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Comment by satysin | Hacker News Reader

To be fair that is a pretty decent response. The reality is batteries do degrade over time and they have to manage that. They should have been transparent about what they were doing and I'm not sure giving the user control over it is all that sensible.

Are there any battery experts who can chime in with their opinion on this?

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I'm not a battery expert, but it needs to be pointed out that other smartphone manufacturers do not have this problem. It was Apple specific - it's not as if every device with a lithium battery shuts off at 40%. So it still feels like they're doing it to mitigate a fault with the device, and should've been more transparent about that in the first place.

Yeah, some other manufactureres phones just carch fire instead.

Is there any evidence that, all else being equal, Apple’s batteries degrade faster or degraded iPhones shut off during peak usage more than other smartphones?

Of course there is no evidence of that - because then people would have a legitimate (though different) complaint.

> It was Apple specific

Maybe these symptoms are Apple specific but Samsung had fire and explosions:

http://www.techradar.com/news/samsung-galaxy-note-7-battery-...

> op: [request for a battery expert to chime in with professional opinion]

> response: [non-battery expert with subjective opinion]

sums up why I hate HN comments sometimes.

To be fair: the OP didn't merely ask, he also gave a subjective opinion on the matter; and it looks like the response was to that, and not related to the battery expertise bit.

But hey; in an online forum things get off topic... kind of like this ;-)!

It’s been pointed out in many places that other manufacturers absolutely do have the same battery problems.

https://support.google.com/pixelphone/forum/AAAAb4-OgUsQiGBJ...

https://us.community.samsung.com/t5/Galaxy-Note-Phones/Note-...

> it's not as if every device with a lithium battery shuts off at 40%

Nexus 6P.

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

As posted above, Android phones do show this behavior, too. However, and I'm no battery expert, I think that Apple was running the CPU incredibly close to the red line and draining the batter faster than necessary. They already have the fastest phone CPU by quite a large margin, they could probably run it at a lower frequency that the batteries can better match, leading to slower degrading.

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