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Comment by judge2020 | Hacker News Reader

judge2020

You could ask any non-Apple industry personnel about what happens to batteries after years of constant usage and all of them will agree that eventually you eventually won't be able to pull the power you need to keep the phone running fast. Getting a new battery always fixed this, Apple just was performing this power management without telling the user before ios 12.1.

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But if I'm an average user and my phone is slow, my first thought isn't "hey I should get the battery replaced". It's perfectly reasonable to assume the phone would still be slow, so why not just buy a newer model?

It's a lie of omission, which you could reasonably interpret as a trick to get people to upgrade.

If you're an average user and your phone is spontaneously rebooting, you probably think to replace it even more.

If the battery is dying at <5% I think it's pretty obvious. But I think the real solution is the throttling behavior PLUS a "service battery" notification.

If Apple had done nothing, then that same user's phone would randomly start switching off at non-0 battery levels (the un-throttled behavior) when brownouts occurred. Wouldn't the same user still come to the same conclusion, that their phone has some problem and needs to be replaced?

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.

> If Apple had done nothing, then that same user's phone would randomly start switching off at non-0 battery levels (the un-throttled behavior) when brownouts occurred. Wouldn't the same user still come to the same conclusion, that their phone has some problem and needs to be replaced?

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.

> It's a lie of 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?

I didn't know about this email, but it still seems like a pretty bad way to communicate this no? How about a notification from the OS like in Apple's laptops?

I agree. They deffo dropped the ball on this one.

A big point of this is how user-hostile replacing a battery on a phone has become for flagship mobile devices, which makes this situation a bit worse IMO.

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