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.
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."