Apple faces lawsuits after admitting it slows down aging iPhones | Hacker News Reader

Apple faces lawsuits after admitting it slows down aging iPhones

abc.net.au

110 pointsempressplay128 comments

I really like Linus' (Sebastian, not Torvalds) thoughts about this: https://youtu.be/TJUeHmdzSx4?t=11m22s

Basically, Apple chose to tune the phones to run at a dangerously high configuration to increase benchmarks, knowing that the battery will degrade like this (and that when the iphone X2 comes out, nobody will be talking about this, instead they'll be talking about how much faster the X2 is than the X).

His exact quote is that "they are running them so close to the red line that surely they must know, when they're shipping these things (Because it's not like LiOn batteries are especially new tech at this point, and Apple has done TONS of research in this field), Apple knows pretty much exactly what's going to happen with this, pretty much perfectly, and they're making the conscious decision to do this"

Before I heard this I thought "Oh come on, Apple truely is protecting your phone here", but after hearing his argument I changed my mind.

What does "running them close to the red line" mean? Do iPhone batteries degrade faster than other phones?

Optimizing for speed instead of device survivability. Basically, instead of running at 110% for the first year then throttling to much less so the device doesn't break, they should have shipped them running at 90-100% so they can last longer. (Those numbers are random but the point is still valid)

I don't think that's a fair representation of what's happening though. The reality is that running it at 110% (for whatever that means) is using a new battery at its maximum discharge rate. As the battery ages, its maximum discharge rate decreases, and would have whether run at 110% or 90%. You need to go way out of spec to prematurely age batteries by discharging too fast. They age mostly by being exposed to high temperatures, stored fully charged, and by being fully discharged (partial charge cycles are better). Artificially limiting performance to the post-degradation level can be seen as wasteful, can it not?

Now the way Apple handled it, silently, throttling performance without a configuration option is interesting. I think the benchmarks may not be truly representative of what is happening, and it's probably closer to a TDP limit on the CPU where it runs real fast until it realizes it can't then it ... doesn't. That comes across as maximally efficient in real life but slow in benchmarks.

This is all in the marketing. Either you can look at it as "iPhone find a way to squeeze every last bit of battery life out of both new and old devices" or you can look at it as "my phone slows down over time" -- the reality of the chemistry of lithium ion devices.

IMO this should be handled with a configuration switch and a notification when performance starts to become limited, though how many would be totally confused by this? That hundreds of millions of users took years to notice should be an indication this whole thing worked pretty well IMO.

> That hundreds of millions of users took years to notice should be an indication this whole thing worked pretty well IMO.

People absolutely have been noticing, this has been a very popular and long running issue. It took years for Apple to admit it, not for people to notice.

I think this could have been better handled by throttling according to the actual condition of the battery, rather than controlling it via software updates. The former seems reasonable, the latter is pretty shady. (Maybe this is actually what is happening and the press has confused what is going on.)

They are throttling it according to battery's condition (but actual throttling apparatus was added via an update). If you replace old battery with a new one, phone starts running at full speed again.

> People absolutely have been noticing, this has been a very popular and long running issue. It took years for Apple to admit it, not for people to notice.

The behavior in question was introduced in 10.2.1 which was first released in Feb 2017.

So no, it was not a conspiracy going on for years. The annual slowdown was just poor unoptimized software. Occam's razor.

Hmm, just a bit skeptical about that. I'm pretty sure that peak "110%" usage rarely happens throughout the day; Maybe during video playback or gaming.

This is especially true since the iPhone 7, with its two low power cores who's entire purpose is to extend battery life.

IIUC the low power cores could be configured to both extend short-term battery life (daily cycles), and decrease long-term battery life.

The uproar is strictly re: long-term battery life.

It's like overclocking your CPU very close to the limits of your cooling ability. You will get great benchmark scores, but your CPU will also last a lot less as well (though with CPUs it doesn't matter if they now run for 20 years or 32 years, but if you push it a lot more you might damage it. But hey, at least you got great benchmark points).

Wouldn't you also get more hardware errors, causing e.g. sudden kernel panics and stuff like that? And wouldn't that damage the brand more than the speed improvement is worth?

Yeah. One could argue that if you are getting hardware errors you are already at the red line (and not just close to it).

Regarding damage: It depends what your goal is. Some people want to get as much performance out of the CPU as possible since they maybe upgrade after a year or two anyway. Some people even try to set records by using crazy cooling systems.

If Apple slowed the phone down upfront then people would complain that Apple were throttling as the user is “too dumb to look after their battery properly” so instead they are doing when they can point to a proven need to throttle the device. This feels like a no win situation for Apple unless they had/will put in “throttle my phone so it doesn’t go weird” switch in settings.

Side note: we’ve known for years that hammering a battery day in day out causes problems, my wife and I have had our 6S phones for the same amount of time - I plug mine in as much as possible (over charging is not a problem anymore) and she runs hers into the red all the time. After 2 years my phone runs fine and, when needed, I get a days charge out of it but she barely gets 4 hours and is noticeably slower. If people looked after their batteries better this would be less of a problem.

On that note, it'd be nice if Apple were more user-friendly about battery cycle counts. I don't think there's a way for me to see battery health without installing an app, and I've never seen a message asking me to replace the battery in my two-year-old iPhone.

If the battery does degrade to the point of needing to be replaced, there is a message in the battery settings page: http://media.idownloadblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/iP...

LiOn is all about loading cycles. In the same amount of time (let's say 5 days) she has used up way more cycles than you did. You probably charged 5 * 20% while she maybe charged 5 * 90%. Obviously she is using up her load cycles much faster than you are. So no surprise her battery isn't very good anymore.

I don't think you two are using the phone equally much (meaning using up the same loading cycles in the 5 days). Like for example, she charging 2 * 90% and you charging 4 * 20% and 1 * 10%.

Do you have a source on lithium ion batteries working this way, because all of the sources I'm finding (and it's not the first time I've researched this) say that shallow cycles dramatically improve battery longevity.

My understanding is that "cycles" are used in discussing battery lifespan for the purposes of warranties and the like because they're an easy-to-define user behavior, not because they actually reflect how the batteries perform.

> shallow cycles dramatically improve battery longevity.

Not necessarily; cycle depth is a big factor, but the interval covered is very important as well. I.e. a few cycles to a high charge end voltage ages cells more quickly than more cycles to a lower charge end voltage. This obviously directly relates to the amount of energy stored. The correlation is approximately exponential: you get somewhere between two to eight times the cycles for lowering charge voltage by 50-100 mV. You very quickly get to zero cycles raising it.

Another factor is cycle length, i.e. cell current, and temperature, as always.

>There’s no need to let it discharge 100% before recharging. Apple lithium-ion batteries work in charge cycles. You complete one charge cycle when you’ve used (discharged) an amount that equals 100% of your battery’s capacity — but not necessarily all from one charge. For instance, you might use 75% of your battery’s capacity one day, then recharge it fully overnight. If you use 25% the next day, you will have discharged a total of 100%, and the two days will add up to one charge cycle. It could take several days to complete a cycle. The capacity of any type of battery will diminish after a certain amount of recharging. With lithium-ion batteries, the capacity diminishes slightly with each complete charge cycle. Apple lithium-ion batteries are designed to hold at least 80% of their original capacity for a high number of charge cycles, which varies depending on the product.

From https://www.apple.com/ca/batteries/why-lithium-ion/

Oh, I think I misunderstood your original comment. You were saying that she charged 90% each time, not charged from 90%. In that case, we're saying the same thing.

Part of what I was talking about was, for example, I believe the Mac system profiler counts a cycle as any change from positive to negative discharge (or at least it did once upon a time), regardless of discharge depth. This gives Apple employees more opportunities to pull up your information and say "nope, sorry, your battery is expected to be dead after this many cycles", and make you feel like it's reasonable that you need to replace the battery.

> This feels like a no win situation for Apple...

If Apple fucked up, why should there be a 'win' situation for them?

The obvious solution would be Apple replacing the batteries for free. Instead Apple won't even let you pay them to replace the battery if it's not in EOL mode — despite throttling starting well before then.

Why should apple replace batteries for free? Do you expect a car company to replace car-batteries or tires for free?

Some components just wear and need to be replaced. Apple just provided a workaround that ensures your device doesn't crash due to the worn out component.

Apple decided to not let the consumer have the choice or ability to swap their own batteries. They've painted themselves into a corner here - and I think they should pay for this, indeed. Its clear that these moves were made solely to maximise profit for Apple, not to protect the consumer and provide them the best-quality experience.

It shouldn’t be hard for Apple to “prove” that there are benefits, outside of maxing profit, to having a sealed battery.

Its also not hard to prove that it was a big mistake and they shouldn't have devolved this feature.

Why do you keep insisting there's a problem with a battery? There's no problem with the battery, it behaves like any other battery in any other phone. The problem is that phone's compute ability stops matching its advertised value soon after purchase.

Because before apple came along, batteries were considered the consumable and were user replaceable. Now apple wants the whole phone to be the consumable. This not good for users nor the planet. Only people who would want a marginally thiner phone in exchange for buying a new one every year and apple's profit margins benefit.

I fail to see why is it relevant to the current issue. Its not like you know 100% that if the battery would be swappable easily, they would suddenly decide to tell you instead of silently slowing the phones down.

Honestly, it feels like people, who have grudge on manufacturers for making non-swappable battery, just need an excuse to bring the swapping topic afloat.

It is also important not to affect any potential lawsuits against Apple by implying, that swapping batteries on affected phones would solve the problem. Because it would not: Apple should also cover damages to people, who had to buy new iPhones after being misguided.

The point is that we wouldn't have a need for these slow-downs if we could just replace the batteries ourselves.

The whole thing is geared to make Apple more money, and consumers stupider.

I understand your point, but now you can see how my fear of talking battery replacements came true. Probably millions of people bought new iPhones this year because they were deceived. Next day after my comment and all the discussions Apple announces they will make replacements cheaper. But those millions are still basically f*cked. And Apple will get away with it because most people complained about replaceability of the battery, while the only real issue is straight up illegal deception. Talking about battery swappability only serves Apple by driving conversation away from it. They will never make battery swappable unless there's a regulation to force it.

They're going to have to suffer some way, before they'll change their attitude. And they've got a few billions of dollars worth of buffer between them, and suffering, so .. you may indeed be right. Lets see.

I disagree this is "straight up illegal deception", in fact, I find the slowing down perfectly rational and a desirable feature. The problem isn't the slowing down, but it is shining light on the irreplaceability, which IMHO is the true crime against the planet. That our legal infrastructures haven't caught up to it is irrelevant, planned obsolescence is a cancer, and if this is the only time people will notice, damn straight I'll use it

It's quite selfish to assume what's OK for you is ok for everyone else in a same situation.

It is, but I don't think I did here. I'm saying it's bad for the planet because of the ecological cost of making an iphone being artificially pinned to that for a battery, in spite of their having very different lifetimes. If people in general thought those lifetimes should be equal, there would be no uproar to this revelation (the slowing down thing).

The fault is Apple decided on our behalf that we spend $1000 to replace the phone instead of spending $100 to replace the battery.

Completely impartial decision. I call that a FRAUD. Apple can call it "caring for me". Either way, Apple made the choice that costs me $900 more than it could/should.

I'll keep using my (jailbroken) devices, and I am looking for the day that this "tweak" will be revered in Cydia, and Apple will never see another $1k from me.

I, for one, am definitely not asking for Apple to give me a free battery. I just do not trust them at this point :)

Can’t you pay them £79 for a new battery whenever you want and they will do the swap for you?

You should expect Apple to freely replace the battery of a phone that may unexpectedly shut down because that's already what Apple said you should expect.

Apple publicly claimed that it affects a limited number of 6s and Apple would replace the battery. That offer is still up today [1]. Then they quietly [2] released an update that applies the 'workaround' to a larger number of devices. That's a fuckup at every level.

[1] https://www.apple.com/support/iphone6s-unexpectedshutdown/

[2] https://twitter.com/jcenters/status/944330221083381761 (Tidbits editor explains)

The obvious solution is that this should have been a user-configurable setting.

Maybe the attitude to run the battery low before charging it comes from NiCd batteries which have the so called memory effect [1].

Could education be the answer? I've never bought an iPhone, do they include a few paragraphs about proper battery care?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_effect

Apple has had a web page about batteries and good maintenance practices [1] for several years now. But most people wouldn't know about it or read it unless they searched for it.

[1]: https://www.apple.com/batteries/

Not quite the issue. Batteries have known charge-loss curves, and they lose capacity in a way that can be predictably engineered for. This is why during the first month or so, they seem to stay on for days barely losing charge, then they seem to keep on about a day or two at general use after that.

So the battery loses down to maybe 90% capacity very quickly, then falls a little more slowly to somewhere around 70% by the next year or so, and will much more slowly lose after that.

But engineers that choose the batteries and design the electronics know this, so they plan the phone around the battery having that 65-85% capacity, never the 100%. That's what I think Apple did knowingly wrong and against good conventions.

Apple designed those iPhones in a way that either prematurely decreased the life and ability of the batteries they chose to power them (evidenced by the shut-offs), or they used inferior batteries that unpredictably or improperly lost the ability to maintain the required draw. That they only issued the scaling patch after shut-offs became an issue tells me that this was an engineering failure, whether by Apple, ATL, or TLB- not user error.

For those interested this is Linus Sebastian (or his last name "Tech Tips"), not Torvalds... As the video was loading I was wondering if Torvalds had started commenting on general tech news.

Well, Linus Torvalds posts at RWT.

This is just sensationalist poorly sourced crap.

> "they are making these devices that it's difficult to replace the battery for..."

No. It's free under AppleCare and a whopping $79 out of warranty, and you can do it via mail.

> "they are running them so close to the redline that they can only handle it for a year"

No source cited for this. There is no indication that iPhones are regularly degrading beyond 80% within or shortly after one year.

> [compares to volkswagen emissions cheat]

Seems reasonable. :-/

It's ironic that this guy invokes the specter of benchmark cheating when Apple actually has been one of the only manufacturers that hasn't engaged in it.[1]

[1] https://www.xda-developers.com/benchmark-cheating-strikes-ba...

Many throttled 6S phones show up as "green" on Apple diagnostic which means that Apple stores will generaly refuse to do the battery swap.

I'm one of the people defending Apple's charge for battery replacement as reasonable, but his point is it's actually a physically difficult thing to do, to replace the battery. It takes real skill to replace a modern iphone battery without ruining it.

> "they are running them so close to the redline that they can only handle it for a year"

As for this, he's citing the fact the iPhone 7 is affected - a phone that came out just over a year ago.

It doesn't really take that much skill. I did it in 15 minutes for the first time with no advance reading/watching. The kits you can buy online come with a full set of tools and instructions.

Counter anecdote: my housemate totally ruined his girlfriends phone trying.

when you have to open up your phone and void your warranty, or bring it to someone "certified" to work on Apple devices and show up for an appointment and pay extra just to replace a battery... when up until this smartphone era, replacing a battery was as simple as removing it from the back of a device and putting in a new one...

It's highly discouraging to replace an iPhone battery. Doesn't matter how much skill it takes. It appears daunting and unapproachable.

The average iPhone user needs a website like iFixIt just to feel confident enough to replace a battery on their own. Go back 10 years and replacing a battery on a device didn't require researching a 20-step guide, a community forum, and special tools.

I love this hack. It's awesome that a device was made adaptive to its context. Tunable. We can chip our cars to optimize performance. We can even remotely update satellites, probes, rovers to extend their lives. Awesome.

Better would be a "check engine light" when a new battery is needed.

Best would be full transparency. I want coconutBattery functionality on the iOS device. I want the option of running the diagnostic utilities the Genius Bar uses.

Note that this goes well with Apple fighting against right to repair and 3rd party repairers - if they can make your phone slow over time and prevent you from cheaply and easily replacing the battery, they essentially force you to replace your pocket computer every two years or so - the pesky "iPad Upgrade Problem" disappears for them.

I think we shouldn't look at this issue in isolation - Apple (earning bulk their money with hardware sales) has tried quite hard to make planned obsolescence an accepted thing. Soldered components, special screws, lobbying against legislation to allow you to maintain electronics.

$79 for a replacement battery seems reasonable, https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/battery-power

> If you're covered under AppleCare+, we'll replace your battery at no charge if it retains less than 80 percent of its original capacity.

> If your iPhone needs battery replacement and it’s not covered, the service fee is $79.

I agree that I wish it were easier to repair and upgrade Apple products.

Yes, of course it does. If you know that the battery is faulty. Doesn't really change the fact that Apple is actively fighting against any legislation that would make electronics repairable though.

My wife and I both just upgraded our iPhone 6's because they became unusably slow after iOS 11. Prior to the upgrade they had been running fine with no issues.

We tried many things including disabling all background app usage, full wipe and restore, etc. My wife eventually took hers into the Apple store and they said they didn't know why it was slowing down but that she shouldn't have upgraded and that there was nothing they could do.

So faced with unusably slow phones, and no resolution, what other choice is there? We both upgraded. She bought an iPhone X and I bought a Pixel 2 XL. We would have both been happy sticking with our iPhone 6's as they were under iOS 10.

The crux of the matter is this: our phones were fine before iOS 11, then unusably slow. We upgraded because we were forced to (unknowingly at the time) by a software update.

Well but you DID buy another iPhone right? Apple got exactly what they wanted - you spending another 700$+ to replace a perfectly functional device after just a few years.

The iPhone now goes to the garbage bin adding to pollution even though it can run the OS just fine without being crippled via update.

Holy shit. You people just throw away the old iPhone after buying a new one? That is a luxury almost no one in my country has. So weird that the people get to live the life on basis of how well the seed generator of Universe performed during their birth.

Welcome to the concept of inequality.

Most people in the world don't have the access to internet you have. And I would imagine some would say "Holy shit. You people browse message boards? I would rather spend that time on a MOOC".

While it is weird looking at the affluence scale above, it is very depressing looking what's at the bottom of the scale. I don't mean to chastise you. It is just a realization I've come to.

I am aware of it. I was not complaining but just amused. If you think about it there is no way the Universe could have existed if it was not for the randomness or inequality :)

Looking back, my reply was unnecessarily snarky. Sorry about that.

Inequality is necessary, but the extent of it and the effects bother me sometimes.

No one in the West (that I’ve ever met) literally throws away old iPhones. They either get handed down to a kid (merits of which are for another thread) or a friend or relative.

Some folk do trade in their old phone and a lot flip them on the used market. I think getting more life out of those devices for the original purchaser is of paramount importance though if we are to stop polluting our environment with the consequences of smartphone manufacture.

I upgrade my iphone every 2 years, and put in a sell order with a mobile phone recycler just before the keynote for the new phone starts, that gives me the best price (it goes down super quick once people see the keynote and decide to upgrade), and I get more than the upgrade on a new 2 year contract will cost ... win win.

I've kept all my old iOS devices. I keep thinking I'm going to finally use that iPod to control my Lego Mindstorms. Or use old iPhones as wifi security cams. I am using one old iPhone to video record meetings.

People in the United States aren't throwing away old iPhones. Apple has a recycling & buy back program, https://www.apple.com/recycling/. other companies also buy back old phones.

Can you install Linux on it and run a small server or something? That at least would get some more use out of it rather than straight into the garbage bin.

If it's given to a place that specifically recycles phones, it may end up refurbished (or not) and sold for another couple of years' use in a poorer country.

You seem to be aggressively agreeing with me that being forced to upgrade for effectively no real reason is ridiculous?

>but that she shouldn't have upgraded and that there was nothing they could do.

The "blame the user for using the product normally" mentality that seems to has arisen around Apple products drives me crazy. I recently upgraded to High Sierra, and Mail decided to delete all of my filters in the process. When I went looking for a fix, I found someone with a similar issue on Apple's forums, and most of the responses were basically berating the user for not taking a backup before upgrading. The attitude was as though this were a perfectly reasonable way for software to behave, and the user was stupid for not anticipating it.

It must be nice to build tech products knowing that your users will blame themselves if you screw up.

What other choice is there? Other than buying a 1000$ phone from a vendor you are not satisfied with? You could do a 2-3 year upgrade cycles with mid-range android devices. They are shiny and fun when new but of course also (subjectively) slow down over time...

Agreed, there is no decent choice :(

I would have happily kept using the iPhone 6 indefinitely. And given the option I would have bought another battery.

Why not just replace the battery rather than get new phones? My iPhone 6's lightning port broke around the time iOS 11 appeared, so I used the insurance we had on it to get a replacement. The replacement was another iPhone 6, with a new battery.

That new battery is working fantastically well for me under iOS 11. I have gotten through 2 days straight of use without a recharge. No exaggeration. It happened to be relatively light use, but it wasn't in low-power mode, and it did everything I wanted it to do for 2 days.

Because nothing was wrong with the batteries as far as we could tell, and Apple "support" didn't mention anything. That's the whole point of these law suits. Apple didn't tell consumers that a) their batteries were degraded or b) that performance would be dialled back to compensate. If people were told they would have just swapped batteries, as we would have. I'd much rather pay $150 for a new battery than $1000 for a new phone.

Prior to iOS 11 they still lasted all day, no random shutdowns, no issues at all. After iOS 11 the phone was slow as hell and the battery drained extremely quickly... the opposite of what you would expect given the recent revelations, but that's what we observed.

OK, makes sense. No indication that anything was wrong with the batteries before iOS 11, so why assume new batteries will help. It's strange though, because my experience, with a "new" replacement iPhone 6, is that iOS 11 works great for battery life. It's hard to understand, unless the replacement iPhone 6's they're making now have some difference compared to the old ones that has to do with battery life.

My household has both an iPhone 6 and 6s. Both have become noticeably slower, more battery consuming.

I just did the full backup and restore trick. We think it worked.

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/12/22/glenn-iphone-sl...

http://mglenn.com/blog/2017/12/22/apples-bungled-battery-fea...

My boss (she who must be obeyed) and I both "feel" that our phones are now more responsive and some features have resumed working like normal.

Such as retrieving voicemails, which had become unresponsive. For both of us. I had been blaming our cell provider (carrier). My bad.

When I first heard about this, it was apparently due to Apple throttling the CPU when the battery started getting old and losing capacity. When the battery gets older, it keeps less charge and therefore, if you want the battery to last a reasonable amount of time, you'd need to lower the power usage.

I recently got my iPhone 6S battery upgraded since it started shutting off randomly below 40%, especially in the cold. I got my battery changed for free due to the Apple 6S battery exchange program.

Today the phone feels just as fast as I want it to. I have zero incentive to upgrade, and I'm even on iOS 11 which I've had zero problems with. I know of other people whose phones got faster after switching out the battery.

In my opinion, after 2 years or so, you just need to change the battery.

I wish Apple made it easier to see the health of the battery, and maybe a button that would send you a package with a return sticker so you could mail your phone in and get the battery changed in a day or two.

coconutBattery.app (for the Mac) will show you the battery health of connected iOS devices.

http://www.coconut-flavour.com/coconutbattery/

[Another commenter shared this trick after I voiced the same feature request. I had been using coconutBattery for a while, but didn't know it had added this feature.]

The elephant in the room that no one addresses is that Apple offers 3 year extended warranty programs for which they refuse to fix the malfunctioning batteries by claiming that they pass their tests. This is despite the fact that the tests ran by the phone obviously fail (let's assume that Apple indeed checks the status of our batteries and is not applying blanket throttling) leading to the frequency limits.

I actually encountered this with my 6+, which I eventually upgraded. It was quickly depleting the battery, but the tests showed it was fine. The tech urged me to upgrade to the latest iOS, which I was hesitant to do, since I'd heard doing so would slow my phone. I didn't want a slow phone with a battery that died quickly. He assured me that the slowness had been addressed. Wanting to fix my phone, I upgraded. [0]

Immediate slowness, to the point of being unusable, demonstrated to the in-store techs. Launching Twitter, for instance, would take minutes and crash half the time. I then found there was no supported method of reverting the upgrade, though one tech told me that if I browsed YouTube I could find a tutorial. I didn't want to DIY a downgrade and still have the short battery life, so I ended up selling my phone for a very low price and buying a new one. If I'd known replacing the battery would have revived it, I'd have happily done that.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/OYZr7zd.png

Before iOS 11 my 3 year old iPhone 6 behaved perfectly fine. After the upgrade it's so painfully slow it's basically unusable. For example, the Messages app maintains a lag of a few characters when typing, the Camera app freezes for ~5 seconds every time you open it, each tap on the screen has a perceivable delay, etc. My battery life hasn't been a problem over the last 3 years and I have not experienced my phone overheating or crashing (which I could interpret as signs of overclocking).

I do not believe Apple shipped the slowdown to "protect my battery". Even if that truly was their desire, I'd much rather protect my UX instead and let the battery die (though, again, it didn't show any signs of severe degradation). This underclocking should at the very least be a customizable setting.

Is there a reasonable chance Apple will revert this change after losing some of the lawsuits?

> I do not believe Apple shipped the slowdown to "protect my battery"

So you believe they only slowed down your phone to have you buy a new phone and hoped not to get caught?

My GF and I were affected by the voltage issue on iPhone 6 & 6S. If Apple can fix it by limiting voltage, it will give a better experience. Alternative is literal data loss which I consider much worse. BUT: They do need to tell users about this slow down. This is where they made a mistake.

I don't see them reverting this change. I do see them paying a hefty fine for covertly downgrading, and being forced to inform their users of the downgrade. I do see them pushing software updates to refine the "battery management system" going forward.

> So you believe they only slowed down your phone to have you buy a new phone and hoped not to get caught?

I don't feel comfortable speculating about their real intentions. Regardless, my main qualm is that they made my user experience worse without warning me about it during the upgrade nor providing the exact reason for it. I guess we can both agree then it's primarily a communication issue.

The throttling code change happened in 10.2.1, not 11.

Thank you for the clarification. That means my phone's performance after the iOS 11 upgrade dropped due to something other than the battery-related throttling. Not sure if that's good news or not...

As far as I'm concerned, this is a deal breaker. I've been an iOS user since 3GS and now I'm ready to jump ship. Apple has been disappointing me since few years now, and I've postponed migrating to Android mostly because I'm accustomed to its UX. But this is enough of a push for me to make an effort to give Android a try.

I'm looking into Oneplus 5T and Pixel 2 XL. Any other suggestions?

For $500, the Essential Phone may be worth a look.

My wife seems pretty happy with hers.

Seems like we are being downvoted for giviing opinions on phones. Sometimes I don't understand this site...Thoughts?

interesting choice. doesn't ship to Europe though :/

I have the Pixel 2 XL. Had the Pixel 1 XL before. Pixel 1 was great. But 2 is meh.. The screen quality is lackluster. The lack of a home button is annoying. Its not a great phone in terms of build quality especially for the high price. I dont know much about the OnePlus but I had a Galaxy Note beforehand and I absolutely loved it. Samsung has been making really great phones other than the battery explosion blip. If I was gonna buy a phone today Id probably buy a galaxy s or galaxy note.

I've been extremely happy with my Nexus 6p. So much so that I bought a Huawei laptop and would probably consider their flagship mobile device before even a pixel these days.

Samsung's Nexus phones were the worst of the series. Samsung's own phones don't get monthly security updates, so I would avoid them.

Stick to Pixel or Android One devices if you're getting an Android phone. Blackberry and Nokia have promised fast updates as well.

I was talking about the Galaxy series. The note is an excellent phone. I used both the Note 4 and 5 in the past. Much better than the Pixel 2 in terms of build quality. The Pixel was great but the Pixel 2 is garrish (screen quality and build quality.) I have no opinions on and have never used the Nexus seres.

I made the jump to Pixel 2 (not XL) a couple weeks ago after being a long time iOS user. I mostly used Google services already, so the transition was very smooth. The Android UX is very good and easy to get used to.

The screen quality is quite garrish though, wouldn't you say?

OnePlus has become a bad actor, possibly worse than Apple here. They ship spyware, refuse to update their flagships, and let's not forget they started by obscuring their ownership to hide that they're a division of Oppo.

The Pixel 2 (not XL) would probably a good enough choice between those two, though I'm not sure if this battery degradation experience would be much better on other devices (in my understanding, those devices would experience sudden shutdowns with a degraded/older battery, just like iPhones did before the software updates to throttle CPU performance). The Pixel 2 XL has also been reported to have some serious display issues [1] that the Pixel 2 doesn't.

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/10/pixel-2-and-2-xl-rev...

I have the Pixel 2 XL and can concur that the screen quality is terrible. The screen is too reflective and the actual color is quite garrish. The backlight also does not dim enough when using it at night. Overall, the build quality is significantly worse than the Pixel 1 XL. Go with a different brand, Google screwed the 2nd rendition up badly...

Got a Pixel 2 XL, I can easily recommend it. Great Phone !

I have the Pixel 2 XL and think it is a terrible phone. The screen quality is absolutely garrish and it doesn't even dim to an appreciable level when using it at night.

Do you use night mode ?

What is your issue with the screen ? I like it a lot ! it goes for accuracy over color popping though, so I get that not everybody is going to like it but to go as far as finding it garrish ? I know that some phones in the first batch had screens issues but I have nothing to report.

I use Night Mode but it doesn't help much. The sRGB gamut issue related to accuracy isnt the reason why...I have the latest patch and even used Oreo Colorizer before then. The screen sucks.

Can someone explain to me how this can reasonably be considered fraud? I don't think Apple makes any guarantees about the performance an iPhone will sustain over time.

Usually in the user manual of product you get informed about the battery life decreasing with time, maybe Apple did not mention that also CPU performance will drop with time. From the article it seems that customers wanted to get a new battery from Apple if the current one degraded while in the warranty so phone shutdown but Apple decided to hide the problem with an update that slowdown the CPU.

Why would you want to live in a country where adding a blurb to user manual excuses your device being crippled after few short years? Even though the hardware functions perfectly well?

IANAL, but I would guess it's the implicit assumption that this is not done to your device without your knowledge/consent. Misdeeds can't be handwaved away with "we made no guarantees we wouldn't do that". It's the explicit choice to not be clear about intentionally hobbling devices and what consumers could have done to de-hobble them that has many up in arms (and spending lots more on a new phone as opposed to a new battery).

I really look forward to discovery and evidence in these cases if they move forward. Surely engineers raised opacity concerns.

Apple's strategy has been to sell devices in an unstable overclocked state with marketing based on benchmarks and then secretly downgrade to a stable configuration later in life.

Its ultimately a bait and switch deception driven by fraudulent marketing.

Is Apple’s marketing driven by benchmarks? I don’t think it is. They rarely talk about concrete performance or specs and focus more on the user experiences the device enables. Might have missed some campaigns though!

They used to show charts comparing new iPhone vs. old iPhone speeds in the launch presentations. Kind of necessary when the S versions were just speed bumps. The iPhone 6 presentation had a chart crowing about "sustained performance". It was about thermal throttling but kind of ironic thinking about it now.

I don't recall any charts from the recent launch - they just seemed to lean on putting the word "bionic" in the chip name.

Which S generation was just a speed bump?

> Apple's strategy has been to sell devices in an unstable overclocked state

I can't confirm this in any way. Can you provide some links or at least an anecdote measurement on how your device was clearly overclocked?

Its overclocked wrt to the design parameters of the device (battery voltage). The rated clockspeed is what can be sustained over the lifetime of the device, not the peak speed. The fact you can temporarily push a faster clockspeed is not what you can claim is "normal".

So, the speed reduction is not "rated" -> "throttled" because it was not sustainable, it was actually "overclocked" -> "rated".

Every year you see Tim Cook happily quote performance numbers on the keynote about how superior iPhones are compared to other manufacturers.

When you buy the iPhone, they go and slow it down to make it run slower after a two or three yearsa. Like VW would lock your 300HP Passat to 200HP after three years with excuse of keeping the mileage up... without telling you in any way.

How is that NOT considered false advertising or fraud? Our iPhones are slower than what Tim Cook smugly sells on the keynote. Deliberately, not due to tehnical limitations - the CPU can run at stated performance but Apple chose to slow them down with an update.

Cars do get weaker over time as the parts wear. And I would certainly expect the microcontroller to adjust to provide the best performance possible under the new limitations. I assume most well-made, modern cars already do that.

> Cars do get weaker over time as the parts wear.

And so does the battery life get shorter as the battery wears. We know that. This in no way allows to anticipate that CPU gets slower.

Well you'd loose maybe some couple percent tops over a dozen years but basically nothing more on a properly maintained car (regular oil change, spark plugs, bearings, whatever).

Here we're talking about halving the device performance after a single year because the thing is designed on such a tight rope that it can't handle the slightest voltage drop which happens to come way too soon because the battery wears out so fast.

From an engineering perspective it looks like the latest devices are designed so that they provide blistering performance out of the box, satisfactory performance 6 months in and something ranging to barely adequate to crapshoot 1 year in. That is, picture a graph f(time) with a horizontal line that defines "This device is OK" WRT your favorite metric (performance, battery life, whatever) on the vertical axis, and it seems to me that the device should be designed to stay above this line long enough, but when objectively looking at it, it appears that the line is crossed way too soon, around the 6 month mark. That is when I started to notice my phone wasn't quite holding up all day, that there were performance glitches here and there that started to annoyingly grow on me, but I was dismissing all of this because hey I shelled out xxx€ for this device, and it can't break down that so fast, because Apple, so it must be all in my head or something.

I cannot imagine Apple not having such graphs when designing a device prior to release, nor after release with all the telemetry they gather. That is, to me, where the fraud can lie: a design where the device produces delightful performance for a known short while, followed by a growing frustration to be released again through delight when a new device is bought. The question is, is this premeditated?

They silently deprived customers of the advertised performance in order to avoid warranty claims.

Cars also wear over time and the onboard computers might retard the timing and your performance or fuel mileage might suffer but I don't see people complaining about that.

Because cars don't lose 1/3rd of horsepower after 2-3 years due to manufacturer ECU being programmed to slow them down.

A maintained car will lose less then 10% of its horsepower due to wear and tear over 150.000miles / 10 years. Note that I said "well maintained" - meaning there's a way to maintain the car to keep the advertised performance. There is no way to "maintain" iPhones to keep their performance over three years - the battery will degrade and Apple will silently make your phone slower than advertised.

This is a world of difference from losing 1/3rd of performance due to software hardcoded loss to push new sales. Intent and reason for degradation matters.

> There is no way to "maintain" iPhones to keep their performance over three years

Replace the battery? Free under AppleCare and $79 otherwise.

If you know that the battery is at fault (Apple hid that) and if Apple Store will replace it (they refused it for many people because diagnostics doesn't show an issue even if phone is throttled).

Apple is also actively fighting and lobbying against any kind of legislation that makes electronics repairable and maintainable.

Read up on the issue a bit more :)

> There is no way to "maintain" iPhones to keep their performance over three years

>> If you know that the battery is at fault (Apple hid that) and if Apple Store will replace it (they refused it for many people because diagnostics doesn't show an issue even if phone is throttled)

You narrowed your scope. (Note that Apple basically never refuses to replace a battery if you pay the $79. They will, occasionally, quibble about the 80% requirement for an in-warranty replacement.)

I agree that Apple should be better about communicating that batteries should be replaced after a couple years of use. My objection is to the claim that there is "no way to maintain iPhones".

No, stop it.

Great paper[1] by Ruhr University students. Whole research is great so take time to check it out, if you want to see bloody industry. Notable pages: 8, 17, 18 for rev. eng maps.

https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~klevchen/diesel-sp17.pdf

The reasonable consumer expectation here is that CPU speed is unaffected by device age, since reducing the speed by battery age is entirely new behavior (both in phones and other portable computing devices) AFAIK.

This is different from degrading _battery_ performance over time, which consumers have had plenty of experience with.

Maybe not actual fraud, we will see.

IANAL but in places like Texas there would appear to be little to no defense against a lawsuit brought under the Deceptive Trade Practices Act where illicit behavior does not have to rise to the level of fraud.

Mainly you are supposed to get your money back plus perhaps additional compensations if you give notice within the proper time frame (this would seem to be within 2 years from when the deception was realized, or within 60 days to qualify for treble damages if a lawsuit is brought) and if the vendor fails to comply then you can sue them.

http://www.ffllp.com/cadtpa/

Violations of this consumer-protection regulation appear to rely more on whether the particular consumer was deceived than whether the deception was intentional, although if intentional it looks like treble damages.

http://www.westfirm.com/tx_dtpa_.html

Consumers over the age of 65 appear to be especially well protected.

http://statelaws.findlaw.com/texas-law/texas-deceptive-trade...

http://pdf.legalformsfortexas.com/PDFs/Civil/CIVLIT_58.pdf

Now the cat is out of the bag I hope Apple adds a "your phone performance is being reduced because of a degraded battery" message to the settings app or something.

Sad that they had to be sprung on this one and not more forthcoming though.

On the "slowdown with old battery" issue, does an old iPhone speed up when it's connected to a charger.

P.S. Just asking out of curiosity, in case someone has an old device and wants to run benchmarks.

So apple iphone was not magically faster than other phones because of better engineering?

I don't think the is the case. The SOCs are faster. The batteries can't keep up. So they need to throttle the performance to draw less power if the batteries degrade too much. Which is why swapping out the old battery restores things. A new battery can provide enough power.

If it isn't fraud then it should be a user option. "Slow down phone as battery ages" yes/no

Or “Randomly turn off with lots of charge as battery ages yes/no”?

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