Comment by IBM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IBM | Hacker News Reader

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The lede of the story and pretty much every one I've read is false.

>For years consumers have complained and theorized that Apple would purposely degrade the performance of older iPhones, pushing them to upgrade faster than they normally would.

>This week the theory of slowing iPhones was validated by external sources and eventually corroborated by Apple.

The conspiracy theory we're talking about is that Apple slows your old iPhone to make you upgrade to new ones and it goes back all the way to the first iPhones. It's false on its face because this fix wasn't added until iOS 10.2.1 [1] and it wasn't what Apple "corroborated" at all. And for the "Apple should have been transparent" crowd, here's what it said in the release notes:

>iOS 10.2.1 includes bug fixes and improves the security of your iPhone or iPad.

>It also improves power management during peak workloads to avoid unexpected shutdowns on iPhone.

>For information on the security content of Apple software updates, please visit this website: https://support.apple.com/HT201222

There's some extremely bad writing on the internet about this story meant to capitalize on the general controversy. Honestly, Apple should find the most egregious one and sue for defamation, and relish the opportunity to testify under oath if it goes to trial.

[1] https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1893?locale=en_US

I agree with most of what you wrote, and I do think it was the right call for them to implement this feature for iPhones with batteries having trouble, and I agree most if not all the articles about this have been poorly written and badly misinformed. However...

> for the "Apple should have been transparent" crowd, here's what it said in the release notes

I can't agree that that's sufficient. That little one liner in the release notes just isn't enough.

On macOS, they did more. The battery menu extra will actually display a warning when clicked if it detects that your battery is having trouble. It shows as an extra row at the top of the drop-down menu with a little little caution triangle icon and the string "Service Battery". When you click this, it takes you to a help article advising you to "take your computer in for service". It's not perfect, but it's better than not telling the user anything.

Apple could and should have done something similar on iOS, especially given that there's a whole section in Settings for just the battery. They could have displayed a similar alert icon with similar help text, for starters. A full-screen alert advising the user to get their battery serviced whenever this condition was detected would have been even better. Burying it as a single sentence in the release notes wasn't all that helpful or informative for customers.

They did in the 10.2.1 update [1]. As well as interviews with the tech press about it [2].

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207453

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/23/apple-says-ios-10-2-1-has-...

My iPhone 6 is benchmarking at 25% lower than the average when fully charged and this warning is not being displayed. So clearly shenanigans are at play.

Are you testing on a fresh install of iOS with no background apps?

Yes and yes. My experience is shared with a lot of other random commenters. Clearly the threshold for this battery warning is lower that the threshold for throttling.

The lede of the story and pretty much every one I've read is false.

Meta comment: Why is it that we routinely debunk shoddy journalism here on Hacker News but struggle to see why people call the vanguard of mainstream media "fake news"?

I see articles from all venues get eviscerated here on Hacker News. Can we be honest with ourselves and just say that if they're this bad about complex technology subjects, perhaps they might be equally as bad on complex geopolitical or economic issues?

Because we shouldn't think about the media categorically one way or the other, as if it's either all fake or everything in the media is true. The media gets things wrong, and we should correct their mistakes.

However, the political aspects of discrediting entire news outlets or the entire news community because of critical or negative coverage of certain politicians or political parties is an attitude that promotes mistrust in our society and creates an environment where nefarious political actors can successful avoid scrutiny.

> Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

> In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

― Michael Crichton

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