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Comment by saghm | Hacker News Reader

From reading the Twitter thread and these comments, I'm not quite sure I understand what actually is happening/will happen to people's phones. Any chance someone could explain what's up to someone with little to no iOS knowledge?

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Well, what's happening to my phone is that every few seconds screen blanks out, running apps crash and the phone goes back to the lock screen. The battery is also draining fast and the phone is warm to the touch.

The battery drain screams of planned obsolescence. But there is always the possibility that it’s proprietary hardware just requires them to write code that just obliterates our battery.

Relaunching is probably an expensive operation. Which would reasonably drain the battery if it happened a lot, just the same as, say, playing a CPU-intensive game would.

Not everything has to have a malicious explanation.

No it doesn’t. This is a belief without any merit whatsoever. There is approximately zero chance that Apple are deliberately causing iPhone batteries to drain faster so that people will buy new iPhones.

Well, no. But comparing the overall resource demands of iOS 6 and iOS 10 (the first and last iOS available on iPhone 5), it's very clear that the latter is an absolutely pig. Burning through more CPU, RAM and IOPS = faster battery drain.

I doubt Apple is deliberately adding bloat to iOS, but every major version is definitely heavier than the previous one.

OK sure, but this has nothing to do with what "planned obsolescence" means.

I understand that the explanation is that the new hardware has different code running on it than the old hardware. I've been an iPhone owner since the first version. Empirically, every new iPhone's associated OS has had significant impact on my battery.

And I've experienced no such thing.

This argument doesn't make sense from a logical point of view. If all iPhones eventually crawl to a halt because Apple ruins them with software updates, why would that push people to go buy a new iPhone? Wouldn't they look elsewhere?

No. They wouldn't. They are used to the iOS way of doing things. The phones do not crawl to a halt. The battery drains very fast. Whereas the phone made it through two days, they would now not make it through one day without some charging.

No. My iPhone 5S is crawling to a halt since iOS 11, and I've already ordered an iPhone SE. It sounds like Stockholm syndrome, but what else should I buy? There are Android phones that brag about receiving three years of security fixes as if that was a stellar achievement, but that's just as short as the lifetime of my iPhones.

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