An alarming number of people still believe Apple slowed down all their old phones for the sole purpose of selling them new ones for example.
I'm not an Apple hater or a fanboy. I've owned a number of Apple devices in the past. However, they have their issues just like any other tech company, but their devoted following does seem to be more cultish than that of, say, Microsoft or Google.
It's a lie of omission, which you could reasonably interpret as a trick to get people to upgrade.
In general, the mobile phone industry has done a pretty good job encouraging their userbase to forget that their batteries are replaceable, so I don't think that most users would consider that as a remediation step off the top of their head.
I think it's plain that the best solution would be informing the user of the problem and letting them choose between behaviors (or, you know, replace the battery), but between slow usage and random shutdowns, I would personally choose the former.
I wonder if there have been any studies on how many users, once the toggle had been added, switched it from the (default) throttling behavior to the shutdown behavior? I'd be curious to see if I'm in the minority there.
No I actually think then the average person would assume it's a battery issue, or at least be able to google it. I'm not saying that this is actually better behavior (I would also choose slow mode over random shutoff mode), but it doesn't obfuscate the fact that the phone has a faulty battery.
The reason I suspect that Apple did this maliciously is that "service battery" notifications are pretty standard behavior (including on their own laptops). It just seems like an intentional omission.
I got an email well before the throttling "scandal" broke out telling me my battery could be replaced for free. It was, 16,000KMs away from home, for free.
What was it Apple lied about?
So they didn’t slow down all old phones, only ones that had the problem. They actually attempted to fix older models. To me this is the opposite of planned obsolescence and appeals to my environmental view that all manufacturers should be supporting their hardware as least as long as Apple currently does.
Now they didn’t communicate, and were fined. I think that is fair enough, but I feel the size of the fine was quite excessive given they were trying to extend the life of their customers hardware.
Note that the other phone manufacturers that have exactly the same problems did nothing and are actually better off because of it.
I had an iPhone 5S that ran ok until I upgraded to iOS 13, IIRC. After that, the frames started skipping and it became frustrating to use.
Whether or not the whole thing was intentionally nefarious I'm not convinced. But the episode looks way worse than your comment suggests.
Yes, they definitely should have communicated better. 100%. It was non obvious to any users that the phone had been throttled and that it needed a new battery. I think the fine they got will remind them to be more explicit in the future.
The feature still exists today, just explained better.
As such, it could even be counted as one of the touches Apple is known for that other OEMs don't bother with. It just needed better communication.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/ipad-airs-a7-chip-is...
Seriously - can you tell me how long you received updates on your android phone?
Apple is the absolute leader in getting longer life out of their phones, they have much higher resale as a result as well.
Apple not only allows older devices to installer newer software (with bug fixes / security fixes / and supportable features) but they have been backporting stuff to a one step earlier iOS as well in terms of basic fixes. It's actually crazy especially in comparison to their competitors (that get no flak on HN) who literally ship with an old version of android AND DO NOT UPDATE IT!
>Seriously - can you tell me how long you received updates on your android phone?
I've used Apple computers exclusively since about 2005 and phones since around 2009. So no, I've never owned an Android phone. In fact, my small apartment has no less than 8 Apple devices in use between my partner and I.
Why do you assume I'm not an Apple user? Because I said something mildly critical of them?
They have an article about hardware microphone disconnects, prolonging battery life, etc. yet they neglected to write an article about hardware throttling.
It's almost as if they had a hardware problem and instead of issuing a recall, they quietly pushed a software fix. No, that can't be it.
False. The retail and support staff were not informed of the throttling. See my other comment.
It's possible that some staff deduced that replacing the battery would help, based on personal observations, but they were never advised by corporate to do this as policy. As such, the vast majority of them were not recommending battery replacements.
You must have got lucky.
It's been established (and admitted to by Apple themselves) that the throttling was not properly explained to consumers.
I'm asserting as fact that Apple retail and support employees were kept in the dark about throttling. So, even if you had Applecare, your "genius" would tell you that your phone wasn't slowing down (you were imagining it) or that the slow down was an inevitable result of ever more complex OS upgrades. The end result is that you were told nothing could be done.
So no one was told the simple truth. That poor performance was related to poor battery health and could be rectified by a simple battery replacement.
We're specifically talking about lower CPU clocking. Now, are you claiming to have known that Apple was throttling Phones with aging batteries before the rest of the world? Because well, that's a pretty amazing feat.
The accusation is that Apple downclocked the phone in order to degrade the phone's performance and make people buy new phones.
In fact, Apple downclocked the phones so that already degraded phones could continue to function without becoming unusable.
That's all it was.
>Are you suggesting it wasn’t known that battery replacements were available for iPhones? I know I personally replaced several batteries over the years in iPhones, I don’t think that was a big secret.
>I thought it was pretty much common knowledge that your battery going bad would degrade performance and it was time to get a new battery
You're now walking that claim back it seems.
>The accusation is that Apple downclocked the phone in order to degrade the phone's performance and make people buy new phones.
No it isn't. Re-read my comments. The accusation is that Apple purposefully hid the throttling from its customers denying them of the choice to replace the battery and bring the phone back to 100%. As I said - whether this act was nefarious is not clear.
Look, you're just not being intellectually honest, nor do you seem to be carefully reading the thread so I've no more interest in debating you.
The exact nature of that bad performance isn't even really important. You're arguing trivialities, that people might have known exactly why their phone went bad. To most people, a phone is a black box, it works or doesn't. Apple allowed the phone to keep working even when the battery had degraded to the point where the phone would randomly crash if they did not address that problem. Apple made the choice to degrade performance in order to keep the phone in service -- that's against their bottom line (they'd have likely sold another phone if they didn't do that), and it gives the customer the ability to keep using a phone without replacing the battery even when it needs a battery replacement.
Wait, what? I'm precisely on topic. The topic of this particular comments chain being throttling of iPhones without notifying the user [0]. It's also the topic of a several hundred million dollar class action suit to which Apple settled[1], after admitting it was a failure to not properly inform consumers[2].
You keep trying to derail it from the topic. No-one is arguing whether the throttling is a valid technological solution to a problem beyond Apple's control. It's a great solution, and it works well to this day — What's being debated is wether or not it was ethical to hide the throttling.
And no, throttling of computer devices based on battery capacity certainly was not, in any way, something to be expected. No manufacturer had ever done it before in a portable computing device (laptop, PDA, smartphone). At least to my knowledge.
Sure, it makes sense now that we understand it. But to somehow imply that it should have been anticipated or just blindly accepted is being grossly dishonest.
I've used Apple computers exclusively since 2005 and phones since around 2009. I'm a very satisfied customer. But I'm not so fanatical that I can't look at them objectively. I certainly couldn't imagine defending something that courts around the world, the vast majority of their customers, the technical press, and Apple themselves have admitted was wrong. I just can't understand the logic.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22769621 [1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/2/21161271/apple-settlement-... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/28/16827248/apple-iphone-ba...
Actually I bought my iPhone 6S in Australia and had the battery replaced for free in Vienna under their battery replacement program. It was done in 45 minutes.
I don't think it was intentionally nefarious -- this is a real problem with this kind of battery and I've experienced it, and it's not unique to Apple devices. In theory, their solution is actually pretty good! The problem was the way they communicated this to end users, namely, that they didn't. They just did it. And didn't even have iOS tell you it had enabled this "battery management" mode when it was turned on.
This wasn't an engineering fiasco, it was a PR fiasco. Apple has always been guilty of what we could diplomatically call "under-communicating," but this is the sort of change someone -- many someones, arguably -- internally should have flagged and said, "No, look, this isn't something we should just do silently, in part because it's going to create a suboptimal user experience and in part because if we don't communicate what we're doing and why we're doing it, it's going to come across as us just slowing old phones down to make you buy new ones."
I considered this omitted because it's obvious given the technical details surrounding the throttling to begin with.
I don't know about that. I seem to see a lot of irrational Apple hate, but not that much irrational Apple love.
I think they are far from perfect in many, many ways. But so much criticism of them appears overblown, short-sighted, irrelevant to me, or just plain wrong.
I look at it like this: all things considered, balancing various concerns, what's the best option for me for my given needs? Following that philosophy I've ended up with a lot of Apple gear. Am I a fanboy because a better alternative doesn't exist?
Sure, let me do that: Apple is a corporation and it is stupid to believe that they care more about you than making profits.
This applies to any corporation. I've particularly noticed that the US citizens are increasingly buying into this propaganda that corporations can better protect their rights than a democratically elected government. And that is just sad and dangerous. We should be campaigning for our privacy rights directly with the government, and not just hope that some corporation will act benevolent towards us.
(And it is not a coincidence that this "news" came up in the social media feeds when the [news about exploits that granted unauthorised access to your camera through Safari is going around](https://www.ryanpickren.com/webcam-hacking-overview).)
The issue here is that instead of adding a physical switch to disable the microphone and camera, Apple is again asking its users to blindly trust it. We just have to take their word for it that it will work. They can always blame a bug in the firmware if somebody finds a way to exploit it tomorrow ...
(Note: I mentioned the Safari exploit only to point out that there is some negative news which obviously a corporation would like to bury with some positive publicity. It is commendable that Apple paid the discoverer a nice bounty and will be fixing it soon.)
Edit: And, ofcourse, the downvotes begin as the social media management team steps in.
There is always an antagonistic relationship between buyers and sellers. Buyers want more money for less features, Sellers want more features for less money.
There is no such thing as "with the user", unless the users are shareholders in the company.
They aren't the worst player, or even close really however. It's just there's a lot of power and influence in that company, so you hear a lot about it.
Apple hate? I'm a Mac convert, and I admire most of their hardware and design. But it's no secret they purposely refuse to interoperate with other vendors, and purposely develop proprietary technologies to keep you within their ecosystem. The recent acquisition, and subsequent planned shutdown of Dark Sky is just one recent example.
Part of it is just the business model, I guess. For example, Google's apps are widely available across a variety of devices, since it gives Google the juicy data that they're after. For Apple, which is not an ad company, the incentive might not be there for opening their apps up to a wider audience.
Since I cannot justify a $1k+ phone for myself and my family members (I am content with my $500 S10e), and I have a mix of Mac, Linux, and Windows devices, the Apple applications (however well designed) are sadly out.
It's an artifact from evolving in a world where snap judgments were often the difference between life and death, and the person who assumed the rustle in bushes was just the wind, but it was actually a tiger, did not live to propagate. However, the paranoid person who thought it was a tiger every time the wind rustled the bushes, did survive to propagate.
Our current political system is pretty good evidence of people believing strongly enough in ideology to destroy the lives of others. I think they really do believe the stuff, and that's why it's so dangerous.
I have quite a few family and friends that unintentionally spread fake news because they really thought the story was real. One in particular is extremely hateful toward fake news but made a conclusion based on a headline that turned out wrong (we don't all have time to read every story we see, as much as we'd want to).
For example, I can't tell you how many times I've heard "I tried a Moto g and it's horrible! My old iPhone was better", or "this $300 Dell laptop is way worse than my MacBook". Of course a $1000 phone is better than a $200 phone, and likewise for the laptops.
But when you start looking at high-end laptops like the surface series, or phones like oppo/Huawei, it's usually in favor of the non-apple.
Plenty of videos out there comparing opening a bunch of apps in a cycle on iPhone vs Android. Android wins the first open, iPhone destroys on the second. (iPhone is able to keep all apps in suspense, whereas android unloads them)
And you proved my point. You picked a $1200 phone to compare to a $700 android, and for some reason thought that was equivalent.
Android also saves activity state for fast resume and keeps activities running until there is memory pressure. I've heard people complain about iOS devices in this regard because they do the same thing but don't have enough memory to do it effectively.
Side-by-side comparisons aren't really of any real-world significance. Very few people do that when forming their opinions. For the average person, performance either detracts from the experience, or it doesn't.
There are many other factors that are more important to experience than performance. Does the interface conflict with their expectations? Does the user find the features to be self-explanatory? Does the device enable the user to conform to social expectation?
> People don’t buy specs, they buy experiences.
More specifically, people don't buy actual experiences, they buy expectations of experience. 99%+ of people who buy a phone haven't had more than a couple of moments of experience with it. They buy it because they expect it to be good based on their first impressions and/or preconceived notions.
And once you stepped in the Apple universe, you will find a large number of devices working together. The Mac, the phone, the tablet.
So there are many reasons to choose an Apple product, beyond its specs per dollar. Also, while I think that Apple prices are high, and upgrade prices even outrageously high, if I spec a high quality competitor coparatively, I often am not that far away from the Apple prices.
WSL certainly has the potential to be a game changer and this has made Windows potentially interesting to me. What would really be a huge step, if Microsoft would built a Wayland server into the Windows UI. Having Linux GUI apps running on the native Windows UI with all acceleration, could make it a premier desktop for running Linux applications.