Hacker News Reader

Comment by shock-value | Hacker News Reader

This is not true according to my experience. See https://imgur.com/a/VH0Bs. Note that in my case the performance restoration came about after I had my battery replaced -- no data wiping or other system cleaning occurred.

> Lost in all the media reports is that the throttling only happens at peak system power demand.

Throttling at least occurs during app loading. Apple admits as much and it was true (subjectively) in my experience. If loading an app qualifies as "peak system power demand" your point is kind of lost because loading apps is something everyone with a mobile device does very frequently.

View on HN

I can't claim to know what was going on with your phone, of course. But artificial benchmarks that push the system to its limits seem more likely to trigger this behavior than everyday usage, so I wouldn't take those results as evidence. I didn't see the app loading bullet point and agree with you there.

In my own case, everything was slow. Loading apps, loading web pages, whatever. And the difference after a clean install now is huge. Went back and did the same to an old iPad that I stopped using for its sluggishness, and it's usable again.

Complex devices, so there's certainly going to be a complex set of problems, but I think that some of it is due to us taking Apple's message that iOS devices are appliances to heart, whereas the truth is that these portable computers still need mysterious maintenance rituals. It's been impressive, but Apple's still got some work to do to make these things bulletproof.

I'd assume that these processors use the same 'race to sleep' philosophy that Intel CPUs have been using for a while, which would mean that peak power draw would be requested very frequently in short bursts.

The degree of throttling that seems to be occurring does seem to be quite excessive. Excessive enough that I wonder whether they've had unexpected battery degradation in the field, or unexpected degradation of the power delivery circuit, or unexpectedly high load consumption or some kind of fault with the SoC.

Either that or they have just pushed the envelope a little too much knowing that their customers are likely to get fed up and buy new phones... hmmm...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com