Apple throttling phones to preserve battery life was the right thing to do.
Doing it without telling users their batteries were expired and causing their phone to slow down was the wrong thing to do.
Whether that merits a $27m fine is debatable.
Doing it without telling users their batteries were expired and causing their phone to slow down was the wrong thing to do.
Whether that merits a $27m fine is debatable.
Why do I think it is important to be told? My old iPad has almost overnight slowed right down and it is unusable - utterly pointless using it. Why do you think that it slowed down? A new update? Maybe. Or maybe it is the battery. Let me go check... yes, the battery has an issue. Only because I know where to check means that I know how to resolve the issue. And I know that the battery replacement cost will be ridiculously expensive. If I didn't know this then I would buy something else. That's pretty bad.
Replaceable batteries come with their own trade-offs, namely water intrusion through failing seals. I'd rather pay occasionally for someone skilled to replace the battery than replace the entire phone after a drop in the sink.
I used the original Pixel for 3 and a half years and at this point it's gotten completely unbearable to use. If it wasn't so I wouldn't have felt forced to upgrade to a phone lacking the features I wanted. Maps takes half a minute to load, the share dialogue is O(n) since the list of targets is regenerated every time you open it, the screen runs at 30FPS or something, taking pictures has several seconds of delay between shutter presses and a quarter of them come out as a solid green, and there's just general slowness of several seconds on nearly every app. And that was after I downgraded to LineageOS from Android 10, when I was getting four hours of standby time (!) and a hole burnt in my pocket.
The thing was as smooth as the OnePlus 7 Pro I'm using now at the time I got it. It was criticized at the time for being overly expensive and an iPhone clone. And now, using it in 2020 feels like using a $20 knockoff device. It was released in 2016. Three years isn't terribly long in the span of human life - at this rate I'll have to buy about 17 new phones if I live another 50 years just to be able to use them at a bearable level of performance. (Certainly a lot of potential money to be extracted for the manufacturers.)
Three years later I'll have to remember this post to see if this still holds true for this new phone.
Also there are practical reasons for this besides social ones (the insistence that OS and hardware refreshes are pushed out yearly or so at the cost of increased CPU and battery usage for existing devices). Flash memory has a limited lifespan and I would imagine it's incredibly cumbersome to replace. It's one of those things where you would just buy a new phone with the money it would cost.
Reusability in the phone market is severely lacking. I run Linux on a ThinkPad manufactured a decade ago and have zero issues running 2020 software. You can't realistically expect to do the same on a smartphone that old. PostmarketOS can't become polished soon enough - I just need to be able to make calls and can't do so using it yet.
I did have an awful experience with the original Google Nexus phone and its updates.
Having to install LineageOS just to be able to keep using it invalidates the "first-party" argument though.
The specs are perfectly sufficient to run anything modern. Granted, I don't play games. But browsing, navigating, chatting, watching silly videos, they all work flawlessly. So far, the battery has been holding up, too, even though I use dashcharge all the time.
So that's just that, two data points. I do believe a lot of people could probably fix their phones by hard reset or using Lineage — in turn, that puts the burden on the OEMs to produce good OSs for long-term use. They don't want to, obviously. I don't think the mobile market is FUBAR, but I do agree it's not in the best state. That's not due to the phone per se, it's due to the ridiculous vendor/OS situation we're in with Android.
And don't get me started on security patches…
Someone should tell that to Apple, throwing devices and buying new ones their strategy when the same devices can easily be repaired but repairing things is not encouraged by Apple.
These phones were unusable with the throttling. I switched to Android because my iPhone 6 was unusable less than 3 years after getting it.
This is like saying that an appropriate fix for a car manufacture is to limit the maximum speed of a car to 25 miles per hour. It breaks so many use cases that the car becomes worthless.
Crucially, I never once left it plugged in all night - I believe not constantly fully charging the battery massively extends the useful life.
Would you prefer the car simply turn off entirely while driving at highway speeds? Because phones with this issue would turn off entirely below certain charge levels, when the batteries had this issue.
A more appropriate analogy would be that your car's fuel pump could randomly fail at highway speeds when below 1/2 tank, so the manufacturer just started arbitrarily limiting the car to drive 25mph to avoid the pump shutting off, when it detected this issue.
Point being, the real problem is not the mitigation they employed, but the fact that they didn't tell users in any way, users just saw a slower phone (equivalent to a slower car.) If my car detected a fuel pump issue for me and said "Fuel pump needs replacing, car is limited to 25mph when below half-tank to avoid catastrophic failure, please take to service center", it would be acceptable. Arbitrarily limiting to 25mph without any indication why, not so much.
This Apple situations has a good analogy in car industry history: the Ford Pinto.
Speaking of car industry, Apple might have gone through a cost-benefit analysis reminiscent of the Pinto Memo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Cost%E2%80%93benefi...
Ford converted the likely injuries and deaths that would be caused by an unfixed issue into a dollar amount, and the compared that dollar amount to the cost of fixing the flaw in every vehicle.
Apple might have done the same sort of cost-benefit analysis: as in, just let the throttling cover up the flaw so the phone doesn't abruptly shut off, and then we only have to deal with the lower cost that comes from any complaints about performance, from those who notice.
If the vehicle's age is only the equivalent of a phone being two or three years old, I would prefer a real fix, free of charge, in addition to any safety mitigation. I wouldn't want the mitigation to be regarded as the fix.
People have decade-old phones that aren't throttled and still have usable battery life at the same time.
Nobody’s saying their initial fix wasn’t flawed, I’m only saying that “throttling is bad” is an ill-thought-out knee-jerk reaction.
Unlike a car, a phone doesn’t pose a threat to my safety so I’d like to at least turn the throttling on/off according to my needs - given that Apple provides accurate information about the implications.
In retrospect throttling might look like a good idea, but back then it was outright bizarre.
Some people were already suspecting that older models don’t get along with newer software, but there was no certainty.
I remember I avoided some iOS updates without being sure it’s helping my phone - all until Whatsapp (or some other critical app) stopped working and I had to upgrade.
So, Apple could instead have had a "battery EOL" warning, sold batteries and specs to 3rd party market, and ensured batteries were easily replaceable.
Oh, why didn't they do that I wonder, maybe because they've spent the last decade making their stuff hard to repair and ensuring parts aren't available in order to encourage upgrades instead of repairs? Surely not, not Apple, they hate sacrificing the welfare of others for the sake of their profit!
If the idea that Apple would rig this didn't fit perfectly in the rest of their narrative then perhaps the judgement wouldn't have come.
It’s been established many times, my argument is not about their initial response, but what they implemented in the next iOS version. A battery control center that tells you your battery’s health, a warning when it’s in bad enough shape that it’s being throttled and needs replacing, the ability to control whether it’s throttled, and a recall/replacement program for affected models.
The initial fix was to throttle the phones, but we all (including myself) agree that was insufficient. But I also believe engineering resources are finite, and I have trouble believing apple would have been able to do the whole control center/notification thing as the first emergency fix.
I thought that instead of telling people they'd just underclocked all the systems secretly?
Do you have a reference for what the on-screen warnings looked like?
I don’t know why this is so hard to understand: their initial response was wrong, but they corrected it. Everyone who says “why didn’t they do X” is ignoring that they did the right thing, eventually.
Implementing the battery control panel the first time would have been the best route, but developing such a thing takes time, and with sudden shutdowns happening for a large percentage of customers, they did a stopgap that was questionable. Is it really so evil to make a quick hack at first and make a better solution in a software update? I feel like the whole industry does this.
Which is the bigger problem here. iOS devices are completely impossible to downgrade, so if an update slows down your phone, you're stuck.
It's hugely wasteful. iOS isn't substantially more capable than it was five years ago—why is it so much heavier?
Can't us computer people just agree to stop using car analogies?
And good luck getting operating system updates after only two years on Android.
France fines Apple €25 million for slowing iPhone software
France's consumer watchdog slapped on the fine two years after Apple admitted its iOS software slowed down the performance of older phones.
Then a huge photo.
The failure to notify thing is fine - Apple should notify folks that
a) they may be using a non-apple battery if they can detect that - was a common scam to replace the battery with a junker just before resale to show full battery for those checking
b) showing battery life for batteries they know are legit
c) warning users (and/or giving the user an option) to extend battery life by running phone slower.
It'd be funny if the US turned around and started fining French electronics that have this same functionality - it'd lay bare the double standards being applied here.
Where do I collect my $27M?
It's also a bit nefarious that the slowdown coincided with a new product launch, so side-by-side comparisons show that the new devices are much, much "faster" than the old ones (which were slowed down without any notification). It's borderline fraudulent.
Good thing we've got people like you standing up for the trillion dollar companies of the world, though. They really need your help.
They could've given users the choice to enable that "protection" from the beginning or leave it off at the end, but instead they chose to implement something that looks suspiciously like it was designed to make people replace their devices way prematurely. We call that planned obsolescence and I believe in France it is illegal.
I don't buy this for a second. They've been throttling devices for many years and conveniently never mentioned it or built features that allowed control of it until they were forced to. It was always their fallback excuse in the event they got caught.
Their next strategy is building hardware that forces devices to constantly hold full battery charges at all times so it kills the (un-replaceable) battery faster which leads to a faster re-purchase (i.e. airpods).