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I don't doubt that you had issues. I had my own issues with an iPhone 6. I'm not saying we shouldn't criticize Apple, and I'm not saying they haven't made mistakes. I don't even care if the replacement program is PR driven--It's still the right thing to do!

What I am saying is: Apple seems to be holding to their guiding principles (sometimes with missteps), as opposed to giving in to shareholder pressure to increase short term profits at expense of a long term relationship with their customers. And, supporting 1.3 billion devices is an enormous engineering feat.

Making an update that breaks the home button, and refusing to fix it ("we can't, just buy a new phone") while rooted phones have community update that fix it is not "making a mistake".

It's a con.

Which update is this?

People who had their home buttons replaced using third-party kits that didn't preserve the relationship between the fingerprint sensor and the secure enclave often blame the iOS release that blocked access to the enclave rather than the repair that broke the security.

I'm talking about the scandal of the iPhone 4, which didn't have a fingerprint sensor. They just made an update, and the button started to act out, randomly. Community found out it was a software bug, while Apple said it was a hardware bug and recommended an update.

It was only a few years ago. It was so common that you could see a lot of friends using the "AssistiveTouch" to get around it.

It's crazy you already forgot that.

It makes me so mad.

Companies can literally get away with anything as long as they have good PR. For god sake it was on every single tech site at the time, and you already forgot that ?

This is excruciating to read.

I feel so hopeless.

Take a deep breath, take a walk, something. I worry a bit when conjecture over a comment on HackerNews leads to feelings of hopelessness. Please, connect with a person IRL and talk with them about something good! Read the Bill & Melinda Gates letter, go see Black Panther, something!

On-topic: I do remember the story you're talking about; it happened to a tiny percentage of the people the story I mentioned did, but one of those people was my daughter, about six years ago. (Time flies!)

My daughter also had a cracked screen and generally did not treat her phone with the care an expensive piece of electronics merits, so I didn't think much of it, and she use the on-screen home button for a year or two. She liked it so much that even after she later upgraded, she kept using the on-screen home button!

I remember people blaming a software update, but mu daughter hadn't updated. I wondered at the time whether that was a coincidence, or multiple issues that people were conflating.

It's also worth noting that while you call it a "scandal" and say the community found out it was a software bug, iFixIt seemed to have a good handle on the exact flex cable that caused the problem: https://www.ifixit.com/Answers/View/56206/Home+button+someti...

> Apple seems to be holding to their guiding principles (sometimes with missteps)

- that time they stole billions in wages by price fixing

- that time they sold out all their chinese customers to the government

- that time they sold out all their US customers to the government (PRISM et c)

what guiding principles specifically do you refer to?

>I'm not saying they haven't made mistakes. I don't even care if the replacement program is PR driven--It's still the right thing to do!

Sure, but doing it under PR pressure kinda dilutes it. I still welcome it. I've had battery issues with my 6S too, where it simply shut down in winter. Apple didn't reach out to me at all (even though they had my info since I purchased it directly from them). I chanced upon an article about a battery recall and that's when I realized that my battery had a defect. Apple doesn't have a lot of trust surplus with me. YMMV.

>And, supporting 1.3 billion devices is an enormous engineering feat.

It is an engineering feat, maybe a mini, or a middle feat. I'm not quite sure whats enormous about it. They control the hardware and software. They have only a small number of models, which are identical. Samsung has hundreds of models. (Not that I think Samsung is doing a stellar job)

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> Your battery didn’t have a defect. It is the same as all batteries - they degrade. Apple can’t change that.

They may have been referring to this issue:

https://www.apple.com/support/iphone6s-unexpectedshutdown/

I’m not defending the somewhat emotional / hyperbolic tone of the comment to which you replied. Just considering that they may not have adequately explained that they were referring to two separate cases (though it isn’t clear from the comment that the difference is recognized).

For my own anecdotal response, my Apple products last many years. They are consistently in good working order by the time I choose to upgrade. I also think that those who still believe that Apple has some nefarious scheme to build-in obsolescence are being manipulated by FUD, and that is based on firsthand knowledge.

>Your battery didn’t have a defect.

Well, all I know is Apple replaced the battery, and I stopped having random shutdowns.

https://www.apple.com/support/iphone6s-unexpectedshutdown/

> It is the same as all batteries - they degrade. Apple can’t change that.

But I have not had a battery completely stop working in the winter, ever. My car battery continues to work just fine. My camera works just fine, so does my laptop, so does my smartwatch, so does my TV remote, so does my powerdrill, so does my radio, so does my torch, so does the wall clock. But who knows, maybe I've just been lucky all these years. And BTW I'm not talking about some crazy Siberia winter. I'm talking about 30-40F here!

>But it seems the intent was to allow people to continue using their devices without upgrading and without having to pay for a battery replacement.

Apple decided to hide information that let a user decide if it was worth it to upgrade the battery. The user had no idea that their battery had degraded.

>But people who [..] and who expect that Apple should pay to support replacing batteries for the lifetime of the device, with no out-of-pocket expense for the consumer is a ridiculous double standard that no other manufacturer has ever been held to in the history of consumer electronics.

Yeah, who are those people?

> But I have not had a battery completely stop working in the winter, ever. My car battery continues to work just fine. My camera works just fine, so does my laptop, so does my smartwatch, so does my TV remote, so does my powerdrill, so does my radio, so does my torch, so does the wall clock. But who knows, maybe I've just been lucky all these years. And BTW I'm not talking about some crazy Siberia winter. I'm talking about 30-40F here!

Weird, my history with car batteries suggests that they do, in fact, completely shut down in cold winters. They do it with such regularity that many people carry specialized equipment in their cars to deal with this eventuality, and roadside-assistance crews regularly deal with it as well.

I happen to have had my camera battery drain completely within minutes of full charge when used outdoors in mid-winter, but I don't often take my DSLR outside in mid-winter any more since my phone fills that need.

I don't usually take my tv remote, power drill, or wall clock outside in mid-winter, but your mileage may vary.

Apple doesn't have access to a different set of physical laws than other companies. Physics is physics, and those batteries don't deal well with cold, period.

Apple's battery was defective. They replaced it. It no longer shuts down.

>Apple doesn't have access to a different set of physical laws than other companies. Physics is physics, and those batteries don't deal well with cold, period.

Well, that certainly is your opinion. But it doesn't change the fact that the battery was defective.

> I have experienced it first hand with my 4S which became horribly laggy and unusable after all of the iOS updates, and I had no way of downgrading iOS and returning it to the factory state.

This is a big issue. It's one thing for a device to get slower over time as programs become more and more demanding. It's another to have a device that's running great and then suddenly slows to a crawl the moment after an irreversible OS update (what happened to my MacBook after Snow Leopard).

It would be understandable if the user was presented a clear choice of extra features that required more hardware, versus less features and snappier performance.

Apple uses dark patterns to get you to update and then blocks the downgrade path. __That__ is the part that's infuriating.

I installed the last iOS update on my iPhone 4s because Apple explicitly wrote that older devices would become faster. The reverse was the case. This was when I decided to never again buy an Apple device.

If you truly want control of your device you simply cannot buy anything that runs iOS.

When Apple decides that the support for your iOS device ends, you have no choice but to upgrade, or risk running outdated vulnerable software.

The laptops, desktops are a different story since you can breathe new life to them by installing a free operating system.

You can’t put a laptop in my pocket and carry it around though.

The only realistic options for a smartphone are android and iOS. Between the two (and I have used both), I much prefer iOS.

Not for features or smoothness, mind you. I actually felt like my Android experience was better.

With google, however, I always felt like they were trying to sell me something and harvest my data through android. Not the case with Apple.

Of course you can run Android without the Google services eg. with LineageOS.

I think that should be illegal.

If a consumer buys something, there should always be a way to return it to the state it was at the time of purchase.

>I have experienced it first hand with my 4S which became horribly laggy and unusable after all of the iOS updates,

If it became unusable, presumably you deactivated it, which means it was tallied into this article's estimation of lifespan.

Important to consider that what HNers call unusable is perfectly acceptable to a great number of people. I've never used a phone with a cracked screen, but I've seen a fair number of people who don't consider this a reason to deactivate the device.