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Comment by CapriciousCptl | Hacker News Reader

So, I'm somehow developing a pro-Apple bias these days. This whole batterygate to me is kind of based on conjecture-- that Apple slowed old phones with the intention to sell more new ones. If there's any supporting evidence, or anything that's come up in discovery that Apple acted in bad faith, I'd possibly change my (admittedly biased) mind.

But really, slowing the phones down to extend battery life is a reasonable tradeoff and there's just not a preponderance of evidence suggesting Apple acted in its own interests and hurt existing users. The main problem is this "feature" wasn't out in the open, but again, it just doesn't seem that bad to me.

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I think this is the crux of the issue. Apple had to make a call for their customers: ensure the low battery is as long-lasting and predictable as possible around 1-5%, or keep high performance as the phone battery degrades quicker and shuts off. I think many people thoroughly understand how crucial it can be to have that last 1-2% and going into a situation where you think you have 5%, but then the phone dies, is a pretty bad experience for the "premium experience" that Apple sells. So for most customers they made the right call to preserve the battery.

This is an engineering trade-off and not something that typically gets publically broadcast to customers. I'm sure there's lots of other niche feature tweaks like this to the iPhone that we're unaware of. They definitely could've and should've been more transparent about this, but I understand why it didn't occur to them.

No it is not an engineering trade off. If you had one of these phones you would know.

The throttling here was so bad, the phones were completely unusable during the throttling. Sure, the operating system was running but doing basic tasks like using Apple maps or even sending a message would be effectively impossible. Imagine trying to play a video game at 2 frame per second. Unusable.

The real decision was that Apple didn't want to pay for millions of battery replacements, so Apple came up with a "software" fix for a hardware problem... Except that the software fix made the phone unusable.

I experienced it as well and this isn’t true either. The throttling was significant (40%, rough ballpark) but the phones were usable. A game that played that poorly would not have run well at full power. Maps and messaging was functional.

They should have communicated the change, in case that qualification is needed.

Have you ever considered that multiple generations of phones were effected by this issue and your single anecdote doesn't describe the full spectrum of behavior.

I don't appreciate being called a liar, especially about an issue that personally effected me to the point I left the Apple ecosystem for years. (I gave up my iPhone before the revelations, but I am 100% sure in retrospect I was being throttled)

Did you ever confirm if the device was being throttled? It was only not user-discoverable for a few months before a point release added the ability to see it from the Settings>Battery menu.

I don't think the person you were replying to called you a liar. They just had a different experience than yours.

> I experienced it as well and this isn’t true either.

I think you'd have to be knowingly looking the other way to take this so positively. Telling someone that what they said "isn't true" is analogous to calling them a liar.

Yes, I apologized to them for that reason. While I did mean to suggest they perhaps misremembered, I don’t think that is the same as lying, and either way the wording was too strong.

Yes, I experienced the throttling on the two slowest processors affected.

I did not mean to call you a liar. I'm sorry about that. However, you were wrong that anyone with experience would agree with you.

You're talking about 'transparency' but as the article points out, Apple flat-out denied the issue existed.

Apple had a call to make: Inform the users of the battery issue, or deny the issue and reap extra sales from iPhone replacements. That's not an 'engineering trade-off' but a ripoff.

You're not understanding the issue here. This had nothing to do with how fast the battery degrades. This was only ever about how the phone acts with an already degraded battery. The two choices are 1. Shut off the phone suddenly if any high performance tasks are attempted 2. Throttle the phone performance to keep it from shutting off.

Apple chose #2, which is best for customers, and got forced to pay $113M from it. It's ridiculous.

> Apple chose #2, which is best for customers, and got forced to pay $113M from it. It's ridiculous.

You're missing out the part where they did not inform the user why their device was being throttled and nor did their internal tooling inform the genius that a simple battery change can fix the issue.

Apple chose to silently degrade the performance of their device, which would lead customers to think that their device wasn't capable of keeping up anymore, rather than that they just needed to change the battery. My guess is that they made a good portion of $113M from this (it's best for customers to drain their bank accounts) so no need to cry for them.

edit: and I'm reading that this would happen within the warranty period. It's best for customers to keep them from getting their device fixed during the warranty period.

Option 3: Inform customers of the problem and let them decide if they prefer the shutdowns, throttling, or to simply pay for a battery replacement.

This is what they did in the end, and is the state of affairs today. It's transparent, fair and honest.

I own an iPhone because I got sick of these kinds of issues I was having with my Pixel phones. (would last ~1yr of perfect bliss. Then the honeymoon ends and the phone would just behave like crap). I decided to give another brand a shot.

I'll tell you what will really tick me off in another year or so... If my device is, without warning, notification, ability to change, etc, purposefully nerfing itself for ANY REASON. That will make me really upset. Especially since I can't just pop the back off and toss a new battery in there.

Good faith or not. It's an anti-consumer move. If my battery even pretended to be removable, you might convince me otherwise. But gluing the battery in under a glued in screen and then throttling my device based on the battery's age... Just really bothers me.

So it'd have been better to just let people's phones crash on startup and become 100% unusable?

The throttling also left my phone unusable while disguising the fact that it was because the battery needed to be replaced.

When there's a problem. I want to fix it. Not ignore it by making everything else work like crap.

Before this the old iPhones used to randomly reboot when the battery wasn’t able to keep them alive. (I had such phone.)

I don’t think slowing it down is “nerfing” compared to that. I speak also as someone who used an old iPhone 6 which was slowed down this way. Btw they throttled based on battery health, not age.

Yeah I definitely had that experience a few times.

Using the maps on my phone in a different country where nobody spoke my language and I didn't speak theirs with 25% battery life and having it suddenly shut down wasn't the funnest moment of my life.

You would have bought a new battery, not a new phone

When my Laptop runs low on power it pops up something like, "You're running out of power." They clearly have the technology to detect if the battery itself is going bad. Why can't my phone boot into that mode and say, "It looks like your battery's life is at X% would you like to slow your phone down to concerve power? [Yes] [Yes, always] [No, ask again when it's more dead] [No, Don't ask any more]"

You know... let the user know what's going on.

Ofc they should have communicated it clearly, they failed in that regard.

Bad battery health (iPhone) != low on power (your laptop) btw.

The "behave like crap" comes from Google constantly bloating their apps to drive upgrades. New phone: maps run smoothly. One year later: maps is a laggy POS.

I agree that it's possible they weren't being malicious. The part that gets me is that they didn't decide to instead allow folks to set a max battery charge to extend their battery life. It's pretty widely accepted that charging a battery to 100% over-and-over will cause battery degradation.

It seems fair to me that decisions that are hidden from consumers and obviously degrade the consumer's experience should negatively affect a company (and more than just the loss of goodwill).

>The part that gets me is that they didn't decide to instead allow folks to set a max battery charge to extend their battery life.

That's a fairly unusual feature to have for a consumer device. Support for it is spotty on laptops, and on androids the only way of doing it (I'm aware of) involves rooting your phone.

My AirPod Pros have notified me that based on usage they would only charge to 80%, but that is modifiable.

iPhones also have that feature, but they're both introduced fairly recently. Furthermore, it's not a general "max charge %" limiter, it's a system that's supposed to automagically guess when you're not going to use your phone (eg. at night), and won't charge to full during that time, but will otherwise charge to 100% (eg. in the morning).

The alternative is that the phone shuts off spontaneously and reboots if power draw gets too high, which also degrades the consumer’s experience and looks a lot scarier and more obviously broken to most people.

Are these really the two options? What about displaying a plainly worded message that explains the situation to the owner, then gives them the choice?

Or would that be too confusing and scary for Apple customers?

Crashing has implications for data integrity which laypeople do not fully understand to this day, despite it having been a problem for the entire history of computing. I don’t think giving users a choice between potentially catastrophic failure and inconvenience is wise. Notifying them of the slowdown is a good idea, and these days you can go into the settings to turn off the slowdown manually, but I think making people look for it is a good idea.

Even if you think customers shouldn't be given a choice, there is still no excuse for not informing the users of the situation.

Apple is not a victim here.

Did I say Apple was a victim? No. They should have notified people. But the conspiracy theories are silly, as are people who act like there isn’t a clearly correct default behavior in this case.

Okay, then we agree the comment I responded to presented a false dichotomy.

You said that their decision obviously degrades the user experience. They were dealing with an engineering trade off and picked the side that didn’t risk data loss. I contend that that’s better than the alternative, irrespective of whether or not they tell people what’s going on.

You're ignoring the point that these weren't the only two choices - even after both 'invisible' and 'bigbubba' suggested alternatives (admittedly not as profitable for Apple).

I’m really not. I said they should have notified people. You’re ignoring that there’s no solution to this problem that doesn’t degrade the user experience in one way or another, which is the point I was making.

The reason for the lawsuits and bad PR wasn't that user experience was degraded, but that it was done in a way that was close to planned obsolesce. Apple had ways to avoid this.

There’s no other way to fix the spontaneous shutdowns though. And I will repeat that they should have told people it might slow their phone down.

Technically speaking, they could have designed the battery differently so it's much more likely to last the full service life.

Acting this way was a choice, which may have been fine with had Apple not denied the issue and allowed replacing bad batteries under warranty.

I'm pretty sure they ran an exchange program for affected models of the 6s: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2016/12/06/apple-says-ip...

There's only so much you can do to make lithium batteries last forever. These days the phone tries to figure out when you need it charged by in the morning so it's not sitting on the charger at 100% for eight hours overnight, and this is supposed to help.

That replacement program was for a different problem, not battery degradation per se but a manufacturing error; The throttling affected other models too (and replaced 6s batteries after enough time I guess).

It's true that battery degradation can't be avoided eventually; but there's a reason why these complaints are rarer on high-end Androids (Also low-end, but it's likely users have appropriately lower expectations for these).

The battery degradation is inevitable though.

Apple doesn't manufacture the batteries. And you can't magically make batteries that perform identically. Every battery made has variation in it and that variation can't be seen until it starts causing failures.

The change would have been to simply advertise the service life was shorter than it actually was, to account for various worse batteries, but the long tail of worse off batteries would have still been there regardless.

That's what they added. There's now a full Battery section in the Settings app which shows you your current battery health, whether the life has declined to the point where it is limiting performance, and an optimized charging setting which is enabled by default so the phone won't charge past 80% unless it's at a time of day where your usage history suggests you'll need the full charge.

It is far more likely that these CPUs have the capability to throttle power usage instantaneously. If the battery monitor detects a problematic energy draw, it should have the capability to correct it before the CPU shuts down.

Indeed! They do throttle instantaneously. Which slows everything down, and stops the device from halting. This is what is being complained about.

Or slow the phone down and inform the customer their phone is running in "Reduced mode" or whatever due to their battery being old. It's honestly not that hard.

Which is more or less what they’ve now done.

It actually makes most sense that they weren't being malicious. Half the posts on this thread don't even understand what the problem is. Namely throttling to prevent the device from shutting off as if it was some kind of anti-consumer feature when it was actually pro-consumer.

Exactly this. As someone who experienced the unexpected shutdowns (described my experience elsewhere in these comments), the throttling fixed my issue until I ended up getting my battery replaced by a third party.

I think what a lot of people miss is that it was not just a restart, but a shutdown that would then require a charger be connected before the phone could be turned on again, even though it would then report similar charge to before the shutdown.

If you were out of the house and did not have a charger readily accessible, it was equivalent to the phone randomly turning into a brick for several hours at a time.

I can’t speak for everyone on this thread, but the combination of “hiding” and “degrading” are what make this anti-consumer. If your car wouldn’t go over 30mph and the manufacturer wouldn’t disclose why, how would you feel?

From the article:

>Apple, the most valuable company in the world, acted deceptively by hiding the shutdown and slowdown issues, according to the court filing.

>"Many consumers decided that the only way to get improved performance was to purchase a newer-model iPhone from Apple," Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich wrote...

> If there's any supporting evidence, or anything that's come up in discovery that Apple acted in bad faith

I know it's not apple's way of doing things, but can you think of a legit good reason why they couldn't service your phone with a new battery for a price instead?

> The main problem is this "feature" wasn't out in the open, but again, it just doesn't seem that bad to me.

It seems pretty bad to me. If they had told customers "Hey, we're slowing down your phone because your battery needs replacement", most would pay $100 for a battery replacement and happily continue using their phone for another 2-3 years. Apple phones last a long time. By hiding it, a non-zero number of customers chose to upgrade their phone which netted Apple > $100/ customer. It's obvious why Apple chose to hide it.

I believe it wasn't slowing down the phones to extend battery life, it was slowing down the phone's power draw because as the LiPo battery wore out it could no longer give the peak power like it used to. The only real fix was to throttle the phone, which apple did a horrible job communicating on.

The real fix was to tell the truth so people can make better decisions, like buying a new battery.

There is definitely business aspect in terms of warranty and customer support. In New Zealand for example, legislation guarantees a warranty window on new devices that the manufacturer cannot opt-out (Consumer Guarantees Act).

Highlighting either option for consumers would bring attention to the fact this is a hardware issue, which would void acceptable use warranties if the battery was degrading to be insufficiently usable within one or two years.

Australia too (under the Australian Consumer Law which guarantees goods are of acceptable quality). Apple has been found in breach of this law by misleading consumers as to their rights in the past.

As a remedy for a number of years they were required to display at the genius bar a sign outlining your rights to a repair, refund, etc in addition to any apple warranties.

> So, I'm somehow developing a pro-Apple bias these days

Everytime this happens to me, I remind myself to visit their accessories store on the Apple website.

As an example, the new magsafe seems like a clear way to extract more money.

The magsafe charger doesn't have a removable cable and it is a very thin cable which is likely to break after minimal usage.

The iPad's keyboard costs as much as an entry level Ryzen laptop.

Non-upgradable everything so you pay for future-proofing upfront.

Oh man you would not like the accessories for a BMW or Audi then. Because what you're describing is not unique to Apple, it's a defining feature of being a luxury brand. They want price conscious consumers to choose another brand.

When there's a rich kid in town, everyone will turn him upside down to see what change falls out of his pockets. Apple is where Apple is because it doesn't put all of its features "out in the open." I don't want 500 config settings for my phone and a lot of other's don't either. If you want to run a webserver on your phone that's cool, there are products for you, but some people want the idiotproof solution.

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