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Comment by jsnk | Hacker News Reader

How is this a "completely manufactured scandal"?

Tens of millions of old iPhone users were left in the dark why all of a sudden the phone was slowing down to the point where it was becoming unusable. Millions of people probably spent hundreds of dollars otherwise they wouldn't need to spend if they know this was something they can fix with a new battery.

I personally have been using iPhone 6 for 3 years until this CPU-Battery disaster struck. So I ended up buying an Android phone. I love my Android phone now, but it's still money I wouldn't have had to spend.

This is a huge scandal. I like the response by Apple, but it's too late and millions of people already spent money they could've avoided spending. Good bye iPhone. I won't be coming back.

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If Apple hadn’t made this change those phones would have randomly turned off instead. Those people probably would’ve gone and bought either a new were iPhone or switch to android like you did.

On the whole I don’t think this would have caused anyone to spend money they wouldn’t have otherwise. Perhaps they would have stayed with their phone longer.

It’s hard to tell, and this is certainly worse than if they had just told people about the battery in the first place (although I imagine THAT would’ve become a scandal two).

>If Apple hadn’t made this change those phones would have randomly turned off instead.

Why is apple the only company with this problem?

Plenty of non-Apple phones suffer from random shutdowns and restarts due to faulty batteries.

> Why is apple the only company with this problem?

It’s the only one people care about enough. Apple gets a major "scandal" almost each year about something that affects every single smartphone company on the planet. Think of the antenna-gate or the bending issues. Lots of non-Apple phones have shown these issues, and the random shutdowns are no exception [1].

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

(updated to add a link)

That's natural since iPhones are being touted as the premium option while putting down Androids as "cheap" phones.

It's all about expectations.

Others may tout Android phones as “cheap”, but does Apple? I don’t actually recall Apple doing any negative marketing against Android.

Are you kidding me? How many WWDC and product introductions have you attended?

I’ve never been to WWDC. I watched the most recent iPhone announcement and I don’t specifically remember any negative commentary against Android. Hence my comment and my question.

They aren’t. Lots of devices utilizing lithium ion batteries experience similar issues once they get some age.

The Nexus has the same throttling:

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

You have sure done a lot of these posts...

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=cz2ghoxghk3&sort=byPopularity&...

Can you stop spamming this? This isn't reddit.

You completely missed his point. If Apple had made the issue clear, he could have just paid for a battery replacement instead of a completely new phone. And they clearly knew the battery was the problem.

Apple certainly should have communicated the real issue, I have no problem with that idea.

The idea I’m arguing against is that Apple either did nothing or purposefully made it worse. They tried to fix one bad problem (random shutdowns) and it caused a different, although less severe, problem.

Apples move to retard performance to keep the phone from suddenly dying was a GOOD move. It wasn’t a scam as some others have claimed.

But obviously they should have communicated to the user that they knew there was a battery issue.

Obviously.

> It wasn’t a scam as some others have claimed.

It is a scam if they're not making it clear to the users why their phone is suddenly being slowed down. The fact is, even if battery issues are a perfectly fine reason to be doing this, by not making that clear to users and instead leaving them in the dark with a now extremely slow phone (Just in time for their new releases!) they are scamming their users.

If you took your car into a dealership, and instead of telling you that you had a bad battery (That they've known was already going bad in similar cars) they told you that they don't know what's wrong with it, but that they have lots of other cars you can buy, would you consider that a scam? I certainly would.

Sounds like a 2017 exclusive problem.

"If Apple hadn’t made this change those phones would have randomly turned off instead"

If Apple hadn't redlined the CPU to hit benchmarks the battery wouldn't have been in such a poor state to need to be shut down/throttled so early in its lifecycle.

They are 100% to blame this situation and have taken the least consumer focused choice up until this point.

What percentage of maximum CPU should all phones be restricted to to prevent causing these kind of issues?

That doesn’t seem like a reasonable solution.

It's more than reasonable to expect a manufacturer to not stress their (recently released) hardware to the point of it being damaged without significant throttling or flat out shutting it down.

But if it is that reasonable than surely there is a long list of electronic devices that do such a thing...

I agree, I simply don’t believe that the iPhone is not designed to be able to run at full speed a reasonable fraction of the time.

The implication that I keep getting from people seems to be that Apple is running their phones at 140% and when the battery can’t keep up they then slow it down to make up for the CPU being underprovisioned on battery.

I think it’s far more likely that Apple is running the phone at 100% of what it was designed for. When the battery ages they were running into problems with the phones having to shut themselves down (perhaps the newer chips were more sensitive to power fluctuations?) so they’ve started throttling to under 100%.

In a desktop analogy: I don’t think this is the equivalent of some company selling overclocked CPUs and lying about how fast they were. I think this is closer to a case of the computers just ended a clogged with lots of dust and had to throttle to prevent serious damage after a few years.

Obviously they should’ve told the user but I don’t think they set out from a malicious standpoint.

In that case, why don't Android devices face sudden shutdowns as frequent as iOS devices (yes, you can point to isolated cases, but it is nowhere as prevalent as Apple devices pre-throttling)?

Note that this problem only occurred on devices where Apple fully designed the chips (iPhone 6 and later). "Off the shelf" chips, and those used for Android, simply have a lot more of a voltage window.

Because no one cares or names it a "-gate" when one Android phone, consisting of <10% of the whole Android phone market has the same issues.

>the phone was slowing down to the point where it was becoming unusable.

Were the phones really slowed down by that much?

Yes, from typing to opening apps, I would say anywhere from 500ms to 5s latencies were added to regular things I do. Opening games and such, forget it, I gave up playing games on it.

I have a 6S and the difference is night and day. Random hangs everywhere, even just typing. My original iPod Touch with iOS 3 runs smoother than this (and has its original battery in it).

I’ve seen a six that you can noticeably type faster on and can take a few seconds to launch simple apps.

In some cases, yeah. It’s bad.

Typing a letter, seeing the keyboard respond to show that letter was recognized... Then putting the phone down, making a sandwich, coming back, and finally seeing it actually make the key click noise and enter the letter in the input field.(That is not an exaggeration. That happened.) A day after that it turned into a brick and I had to give it that DFU middle finger to get my iPhone 6 back into a workable state. That was all because of the iOS 11 upgrade.(I skipped past 10.2.) While the full reformat of the phone has more of less resolved the issues it still experiences slow downs while rapidly draining the battery due to iOS 11 idiocy.

My phone's remaining battery life is above 80%.

Same experience on an iPhone 7. I wish I’d never upgraded to iOS 11 :(

Sadly you should wait at least 6 months before declaring unconditional love to an android phone as I learnt by myself..

That's the second time I've seen that timeframe mentioned in this thread. What was your experience? I don't like upgrading so I tend to keep my Android phones for years and just keep the OS updated. I was getting a good day from my S4 after years of ownership.

I bought a new Nexus 5 about ~6 months after reveal to supersede my aging iphone 4 that was 4 years old at that point. At the beginning I was super excited about the very good performance, just after less than 6 months the performance started to become sluggish, battery life was noticeably worse and while with my iphone 4 I had probably 4 reboots or freezes in 4 years, in 6 months with the nexus 5 I had many more such problems. The worst was a loop boot after 1 year and something that killed my battery from 80% to 0 very quickly and, very luckily, after it was dead it didn't continue loop booting. It happened to me another one or two times if I recall correctly. The phone was 100% stock, I never flashed anything at all, I just performed the android updates. Arrived at the point of having a quite strong desire to throw it against the wall pretty much every day, I sold it to my friend's father when it was 1 year and 8 months old. I begged my friend to thoroughly test it before getting it and I gave him a really good price and he was very happy with the performance (I still can't fathom how in the world it is possible...). After 8 - 10 months his father could not use it anymore because it won't charge.

After that awful experience I would rather get a kick in my genitalia than an android phone.

So you had a bad device. I am using a one plus device for last 2 years with none of your issues. I have friends relatives using even older devices. Not all devices are same.

My friend Nexus 5 had the same shitty performance in the same timeframe and then I realised that he never used an iphone and for him that sluggish performance was normal and he never noticed that he had a problem. Pretty much every other Nexus 5 that I have seen was the same and my friend Nexus 6n or whatever is called was even slower when it was newer.

Yeah i typed that on an iPad. I know sluggish performance. Even iPad can get sluggish on few occasions.

>>Tens of millions of old iPhone users were left in the dark why all of a sudden the phone was slowing down to the point where it was becoming unusable.

Enough with the hyperbole already. Yes, a few (rather outspoken) users had this issue. For everyone else, slowdowns were noticeable, but they barely made the phones "unusable".

That's why this is a manufactured scandal. Yes, Apple could have (and should have) been more transparent. But their decision to throttle the CPU was based on sound engineering principles, rather than a nefarious attempt to get people to upgrade.

I uploaded you because I think the down votes are over done, but how much your phone slow down does seem to depend on how the phone was used. Some I’m guessing it was barely noticeable but some it was a real problem for. I’ve seen them.

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