It wasn't what Apple was doing that was the problem, it was the fact that they were initially quite secretive about it! People just started noticing their phones slowing down without explanation. Now days iOS tells if your battery no longer supports peak performance, which is the right thing to do.
> "Yes, they should have shipped the feature off by default and with a toggle"
Oh, it should always have been on by default. Most people would much rather their phone run a little slower than risk random crashes and shutdowns! But iOS should have told you about this from the start.
Also, Apple already had somewhat of a reputation; this was far from the first time they would do shitty things, blame the users, and/or refuse to communicate what's going on.
It's a classic case of 100% right and 100% fired: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDO24U3hMkU
The Lenovo Thinkpad t480s comes to my mind: with factory settings, the CPU was unable to reach its advertised boost frequency nor maintain its max non-boost frequency for more than a few minutes. After 5 to 10 minutes, the machine was usually running at 300/400mhz under its advertised clock speed.
Undervolting helped a lot but could not fix the issue completely, under clocking was the only solution to maintain a consistent clock speed.
It was usually less annoying for me to just disable turbo, and only turn it on if I really needed the boost.
# echo disengaged > /proc/acpi/ibm/fan
So if you are an average user of a Lenovo laptop without technical skills, you probably have a machine that does not meet the advertised performance, and no way to fix it.
End result is your old clothes dryer starts taking longer and longer to dry clothes.
Laptops and phones also notoriously slow down to manage heat, and that is also never told to the user.
A common task that repair shops do to "fix a slow PC" is clean dust from the fans and heatsinks to reduce throttling. Users don't know or understand that this is happening, they just know their system is slow.
Apple “You clicked a pop up that said you accepted random shutdowns and reboots due to a degraded battery instead of allowing us to degrade performance to enable a stable experience with a degraded battery.”
How would you explain the above to tech illiterate people? Increase suppose calls because you allowed a user to chose between degraded yet stable performance versus seemly random (to the user) reboots and shutdowns?
That would be transparent and also allow decisions, if AppleCare also allowed for free battery replacement after receiving that message it would be a PR boon, not a kerfuffle.
But you might overestimate technical understanding of people.
"Letting people know" comes with it's own challenges.
There are a lot of choices an OS makes without letting it's users know.
It would be quite overwhelming to communicate all. And in making choice what to communicate mistakes might be made.
Screaming disgrace is a bit exaggerated.
Consider: a pop up saying "Your battery need replacing, it is operating in slow mode to avoid crashes" v people thinking "Damn, my phone is slow - I better buy a new phone"
My 2008 MacBook Pro was able to detect battery problems one year before they started to manifest physically. They did it by adding another controller and an independent firmware to the battery itself, but there was no better tech at that time.
M powered MacBooks added auto hold-off (discharge to 80%, keep it there) or postpone charge (because the battery is used too rarely), to the list of tricks they know, and these are just the visible ones to the user.
Where? AFAIK this is a feature you need a third party app like Aldente for. The OS does not offer any way to control battery charging level. Yes, it tries to be smart and guess when you need full charge and sometimes decides to charge to only 80% but that doesnt work for all users except the ones with very regular routines and there is no manual control.
Sometimes it flat out refuses the charge. Then I disconnect and use the battery until 30% or so. Then charge when convenient.
My MacBook Air M1 has 165 cycles in 3 years, at 90% of design capacity. I think this is a very solid management of the battery for a computer used every day literally.
My MacBook Pro is at ~85% after 8 years. I don't remember total cycles now.
I find running on battery, lots of things are throttled or disabled. CPU is slower for example. That's probably a good reason for why not.
FWIW, the performance and CPU features are the same on Mx based MacBooks whether they're plugged in or not.
> M powered MacBooks added (...)
Things that Lenovo laptops have had for a generation?
It was also present in HP and Dell's business notebooks for quite some time, but again, it's not smart. Just a pre-defined percentage.
Apple manages maximum charge capacity automatically depending on the way you use your computer.
For this to be happening in 2023 means that some manufacturers at least, seem to be not managing this potential problem at all.
Every company makes big mistakes. Also Apple once built laptops with self-cooking GPUs, a couple ones very fragile keyboards, a series with too-sensitive screen coatings.
We can write tons of problems with every producer. The most important metric is whether they're learning from that or not. As far as I can see Samsung and Apple learnt their lessons.
Apple cannot predict where you are going to use laptop on AC power at home or whether you are going somewhere and need a full charge. So manual control is better.
Yes, it does. Even my 7 years old iPhone X does it. I use some features at very specific times, and it suggests me "do you want to do X?" around the time I do that. So the models work well.
Also, the phone generally enables optimized charging if I put it to charge too early. Scheduling to finish a couple of hours before I wake.
You're conceding that you have a predictable schedule. Folks on the other side of this (who believe it can't work nearly as well as manual control) don't have a predictable schedule. Think of it like {hybrid workers who use a desk all day the same 3 days a week, and are nomads the other 2 days a week, and the ML system can figure this out} vs {on-site workers who use a desk all day 5 days a week, but are nomads a few random days a year, which always catches the ML system off guard}.
Both are valid. A setting that caps it at 80% unless you hit a button for "I'm about to spend a lot more time unplugged than usual, so prepare the battery for that" is the only way to handle unpredictable circumstances. Just like preparing an EV for a road trip.
My Macs charge routine is way more hectic than my phone's which is very predictable, and both of them guesses what I'm trying to do correctly 99% of the time, and that's fine by me.
What I said is, it's working fine for me, but the system is open to tuning both out of the box (I need this now, please charge), or with some small tools (it was called Aldente IIRC), for differing, equally valid needs.
I don't think we're in disagreement here.
BTW, your nick reads ********. Is it hunter2 or something? ;)
That may or may not be noteworthy. Despite half my family using MacBooks, and some having had major battery problems, I’ve never heard of such a notification as you describe (including at least one where I’d certainly have expected to hear about it). And the similar system SMART for storage devices is notoriously unreliable: I’ve personally had devices with dire warnings chug along merrily for plenty more years, and observed one or two failures that never received any warnings.
Oh, don't bring up SMART. I remember long-testing >100 disks, and most of them passed (it took hours), and all of them failed within 10 days after facing real workloads. We needed a temporary storage for migrating things, but we lost no data, because it was just a copy operation.
Still to this day people on HN repeat it like it's fact, and when you correct them, shift the goalposts to "well they didn't TELL people."
Apple provides a very comprehensive user manual that ships as a pre-installed app on every phone. There are large headings describing the latest features right when you open it.
I don’t recall being unaware of this feature before it became a “scandal”, but I’m one of those weirdos that reads the release pop-ups.
What do you do now? Your phone is laggy and there's no setting to disable the feature or a way to revert to an old iOS version. You go to the store and they don't tell you anything about a battery replacement, but instead suggest a new iPhone!
The feature was useful, the implementation wasn't. The issues weren't caused by the user not reading the changelog.
You keep repeating this, but battery replacements were a thing before this whole debacle. I got them a few times, I think they were like $79 (yes definitely more money than the sus extended batteries I'd buy off eBay for my HTC Evo). I realize society collectively forgot about them once the back stopped coming off the phone, but surely a tech savvy hackernews would realize that they couldn't use the same battery forever without replacement.
I don't blame the guy for recommending a new phone, after all apparently Apple didn't inform all their stores about the change, so they probably had no idea that the fix was a cheap battery replacement.
They knew that old devices (especially common with the well-selling iPhone 6) would fail at peak demand, and wanted to address that, but they probably didn't have an accurate figure of exactly how many devices would be covered by the feature as initially configured.
That it took them as long as it did to react to the resulting situation is unfortunate, but could probably be explained by corporate culture at Apple, they don't generally like to admit mistakes (see the Trash Can Mac Pro press meeting a few years back).
In the end it was just a huge PR fuckup, if they had properly considered how many devices would be affected they would have realised they needed to communicate more clearly, they could have avoided lawsuits and honestly if they had played their cards right from the get go they would probably have received praise instead of backlash, but instead here we are 7 years later still explaining how battery chemistry affects integrated circuits on technical forums.
I'm an avid reader of pop-ups and release notes. They didn't tell people.
From people I've talked to, it seems like the VAST majority of people are under the impression that Apple does this as a planned obsolescence practice.
In fact, this thread is the first one I've come across where most people seem to get the point of the feature
Notably, this will no longer be an issue on modern iPhones because they have much more reasonable batteries.
Apple underspecced the batteries in iPhones and then hid the software kludge they made to hide that fact. That's why the reaction is warranted.
Designing a product to fail gracefully is good engineering practice.
Apple made the right decision to make the phone go slower instead of crashing. Somewhere out there, there's someone making a 911 call on an iPhone with an old battery.
- The phone became slow, laggy animations, etc.
- I had no idea what was causing the problem.
- There was no way to return to an older iOS version or a way to disable the new behaviour.
- I went to an Apple store and was told that I probably should get a new phone.
I'm sure they had some good intentions, but in practice they degraded my experience too much and profited from new iPhone sales that didn't need to happen. Apple had to be sued first to add a setting to disable this feature and start offering cheap battery replacements (by then I had already moved on).
From the implementation of this feature to the way they handled it, it was all Apple. Samsung had nothing to do with my bad experience.
Not everyone was affected this much by the change, but some where. And that's a problem.
By itself this is already a problem, but they also decided to not allow you to disable the feature or reverse to an older iOS version. I don't think they informed their Apple store employees either, at least I was told to buy a new phone. They had to be sued first to add a simple setting, ffs!
So yeah, I think the criticism is valid and deserved. I'm sure they had good intentions, but the implementation was shit and not only they created issues for some iPhone users, but also profited with new iPhone sales (not me, that was my last iPhone).
Either Apple did the proper QA of the battery to understand how it would behave as it got to end of life and knowingly put a battery into a $800 phone that wouldn't be functional before the phone would run out of software updates, or they FAILED to do proper longevity testing on the battery of a $800 phone.
It wasn't planned obsolescence when they added that code to keep the older phones working. It WAS planned obsolescence when they put a pitiful and underspecced battery into their $800 phone.
What Apple did was clock down the CPU of iPhones with degraded batteries in order to reduce peak load which would otherwise result in crashes that would have made the device borderline unusable below some charge percentage.
Yes, they should have shipped the feature off by default and with a toggle, but the feature itself was amazing as it let already old phones last longer than they otherwise would have.
Apple deserves a lot of shit for their bullshit surrounding replacement parts, but this particular topic is something they get an undeserved amount of shit for in my opinion.