If your iPhone is slow, try replacing the battery
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Scaling the CPU down with battery capacity seems like a great way to hand-wave away planned obsolescence accusations.
I was curious about the results my phone would receive, so I bought the Geekbench app mentioned in the reddit post. Indeed, my phone scores max out at half of what it claims the iPhone 6 should benchmark at.
I'm pissed.
(2) Replacing the battery is simple. You take it to a phone shop or to Apple and in about an hour it is done. Most people aren't self servicing electronics or pretty much anything these days.
I don't and my comment doesn't suggest that. What I suggest is that phones with non-user-replaceable batteries should be designed with capacity large enough so that life is still acceptable after two years of normal wear without throttling the CPU.
As for how "simple" replacing the battery is, I don't consider a $79 repair that requires an appointment and driving to an Apple Store and wasting an hour of my day "simple".
Whether user serviceable or not is irrelevant, as long as they have a support program to replace your battery.
> As for how "simple" replacing the battery is, I don't consider a $79 repair that requires an appointment and driving to an Apple Store and wasting an hour of my day "simple".
A support program is still far more trouble than user-replaceable batteries.
(2) Replacing the battery should be simple. Pop open the back cover, pull out the battery, and push the new one in. Heck, I used to carry a spare battery just in case, because it took 15 seconds to swap. Taking it to a phone shop and waiting an hour isn't what I would call simple.
If this was the case, the title of this post would be "iPhones don't use all available battery power" instead of what it is. You can't please all the people all the time.
2) No. It should not be simple, and there should not be a crappy "back cover" which "pops" open. If you do that, you've made a fragile piece of crap with no water resistance and much less durability and you've wasted a lot of space. Space which is in very short supply.
Who said anything about crappy? High quality is achievable.
> If you do that, you've made a fragile piece of crap with no water resistance
As opposed to a fragile piece of crap with (some) water resistance? I'm not an expert on water resistance but I'm guessing something can be both resealable and water resistant.
> much less durability
Providing a back cover that would pop off if you drop the phone probably improves durability, due to the ability for energy to escape.
> Space which is in very short supply.
Why is it in short supply, other than because Apple tells you that you need a thinner phone?
Indeed, in their heydey Blackberry had a leather-covered removable back cover. It was a premium product designed to be familiar to fancy people who wore hand-made suits and shoes. Indeed it was far more "quality" than the blingiest gold iPhone, which is just tacky.
I’m not either, but you’d have to figure out an extremely special way to create a water-resistant phone with battery contacts that would not corrode on contact with water.
Plus, battery contacts don't corrode from a short exposition to water (otherwise, so would the headphone plug).
I have a Nexus 7 as well and I have no idea what this pop out cover means. Can you please help me understand? Thanks
A back cover that pops off _appears_ more fragile to most people.
Similar thing with water resistance. They could make a resealable back cover. However, you now have support trying to determine if someone's phone has water damage due to manufacturing issues or because they didn't put the cover back on. This leads back to the phone appearing more fragile (or Apple seeming petty).
You also have the scenario where the phone is dropped hard enough for the cover to come off and then land in water.
I'm quite happy with my Samsung Galaxy S5 mini. It is fully waterproof, despite replaceable battery located behind a removable back cover. The cover also never came loose on accident.
I guess I don't need to elaborate on the survival chances of an iPhone - any iPhone - in these circumstances.
No, the problem is that Apple can do whatever the fuck they want and people still will literally rip the entire stock out of Apple Stores. The newest Macbook Pros still have 16GB RAM tops and not a single miniDP or USB connector, thus leaving people with a pile of useless junk when they upgrade (or have to replace, e.g. due to dead mobo) their older Macbooks. Not to mention the ultra ... "keyboard". People still keep buying them by the masses.
Ie. "the world is idiots and I know better" as opposed "people have different priorities".
>The newest Macbook Pros still have 16GB RAM tops
And for a very good reason. Low-powered (suitable for laptop use) support for 32GB memory wasn't there in Intel chipsets. But not only you didn't bother to investigate, but you know better.
>and not a single miniDP or USB connector, thus leaving people with a pile of useless junk when they upgrade
Or, you know, they can buy a couple of $10 USB-C cables or a $50 hub and be done with it. I prefer the move towards USB-C only faster, than them releasing yet another laptop with 5 different types of ports that will drag on the migration.
No, instead you have two, with differing capabilities but the same form factor. And you have way more than 5 different cable types, each capable of different things, again, with the same form factor.
I'm not yet convinced this is an improvement.
All of those can be used to do the same thing -- just with a smaller powered current, and/or slower speed.
Just don't buy crappy cables:
https://www.theverge.com/2016/2/4/10916264/usb-c-russian-rou...
Just buy high-end USB-C cables from a reputable vendor and you are set. As long as some product (e.g. a printer or hard drive) comes with a specific USB-C cable, use it with that, and it will be good for it. End of story.
As far as I can tell, the advice should probably actually be "Buy high end Thunderbolt 3 cables from a reputable vendor."
Or the fact that's very easy to just buy another one for data/video etc?
I guess the standard could do with some color coding, but it's not like its the end of the world. Or worth it to have N different connector technologies just so we can differentiate what does what.
But why in the world don't they also sell an Apple-branded Thunderbolt 3 cable?
https://arstechnica.com/video/2016/11/the-2016-13-and-15-inc...
They're buying the brand, and they're making the call that having something that has Apple-level quality is better than buying a design they would prefer with inferior quality.
But that doesn't preclude Apple's high-level design choices leading to objectively inferior quality (even if the objective inferiority is only to a hypothetical Apple that made better high-level design decisions.)
They're more buying the vendor lock-in. When I have invested 4-digit sums into Apple Music, Apple Movies and games, I can't port that all over to Android. Yes, I can port DRM-free music over, but no such luck with movies and games - there are games like Real Racing where you can sync progress across platforms but they're rare.
Add in that Apple will (as evidenced in the article!) artificially slow down phones to the point of being unusable, and you have the explanation why people keep throwing money at Apple. It's like gamblers throwing more and more money into the slot machine - it's the sunk cost fallacy.
You very easily can, the lock-in argument is tired.
For one, Apple Music exists for Android: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205365
And even if it didn't, it's a subscription service. Nobody invests much in it, except your monthly subscription. One can cancel at anytime and go to Google Play, Amazon, Spotify, etc.
As for the music download (paid songs), from the major vendors it was Apple who famously spearheaded the "kill music DRM" thing, and has been offering DRM-free music for a decade or so. Which, one can easily play on Android, etc. No lock-in there either.
Games? As if mobile games or even computer games are not casual and replaced by new ones every so often? Plus, with Steam et al, aren't those transferable as well?
Same with movies. Who even buys those? It's the era of Netflix, subscriptions and at least renting.
>there are games like Real Racing where you can sync progress across platforms but they're rare.
As if that's what's holding people from moving away the Mac...
No, they are not. The only thing to buy anything on iOS is the App Store, and it is not transferable - the only things transferable on the iOS Stores are, as both you and I mentioned, music (of course, excluding music bought prior to the no-DRM switch!) and stuff like newspaper subscriptions bought on iOS stores but bound to an account on the newspaper's platform.
Steam is for OS X only (not iOS) and there are no major games on OS X that are not available on Windows (but a huge number of games not available on OS X, thus creating a lock-in to Windows).
> Same with movies. Who even buys those?
It's about the collection you have. I personally have no stakes in that game as all I have is physical media, but I know people with four-digit-sums investments in digital movies and other purchases. For them, the vendor lock in is real (and it's not just Apple - I, for example, got my Amazon account blocked for unpaid bills back from a time where I was financially ... unstable, to say the least, and I literally have no way of ever getting that account reinstated and thus access to my three-digit-worth ebook collection!).
I was speaking of the Mac. Who "invests" in iOS games, and would care to play them for years on end? For the huge majority, it's a casual thing.
Same with movies. Anybody who invested "four-digit-sums" in digital movies should just move on, like people did with VHS, DVD, and other early formats (and people had even more substantial collections there -- they had been burned enough times not to invest in digital movies). Besides, their "digital movies" already would look archaic in today's 4K screens (unless the service updates them).
>and it's not just Apple - I, for example, got my Amazon account blocked for unpaid bills back from a time where I was financially ... unstable, to say the least, and I literally have no way of ever getting that account reinstated and thus access to my three-digit-worth ebook collection!
That's a separate issue -- not being able to reinstate a rental account is crazy, especially if one doesn't only think of US, Japan, Western Europe and co, but the huge 70% of the world, where temporary issues with stability (in jobs, economy, etc) can often lead people to unpaid bills.
I'm not talking about games only, there also is a vast amount of productivity software on the iOS platform.
> For the huge majority, it's a casual thing.
And for those who fall into the category of "whales" in F2P or pay-to-win games, it's sometimes six figures.
> like people did with VHS, DVD, and other early formats
For a DVD, I can grab an USB DVD drive - or my BD player. Which will play back anything down to a CD-ROM. The content is easily accessible, and if I want I can do a bit perfect backup even for copyrighted stuff with AnyDVD. For a VHS tape, I actually have a dual-head player - it can do recording on both tape and DVD, as well as transfer a VHS tape to DVD. (Yes, tapes are really oldschool)
How much productivity software exists on iOS that's available for Android that you don't pay for via a subscription that allows you to use the same software on any platform?
You can slow down an iPhone quite a lot until it gets as slow as a brand new flagship Android phone at top speed: http://www.zdnet.com/article/iphone-8-iphone-x-vs-android-fl...
Also, the slowdown only occurs if and when the battery is at the end of its useful life. My iPhone 6 from 2014 still runs as fast as ever, and considering the OS update policy of Android phone makers, my iPhone is also a lot cheaper per year than any comparable Android phone.
That said, I find it completely idiotic on Apple's part to slow down the phone instead of letting users know when the battery is at its end of life.
Yes you can port most movies over. Download Movies Anywhere (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/movies-anywhere/id1245330908...), link your iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, and/or Vudu account and any movies you bought from one service from a participating studio automatically shows up as a purchase in any of the other stores.
I've tried it and it works.
The point is, people who desperately need more resources on OS X for whatever reason - be it game development, video/photo editing or even using a web browser - are stuck since years on Apple. With nothing more than Chrome, Excel, Word, Slack, iTerm and Outlook running, I have all my 16GB RAM and 15GB swap usage. I actually work (as a web dev) exclusively in the terminal on a remote server via ssh, because phpStorm, Eclipse or any other IDE on the laptop plus a server environment makes it unbearably slow.
> Low-powered (suitable for laptop use) support for 32GB memory wasn't there in Intel chipsets. But not only you didn't bother to investigate, but you know better.
Laptops in the Windows area have had 32GB support since over 7 years with the release of the Dell M6500 (https://www.geek.com/chips/dell-ships-a-17-precision-m6500-l...). Apple has not even fucking tried supporting what their actual power users need, all in the name of "we have to build a laptop as thin as a feather". Yes, it would have eaten battery life - but why not do the same as the Windows manufacturers did and use a bigger battery?
Apple could have kept selling the MacBook line as low-powered/long-battery-lifed version for those who just want to look like hipsters by having a MacBook, and the MacBook Pro line as powerhorses for the mobile work force of 2017. But no, they screwed up both user groups - the hipsters get to carry a suitcase full of ugly dongles for even the most basic tasks, and the power users watch in awe at the Windows colleagues, who have a crappy OS but a machine that can literally do work.
> Or, you know, they can buy a couple of $10 USB-C cables or a $50 hub and be done with it.
I'd like to be able to plug in a USB thumb drive without a dongle that I'll lose, forget or having it loaned (aka stolen) by a coworker in less than a week. Or, Apple even removed the HDMI port, right after people started building HDMI sockets in conference rooms instead of VGA which was the norm for the latest 20 years. Thanks for having to buy yet ANOTHER dongle. Oh, and a new dongle for the keyboard, another one for the mouse, a new one for wired Ethernet... and no, docking stations are not a solution, not in a "flexible office" layout with different generations of Mac and Windows hardware.
The only thing that actually DID turn out well is that the power brick and the cable are now separate - but oh wait, the new cable can actually break instead of having it flap out elegantly... and because the plug is long instead of short and stubby like many Windows laptops have it, it's prone to cats trying to sit on it, and bending it in the process.
Intel dropped the ball here. There are battery life expectations in the prosumer market and Apple would not have come close to them withing sticking to the low power configuration.
It's also not even remotely the only laptop brand that made that same decision.
That's what the MacBook line was supposed to cover, and MacBook Pro, like the name said, was the professional line.
> It's also not even remotely the only laptop brand that made that same decision.
But from those brands which cater to enterprises, there is always the ultra-high-power lineup that power users can choose from. HP has the EliteBook range, Dell the XPS range and Lenovo the ThinkPad P. Some of them I can even order with 64GB RAM.
Apple leaves me at a quarter of the RAM. Apple has left power users like me standing in the rain. The problem is that it's really hard to switch, because Windows 7 nears its end of business and I won't touch anything above it with a 10 feet pole due to privacy and UI problems, and Linux is way too buggy when it comes to energy efficiency, new hardware support or proper support for Optimus and friends. Of course Hackintosh would at least solve the UI problems but it's difficult enough on a desktop platform, and I would never dare to use a Hackintosh for work stuff due to the legal issues.
That ship sailed away pretty much right around when Intel Macs started shipping. Stop clinging to the past, honestly.
That market is deader than dead in every brand. Even Thinkpads. Especially Thinkpads. The only strong market (read: at the scale that Apple sells products) that exists for performance (read: 17") laptops is in gaming. It's also _tiny_.
Not much to cling for, actually - I jumped ship from Windows only three years ago and back then, it was fine. The problem is that software seems to have evolved as if RAM is an infinite resource (hello, Electron apps, especially Slack). Windows ecosystem has kept up with the demand, Apple... not so much.
> That market is deader than dead in every brand.
But it nevertheless exists in every major brand, and big companies buy them en masse, or at least: enough of them to make the manufacturing of these models worth itself. Only exception is Apple, and that's part of why professionals are highly afraid that Apple has lost its track.
This is a point I'm 100% in agreement with you on! :)
> But it nevertheless exists in every major brand, and big companies buy them en masse, or at least: enough of them to make the manufacturing of these models worth itself.
I used to be in a role where I had purchasing information for computers for a nationwide big-box retail chain. You would be surprised at how low the order quantity on some of those 17" laptops is. I'm not talking about for the stores but for the manufacturer. Often it's in the low thousands (per market, of which there's really only 4 and for those laptops really 2). Those big laptops are a price anchor to sell more mid-range laptops that have higher margins. Big laptops get the least amount of hardware design engineering effort/QA. Their volume is low enough that the support costs are minimal, even if many of them malfunction or fail. Toshiba in particular is notorious for this.
Apple sells north of 5 million Mac computers a quarter. A freakin' quarter! It is absolutely not profitable for them to divert attention to low volume products. The opportunity cost lost is enormous. They could spend their efforts making the existing inventory a fraction of a percent cheaper or more successful and it would dwarf any profits made from a 17" laptop.
Most of those other brands can afford to sell 'performance' laptops mainly because they have to: they aren't selling 20 million laptops a year. Keep in mind, PC sales have _cratered_ and Lenovo is bleeding money. So is HP, but this year they had an up year...mostly off of selling Chromebooks.
Toshiba isn't what I see in enterprise environments... there I see HP and Dell, but especially Lenovo/Thinkpad.
> It is absolutely not profitable for them to divert attention to low volume products. The opportunity cost lost is enormous.
I agree with you on the general point. The problem and danger for Apple is: their initial success and brand was built by artists (no matter if photo, video or audio) and designers where the performance of Apple equipment pretty much left Windows based systems dead in the water. When these professionals jump ship to Windows, the appeal of Apple as "hip" and "modern" gets lost.
Apple does not have much time left to prevent this - people doing heavy loads like 4K or 8K video work are already jumping ship left and right where possible (of course, anecdata rather than scientifically valid data, but the trend is alarming) because Apple equipment fails to deal with the requirements on every front... especially as more and more video production shifts to 4K.
The only video production houses I know still using Apple only buy it because the people in charge of purchasing either are 10 years out of date or they want their clients to see all the slick, expensive hardware they have around the office as a truth signal.
The market has proved that Apple doesn't have to care.
Lenovo T-Series: DDR4. HP Zbook: DDR4. Dell XPS/Precision: DDR4. Asus Zenbook Pro: DDR4.
Or did you really want to compare with an x1 carbon? Apples and oranges.
>And for a very good reason. Low-powered (suitable for laptop use) support for 32GB memory wasn't there in Intel chipsets. But not only you didn't bother to investigate, but you know better.
You're actually proving his point for him. This excuse wouldn't work for anyone else but Apple.
Of course normal DDR4 is perfectly fine to use in laptops (compared to lpddr3) without severely damaging your battery life, other manufacturers manage to do it just fine. And while I'd agree that ekeing out those extra standby (because there isn't even much difference in load efficiency between the two) minutes is great for the smaller devices, it becomes ridiculous when one consciously orders a device with a 45W TDP Quadcore CPU, 2TB SSD and dedicated GPU with 4GB GDDR5.
Not according to Intel either, so the point is moot.
Industrial wide problem based on consumers voting with their money.
Samsung and the rest of Android is also following the same thing. No replaceable battery and no head phone jack.
Smartphone battery degradation is indeed a consequence of design choices, but I think those choices are reasonable. I prefer battery power and processor power now over long term battery life, as long as the battery is replaceable.
(And to preempt the typical responses to this: I know battery cases exist, but they're a substantially inferior solution.)
If you had both choices before you in the store, who wouldn't start to wonder if they'd regret the thinner/lower capacity choice?
Imagine a "Black Edition" of the iPhone that's thicker, has a headphone jack and an integral rubberized case. The aesthetic would be similar to military style watches.
Imagine a thicker MacBook Pro that doesn't require dongles. Don't announce them initially but show it in some hacker movies. Make them special order initially. I can dream...
Many folks (most in the last couple of years?) are firmly entrenched in the Apple ecosystem. Wanting a nicer camera and nicer screen, while not having to worry about migrating data and apps, forces the 'lighter/thinner' option on people. People moving from an iphone 5s to a 7 aren't necessarily "voting" for a thinner phone. They are more likely "voting" for a better camera or more storage, but are forced in to 'thinner' as a byproduct.
I've never met anyone in the last 5 years who's upgraded to a new phone based on their current device being 'too thick'. Camera, storage, speed and screen size are factors; thickness has never been a motivating factor I've heard from people.
Lithium-based batteries suffer chemical degradation of their electrodes related to time as well as charge cycles. Even an unused lithium-ion battery can die before it's ever installed in a product. The electrode damage is what causes the capacity to decline.
For the record, lead-acid batteries can suffer similar degradation due to sulphur build-up on their internal plates, but regular use keeps this at bay and a well-maintained battery will just keep working. Part of the problem is that it's nearly impossible to maintain modern batteries as they're all sealed by design.
And you say that as an expert on batteries, having done a comprehensive comparison study?
It also seems that you could throttle the CPU, but provide the user a way to override it. That'd be far more reasonable IMO.
Of course, maybe iPhones could just tell the users to replace batteries if battery life starts to deteriorate below a certain threshold.
I can do one in 120 seconds, and I’ve only done it twice.
There's a free battery replacement program for the models affected [1].
My phone was one of the affected, but never got around to take it to repair shop because I thought the few random shutdowns were the only problem.
[1] https://www.apple.com/support/iphone6s-unexpectedshutdown/
If this is true that apple throttle its performance due to battery Cycle, I will pissed too. Apple should have noted to me within iPhone that i should get a Battery replacement in the Apple Store, or I will be bringing my own Battery Pack when I am out.
Out of the bulk load of Energy Usage, CPU is not even the primary area where energy are used.
40%+ is the Display 20%+ are the Network Connection, WiFi or LTE. 10%+ are RAM, NAND, etc.
I am guessing around 20% is the CPU and GPU. So they lower this and try to save 10% more battery in response to lower battery cycle?
And they have an Financial interest to slow your phone. This makes me sick.
And I consider myself an Apple Fan.
My geekbench single-core score is 1045, vs expected 2500
It is absolutely, 100% the right choice that a low-powered mode is used, and entered into, in software.
I don't believe replacing a battery every 24 months is unrealistic if you want screaming-fast performance.
There are a handful of exceptions I can think of:
- There is no excuse not to give full power when plugged into a charger.
- The OS should not be slow: its UI should be developed against the slower core.
- The OS should allow a certain amount of high-power usage, if it is intermittant. In other words, apps should be able to request please, please be able to process something quickly, they promise not to use much power for a long time afterward.
This may improve user experience in some cases.
In general I would say Apple is making the right choice here.
IMO, they are making the wrong choice because they are making the choice (without letting you know).
Isn't this a setting those nifty Boolean sliders were invented for?
The whole appeal of Apple is that they are making those kind of choices, and correctly for the biggest number of users.
Hobbyists can always run their own custom mobile OS version.
Not on the iPhone.
Also bear in mind that app developers are also reactive to Apple's choices. (If they need to optimize their software, they will do so. On the other hand, if they can skip optimizing by just telling users to turn on a setting, many will do just that.)
I'd rather Apple make developers have to look up what an algorithm is, and spend hours - hours! - of their life turning an iterative exhaustive search into a binary search (for example), because they have to work on a slow core too, than for me to have to dig around in settings, turn on a "Force high-CPU usage" and let developers keep being lazy.
This goes for Apple's developers too, and I realize their own first-party software such as the OS is too slow on the low-power core. I mentioned this above.
I stand by my original comment.
Bear in mind that there might be applications that use state of the art algorithms, can run, but just barely, on the high-powered cores but not on the low-power cores, and are not intermittant. I am saying that it is acceptable to have to replace battery every 24 months, or plug in the phone, if you want to keep using them.
I can give you another analogy for why I don't agree with your take. Back in the day there was an "iPhone hand warmer" that drained the battery and spun the processors. These days that application would get throttled, it would not be able to warm up the phone by draining its battery.
In my opinion this is correct.
It also seems like a great idea to save battery life.
Bought it in straight cash a couple years ago. Was completely content and extremely happy... until now. It feels D.O.A. Random pauses for almost every action. Answering the phone even takes a good 2-3 seconds. Music crashes randomly. Podcasts pauses like it's meant to be intentional behavior. Battery drains noticeably faster now. I used to get at least 2-3 or more days. Now I can barely make 1. Similar problems started with my Apple Watch (2.0 bought in April).
When the iPhone was first announced by Steve Jobs I seem to recall him exclaiming how everything was nearly instant, fast, responsive, and smooth. I feel like it must have been in a dream now.
The reason I complained is that after the upgrade the user experience was similar to that above where these problems persist; tapping on certain things don’t work, pauses in apps, crashing apps etc.. but also most notably for me is that my speaker volume is less than when it was new.
Anyone experience lower speaker volume also?
Every action is noticeably slower (~1s response for everything) and now, as of last week anyways, need to recharge my phone midday where I've never had to do that.
Now that you mention it, yes! Not just speaker though, headphones, earbuds, and especially noticeable using Bluetooth headphones/earbuds.
I can't even use the phone to talk without a headphone/earbuds and a mic. I can't hear what anyone is saying anymore.
So the phone would pompt and say that it would upgrade late at night, but it would ask you to confirm it to do so, then allow you to delay the upgrade - requiring your pin...
welp, I ALWAYS delayed that upgrade and told it NO, ask me later and entered my pin....
Yet, I woke up one morning and it reported to me it had successfully upgraded.
I was livid (this was right after the calc animation-deay-bug was made public)
So I went into apple store walnut creek, super pissed off.
I said to the "genius" "Do you know who Jonny Ive is?" he said "Yes", so I said "well if he were here in this store I ould punch him in the face"
I specifically did NOT want to upgrade the iOS on my phone because I use a lot of features that were reportedly buggy in the new release.
Apple told me there was "no way they could revert my iOS version whatsoever"
but the upgrade was done literally without my consent..
I was really angry...
Now, the farking thing is falling into the bug group of the 6S+ phones that have the faulty battery problem, yet my SN doesnt hit in their list of bad SNs that are suposedly affected:
Poor batt perf, touch screen taps stop working/delayed like mad, batt drains in less than a day, random shutdowns, random reboots, app crashes, etc...
so yeah, this isnt a conspiracy theory - the 11.1.2 iOS deserves someone at apple needs a shovel to the face.
Tim, hows it going.
I replaced it with an 8 and other than waking up if I hold my case with even the slightest amount of pressure, it's been great.
Interesting that this effect may be a byproduct of automatic scaling the CPU frequency based on remaining battery capacity, rather than the newer OS versions being purposefully poorly optimized (like most people assume)
I seem to recall the first several years—maybe even the first decade—of OS X being marked by each new release being faster on the same hardware, though dropping support for the oldest hardware. It was definitely true for the first few releases of OX X, because 10.0 was notoriously sluggish. I also don't recall any slowdowns with my 2006 iMac across the several upgrades it received before Apple made 64-bit firmware a hard requirement.
If there's any truth to the meme you cite, it probably stems from the mobile side of things, where iOS started out fairly efficient but the hardware was very underpowered. (And in that case, I'd like to point out that the iPhone is only 10.5 years old.)
But you aren't reporting the phone being warm to the touch, so... hm.
Have you tried wiping and restoring it?
It could be interesting to back it up, wipe it (and maybe remove the SIM card for completeness?), install the worst performing apps on the fresh install, and _then_ (maybe wipe again(?), then) restore it back to normal.
If app performance is terrible in the fully-wiped state, I'd take the phone into an apple store (regardless of warranty status) just to see what they say.
Hmm. Just thought of this: maybe your battery is like the OP's from reddit but in really bad condition, and your phone is downclocking itself to compensate?
Adding this to my comment because it's relevant
I would get your battery checked out for a start. Many of us (including myself) have iPhone 6s and seen no major issues.
basically there are times when it will drop sigbnificantly in a short period, but i have also had it last significantly at 1% and go from ten to 1 in a second - then i rush to plug it in and as soon as I plug in the cablee it immediately jumps back to ~15%
so I think its both hardware and software...
If so, I’m in for a try.
I prefer to skip even the backup step, instead relying on cloud sync for contacts etc, and manually dumping a couple apps.
After doing a full backup using iTunes, then resetting the phone to factory conditions, and finally restoring the iTunes backup -- my storage space returned to normal, and the speed increased dramatically.
I suspect that over time, internal files accumulate (e.g. log files & upgrade restoration points), and this accumulated cruft gradually consumes space & degrades performance.
Now, if you use crappy 50-cent third-party chargers, I don't know what happens.
I have a ton of lag on my 6 on iOS 11. I bought it roughly 3 years ago
I'm light on battery though. No movies, no books, a wee of games, some browsing. Heaviest use is sports tracker and maps. I do use it for testing apps nearly daily. But usually it's hooked up to Xcode.
If you're on the fence on whether you should upgrade from an iPhone 6 or lower definitely stay away.
It’s very real though. A fresh clean reset of my old iPhone 7 had a significantly lower Geekbench score, and that went away after the battery (capacity: 78% of design) was replaced.
1. If such a common complaint has such a simple fix, why isn't Apple shouting this information from the rooftops? Why do we need anecdotal information posted on Reddit to figure this one out ten years after the launch of the first iPhone?
2. Being a byproduct of automatic scaling or the commonly cited flash degradation doesn't explain the abrupt spikes in the search for "iPhone slow" around the release of a new iPhone (Google Trends: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=iphone%2...). Could it be a purely subjective, psychological effect? Does anyone have actual benchmark data on this?
I was preparing to do a backup, wipe and restore (which made my first gen iPad Retina somewhat usable again) but first thought I’d try some of the tips online for speeding up iPads, and to my surprise it really worked and made it much more responsive.
If I remember correctly, the ones that seemed to make the most difference were: disabling animations (in accessibility) and disabling any kind of notifications/background app refresh/auto update, but if you’re in a similar situation it’s certainly worth trying some of the other tips in guides like https://www.macworld.co.uk/how-to/ipad/how-speed-up-slow-ipa... and if that doesn’t help, doing a backup and restore.
People would not notice drastic performance issues after doing an iOS upgrade if it was just the battery.
I would not be surprised if this were class action lawsuit material.
My wife got the iPhone X (yes...I know, $1000) and she's encountered a few bugs/crashes. I make fun of her for it. I find the usability of my Samsung not as good as iPhone when iPhone was at the peak, but I'm ok with it beacuse I'm not buying a device that touts itself as 'it just works'...plus I got it for 1/3rd the price after massive discounts.
In either case it's a ~40$ repair to replace a phones battery and IMO a good idea at ~2-3 years old on all phones. Assuming you keep your phone for 4-5 years.
I saved ~$500 when purchasing the flagship phone of another platform, so even if the experience is poor, I have an extra $500 in the bank.
Also - the Samsung S8 gives you very fine control on throttling the CPU to save power.
Also don't somewhere around 80% of the available Android phones on the market have JTAG connectors on them? No thanks. Cool if you want something hackable, but not cool for a device that follows you everywhere and knows everything about you.
Edit: This seems to be an unpopular opinion, but really platform and application security are a feature set and it happens to be the one where iOS is kicking Android's ass. Some people may or may not care about it, just like some people may or may not care about battery replacement. For me it's the #2 thing I need my phone to do after make and receive calls.
The whole industry of portable ad-clicking devices is awful. Just accept that you have to buy new hardware every 1-2 years. You can't even buy "regular" calls-only phone now.
The voltage specification you see written on batteries is actually the discharged voltage.
For instance a car battery is known as 12V. That's the uncharged voltage, it's 14V at full charge.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_converter
That being said, it's conceiveable that a worn out battery might not be able to supply enough power to run the CPU at higher clock speeds.
I trust their batteries and their directions.
A great tip I used, iPhone parts are so small and fiddly. Print out the instructions, and at each step, if you remove screws, tape them to the whitespace beside each step. Then when you reassemble in reverse order, you know exactly which screws to use.
So I took it to the store for an official replacement (I decided I would pay for it). The genius ran a diagnostic which showed the battery as fine (green, he called it) and almost immediately started to tell me why it may be something else in the phone and started pointing me towards buying another phone instead of getting the battery replaced.
But for some reason their diag tool is worse than coconut battery or just wrong? If my battery were 60-70% good and they had lowered thresholds that's one thing, but my battery was long gone and they told me it's fine. And of course I insisted and the phone is fine now with a new battery.
I know there's probably a decent explanation for it but it certainly felt like they really wanted me to buy a new phone, and that their diag tool perhaps isn't the most truthful right now when it comes to battery health.
I believe the tech checked as well right when I brought it in. What was weird was they told me the battery was fine and something else was wrong. And the phone has been fine since the replacement.
And I think coconut is pretty reliable. We ran it on a couple of coworker phones before bringing my phone in, and mine was by far the lowest. Everyone was up in the 80s and mine was in the 40s. It ran multiple times with the same result.
The apple tech told me green means it's in the 80s.
Immediately I noticed my phone was basically unusable, incredibly slow, everything was crashing or locking up completely, I couldn’t believe it. I thought iOS 11 was the culprit, and even did a complete reinstall without restoring any backups to no avail. Finally, I noticed a slight dark spot on the LCD - the brand new battery I had bought was already bulging and in bad shape.
I sprung for a better quality battery from ifixit and immediately the phone was running like brand new again. I thought the cheap battery had been supplying an unstable current, but perhaps there is indeed an issue with the software itself.
One key thing I realized - ANY battery work done outside of Apple’s official repair means they will never work on your phone again. So if you care about having Apple do any kind of work on your phone (even if totally unrelated to battery), you will have to get it replaced by them.
Another thing I learned is that Apple would replace the entire display and front assembly (front camera, earpiece, speaker, brightness sensor, proximity sensor) for only ~ $150. However, due to the third party battery they couldn’t work on it anymore.
You can find parts for less, but it's really a roll of the dice as to what you're going to get.
Same as recent macs.
So yes.
It would be good to verify the former in a controlled environment. The latter is easily verified by Geekbenching your iPhone every 10% it drops.
This is heavily common and prevalent with that generation I found out. iPhones/iPods both had it happen.
It was a little bit twilight zone like before I looked into how common it is, bought them at different times.
If you aren't constantly using a device turn it off because LiB batteries they use only last about 2 years / 400 charges and overcharging ends up swelling.
Anyways 2 years is a reasonable time for me considering the age of my phone, after 2 years I'll probably switch to a new phone.
[1] http://bgr.com/2016/11/30/iphone-7-vs-iphone-6s-battery-drai...
[2] https://www.macrumors.com/2017/10/01/apple-looking-into-ipho...
But the issues that ensues were whenever they went to speaker phone massive amounts of static seamed to be sent to the mic. If you where on the other end of the call it would be very annoying. To the point we joked about being 'Brain Hacked'
Mobile phones have vastly changed in the last few years from once you could replace a battery very easily, to today where it seams you needing $100k equipment to do it properly.
My current phone is the 6 SE which up till the last few months has been able to give me a solid 48hrs on a charge, but I've been diligent with making sure I get a full battery cycle. Coupled with no touch ID and only face ID on iphones im a little lost. The pixel doesn't seam like its for me. Maybe I will go back to Motorola, at least they have new expansion slots which remind me of my Compaq Windows CE phone with a PCIe slot.
I don't know what im going to do when it starts to crap out. I'm gonna give an official battery replacement a try before I buy something new.
But still I feel we have peaked and are tracing back down in mobile phone quality.
You could just buy another SE, they haven't gone anywhere...
Do you mean that you ensure that the battery fully discharges down to zero every time? Because if so, that is one of the worst things an average consumer can do to a Li-ion or Li-poly cell over the long term life of their device.
The practical applications of those two facts, however, are much more nuanced. Ultimately, the biggest killer of batteries is heat. Charging your phone and using it battery-intensively (max brightness/lots of processing stuff) are the biggest heat-causing things that come to mind. Another thing that can happen is heat buildup: you might not be using it very intensively, but if you use it for hours on end the heat can eventually build up and the phone will get hotter over time.
It's entirely possible that your method of using your phone actually does cause less stress on the battery. However, this is 100% dependent on what you and your friends do with your phones, before and while they charge, as well as the kind of phone, its charging circuitry and a million other factors.
At the end of the day, all I can say is "batteries are basically magic, use less power, and don't let your phone get too hot." The only universal recommendation that will guarantee better battery lifetime - with every battery chemistry - is to draw less current from the battery (on a phone: turn down your brightness, turn off things you're not using, etc etc.)
1) Fully charging them 2) Fully discharging them 3) Heat
These are all monitored by the battery support software/hardware but all will affect performance.
The phone will not let charge or discharge to 100% even though it says so. Min/Max values are stored on the phone and adjust as your battery ages. 100%/0% per you phone's display is really just the max/min allowed values.
Essentially, from the moment you manufacture a lithium-ion cell, the materials inside start reacting and losing capacity. When fully discharged, this reaction rate is increased by quite a bit.
The capacity of a lithium cell is dependent on the minimum and maximum charge voltages. These are chosen to balance the capacity of the cell, as well as the cycle life of the cell. It is assumed that you will only run the cell to 0% on the rare occasion, otherwise that you will charge it before it gets too low. FYI, Battery university is a good resource on just about everything batteries [1].
My advice when it comes to caring for the battery in your phone is incredibly simple: Plug the device in each night when you go to bed and unplug it when you get up in the morning.
[1] http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_li...
In both cases it was a breeze and both devices seem to have a new lease on life with fresh batteries and being freshly wiped.
I’ve had the 6S in airplane mode on the counter for 7 days now and it’s at 47% charge since the first time I charged it. Obviously it’s just sitting in ultra/standby super low power system constantly but I’m still impressed.
$100k equipment is absolutely not needed. $10 screwdrivers and maybe some experience with anything electrical but it’s certainly not advanced!
The MacBook Air battery in particular was super easy to swap out. About 10 screws which all came out easily and the metal back pops off incredibly cleanly fully exposing the battery. It’s a beautiful design and case was a pleasure to work with. Putting it back together took 2 minutes and everything lined up perfectly. The only mistake was slightly over-torquing one of the screws holding in the battery, with no ill effect.
You do realize that Apple released 2 iPhones with the same performance and capacities as the iPhone X that do have touchID, right?
That said, faceID is marvelous, and I would want to go back...
It reported that my 5S has lost 39% of its life and should be replaced immediately. The phone works fine, but loses all its charge in 48 hours, even if it isn't used.
BTW, Linpack (free app) reports the same speed score when connected to the battery charger vs not, so obviously iOS isn't throttling due to its weak battery.
My MacBook Pro became so slow that I spent days trying to figure out why, only to discover it was my bad battery.
Would you know whether boot camp windows would also be affected by this?
The problem nowadays is that it's almost impossible to get an original battery. On Amazon, everything is a fake. In stores, the battery does not exist anymore or is super expensive. It seems LG doesn't care, maybe they speculate people will just buy new phones.
In a way, my approach to have replaceable batteries failed.
While I see any argument for Apple doing this (helps keep the battery life high), this is not a disclosed feature. It's intentionally limiting the product's capabilities from what's marketed.
People expect batteries to become worse with time - there is no getting around the fact that the chemical reaction becomes worse with use. A CPU, though, that should never see significant scaleback unless it's faulty.
What people here don’t seem to understand is that capacity, battery health, and max power output are related.
Old batteries just can’t provide the current that the phone needs.
Battery replacements are cheap, and when your battery is degraded you should just swap it.
Consumer protection laws won’t help you here. Apple is not pretending to sell a phone that doesn’t need service; on the contrary, they even strongly advertise their “protection plan” that would cover degraded batteries.
I have an S7, and when the battery level gets really low it does exactly that (although it can actually take it even further if you want, switching off the radio, making the display monochrome etc).
The problem here isn't that iOS isn't just trying to conserve power to last a bit longer. At some point the battery physically can't deliver the current required to run the CPU at max speed.
At that point, the phone battery settings screen says something like "Battery Service Required".
For some reason a lot of people get annoyed when their phone needs service. It's understandable, but I really don't see what Apple should do about it.
When a car's battery needs to be replaced, people don't go complaining how their car is suffering from planned obsolescence, they just replace the battery.
Is it even possible to replace an iPhone's battery though?
I would guess if Apple offered battery replacement as a service, at a reasonable price (not very Apple-like, I know!), people would use it.
Before this, I had forgotten what it was like to be able to use your phone all day even after forgetting to plug it in the night before.
Apple can make batteries that have awesome run times - they just choose not to so the phone can be x% slimmer. Bummer.
I'm thinking about getting SE as I have small hands and it looks like a perfect fit but I think it's kind of pointless to get a new iPhone with so serious, known and most likely impossible to fix, bug?
SE is expensive to me as it is, I don't want to replace battery every year or so (I'm a heavy user).
Recently her battery has started to show signs that it is wearing out, such as jumping instantly from 5% to 30% when plugging it in to charge, so it looks like this behaviour is a software 'feature' on all iPhones.
Can't comment on long run performance. I can say I've never heard it mentioned in these threads. I'd google SE battery throttling specifically though.
I had a phone with a faulty battery and it would simply turn off on a large current spike (think camera with flash taking a picture) presumably since the voltage crashed.
It sounds like the idea is that the OS is throttling the performance to extend the battery life of a battery in poor condition, more than it sounds like it is limiting current draw to avoid "brownouts".
I can see why this is a good idea and a bad idea, in that many people simply want a full day of being reachable on the phone more than they want smartphone features, but others who are considering replacement would like to know that a $100 fix would make their phone less frustrating.
iPad:~/ root# ioreg -l -w0 | grep Capacity | | | | | "Capacity" = 960 | | "BootCapacityEstimate" = 87 | | "BatteryData" = {"CycleCount"=232,"MaxCapacity"=10639,"FullAvailableCapacity"=11085,"StateOfCharge"=98, "MfgData"=<redacted cuz it looks like a unique id>, "DesignCapacity"=11560,"QmaxCell0"=11678,"Flags"=1,"ManufactureDate"="6205","ChemID"=4384,"BatterySerialNumber"="redacted","Voltage"=4155} | | "CurrentCapacity" = 10500 | | "BootBBCapacity" = 10364 | | "AppleRawCurrentCapacity" = 10242 | | "AbsoluteCapacity" = 11272 | | "AppleRawMaxCapacity" = 10489 | | "MaxCapacity" = 10500 | | "DesignCapacity" = 11560
I hypothesize that the MaxCapacity will drift lower over time. They have all the info they need in their registry.
After my iPhone 6 (ios 10) got stolen, I've bought a brand new iPhone 6s (ios 11) on the official apple store.
It was totally unusable, all problems people shared I've had as well. It would take several seconds for an app to open, the phone would freeze for one minute, volume controls on the lock screen wouldn't work, my Bluetooth range was literally less than 10cm, sometimes when I called the phone would mute my voice.
I've tried resetting the phone twice. No luck. Then I've downgraded to iOS 10 and all problems went away; performance was similar to my previous phone.
So, no battery problem, no buggy phone, just a very very buggy operating system (or an OS that purposefully slows down on older devices).