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I still think Apple should sue some publications for defamation for the manifestly bad reporting about this story [1]. Here's John Siracusa about it [2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15995018

[2] https://overcast.fm/+CdQP59ws/56:00

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Unfortunately, this is just how Apple is treated by much of the industry. People love to hate Apple, so there will always be: "Fingerprint Scanner: how Apple is stealing your identity and eroding your privacy", "Thin phones: how your phone will break in half", "WiFi On/Off: Apple & NSA tracking you even when you think your WiFi is off" articles, etc. This battery thing is just the latest Apple FUD and panic with a perfectly reasonable explanation.

I work with a guy that doesn't use Apple products at all, yet _always_ forwards this stuff to me. I don't even argue about it or defend Apple—it isn't worth my time and it isn't worth Apple's time either.

Maybe they have a defamation case, but really who cares?

(edit grammar)

Corporations don't have feelings, no need to be so personally attached. Who cares if Apple gets hate?

I don't think anybody really cares that much, except for I guess the biggest of Apple fanboys. There are fanboys for everything: Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. There's also the inverse, haters for everything. It is interesting, however, how MUCH hate Apple gets proportionally to other companies. Especially around this story, there was a lot of misinformation around what was really going on. There just seem to be a lot more people willing to bash Apple for everything, moreso than there are people doing the same to other companies. And especially more than there are Apple fanboys.

I do use Apple products, but every company and product should be scrutinized equally. Not that it matters if Apple gets hate, they're still a billion dollar company, but I do find it interesting on why they get that hate at times when it's not really worth it.

I dislike animosity based on falsehoods because it diminishes society as a whole. Look at the loss of trust in the media as a consequence of last year's election as a giant red flag in that regard.

John sort of skated by the point that these phones were designed to have this problem. Spontaneous shutdowns with aging batteries are not a standard feature of all smartphones. Apple made a trade-off in the phone design that caused this hardware problem and then used software to try to workaround it but didn’t tell people that this would slow down their phones. My wife has an iphone 6 with this problem and was considering a new iphone to fix her performance problem. Whether apple meant to or not, their lack of full disclosure caused people to needlessly replace their phones. To say apple did nothing wrong is fanboyism.

Was the reporting bad? Sure. Was apple in the right? Definitely not.

Apple is right that this is a fundamental battery issue. Other phones must have SOME way of dealing with it.

Does anyone know how Samsung phones (for example) deal with low battery voltage issues? Do they simply adjust the battery meter so that it reports zero percent by the time you might start having these issues? Does it slow the phone down The way Apple did? Does it issue some sort of warning that your battery is getting bad?

Or does it just shut down if you overtax things?

It must be possible to figure out how other vendors solved this issue.

If by "fundamental battery issue" you mean that all phones have this issue or some comparably severe tradeoff, then no, this is not a fundamental issue. Batteries don't all degrade at the same rate, and even given a specific battery tech, the way it's implemented in the device can have a dramatic impact on the longevity. Temperature, rate of charging, the degree (i.e. voltage) up to which it is charged, the degree (i.e. voltage) at which it is considered empty are all factors that are primarily in the device manufacturers hands.

Even a few percent overprovisioning can extend life expectency by a lot; and aggressive temperature-related charging (and discharging) throttling can trade peak (benchmark) performance and predictable charging speeds for longevity. I bet apple could make a phone with at least double the battery longevity with 1% price, mass, and size increases, and perf and battery life decreases -- if they wanted to. Of course, those factors are easily quantifiable, and battery longevity less so...

So sure: battery degradation is a fundamental issue in the sense that all batteries degrade - but how they do and what tradeoffs the device makes to minimize that are largely up to the manufacturer, and unfortunately also poorly documented, poorly benchmarkable, and I'm not sure how clearly a warranty would apply - so yeah, the it's a factor that manufacturers are bound to skimp on.

(I wouldn't particularly expect apple to be any worse than the rest of the pack, though).

There are ways to try and mitigate it, but when I was really getting at is that if you use ANY device with the lithium ion battery long enough something like this will end up happening.

Some other phone may be designed so it takes an extra year and a half or two, but it will still happen one day.

Technically, I suspect they could easily make em last 10 years without too many drawbacks. And if you're willing to be a bit more compromising, much more even than that. But why engineer that kind of life expectancy into a device that's going to be hopelessly outdated before then?

But a little more honesty in expected degradation would be nice, including the warranty that if degradation exceeds some minimal specification, the phone will be fixed at the manufacturer's cost, and not just for a year. 10 years may be unnecessarily long, but 1 year is definitely too short; and the level of acceptable degradation is too vague.

Back when I was still an Android user, I had a Nexus 4. After a year of use, it also started shutting down at random points if battery was below 20%. Before that I had HTC Desire (the first one), which did the same, at reaching 10% of battery, after about a year of use.

Maybe manufacturers should focus on usability instead of bling and flesh-cutting thinness, the latter of which would probably never make it as a feature request if it weren't for the incentivized yearly upgrade cycle.

But I bet you knew it was a battery problem, and how to fix it without buying a new phone.

That's the main problem here.

Well, yeah. But to be honest, I'd rather the performance decline than knowing I have 20% of battery and am waiting for a critical call and then the battery dies.

Cheaper Samsung phones shut off, thought Samsung has SO TERRIBLE BATTERIES it's not even shameful, they should be sued! Every battery puffs up after 6-12 months, and the warranty only covers first 6 months of usage. I know many people to whom it happened, to some multiple times, and they didn't drop the phones. This was with cheap phones obviously, but still, very bad behavior from phone manufacturers on all sides... :/

Spontaneous shutdowns at 20-30% battery was a feature of my Nexus 6P.

http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/12/20/some-nexus-6ps-have-...

Nexus do this exact throttling behavior:

https://plus.google.com/+YgorCortes/posts/CZ2GhoxgHk3

This would be a bad PR move. A giant insanely-rich company suing news publications?

Apple has dealt with overblown controversies before (Antennagate, etc.) and the best way to deal with them is to do what they're doing: communicate better, improve their software, make repairs or returns more affordable.

don't they already snub publications that they don't like anyway ?

Yes, if they want to be petty about bad publicity, there's other effective strategies like denying access to the publication as they did to Gizmodo back in 2010.

I don't think it's an either/or. They should do what they announced today and sue for defamation. When they announce the suit they could state that they intend to donate any awarded damages/settlement to charity to counter the "Big Company sues blogger" stories. But I think the reputation damage is very real and it would give Apple the opportunity to testify under oath (if it went to trial).

Even if they took publications to court, the public opinion would not change for the better because people stop paying attention to any story within two weeks of when it's revealed. The damage has already been done. The only potential reasonable argument to do something like this is for Apple to scare off other publications from publishing damaging headlines in the future. But the benefit of this strategy would be little when balanced by the negative PR hit it would take by every other news publication writing articles and OpEds on Rich Big Corp vs small, struggling, important-for-democracy news organizations. There's no faster way to torpedo your public approval than to go after news publications.

I think you’re both overstating how widely known this controversy is and understating how bad suing a tech blogger would look (see: Streisand Effect). I’m a techie and have barely heard about this. People who went and bought new phones will be pissed, but the majority of users won’t care.

This response owns the responsibility of countering misconceptions. The huge majority of Apple users won’t remember this in a month.

I had to turn off that episode after Casey opened the segment by condescendingly dismissing any concerns about the behaviour. Quite rude and annoying.

Marco doesn't see the value in tracking podcast listeners, but I'd think he'd benefit to know what causes people to stop when listening to their show.

> opened the segment by condescendingly dismissing any concerns about the behaviour.

Really? I thought that was perfectly fair. Apple made it so people’s phones don’t randomly shut off all the time if the battery is old and people are complaining about it because it fits into a different false narrative.

I honestly do think this whole thing is very overblown. I’m glad they’re fixing iOS to inform users it’s going on (that was certainly an issue) and dropping the price of battery replacements is a great move.

But I don’t think this is the giant scandal that the tech press is trying to make it. I thought Casey’s assessment was quite fair.

Apple hid the cause (an ageing battery), and purposely slowed down peoples phones without warning.

If your phone randomly shuts downs, or it last less time between charges, you know it must be a battery issue. You go to Apple or whatever, and fix it paying no more than 79$ (maybe even free if it still has warranty!)

If you hide it and degrade performance, people don't know its a battery issue, leaving them to suffer a slow phone, or spending 700+$ on a new phone.

No matter the good intentions, and the "good solution" they implemented, they fucked up.

I'm sure ATP knows what is and isn't popular on their show. All three hosts don't need to be in alignment on an issue; having three parrots reciting the party line would be horrible. The fact that Casey is the less technical, touchy feely (hell he's on a podcast named analog for chrissake) is part of ATP. As is making fun of his white cars.

Thats the sort of thing that happens when you are spoiled by buying every iPhone, never experiencing an ageing phone or even an iOs update on an older phone.

It was painful to hear.

Reportage: Apple secretly slows down your phone.

Reality: Apple secretly slowed down people's phones.

Why would they, if other people throw mud on their brand, respond by throwing more mud?

The proper response is to clean their brand. That’s what they do now. I think it is better late than never, but it also is somewhat (depending on how picky they will be on replacing those batteries, and on whether they will pay back people who replaced their battery recently because of this problem) classy.

I also think this is intended to, and will, stop the class action suits being filed before they have even started.

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