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Comment by nerdponx | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, you can now get an official iPhone battery replacement for $30 on the "last-gen" models, or for free with Applecare.

https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/battery-power

It looks like on some issues, we still have market power.

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This $29 official Apple battery replacement ends in December 2018, so if you want to take advantage of it, act soon. I expect the price will go back up to the former $69-$79 range in 2019 even for phones affected by this $29 campaign.

> free with Applecare.

"free" battery costs at least $130 for Applecare and it's rarely worth it. Without Applecare, it only costs $30 to replace.

I got a battery replacement for $30 (that’s a temporary price which Apple provided because of the PR flack they were getting for slowing down phones with poorer batteries). Unfortunately, it’s clear it wasn’t a new battery, or maybe the replacement wasn’t done correctly, but the battery life isn’t great and I can no longer get a battery health reading from the settings>battery section.

The replacement has a 30 (or 90?) day warranty. Get that fixed.

Only after apple was caught red-handed slowing down older phones to entice users to upgrade.

And they said sorry and let users disable it. FWIW disabling it makes my phone turn off when I'm using it in cold so they had their reasons. Not only that, they released ios12 which makes my iphone 6 feel like new again, which is unprecedented in other OSes.

So it's ok to screw over customers as long as you apologize after they find out?

It's not screwing over customers as a slow phone is better than a phone that turns off at the same time.

At most you can say they where trying to fix a hardware issue with software which is never a clean solution.

Except the situation isn’t binary. It’s not either slow your phone down or let it not working. The problem is Apple makes the other option, battery replacement, extremely difficult. If you do it with Apple, then you have to pay a ludicrously high amount (and I’m not sure if they give you a new or a refurbished battery). Further, Apple does not provide third party repairers, or customers, access to genuine parts. Even worse, as Louis Rossman has publicized, they work with US customs to prevent 3rd party repairers from even acquiring genuine batteries.

> The problem is Apple makes the other option, battery replacement, extremely difficult

Take it to an Apple store, call Apple support, or take it to any one of your friendly neighborhood repair shops?

> ludicrously high amount

Battery replacement costs:

Google Phones: $79

Apple Phones: $79

Samsung Phones: Nothing 1st party, $50 was the cheapest 3rd party I could find.

This honestly doesn't even seem like that much when the battery itself retails for $25 before shipping. That plus an hour of skilled labor to do the replacement puts us right around $80-$100. And when a new battery extends the life of your $800 phone for another 2 years its hard to say the value isn't there.

It took me like 15 minutes to replace the battery in my Mi5, 5 of which were spent watching a tutorial video. And I'm neither skilled nor did I have the right tools. The battery itself was 10 EUR including shipping from a local seller, fwiw.

That said I don't think 79 USD every two years is ridiculous for a 700+ USD device. It better not take an hour, though!

iPhone is very water resistant which makes this a little harder. I also doubt it takes an hour if you know what your doing.

I mean you could at least pretend to have a charitable interpretation of their position. Apple implemented a software workaround to extend the useful life of phones with aging batteries which engineering thought would be transparent.

Then after what could only be described as a media shitstorm Apple responded to the criticism by putting the decision in the user's hands and offered battery replacements for around material cost. I mean $30 is ridiculously cheap when just the battery for my Android phone is $24 before shipping and labor. I'm honestly jealous.

> which engineering thought would be transparent.

What engineer thought that slowing down devices would be 'transparent'?

Wait, so how do we disable it? I thought all the did was add "battery statistics" one could view?

Under Settings => Battery => Battery Health. The option to disable throttling only shows up if it's been applied to your phone.

That's a gross misrepresentation of fact.

Apple engineers slowed the CPU in the phone, in order to keep battery life reasonable, and prevent the phone from restarting when worn batteries couldn't deliver power. Windows does this with laptops.

Apple's mistake was not disclosing it. There an argument for user experience that advocates making the best choice for the user and not over burdening them with options.

It’s not just not disclosing it. Their geniuses would actively tell you that the phone was not any slower and that you were imagining it.

I'm not sure why you're expecting miracles from what are essentially sales reps turned helpdesk. You have every right to be mad because they are representing their company but we get senior engineers from MS that don't understand basic things about Windows.

I guess that makes it OK? "Whataboutism" at its finest.

Apple's mistake was really that they didnt do proper load testing on their batteries. Had they shipped a battery that was capable of keeping up with the phone, this wouldn't have been a problem to begin with.

Instead, they pushed their users to buy new phones, or pricey fixes for a manufacturing mistake

How did you come to that conclusion, did Apple admit they did improper testing?

Because we saw the evidence: The batteries they shipped started dying early. I'm willing to believe that they did do proper testing and ignored the results, but I'm not sure that's better.

I'm not a battery engineer, nor a battery tester, so I cannot comment on what a proper test would be, and if that would include testing the battery for extended period of time prior to releasing them to market.

But you don't need to be a battery engineer to understand statistics. If these batteries are dying early, then either Apple didn't do enough testing, they did and ignored the results.

> Apple's mistake was not disclosing it.

They did, technically, in the release notes for the update that introduced it. That said, it could (and should?) have been more prominent.

US only probably

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