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Comment by dwc | Hacker News Reader

> For this specific case Apple's explanation, they started throttling down CPUs based on battery age to prevent unexpected phone shutdowns make sense.

At best it's a complete botch on Apple's part. I got that update and my phone was noticeably slower, right off the charger at 100%. My typical usage pattern has me plugging in my phone at night with usually more than 50% and rarely around 40%. I'm never in danger of unexpected shutdown.

The way things used to work, I'd drain an iOS device and somewhere around 20% I'd get a popup to switch to power saving mode, with a choice to do it or not. This is quite reasonable, usable, and the device remains fast until you're in the danger zone. Wanna tweak it? Move from 20% to 25%. Done. Worried that people won't switch to power saving mode and then have a shutdown? Make the switch mandatory at 20-25% or whatever.

But slowing down older phones all the time... it's hard not to be suspicious of motives.

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The issue is that the peak power consumption could exceed the maximum power that the battery could deliver, not that the batteries were running out of charge. By throttling power consumption you can prevent unexpected shutdowns at the expense of maximum performance. This is especially problematic in colder climates where phones were shutting down because the cold battery couldn’t deliver enough juice, regardless of its charge level.

Doesn’t this mean that they made an error while designing the hardware, because required power output could not be sustained over a normal battery lifespan?

But the decision process probably favoured shipping and trying to patch around it in software because form always wins over function.

Unsurprised by the lawsuits, sounds like a massive engineering fuckup to me.

The question is whether (as European, under EU law), isn't this a product flaw, and should not the customer be fully reimbursed with a replacement device of equal or better quality without said flaw?

A discount for a new battery is a laughable fix. It doesn't solve the issue which is going to reoccur once again, and it isn't free either. What did the customer do wrong in this case?

If you go back to how this was originally discovered, it was in public aggregate benchmarks:

https://www.geekbench.com/blog/2017/12/iphone-performance-an...

The thing to note here is that even in the charts of older devices, by far the largest peak is at max performance. In other words, most older phones, even running the new code, were not being slowed down when they were benchmarked.

There's no evidence I know of that every older iPhone is being slowed down, all the time.

Now, I certainly believe it's possible that your phone slowed down across the board after an iOS update, but there are a lot of reasons that could happen. See for example this story, where a customer went into an Apple Store on suspicion of a battery issue, but the performance problems were actually fixed by a backup and restore:

http://mglenn.com/blog/2017/12/22/apples-bungled-battery-fea...

You are misunderstanding the problem. Older batteries are unable to provide the short-term burst in voltage required when the system CPU clocks up to handle increased load. This failure could (and did, I've experienced it) cause a shutdown, even at 100% battery charge. Turn the phone back on and it still says 100% battery charge. But the battery can't supply the peak voltage load, so the phone shuts off entirely.

Myself, I prefer my phone to stay on, even if that means it runs a little slower.

You may be experiencing a different perf bug.

"My household has both an iPhone 6 and 6s. Both have become noticeably slower, more battery consuming.

I just did the full backup and restore trick. We think it worked.

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/12/22/glenn-iphone-sl....

http://mglenn.com/blog/2017/12/22/apples-bungled-battery-fea....

My boss (she who must be obeyed) and I both "feel" that our phones are now more responsive and some features have resumed working like normal.

Such as retrieving voicemails, which had become unresponsive. For both of us. I had been blaming our cell provider (carrier). My bad."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16015840

> I'm never in danger of unexpected shutdown.

This has little to do with remaining charge. The batteries of the older phones could not, in certain cases, deliver the necessary power when it was demanded, which is what led to unexpected shutdowns. It was not directly correlated with your current charge.

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