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Comment by bilekas | Hacker News Reader

> Apple implemented this to help users extend life of older devices.

Is there a statement from them to this point ? I couldn't find it in the article.

But this isn't the point anyway really.

The users were not told. > IPhone owners were not informed that installing iOS updates (10.2.1 and 11.2) could slow down their devices

This means that the users would definitely just assume their phones were now in need of upgrade.

Also as for the trade-off between performance and optimisation, thats fine. That was there previously also.

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They did [0], and to me it's a legitimate course of action to extend device life and minimize support load a bit. However, it should be disclosed clearly and not covered up until it blows up.

[0]: https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-slows-down-older-iphone-batt...

Yeah, they _eventually_ got to an acceptable balance where they announce it and show the current status in the battery settings. But that was only after the PR blowup about it.

I'm sort of conflicted about the fine hitting now, as a result. If they were still being intransigent about the issue, sure, but they've already fixed it...

> I'm sort of conflicted about the fine hitting now, as a result. If they were still being intransigent about the issue, sure, but they've already fixed it...

It seems right to me. It's a relatively small fine; Apple makes a few hundred Euros in profit per phone. I'm not sure how many iPhones are in France, but I'd venture to guess this is less than 2 Euros per device.

They found a way to legitimize planned obsolescence at the eyes of the public. Apple should be celebrated for this, not sued. /s

The phone being unreliable and constantly shutting down would arguably be a way more effective method of “planned obsolescence”.

My 2015 MacBook Pro has the issue of shutting down or turning off when still at 20% or 30% battery and I find it immensely frustrating (I assume it’s a similar issue of an old battery not being consistent). I’d much rather it be throttled and be reliable.

They found a way to cover up an ongoing design flaw in the phone/battery capacity combination. The phones are too powerful for the batteries that Apple uses.

Almost no other line of phones has this issue.

It is amazing how people twist this situation to make Apple the hero for saving "old" phones.

That's FUD.

The phones absolutely did not behave like that when new. And, if the battery is replaced, they go back to their original performance.

You are FUD. You obviously dont own an iphone 6/6s and havent been impacted by ios updates

That's the problem, yeah. If they'd made the tradeoff clear and advised that a battery replacement would alleviate it, that would be one thing. But the margin on a $50-70 battery replacement is a lot thinner than the margin on a $500-1000 new phone, so...

While keeping revenues and margin is certainly a priority, I think the bigger issue is a desire to not split the Apple userbase across multiple iOS versions.

"Less than a year after release, iOS 12 has reached 88% of all active iOS devices" [0]

By contrast, Android has an insane amount of fragmentation, though the link is outdated, at the time, Marshmellow 6.0 had the most users, at 16.9% of all Android users, while Android 9 had just 10.4% (this was 10 months after Android 9 had been released) [1]

I know this comparison isn't perfect by any means. Apart from the differing time frames, Android has more use cases than just mobile devices. Nonetheless, the difference is staggering.

[0] https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/ios-distribution-news/

[1] https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html

I'm not sure how this is relevant. Throttling has been present in iOS since at least version 10 (2016), if not longer - IIRC 10 added the settings UI to override throttling if you want to, but I'm not sure when the actual capability landed.

Preventing ecosystem fragmentation is well and good, but it's orthogonal to publicizing that the OS does CPU throttling on devices with batteries whose power delivery is compromised by age, and making clear that a cheap battery replacement will do as much to solve that problem as an expensive new phone will.

(I do my own refurbs, so I can vouch from experience for a battery replacement solving throttling. There's no deliberate derating of older devices qua older devices that I can see, but it's reasonable that people believe there is, because Apple has done a terrible job of making clear what's actually going on. One of many cases where their habitual allergy to transparency has harmed them and their userbase alike; it's hard to blame kremlinologists for being kremlinologists when that's the only way to try to figure out what the hell your company is doing.)

> IIRC 10 added the settings UI to override throttling if you want to, but I'm not sure when the actual capability landed.

11.3 in March of 2018 added the override UI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_11#11.3

Oh yeah, that checks out. That was after the huge stink over silent throttling, wasn't it?

Yup! All the silent throttling drama hit the mainstream in December of 2017, and Apple reacted with discounted battery replacements starting in January of 2018 and this update a few months later.

I did the battery replacement and it didn’t help at all.

I've done several, and it did. Make sure throttling is disabled (Settings, search for Battery Health); in my experience the OS doesn't do that on its own, presumably relying on the playbook they give their support techs to cover that. It also doesn't hurt to do a "battery calibration" process like the one found at https://help.ifixit.com/article/265-battery-calibration - I don't know that I've seen a huge difference from that, but I always do it, so I wouldn't really be able to say that it's not necessary even if it isn't.

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