I am happy to see this issue getting so much attention outside of tech circles. Apple has mostly gotten a pass for their anti-consumer behavior recently and I hope the negative publicity from this forces them to improve things.
To avoid a case of 'no good deed goes unpunished', I do hope Samsung, Google and co get some attention over lack of updates for older phones/OSes too. Their approach of not updating perfectly good phones just leads to greater e-waste, not to mention wasting consumer dollars.
Has Samsung, Google et al provided any clarification on why particular phones do not receive updates?
Probably because they don't want to spend time supporting these devices?
It's more fair and conceivable that Apple should be forced to meet certain standards for updates they choose to release, than for any manufacturer to be forced to make updates for some arbitrary/indefinite period of time.
Security patches provide herd immunity and today it’s more important that everyone around you is patched than you or just you.
You share a metric ton of personal information with people and if their devices are compromised so is your data.
Now you might be on top of every vulnerability and wake up in be middle of the night to check up the NVD RSS feed but I would bet my life on the fact that the majority of your social circle doesn’t.
You wouldn’t accept Facebook or Google not patching their servers why would you accept your friends and family not patching their devices when they are in a much better position to compromise you if they are compromised?
Against my will, 99.5% of my email and social connections are saved by Google, Facebook, and the servers of whatever random apps slurped my friends' contacts. (Example: Venmo has a large and accurate friend suggestion list for me, somehow. I assume all those people have my number in their phone and their Venmo app matched it with my number.) So that ship has kind of sailed anyway. Their devices are compromised by design.
No real people hold this opinion. You don't hold this opinion.
You're saying that phone OS updates in general (whether from Google or Apple) are so low quality that its better NOT to get them on older phones?
I didn't take a general position; I expressed skepticism in GP's implicit argument that every update is a good update, and my frustration at the idea of having updates shoved down my throat. I included some other related ideas without explaining clearly enough, partially because I'm not sure how/if this should actually be regulated.
My old iPhone 5 started with iOS 6.0 and went all the way to iOS 10 but got noticeably less performant with each new major update. I'm certainly not arguing those updates were necessarily bad but I think it's worth discussing. Security and bug fixes are tethered with changes designed for much more powerful hardware.
A downright scummy company. /s
Of all the things Apple has been accused of over the years this seems like one of the most clear-cut examples where they didn’t do anything wrong.
You want to make political points? Go after them for iTunes, the App Store, something else. Somewhere where you have a leg to stand on.
“Your honor, they tried to cause the phones of the American people to be more reliable! I demand justice!”
Funny thing is, I've owned non-Apple phones for years and I've never had any "randomly shut off." If you pay half attention to the battery capacity icon and/or warnings the devices gives you, any 'shutting off' due to no more battery charge will not be random.
Maybe Ford should recall their cars because the tires eventually wear out?
I always attributed it to an unintended side effect of the case itself being used as a heat sink. Battery gets very cold very fast and loses peak voltage. Would be interested to hear if there's a more accurate explanation.
The voltage written on a standard battery cell is the "average" voltage the cell will produce across its life time.
As amperage is spent(?), the voltage will drop slightly, so the cell will start out higher than listed and end lower than listed.
What is likely happening is that the when a certain app is started, various parts of the hardware is clocked up to handle the work load. This result in a higher draw, and a sharp drop in the measured voltage, in turn the power management logic considers the battery nearly drained and shut down.
Never mind that unlike older battery chemistry, lithium batteries do not take kindly to being fully drained. Thus there will be a programmed safety margin involved.
eh?
My PC did get hacked in the 90s when I was running something like kernel 2.0.36.
Look at all the trouble people are having with the meltdown/spectre updates. I haven't updated, I have no trouble. The odds of trouble if you update I think are much higher than the odds of any trouble from not updating.
Keep in mind I'm talking about a PC behind a firewall not an internet facing server.
I cannot get behind the criticism of Apple on this specific issue. I think they were doing the right thing and I think adding a software option to allow the user to disable the governor algorithm (for lack of a better term) is akin to giving the user enough rope to hang themselves with.
It happened while I was travelling, and having the phone shut down isn't helpful when you're trying to navigate via Google Maps, or take photographs, or while you're trying to hail an Uber. I would have loved to have the option to slow my phone down instead in that circumstance instead of just random shutdown and reboot.
In and of itself? Nope. But someone should be asking Apple why they have 3, if not 4, generations of phone now that has to have this software "fix" in order to continue to operate. Looking at forums, some people's phones are getting throttled well before Apple's 80% battery capacity mark. Someone needs to be asking why. Some people's phones are getting throttled after only a year. Why? Someone needs to ask.
Stepping back a bit, I don’t recall hordes of reports of random iPhone shutdowns in early 2017, but it certainly did happen some of the time. This update slowed down every iPhone with an old battery regardless of if that user was ever really likely to experience random shutdowns. The fact that Apple obscured this change also makes it a bit more suspect.
> This power management works by looking at a combination of the device temperature, battery state of charge, and battery impedance. Only if these variables require it, iOS will dynamically manage the maximum performance of some system components [0]
An especially cold winter.
Could just be timing/environmental compared to when the original change was released.
- stop powering the device when the charge gets into the zone where sudden dropouts might happen (i.e. lose about 5% capacity)
- accept sudden dropouts and have users experience devices that suddenly fail (i.e. lose about 5% of their useful charge since you can no longer depend on the device being on)
Apple led the way on lack of repairability and expandability on their devices. Sadly other manufacturers slowly followed suit.
You likely need to turn off iMessage if you migrate to a non-Apple phone to get SMS or text messages someone sends you from an iPhone.
Locking certain iOS functionality away from 3rd parties - preventing browsers such as Chrome from using said functionality that Safari enjoys.
Want more?
Why they? Because that's their job - to help individuals coordinate at scale.
This is the most damning one. I recently (6 months ago?) switched to Android and I still have friends who cannot send me text messages. They're non-technical and unless I'm sitting in a room with them will not be able to walk them through the process. They have to do something, I can't do it on my end. So now I have a handful of friends with whom my only method of contact is FB messenger.
It's such a fucking scam.
I argue no. Apple has always been a head of the curve on removing hardware from their devices. This is upsetting if you use that device but it also frees up resources that can be used for other things. This includes space/weight/power wise in the device and economically factories making floppy/cd-rom drives now make something more useful. The problem with regulations is they are often slow and arbitrary. That is not what we want in tech.
I could imagine in 2010 that regulators (perhaps encouraged by a congress person that has a stake in CD-Rom factories), decide the iPad is a type of laptop and so much include a CD-ROM drive in it. Yes having every company make individual decisions is messy and inefficient but that doesn't mean regulations will end up producing better results.
Uh, such as what? The Nitro JavaScript engine is available for all apps now.