Hacker News Reader

Comment by augustk | Hacker News Reader

  IF newTV THEN
     delay := 0
  ELSE
     (*make customer by new TV*)
     delay := 10
  END

View on HN

Careful! Apple might sue you for IP theft.

Apple is one of the few coMpanies you should trust for this.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51413724

https://interestingengineering.com/apple-to-pay-up-to-500-mi...

I’m sure AppleTV’s will slow down when the batteries get older and they won’t tell you to replace the battery,..

It's just proof of planned obsolescence. For phones it happens one way, for TVs another way.

So do you have a magically solution to keep rechargeable batteries from degrading over time?

yes.

a replacement battery.

And you can get a replacement battery for $70. I got one for my 6s after two years before the whole batterygate thing started because it wasn’t holding a charge. Between my son and I, we kept it for four years. The only reason I didn’t keep it for another year was because I wanted a larger phone with a larger battery.

It‘s not. Instead it‘s the only reasonable way to deal with degrading batteries - a limitation all manufacturers have to deal with. Apple opted to prevent unexpected shutdowns by slightly throttling performance - the correct decision for most users, but they didn‘t tell the user about it, which of course serves as a great excuse for colorful, exaggerated headlines like the one in your linked article.

Once the battery is changed they are not slow any more. So not a valid point really.

I literally linked an article that says they've had to settle for half a billion (!) because Apple did this without informing the users they were doing it. And Apple had an obvious financial incentive to not mention it to users. People found out almost by accident that their phones were still working well, except for a part that is replaceable (and much cheaper than a new phone).

In what world is this not a valid example of planned obsolescence?

So you'd rather the phone die and be unusable rather than slow and useable?

Apple's only mistake was not proving the opportunity for people to choose from the start.

Mistake? They made the decision to slow down devices without telling users and profited from that decision.

My iPhone 5 became slower after 1-2 years. If the battery was bad, I never noticed it (no shutdowns or anything like that). It coincided with a new iPhone and iOS version... I tried every trick, from formatting the phone to reducing animations. Then I found a thread on Apple forums about this and someone was suggesting getting a new phone!

I did buy a new phone (OnePlus One) and it's still working after ~5 years. The battery doesn't last as long, but it doesn't die when I receive a call or play a game.

Because of this, that iPhone 5 was my first and last iPhone.

> My iPhone 5 became slower after 1-2 years. If the battery was bad, I never noticed it (no shutdowns or anything like that).

So...it worked as expected? Slightly slowing the phone down is exactly what prevented your phone from potentially and unexpectedly shutting down.

It slowed down the phone a lot, not "slightly". I wasn't asked if I wanted the slow down, there was no way of disabling it, Apple didn't acknowledge it, and I had no reason to believe the battery was in a bad state.

Last year I upgraded from a mid-range phone which was almost 4 years old. It didn't have any "slow down" feature and it never shutdown, so as you can imagine, I'm not willing to give Apple a pass here.

They settled a lawsuit in order to not lose it... how is that a "mistake"? They paid $500 million to settle it.

The iOS 14 runs great on my iPhone 7. it will also run on the 6S, or the 2016 iPhone SE. The new SE will probably get OS updates for around 5 years or so.

From the article, "It said the lithium-ion batteries in the devices became less capable of supplying peak current demands, as they aged over time. That could result in an iPhone unexpectedly shutting down to protect its electronic components. So, it released a software update for the iPhone 6, iPhone 6s and iPhone SE which "smoothed out" battery performance."

The alternative is that your phone shuts down

I still remember when phones had replaceable batteries.

The alternative is that Apple could tell the user the phone battery was going bad, so they'd buy a new battery rather than a new iPhone. The other alternative is that Apple could test the battery and apply the throttling only when appropriate (rather than generically over entire models). Weirdly, both decisions contributed to Apple's bottom line. What an odd coincidence.

They did not slow down the battery “generically over entire models”. They slowed it down when the battery was degraded. Wouldn’t it be much easier for Apple just not to issue OS updates for older phones if they wanted to encourage users to get new phones?

Making units more disposable makes perfect commercial sense. Making them overtly more disposable might figure out into customer decisions which would be bad for profits. Better be subtle about it.

In that regard, not slowing down the devices with degraded batteries would have been substantially better. The behavior before was substantially more annoying: The phone would just shut down.

That would have led to bad publicity. Worse, people could have figured out by themselves the batteries were the problem. The trick is to annoy users, not make their workflow entirely impossible, and than to give them misleading advice so they'd buy a new phone.

All apple devices I’ve used in the past years tell you when the battery is degraded to the point it needs replacement. However, especially iPhones can be in situations where the battery may still be fine for most usage, but still not be good enough to support the required power draw - for example when it’s cold outside (aka winter). I much prefer my phone to slow down in these situations over shutting down as earlier versions did.

Apple denied for years there was a slowdown of old devices under any circumstances. By not telling users, Apple encouraged users to buy new devices rather than new batteries, fraud in the moral sense (if maybe technically not in the legal sense).

Infringement.

For non-coders, this video by Steve Cutts shows excellently how the concept works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jid2A7ldc_8

Guess what? The new TV uses that software too, so it’s about as slow.

Maybe it's got a faster CPU/GPU. Saw that happen with computers and then phones for some 40 years.

It's much better with computers, though. I am able to decently run modern games on 2015 gaming PC.

My 2015 flagman phone from meizu seems to have the same processing power as potato. And I don't even play games on it.

> It's much better with computers, though. I am able to decently run modern games on 2015 gaming PC.

Linus Torvalds and Bill Gates were and are obsessed with backwards compatibility, and _not_ breaking user programmes.

I am not sure how much the Great Man Theory applies here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory) or whether personal computers would have a culture of backwards compatibility without those two?

Intel also seems to care about backwards compatibility. (Though they needed a nudge from AMD when transitioning to 64 bit.)

In contrast, Apple and ARM seem more eager to start from a clean slate. So I can perfectly imagine a personal computer industry in an alternate universe that's happy to force people to recompile their programmes every few years; and otherwise to just abandon old binary-only software.

The winners in the competitive struggle are going to be people who don't break things. People who routinely reset their ecosystem tend to lose then get forgotten.

It isn't so much their influence as much as there is a community that is constantly searching for reliable platforms to build on.

> People who routinely reset their ecosystem tend to lose then get forgotten.

ARM seems to be doing well and they release binary incompatible chips every so often. And resetting had long been the norm in the world of games consoles.

So I wouldn't take what we observed in the personal computer industry as a universal truth. It's probably rather contingent.

When did ARM ever release a binary incompatible CPU?

For the application space they have the old armv7 and the new armv8. The latter can actually run armv7 in aarch32 mode.

Cortex-M only runs Thumb instructions, not the original instruction set.

But Cortex-M is not an application CPU, it was specifically designed for embedded systems (hence the M in the name).

If I recall correctly, it runs a subset/superset of thumbs2 which standard armv7-8 also can execute.

"The winners in the competitive struggle are going to be people who don't break things."

Search for developer comments about their experiences with Rosetta 2.

Maybe Apple isn't so dumb after all, eh?

What makes the comments on speed even more impressive to me - note that the developer test machines are using a two year old CPU. Originally designed for a battery operated mobile device.

A12Z has hardware support for accelerating Rosetta 2 that is unused on iOS, so its use as the core of a developer transition kit was clearly decided well in advance.

Maybe the quality of the software makes that point fairly moot.

I have a year-old TV from LG. Changing channels with the numeric buttons take around 4 seconds, while using the increment/decrement buttons I have to wait only one second. Strange!

Is is because it is waiting for a multi digit input? You can try to enter 01 for preset 1 or 001 depending on how many presets your TV has.

Ah, of course! That must be the reason.

You might be able to hit the OK/Confirm button to switch faster.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com