devices. For many releases, every new OSX release would bring performance enhancements.

There's plenty to complain about Apple - their profit margins are huge, the devices are difficult (in some cases, borderline impossible) to repair, the App Store situation, etc. But making devices obsolete with updates is not what they do.