The problem is they didn't tell anyone they were doing it.
So people thought their phone was just old and slow and bought a new one, when they could have just replaced the battery and made it fast again.
So people thought their phone was just old and slow and bought a new one, when they could have just replaced the battery and made it fast again.
Not only that but this is the second time Apple's being sued since they did the same thing to the 4 and 5. And the thing is, they pushed the update when they released the 6. I'm surprised (but not really) that they're still pulling this crap.
Then France should issue fines for every electronic device sold that had this functionality. Except that would have meant fines being issued for effectively every laptop, phone, and tablet sold in the last decade. What Apple did is a near-universal function in battery powered devices with powerful processors.
It'd be funny id Apple disabled this functionality in France, thus bricking many old phones, and tell the French that they made this change to comply with French regulators.
The argument that customers should have been notified of functionality that strictly improves the usability of the product doesn't make any sense. How does extending the usable life of the phone (even if it is less powerful during the end of the usable life) making consumers more likely to buy new phones? Apple had acknowledged that old batteries could not drive the processor at the highest clock rate long before this became newsworthy. Like I said: if Apple pushed an update removing throttling it would lay bare just how absurd these penalties are.
(BTW, laptops would report bad-battery condition usually, this is how you know you need a replacement, which is an easy operation with them.)
As far as ease of replacement goes, Apple prioritizes form factor over ease of service. Mercedes vs. Toyota.
What irrationality, twisting everything to be some secret anti-US agenda than to just assume/see the obvious that the big players are the big offenders and they happen to be US players (for now).
Yes, go fine every other company that throttled processor clock rates when battery power supply was low. Apply the law equally and that would convince me that this isn't discriminatory enforcement.
The reality is that this would never be carried out, since effectively every phone, tablet, or laptop maker would be fined. Throttling processor clock rates when battery voltage is low is something that every good electronics manufacturer does. Because if they didn't your device would stop working when the battery is old, close to discharged, too cold, or more. By throttling clock rates, the phone still functions but with a slower clock rate. The user impact is strictly better (a slowdown vs. a crash or not even being able to boot). Every mobile device manufacturer did (and still does) do the same thing that Apple did to its iPhones.
It's not like many EU companies do that. And when they do, they also get fined, but they don't cry about it as much.
Then this happened, I replaced the battery and kept it another 2 years. I replaced the battery again and now my wife has it.
Definitely was on the verge of replacing it.
Yes feature creep plays its part but this was a big deal.
Unless you had done the backups of your data yourself and wiped the installation of the machine, you were screwed. This is the same situation for iOS.
https://www.overclockers.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-2889...
But regardless, this is not the point. The point is they misled people and let them think it was that the new OS was slow, but it was not! When you replaced the battery the phone became very noticeably faster.
A base install of Windows 98 was a hell of a lot slower than a base install of Windows 95. But that was mostly down to the IE4 integration. Once you installed IE4 on Win95 the two platforms were pretty similar.
That’s called design.
You have to make the decisions yourself. Customers are paying you to do that, not present them with a million checkboxes.
Apple deserves a lot of criticism but this is a complete non issue.
Having your phone slow down instead of shutting randomly down when the battery can’t supply the proper current is the best choice for the customer in pretty much every conceivable situation.
There are a lot of other decisions they are making on your behalf without warning you. And that’s how it should be.
"This thing is mysteriously slow, so I guess I'll get a new one" is much more profitable for apple, and more user hostile than "You're phone is slow because the battery is old. It' x% slower now than at purchase".
So in my view, it's a dark pattern.
It's simple. Don't hide what you're doing. Either a notice in the UI, or even a press release at minimum. Something.
The ones that change a feature after the phone is sold when that feature was prominently marketed to consumers is a safe minimum threshold for what you need to notify your customers of.
If they changed it after 6 months because of a battery design flaw, there would be a class action lawsuit for false advertising. Natural processes that all batteries exhibit that cause them to degrade are fine, and nothing to get up in arms about, but a third party "fixing" the problem for you without letting you know they did so (or giving you the option to opt out) is both not expected, and for many people, not wanted.
It's like buying some high-end car with a supercharger, and a few years later you take it in for a service and the service technicians "helpfully" disable your supercharger because it can sometimes cause problems in some circumstances now that the engine is more worn and the tolerances aren't as tight, but decide it's not worth telling you. That might be something you want, but ultimately you should get that choice.
> Because if what you propose goes into legislature there's a non-zero chance that will happen.
It's already covered. Apple was hit with a class-action[1] about this very thing, and France is fining them, as this submission notes. That's it working as expected, and it hasn't stopped updates from rolling out (but it might have stopped some specific portions of updates that people wouldn't have liked, who knows).
Either companies are to be held accountable for what they say when they are selling you something, or they aren't. I prefer a world where they are.
1: https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/10/16/apple-hit-with-ne...
Batteries degrade over time. That's expected. Processors don't process fewer instructions over time though, that's someone making a decision, rather than letting the natural laws of physics play out.
Is that really such a foreign concept? You've been sold something with promises, and those promises are subject to natural occurrences and common conceptions, which are that some things will physically degrade without any outside action. Outside action to change that but at the expense of something that would not normally degrade, when it's about something that was marketed for sale, should not happen without notification and in most cases the ability to opt out.
Don't change how sold features are handled after sale if it flies in the face of assumptions without taking care about letting people know and opt out. It's not really that complex. All it requires is actually respecting your customers.
Zero.
It's what you normally do when the new phone comes out.
I did it with my iPhone 3G when they put the new iOS on it. It became barely usable and i got an iPhone 4.
That was real. The 3G was SLOW.
This time it was not real.
I wouldn't so arrogantly claim to know how consumers spend their money on technology.
What do you think the average user thinks when their older phone performs worse after an OS update? "Aha, I bet the vendor is throttling the performance to preserve battery life, which I can fix by replacing with a new battery, a repair process which the vendor makes clear and easy!"
This has not been my experience. I'm a technical iPhone user and I don't even research it this much, I just think "%#&* they updated the OS again and now my phone is slow again"