IPhones start slowing down after a year
theverge.com
theverge.com
Worse yet, Apple doesn't disclose this and it took an independent researcher to actually measure it and discover this. Wonder why? Smells a bit reminiscent of VW's diesel strategy.
"Thank you for spending your precious, discretionary income on a new Tesla! Your new vehicle will automatically slow down as it ages, because random battery parts will wear out, and going slower 'helps stop random shutdowns, which are a major pain.' By year five, your vehicle's max speed will be artificially limited to approximately 20 mph. We can help with that if you bring it in to an authorized manufacturer-owned store, assuming there is one in your country, or ship it to us at your cost, where we will replace a random part at only 20% the cost of a new Tesla. You could do this every year to maintain peak performance, but we prefer that you don't know about this at all and just buy a new car from us instead."
Planned obsolescence, with an air of plausibility to its reckless, environmentally unsound 'science' that forces you to dispose of the phone (if you don't know about this pre-programmed slowdown) or battery (if you do) before it actually ceases being useful to you.. brilliant.
But, when you get that shiny new phone home, you're blown away at how 'fast' it is compared to your previous phone.
It's actually breathtakingly brilliant, in an evil genius sort of way.
Replacing the battery restores normal performance. You don‘t need to go to an authorised repair shop.
"In order to maintain the battery life you are used to, we had to introduce limits on your iPhone. This is because by time batteries unfortunately lose their capacity. Your phone will be just as new if you take it to our stores and get the battery replaced"
would be communicated, it would be nice. In my opinion. btw batteries usually also have a year of warranty, so there really should be a way to check it's performance.
I rather have shorter battery life with same performance so it's more noticeable that I need to replace the battery.
I would like to be informed of this "Your battery is starting to fail". Same way as SMART monitoring in disk drives tells you that it degraded too much and will break soon.
I don’t think this is about us having a better experience though. It looks like a strategy to sell new devices by making the old ones obsolete.
I hope we see a class action.
> I rather have shorter battery life with same performance so it's more noticeable that I need to replace the battery.
I agree, but something is odd about this whole situation.
I have an iPhone 6, iPhone 5, iPhone 4, a 2nd generation iPod Touch, and several Android phones.
The iPhone 6 is the first one I've seen randomly turn itself off when the battery level was below 30%, all of the others would run normally even when the battery condition was poor. I could continue using them normally while the battery indicator ticked down to 1%.
While my iPhone 6 no longer randomly turns itself off, it frequently doesn't respond for 15+ seconds when typing a letter on the keyboard or tapping a text field, it's essentially just as unusable as if it had turned itself off.
What makes me suspicious is that I have a 2nd iPhone 6 here at the moment with a similarly aged battery in fairly poor condition. It doesn't randomly turn off, and the performance difference is immediately noticeable, it's actually usable. The only real difference I can identify is that it is still running an older version of iOS.
My guess is that most of the billion iPhone users have no idea, and they really don't want to invest much time into figuring it out.
ETA: Point being, this doesn't appear to actually be limited to batteries that have seriously degraded.
If they are related (and perhaps they are, I wasn't thinking about the recall when I wrote my comment), do you think it's unreasonable for engineers at Apple to try to prevent unexpected shutdowns? I would think it would be unreasonable not to, once they saw the impact it was having on user experience. And that's besides improving the battery. The amount of engineering that goes on with respect to power and performance management is incredible, and attacking these types of problems from multiple angles is expected, particularly when you're looking to eek out even more performance in something that's already been through years of optimization iterations.
Apple knew the peak draw of their SoC (they designed it). And they knew the capabilities of the battery. Under sizing the battery is exactly what I would call a design flaw.
For extremely short duration peaks up to a few microseconds capacitors are a great workaround. They are necessary for pretty much every digital integrated circuit. A billion transistors all switching at the same time on the rising edge of a clock cycle has a massive instantaneous current draw.
Yes. And it does look like a case of undersized batteries. If I had to guess, I'd say it was because of too strict product design specifications meeting a lower than expected quality in manufacturing.
CPU power peaks usually last for a (large) fraction of a millisecond or more, because that's how the OS scheduler works. Added to that, peaks may not happen for entire minutes or hours. Both of those work against the usefulness of large capacitor banks.
Because iPhones don't really have user serviceable batteries, I wonder if an after market battery charging case would provide more speed with a new battery pack.
(That's from reading around on the internets. I only have direct knowledge of my own situation, where plugging my phone in did not help but replacing the battery did.)
If your battery starts degrading while still under warranty how would you know other than "hmm... my phone feels slower than usual".
How does this throttling occur? Is it gradual or does it happen in large noticeable steps? My guess is that it's gradual throttling because it's taken this long for people to identify it.
Does the throttling only occur after the phone is out of warranty? Or is Apple hiding a potential warranty repair?
It's not intentionally handicapping the performance to hide the fact that your fuel tank can no longer hold the same volume of fuel.
This behaviour adds significant stress and annoyance to lives of millions of people. In my book, it's just evil.
Apple took away the ability to choose the powerbank option.
Fortunately, I could replace my device because that was the case (I went to Apple and they replaced my battery after they did some extended tests because they were aware that a “small number of iPhone suffered from this issue and they tried to find out which ones“). Sure enough, about one or two months later I checked my old serial number and apples website told my that my old phone was eligible to be replaced.
This seems to affect the iPhone 6 and 6s the most. According to geek benchmark my used iPhone 7 is at 80% speed when it has about 50% battery remaining and at pretty much full speed when my battery is fully charged.
Apparently all phones suffer from that problem but the batch we referred to seem to be especially bad. The software update just seems to have mitigated the effects of iPhones which were mostly ok but shut down occasionally (and the effected ones which shut down almost every week when it was at 70% and about once or twice a day at 20-30%).
You call the decrease artificial, but I don't see evidence of that. I'm not sure what your "reduced by 8%" number is -- capacity? -- but in any case, it wouldn't necessarily scale linearly with the amount of CPU throttling needed to make the CPU stable.
Also, I'm not sure where the "significant decrease in performance after just one year" is coming from. The article says performance starts to degrade after a year, which isn't the same thing. The article doesn't even have a cite for that (that I saw), so I wouldn't take that claim seriously yet.
Of course, I'm sure there are batteries out there that are aging prematurely, but that's not the same as a device being designed to degrade after a year. Personally, my iPhone 6 plus began slowing down really noticeably at close to three years old, which is acceptable, IMO.
But I think Apple needs to have iOS alert you that it's slowing your phone down because the battery has degraded. Then you know what to do: * If it's less than the normal service life of the battery (2 years, I guess), you should get a free battery replacement. * If it's later than that you can choose to replace the battery on your own dime. * Or you can choose to get a new phone after all.
By not telling people what's going on, people with a prematurely degraded battery probably won't know to get it replaced under warranty and people with normally aging batteries are more likely to buy a new phone rather than replace their battery.
I see so many Mac laptops with the service battery warning on. People won't replace them until they have to, even to the point of the laptop needing to be connected to the wall outlet to run.
With iPhones, Apple decided to make the device less useful instead.
If you had a dead battery (or no battery), your CPU frequency would be limited because the AC adapter could not supply enough power on it's own
The link is dead, but it was documented on Apple's support site: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2332
In this case, are they 'guilty' of leaving extra performance/range on the table when the vehicle is new?
https://electrek.co/2016/11/01/tesla-battery-degradation/
What Tesla does do is pretend that the bottom 20% of the battery doesn't exist. That's because it's very damaging to use it at low charge.
1. Battery degradation should happen to all phones, regardless of OS/manufacturer. How do other phones handle this (flagship Android phones etc.)?
2. If other phones don't experience these shutdowns on such a wide scale or don't throttle the performance so harshly (to literally half or one third of original performance) to avoid shutdowns, what about the iPhone is different to force them into this decision?
Geekbench which posted the larger group of data confirming this, they could probably run the same analysis on S8 phones from Samsung.
Now, if the same does not happen on other phones, the entire debate being framed as it currently is, is a pretty amazing PR spin.
It's much easier to justify the decision between phones shutting down or throttling the device, than it would be to justify a engineering decision that makes the above two choices the only choices, despite other vendors being able to seemingly pull off this magic trick of keeping devices working for more than a year.
With all of Apple's resources and engineering know-how, it seems a stretch that they would be the only ones incapable of solving this issue.
I don't actually know if other vendors solve it differently, but I do know that they have the same battery life, the same phone thinness and powerful specs.
Does anyone have a clue about this? Seems like the more interesting story.
Cars do sometimes stop working after a year because their batteries fail and the great majority of people in that situation take their cars to a repair shop rather than do the work themselves.
Actually, the battery in a phone is more comparable to the entire fuel delivery and ignition system in a car, not just the battery. Even fewer people could handle that work on their own.
The point revolves more around whether replacing a vital component after only one year of normal use would be covered by warranty (in EU for consumers warranty is two years for everything).
Another interesting point is how you discover that some part needs to be replaced.
For the car, it is easy, one morning it won't start.
What if (say) Ford or Chevrolet (or Volkswagen that has some documented experience in the field ;)) had a hidden electronic device that - in order to save the battery and your next morning start of the car - progressively dimmed a litte bit your head and tail lights and/or lowered the heating or the cooling set temperature slightly, starting, still say, after six month?
So you know, there was a point in time where I just replaced my phone's battery. I bought the battery, opened the back cover, and replaced it. And it worked great. :)
The reason people take their cars to a service shop is one of convenience for things like batteries, not because it's a necessity created by the design of the vehicle.
This happened during a period in my life when I absolutely needed my phone to be functional. I can honestly say that I'd rather have the CPU throttled, than to have to experience random shutdowns.
Let the user choose their own fate. I know, I know, that's crazy talk, right? If given the option on my old iPhone 6 plus, I would have chose to maybe have the phone shut off suddenly at 40% battery life and run at full speed. On the rare days when I'm going to be heavily using my device (and not near constant power) I could change the setting so that it would run slower, but not freak out with battery problems.
This assumes that Apple doesn't know best, and that the user actually has a say in the matter, which goes against iOS / OS X / Apple at a deep, philosophical level.
> Throughout iOS, people—not apps—are in control. An app can suggest a course of action or warn about dangerous consequences, but it’s usually a mistake for the app to take over the decision-making.
See also various UI guidelines from Microsoft at times when not a single MS app that was profitable followed those guidelines.
Of course implying that there are only two possible solutions to this problem is exactly what Apple wants you to think. It's kind of like Kevin Spacey raping minor boys and saying "okay, you caught me - I'm gay," to avoid any real consequences. It's misdirection.
There are two real solutions to this issue, none of which is being offered or hinted at by Apple:
1) increase battery size to match that of competitors (so up to 2x from what it is now), making the lower battery life over the years a much smaller problem for users
2) compromise a millimitre of thickness and allow users to replace the battery on their own, especially now after Apple gained more space by giving up the audio jack.
But of course Apple doesn't want you to think of any of these. Instead it wants its customers to keep fighting over the "Battery or Performance* faux choice.
This patronizing attitude of hiding all complexity from users is getting beyond ridiculous these days.
I've had many friends complement my utterly midrange phone for feeling so snappy; it's because the stupid animations that only serve to slow down UI transitions are off.
This sort of begs the question - if your phone is shutting off suddenly at 40%, is the battery really at 40%?
People have certain preconceived expectations when they see a percentage. The best analog I can think of is a gas tank. People know that how they drive affects their fuel consumption, but they also know that when their gas tank is 40% full, their car's not going to shut off suddenly.
Perhaps we need to look at using a different measure than percent to indicate remaining battery life. Having said that, I don't know what that different measure would be.
If you had only puttered around town (putting only a light load on the engine), you could have fully used the remaining 40%. So the gas tank does still have 40% capacity remaining at that point, it just can't deliver surges like it used it.
AFAIK, most of the battery degradation on phones can be attributed to heat and suboptimal operating temperatures. An EV will heat up / cool down the battery, treat each cell as an independent unit during cycles etc. They will degrade a lot slower compared to phones. Most EVs even after years of use have decent battery performance and some manufacturers (like Tesla and BMW) even go with 8-10 year battery warranty programs.
I think they don't see much abuse like the tiny phone batteries.
And frankly now that sudden shutdown isn't a thing, I don't think it matters much. Apple just has to communicate the situation better when processor throttling reaches severe states.
Those cars have the extra problem of having batteries out in the cold too.
As a battery degrades, the time is reduced.
Regardless of what the initial voltage is, a plot can be drawn based on measurements of the voltage to see how quickly it's approaching the cut off voltage.
So the battery capacity should really be where the voltage is relative to the last peak when fully charged compared to the cut off voltage.
If Apple is reporting a battery at 40% capacity when it cuts off then they're fudging their numbers.
I recall when they switched to non-replaceable batteries in MacBooks, they boasted how their battery lives were the best and would last x years. Is this how they did it?
I started buying LED flashlights when the first couple of designs with high efficiency voltage regulator circuits showed up. The one my buddy had was only fit for a reading light for the last couple of hours of use.
People used to understand that things got dimmer or slower when the battery was almost dead. Due to circuitry these flashlights kept going even though the battery voltage had dropped below the shutoff voltage for an LED. Shouldn’t we maybe have built on that familiarity? Couldn’t we still?
Apple probably does know better than majority of users about their combined preferences. They can track user behavior around power management and see what they actually do versus what they say they want and design against it.
On the rare days..."
They don't design for rare days though, all good product managers design for the majority of use. Why would they put extra effort into adding a functionality, which could be confusing or inelegant to most users, which is only used rarely by a superuser?
You mean Apple can't stop jerking around, and for once be useful for the user rather than their bottom line?
This isn't philosophy. This is marketing sold as philosophy.
Let's be real: yes Apple has distinct knowledge about design. But also, users have knowledge about what's best for them.And without that knowledge, Apple wouldn't be able to design a good phone. And they know it. they do user research,etc.
But in a sense, that's how all luxury marketing works: convincing people that some object bears great significance, because of the sheer talent of it's creators.
I get caught out with a low battery too often. And having to remember to turn it on every time... if I could remember to do that I’d just remember to plug the damned thing in instead.
Either way looks like a design issue that's just too convenient for Apple to keep selling new phones each year. If they put slightly thicker battery with adequate spare capacity or reduced peak power draw for their SoC people can get 2+ years of consistent performance out of their device. Instead Apple is designing to provide one year of peak performance followed by slow downs so you can go out and get the new phone next year - sounds not very user friendly to me no matter if it looks intentional or not.
People switch to the iPhone because of their longer usable life compared to the competition. People pay more for old iPhones compared to the competition because of their longer usable life. Not only is it not in Apple's interest to make self-destructing phones, to even accuse them of that requires ignoring the entire history of iPhone adoption and resale value.
Further, there is no "one year" for batteries. Batteries with more charge cycles degrade faster. Batteries that push peak performance more often degrade faster. Batteries that spend time in extreme heat and cold degrade faster. Because of this, a simple anecdote of "throttling after a year" means even less than usual.
No-one has data on how much throttling is going on, but Apple. The best proxy we have is the aggregate purchasing decisions of people who had iPhones, and the prices of used iPhones. And people with iPhones overwhelmingly keep buying iPhones. And the prices of used iPhones aren't going anywhere. This "Apple makes self-destructing phones" theory needs a rest.
A lot of people? I'm sure there are tons of people who do this where cost isn't an issue.
Type in your serial number, and it's probably covered.
Apple charges $79 to replace a battery. Seems cheap to me. And, btw I have been running my SE for a couple of years and the battery is only reduced by 8%. Seems pretty good to me. I think peoples expectations are just absurd.
As for the battery only being reduced by 8%, I think that's a huge positive point for the SE and its internals. This phone just lasts so long that you charge it less than the other phones Apple sells.
IMO, the problem is Apple either tricks you into upgrading your OS or constantly nags you if you don't. When you find out that the new iOS has slowed down your phone, you're forced to keep using it instead of being able to revert your phone back to the factory state - something every user expects out of a consumer device.
The battery still has 95.7% of the capacity, with 400 cycles, yet my device is throttling the cpu between 30% and 50%. It was how slow it was running that made me upgrade this year instead of the next which was my original plan.
If I had known that replacing the battery fixed the speed problems I would have saved the money.
They really need to communicate this reduced power state to the user.
11.2.1 and they still haven't fixed all of the major bugs. Including this one that is driving me insane as a developer: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=176896
From the perspective of environmentalism, I think all phones should have mandatory replaceable batteries. Is that really so absurd? Why are companies allowed to design devices with such disregard for the environment.
But Apple sets the bravery bar extremely high. The process of replacing a battery in e.g. my SE is insane: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPhone+SE+Battery+Replacement/6... describes the teardown, and https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPhone+Battery+Adhesive+Strips+... the process of applying adhesive to the replacement battery - yes, that second task is complex and difficult enough to require an entire separate guide of its own.
I get that the goal of this design is to ensure that the battery does not move once it's fixed into the case. And I understand why that's necessary. What I don't understand is why it can't practicably be achieved by a combination of closer dimensional tolerances and the application of some thin elastomer to the parts of the case that contact the battery. Given the complexity of the assembly process, I can't imagine that such a design would be more difficult to assemble than the one that shipped, and it would provide a considerably more approachable battery replacement process - I'm not shy about performing my own device repairs, and I'm good enough at it that I haven't ruined anything yet, but this is one where I'd rather pay the $79 to have it done in an Apple store, and the adhesive is about 95% of why.
It's easy to only think about one side of this issue. To put it another way, think about the additional layer of plastic needed under the battery compartment to protect the device internals while the battery compartment is open. There are additional component changes and efficiencies lost to make this move.
Then there's the battery itself -- the replaceable ones are much more robust in design and shielding -- additional plastic. They also have to have bigger contact points to ensure a good connection.
It might still be a net positive, but it's not a no-brainer call.
Batteries should be replaceable without the need for special tools (a simple standard screwdriver (Torx or Phillips) is OK, pentalobe screwdrivers are not) OR they should last the life of the device without significant degradation.
Oh, and 50% after two years is a pretty good rough estimate on phones that are charged often.
The last couple of revisions of phones aren't that much better than previous generations. This seems mainly due to Moore's law slowing down. Heck, Intel hasn't released a process shrink in 4 years. Apple and other vendors are going to have to start pulling even more of these planned obsolescence tricks if technology doesn't pick up soon.
Support a small business and have someone else install it for you if you need a new battery. It won’t cost that much. If Samsung had stores they would charge you something near Apples price without question.
(I've mentioned iFixit lately; I'm just a happy repeat customer.)
I'll be more than willing to take my chances with a lot of parts on computers/phones/electronics/etc
But the power supply systems are one area I will not buy anything other than OEM or "top of the line" for.
I've fallen asleep with my phone in bed, I have it on a nightstand a foot away from my head most nights, it sits in my pocket for most of the day. That's not something I want to have even a 1% chance of failing when the failure mode is "burst into flames".
I always wonder how people use those vaping devices (especially cheap ones from ebay) without fear of them blowing up, energy density is crazy there.
Every month or so I hear of another person who's phone caught fire on their bed, or the whole galaxy note fiasco. While I agree with you that for the most part it's not a worry in devices from reputable manufacturers (like OEMs), but it is and will continue to be a problem for cheaper manufacturers, and suppliers who aren't afraid to lie about what's inside the package.
Why wouldn't your first thought be "Hey, maybe Apple doesn't make the best battery for the iphone"? You already know they make a flawed one, maybe someone else makes one that isn't flawed?
Plus $79 for a new battery PLUS expert, warrantied installation is a good value. You're paying for a lot more than just a battery.
(FWIW, I've replaced the batteries in my iPhone 4 and 5 in the last year. It was much easier than I thought it would be. I still have an original launch-day iPhone. Maybe I'll see if I can still find a replacement battery for it.)
Also, Apple‘s service is atrocious. Mail it in, and you‘ll be without a phone for up to two weeks (!). I tried bringing mine to an authorised service provider in Austria, and they told me it would take 24h to get a quote, and the actual repair would take up to two weeks.
I went to a 3rd party shop, it took them about 15minutes to do the swap, and it cost a fraction.
Apple profit on the transaction is smaller than my loss. It takes me 15sec to replace battery compared to driving to/from the store & involving 5 people in the process (sales, technicians, accounting). It's a clear win- lose with a negative total transaction.
- my iPhone 6S, barely one year in: down to 87%, 282 cycles.
- a friend's 6S+, one and a half year in: down to 74%, 398 cycles
- another friend's 6S+, two and a half years in: down to 54%, slightly less than 600 cycles
Those LiPo are supposed to last 800-1000 cycles before dipping below the 80% mark and it's a far cry from that.
Even before I checked the values for mine I noticed a cliff effect when charge goes below 40%, at which point it takes only a dozen of minutes of light use to drain.
This is not OK. I can readily accept a non-replaceable battery on a 800-1000€ phone but it has to keep giving good performance (WRT both battery life and throttling) for three years (it was so for my iPhone 3G and 4). Changing the battery on my dime each year is not an acceptable solution.
This is poor engineering that minmaxes thinness vs battery, and I see the same trend on the MacBook line, which currently makes me very unlikely to upgrade my 2013 rMBP.
The lower cycle number for iOS devices is presumably due to them being exposed to higher temperatures (in pockets e.g.) and not having any active cooling to counter this.
Cheap!
Or maybe it's only degraded by 8% because it's only a year and a half (a year and 9 months tops since the first ones were sold) old?
This is one of the richest companies in the world who charge some ridiculous prices for their products arbitrarily slowing down older models of their phones on purpose for no other reason than to force their customers to upgrade to newer phones. Planned obsolescence. Their stated reason for doing this is smacks of bullshit.
Here's another one, apparently straight from Apple's marketing team: "It makes perfect sense for Apple to optimize their devices for stability and max run time."
This was perfectly timed to come out just after the silly Mozilla thing, with people talking about how they've lost trust in the company; here's Apple gimping their hardware and not telling their paying customers a damn thing about it.
Mozilla did their thing imho in all naivety. Someone there thought that would be "cool" you know because Mr robot is cool, but clearly missed the point.
Apple have a history of trying to pass off design flaws as features; antennagate anyone? As far as I'm concerned if you know that a component will deteriorate over time like a battery making it practically impossible to replace is a design flaws.
If I buy a 'boost' battery case because I know the battery is going to be getting worse with time does their software solution acknowledge this and let me keep the full speed my phone should have?
https://web.archive.org/web/20080913210306/http://support.ap...?
The exact opposite of all other laptops I've used, where AC-only/AC+battery will be the highest performance, with battery-only being the least.
It'd be interesting to see if these iPhones run faster or slower when plugged in and charging.
Any other behavior, including offering the user power options (because many users won't understand them) would introduce a poorer user experience (abrupt hard shutdowns, constant need to charge) and likely sway some portion of non-tech users to purchase a different brand when they refresh.
At the end of the day the battery is replaceable and if you chose to buy an iPhone you're already aware that they it is a "premium" device.
IIRC from those Geekbench scores it seemed as low as 50%.
I think that the media are being far to sympathetic to this battery life idea. Really the ought to be tearing Apple apart for the 6S’s shutdown problem!
Who does this hurt? Consumers. Who does this help? Apple.
* aggressive high sierra push notification * "skip for now" instead of "no thanks" for icloud sign-in * really really hard to disable features (like application resume)
If you want to tune your core voltages then isn't that what Android is for?
When it starts not just-working, that shows up in the experience with the device, and it no longer makes sense to tell people they shouldn't be asking questions.
When you pay a lot of money for a high performance phone (which is what all iPhones are when they're released), you also expect it to perform accordingly for a reasonable amount of time.
You cannot make informed purchasing decisions if manufacturers are hiding this kind of information from you. How many people bought a new iPhone due to degraded performance when a new battery would have fixed it right up? People didn't have the information to make that choice, and I believe that's what's upsetting at least some people.
Wasn't it obvious to Apple that batteries start to suffer from degradation over time? Wasn't it obvious that the solution to this was the replacement of batteries? If so, why didn't they implement a replaceable battery?
I'm averaging roughly 3.25 years per iPhone, having upgraded from 3GS to 4 to 6 over the past ten years. I'm going to replace the battery on my 6 and see how long I can keep it going.
If one would be able to swap batteries in the iPhone and Samsung s7 there would have been a less issue.
Phones should also have boot loaders allowing free operating systems. It would help with new environmental laws demanding reapairability.
I don't disagree with your overall point, but is this part actually true? How does the environmental impact of creating a phone compare with that of creating a TV which might only last 10 years, or a car? Feels to me like the phone impact must be pretty minimal.
Even if this isn't planned obsolescence, it is tangential to it. They know they are putting a new phone out every year or so, and they are hedging their bets that people will move to it so this decision makes total sense for them financially. It feels underhanded even if not fraudulent, they made a decision that is better for them than you. God forbid you have to charge your phone during the day?
Particularly, when as the throttling is severe (more than 25% or so) and when the user is encountering it with any frequency.
I don't have any empirical evidence to support it, but I've noticed no degradation in performance of the phone. Given this news I'd like to attribute that to the minimal use of the internal battery.
So if this approach gives me a more hours albeit less snappier hours, I'm good with this. But it should be a mode.
Transparency to end user would be helpful to end user. Doesn’t full performance come back when running on wire power?
Why throttle the ac connected devices?
There are multiple ways in which Apple can do planned obsolescence without actually there being a record somewhere of a "meeting on planning to make the iPhone obsolete".
I have a charger at work, at home, and in the car. I'm used to having to charge things. Just having a reduced battery life is fine with me.
The reason why they're taking the "reduced performance" route is that it is planned obsolescence. It drives sales of new phones in a world where the actual phone, if well-protected, could last a decade. In our current world where smartphones have plateaued for years and Moore's Law has stagnated, it makes business sense to artificially induce a marked GUI performance difference between an older and newer phone. But it sucks for the consumer, and this sort of intentional downgrading should almost be illegal.
Glad to know I just have to change the battery. ~$40-50 at a local shop.
Batteries wear out and need to be replaced after a year or two. Apple does something to make the phones last longer, and people frame it as a negative.
I’ve replaced a handful of batteries in iPhons and it is quite easy for anyone who knows how to use a screw driver and watch a YouTube video. Or just pay some small business to replace it.
Users may not know that their battery performance is degraded. And even if they knew, how would you expect the average user to correlate bad battery health with low system performance?
Apple should have notified users of battery health issues (they do so on MacBooks, for example) and the impact on system performance.
I understand why they did it, and it's not bad as a field-patch to a hardware bug, but doing it silently is pretty skeevy.
They should have mentioned this in the original battery recall, and displayed a warning on the battery screen in Settings, at the least.
All these slow down as well. Try using instagram on low battery.
I finally decided to upgrade to an X because how bad it was. Turns out it is throttling by as much as 50% (I still have the phone) so I could have just spent 79$ instead of buying a new iPhone.
The same will happen to a lot of people.