apple can say otherwise but that doesn't mean you need to regurgitate their lies. Apple only slowed the phones after a software update, not as a natural response to battery degradation. if that were the case it wouldn't be unique to that specific phone anyways.
God, apple makes good hardware but the people who just makes things up to stand in the fire of criticism are the strangest
https://web.archive.org/web/20200207222719/https://www.econo...
The lawsuits currently being settled are the same: they haven’t stopped doing it, but now there’s a clear UI explaining why it’s happening when it happens.
> Apple only slowed the phones after a software update, not as a natural response to battery degradation. if that were the case it wouldn't be unique to that specific phone anyways.
It’s not unique to that model, or even Apple, as was widely covered at the time. They added that battery management feature in a software update in response to data showing a fair number of users were affected by unexplained shutdowns, so it affected the population of people who had been aware of their phones’ battery health but the problem was that it happened without notification instead of popping up a “your battery is dying!” warning.
You might find https://www.geekbench.com/blog/2017/12/iphone-performance-an... interesting:
> Users expect either full performance, or reduced performance with a notification that their phone is in low-power mode. This fix creates a third, unexpected state. While this state is created to mask a deficiency in battery power, users may believe that the slow down is due to CPU performance, instead of battery performance, which is triggering an Apple introduced CPU slow-down. This fix will also cause users to think, “my phone is slow so I should replace it” not, “my phone is slow so I should replace its battery”. This will likely feed into the “planned obsolescence” narrative.
They are not "outright lying" like you claim, considering you explain why what they're saying is true ("phone throttling its power draw" = slowing down)
If you believe Apple's marketing, it's false. If you look at customers' reaction, it's likely true. There were a lot of complains after every update, and the only known solution was to buy a new phone.
It’s also worth noting that multiple government investigations and lawsuits have failed to turn up any evidence supporting the conspiratorial claims about forced updates.
I know that Purism’s marketing strategy has to be convincing you to buy a product which is inferior on many counts but I think it’s a mistake to do things like this attacking their competitors because the “free is better” framing is fundamentally about trust. If they’re dishonest about something we can easily assess, how much can we trust the claims they’re making about things which are much harder to prove?
You are technically right, but important part you are missing is that the Apple's behavior has only ended after they were sued.
> things which are much harder to prove
Which things? All code is FLOSS btw.
You have the order backwards: most of the lawsuits were filed after they’d shipped two rounds of UI indicating when battery health was degrading performance – the lawyers recruiting clients knew that would make it easier to argue that the company was effectively admitting fault.
https://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2018/01/with-tw...
> Which things? All code is FLOSS btw.
Ever wonder why they advertise “less binary blobs”? Any complex device has a long trust chain - you have the OS, of course, which we already know has an older security architecture than iOS or Android, but you also have the firmware for every component, implementation choices for how those components connect, and things like the CPU and it’s microcode. I guarantee you haven’t examined all of those so you’re trusting them to do so, which is what everyone does, and that’s why I mentioned the transitive nature of dishonest marketing. If they’re playing fast and loose in one area that makes it harder to say that they wouldn’t try to cover up something else, overstate the degree of diligence that they’ve applied, etc. If one of their developers is compromised, how do I know the same marketing weasel won’t decide that it’d be bad for their reputation to acknowledge it in the absence of proof that a signing key was leaked? I’d like to say that they wouldn’t but clearly their senior management aren’t placing enough emphasis on honesty.
Now, if it was some random internet poster I might excuse this as fanboys being tedious or spending too much time on clickbait sites but this is an official publication from a direct competitor. They have to have expertise in this subject to be capable of building devices and anyone capable of designing a phone is going to know this is a real problem.
I doubt any of their marketing people are reading this but outright lying like that is not how you build trust in your products. They’re referring to the phone throttling its power draw when a degraded battery could no longer provide full output, and the alternative would be shutting down suddenly at a time when the phone was doing something demanding like playing a game. Other devices do this as well for the same reason, and anyone selling battery powered devices has no excuse for not knowing this. A company which shipped a phone in 2020 with 5 hours of battery life when new must be painfully aware of the challenges.
Similarly, anyone buying another phone rather than a much cheaper battery replacement is probably doing so because they want the additional performance, camera quality, etc. or simply normal wear and tear has added up over time and the repair costs are closer to replacement.
A company delivering a phone with performance slower than competing devices made a decade earlier similarly has no business claiming that the gains for most users are marginal just because their hardware has lagged far behind. There’s a great example of deceptive marketing here:
> The Librem 5 utilizes a quad-core arm based CPU, where Purism is the first company to include this CPU in a mobile phone
https://puri.sm/pages/iphone-vs-librem-5/
Someone who doesn’t know that quad core ARM CPUs started shipping in phones around 2011 would not understand that to mean “nobody else uses this specific CPU for phones” rather than what they’re hoping the reader will think: “this thing isn’t slower than an iPhone 4S” The security claims are similarly broad and designed to be read as more persuasive than is actually warranted.
This is disappointing because I like the idea of more open hardware, and it’s certainly the case that a lot of phones are thrown out because they stop getting support, but the more I read their copy the less I trust this company. They’re trying to make an argument for why you shouldn’t hold slower hardware against them, but they way they do it makes me less inclined to trust anything they say without carefully validating it.