Comment by ninkendo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ninkendo | Hacker News Reader

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> 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.

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.

I think people would prefer to know about it and be in charge of the decision.

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.

as a matter of fact, modern cars (including French manufacturers like Renault) implement a "limp home" mode that limits the speed when problems are detected in the engine or transmission. It's hard to believe that Apple's action could be so poorly understood.

A substantial difference as others pointed out is that Apple did this quietly, whereas limp mode is typically notified to the driver about loudly as anything can be.

That limp home mode is not offered as the real fix, is it?

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.

> Would you prefer the car simply turn off entirely while driving at highway speeds?

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.

I don’t disagree, and that’s what Apple did: they implemented the battery control panel which let you know your battery’s health, gave an alert when a bad battery was causing throttling, and extended a battery replacement program for affected models.

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.

I wonder why they didn't use this simple argument in court, or else why it didn't work.

Standard practice is engine check light, then mechanic looks at it, then you replace the part for £X using one of several generics, or a first-party part if you want.

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.

They did implement a battery EOL warning. What are you blathering about?

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.

Ah, OK, so when the battery started failing a dialog came up "battery expired: do you want to enter low power mode" and people clicked yes?

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?

They did the throttling without any dialogs in the beginning. In the very next point release of iOS, that evolved into a battery health control panel where you can see the health of your battery, and it alerts you if it’s being throttled.

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.

If you are making high end cars and they don't last three years you have a big quality problem.

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