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Comment by reacharavindh | Hacker News Reader

Two things could've made this situation better.

1. Make the damn battery user replaceable! If you know it is depleting resource and you designed the phone to last longer, this should be the case.

2. Be transparent to the user. Show in Battery Settings how the battery is doing and whether or not the OS is throttling itself.

There is a third one, put in a bigger battery. I think Tesla does this with Model S. Be nice to customers.

/rant

- pissed off customer with a slow iPhone 6 that is probably affected by this.

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1. The battery may not be user replaceable, but it is replaceable. Apple will do it for you for like $80, which doesn't seem horrendous on a 3 year old $600 phone.

2. Agreed, the battery page in Settings should say "your battery is old, performance will be reduced in demanding situations"

3. FWIW iPhone X has a noticeably longer battery life than iPhone 7 had. Some of that may be down to the OLED screen (which sounds like it may be a standard feature across all 2018 iPhones), but is likely also due to the battery getting more space in the chassis. I'd be going to bed with the 7 in single digit percentages, where last night my X had over 50% left.

I hear you. I upgraded my iPhone 6 Plus to the iPhone X due to how laggy my device had become. Siri was slow now (to the point that it began to provide little/no benefit over manual), navigation became slow, etc.

I do wish they'd do the transparency thing. Yeah, I know these batteries have a certain amount of functionality before they nose dive: let me know and I'll bring it in for Apple to replace.

Replace kits cost $25 from iFixit and others. It's not as easy as just plopping a new one in but together with the excellent guide at iFixit, it works pretty well. Upgraded the battery in my 6 last week.

i miss swapping batteries, or carrying more just in case.

they could actually make phones with batteries just small enough to swap out a bigger pack

Yes. If they could make a tray and flap to hold the nano SIM card and still make their phone water resistant, they can engineer the phones to have user swappable batteries. They just choose not to because it is not in their interest for their customers to keep the phones longer.

That may be part of it. It's also that people like thin phones, and replaceable batteries place mechanical requirements on the phone that make it thicker.

I'm surprised this is not being used as a competitive marketing strategy. If another major company developed a phone with removable battery and still be as trustworthy as Apple, it would be great and put pressure on Apple..

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