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Comment by NDizzle | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to throw out an impossible solution to this problem. It's impossible because it's very un-Apple.

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.

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This assumes that Apple doesn't know best

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?

They nearly have done this already with "Low Power Mode", but unfortunately it seems they haven't committed to trusting the user to use this.

Low power mode seems to turn off unnecessary animations and speed up my phone.

The first thing I do on any new Android phone I get is enable developer options and disable all animations.

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.

Turning low power mode on or off makes no difference in this area. My phone runs at 50% speed, regardless of whether Low Power Mode is turned on or off.

I agree on the surface, but there are millions of older people and those who don’t care to learn, would be scared or alarmed of having that option. Do I still want the option? Sure. But having worked support for years, customers are dumb. They are not HN commenters.

Then bury it in the settings. Let the phone automatically fall into "dead battery" mode but give me an option 7 menus deep to undo it.

Then article "Trick Apple doesn't want you to know" comes up and every mom and pop goes 7 levels deep into settings.

So what? That's how people learn.

This patronizing attitude of hiding all complexity from users is getting beyond ridiculous these days.

Yet users prefer systems that hide all complexity from them instead of installing Gentoo...

There's a limit to how much complexity you can hide before you turn a potentially useful tool into a dumb consumer toy.

>> 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.

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 we go with the car analogy, then the gas tank would become smaller with age, but also the fuel line which feeds the engine becomes smaller with age. So overall capacity is reduced, but in addition to that, if you try to floor it when the tank is at 40%, the engine will stall.

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.

I guess we should take a look at how the electric car makers do it then? They have this problem and deal with it now. Not having any experience with electric cars, I can't speak to how it's done.

EVs have a lot of smaller cells packed together and there is a heavy and capable Battery Management System attached to that, along with heating and cooling elements.

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.

But how do they display remaining battery life? %? Range in distance?

There is another problem, at least I had it with my android phone, is that percentage is averaged on usage pattern, so it would show me I have 20% battery and then I make one 5 min call and it is suddenly 2% and critically low, simply because I usually don't make calls late evening and phone sits in idle.

I don't think you can have such a number, as it hinges so heavily on unknowable future usage and environmental factors.

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.

Not having an electric car, does anyone know what Teslas, Volts and Leafs do?

Those cars have the extra problem of having batteries out in the cold too.

Batteries have a predictable discharge cycle. They're fully charged when their output voltage stops increasing and as they discharge the output voltage slowly falls until it reaches a certain threshold where the output voltage is no longer enough to power the device. That cut off voltage is a fixed number. The part that varies is the time it takes to go from fully charged to the cut off voltage.

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.

Drawing power causes voltage drops; I suspect what they're saying is that a degraded battery under heavy load will momentarily drop from 40% to under cutoff threshold.

Large voltage drops under load are typically an indication of a bad cell or battery. You could argue this is beneficial to the customer but Apple is hiding the fact that they're doing this. Why?

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?

Now, I know that different battery chemistries have different discharge profiles and this waters down my point a bit, but hear me out.

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?

>> 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

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.

Users are "idiots" and you should decide for them.

I find it funny that the human interface guidelines for iOS states the following under User Control:

> 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.

“Do as I say and not as I do” has a long and storied history in software.

See also various UI guidelines from Microsoft at times when not a single MS app that was profitable followed those guidelines.

Assuming that comment is not sarcastic, you can choose for the user (default option) and still allow them to change that option somewhere.

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.

Why is the phone randomly shutting off at 40% in the first place? None of the earlier phones did that. It's clearly a design flaw in the newer phones.

I used to have a desktop that would randomly reboot until I replaced the power supply with a higher wattage one, which is more or less what was happening here afaict.

Imagine you sold a thousand of those and after realizing the mistake shipped a bios update that underclocked the CPU instead.

Except, in this case, batteries lose their ability to deliver power as part of normal wear and tear.

Which wouldn't be a problem if apple didn't decide the design life of the iphone was only 1 year. Otherwise they would have correctly accounted for the internal resistance of the battery increasing.

If this gets me the ability to force my phone into low battery mode all the time I’d be for it.

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.

> It's impossible because it's very un-Apple.

You mean Apple can't stop jerking around, and for once be useful for the user rather than their bottom line?

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