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Comment by greatgib | Hacker News Reader

Some people are pretending that it is a user feature to throttle and that it is to have a more stable phone when the battery becomes older.

But, if my memory is good, when Apple was fined in France, it was shown that the throttling was performed without consideration for the battery state. So was done even with a new battery (or the power cord plugged)

Also, for people having Stockholm syndrome, if they would have to throttle to preserve stability when the battery is old, it is not a "nice" user feature but a consequence of having made the battery not removable and easily swappable!

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There is also another point that I forgot, and that is a main point of the french fine I think.

In itself, if explicitly warned and controlled by the user, throttling to work better with an old battery would not be so bad.

But the thing is that, if your phone (or laptop) does not last long anymore on battery before shutting down, but otherwise works normally, you know that it is just the battery that is dead and that needs to be replaced.

But, if the phone becomes slower/sluggish, most non tech users will think "my phone is slow because it is old, it's normal aging, so I need to change it with a new one".

And worse, some will even think that their memory was wrong and that it is just that the new models are so fast and reactive that they realize how slow was their previous phone without them realizing.

This makes me think about the case of Windows. It is well known that a computer with Windows will go slower and slower time after time as the system get messy. Based on that, I can't count the number of persons that I have met that were thinking of changing their computer for a new one because the old one "became slow because of its age". When the real solution was simply to reinstall Windows to have a fresh system!

> This makes me think about the case of Windows.

A certain graphics card manufacturer has claimed that graphics cards (in continual use) reduces their performance by around 10% each year. Of course, its a near-myth, only saved by the fact that certain components (like fans and the thermal interface on certain cards) loses their performance due to factors beyond their control.

The solution is obviously to clean the damn thing.

That reminds me… Thanks!

And add new thermal paste, i can recommend Thermal Grizzlys' stuff.

Disclaimer: contented customer

What's wrong with using normal thermal pastes, like toothpaste? Or Vegemite, if you're Australian, I suppose.

http://www.dansdata.com/goop.htm

I'm not sure what the current situation is, but at least a few years ago my experience with both Nvidia and AMD was that when upgrading past a certain driver version, fps would tend to decrease again.

Due to the large number of architectures and models churned out by AMD/Nvidia, when releasing drivers, they tend to concentrate on the performance of the latest and greatest cards, and throw a bone to the previous architecture. Older cards are absolutely neglected and may have perf regression after upgrading drivers.

Linus Tech Tips addressed this claim in a recent video comparing GPUs that were used for years to mine crypto vs like new identical or similar GPUs. Turns out it's barely 1% a year and that's likely a difference in cooling capacity from a dusty card.

Meh, I don't know. I have one of those older iPhones (a 7) whose battery health went somewhat down (around 80% or below) and the phone felt kinda sluggish. I then disabled the "peak protection" or whatever it was called, and then it started randomly shutting down, while not being particularly smoother. It should be noted I don't use intensive apps, such as games.

After I had the battery changed, everything went back to normal. Smooth, no random shutdowns, etc. And the battery change cost me a whopping 60 euros out the door at an Apple authorized service center (I even booked the repair through the Apple website).

Now don't get me wrong, if I had the choice between a phone with or without a removable battery, I'd go for the former every time, even if it meant it would be bigger. Before the iPhone, I had a Galaxy S5 and I never had an issue with its thickness.

But, in more practical terms, all the phones I had before the iPhone (Galaxy S 1, 3, 5) had removable batteries. The 1 I actually bought used, and it came with 2 spare batteries. The only reason those batteries saw any action was because I tried to use them from time to time to not let them die.

Now cost-wise, by the end of the GS5's life, the battery started bulging and didn't last as long, so I was looking to buy a new one. A replacement Samsung battery costed 60 to 70 euros, the same price as the iPhone replacement battery, and indeed, most other phone batteries. So I wouldn't say Apple is gouging customers on this particular issue, at least not any more than other brands.

The reason the battery replacement is possible and cheap is because Apple was sued to oblivion due to these throttling issues.

I'd be curious what the prices were before this lawsuit.

[0] is a September, 2019 article from France, stating that prices went up to 55 euros for the iPhone 7 and similar models. Since I paid 60 one year ago, that means that the trend is upward, right?

I've also seen somewhere (can't find it right now) that talks specifically about the throttling issue, and apparently this concerns a one-time battery replacement for 29 euros.

This leads me to believe that the 60 euros I've paid were the "regular price", not some discount because of the lawsuit. But maybe prices have been brought down, broadly speaking, as a side effect.

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[0] https://www.igen.fr/iphone/2019/09/apple-augmente-le-prix-du...

Certified repair implies there are uncertified shops too, which will replace it for less. NSI.

iPhone battery replacement was always possible and cost about the same.

Your memory is a bit off. You could use a CPU monitoring app to see different speeds on newer and older batteries. You’re right that it didn’t speed up when plugged in.

I think iPhones don't run directly off external power even when plugged in -- they charge the battery, and run from that. For evidence, note that if your battery is completely dead, you need to provide power for a few minutes to get it some baseline amount of charge before you can turn the phone on.

It feels plausible that a battery with bad peak voltage could still be unreliable even while being actively charged, so it'd make sense if the throttling remained.

Most phones don't run directly from mains with an empty or removed battery.

The reason is that the power supply isn't guaranteed to be able to cope with the short peaks in power like from the various radios. It could lead to brownouts. And it's not a common enough usecase for manufacturers to bother supporting.

> And it's not a common enough usecase for manufacturers to bother supporting.

Woah now, I would like to disagree with that, phones running out of a charge is a pretty regular occurrence. In fact, I'd say the only reason people panic so often to keep a charge is because the fucking things won't turn back on immediately. shakes fist at sky It would be fucking GREAT if I could use it (turn it on) immediately upon plugging it into a power source. I have been pissed off about not being able to use my iPhone (or any device) while plugged in since "they" (electronics manufacturers) started doing this shit. Truly, I've seen grown ass people thrown into a panic because their phone is about to die and I promise 80% of that panic (for a plethora of reasons from silly to necessary) would be alleviated if they knew they could just plug the damn thing in and have it turn on immediately.

Edit: moar better grammar.

I will say that I've used a smartphone for about a decade now, and I can count on one hand the number of times it has actually run out of charge. (With hitting <5% being about as infrequent.)

Usage patterns clearly vary wildly, here. :D

That's likely because you've incorporated the "phone battery dance" so strongly into your life, that you don't even notice it anymore.

I agree with GP here - most adults (and teenagers) organize their day in part around keeping their phone charged.

I have one phone that once got into a reboot loop: its battery was flat, so I’d provide it with a USB power source, it’d charge the battery for about five seconds, then it’d try to start up automatically (without me telling it to), but that would stop it charging the battery from which is all it seems to be willing to draw from at that stage of boot, so after another about five seconds it’d die of a flat battery again, then after another few seconds it’d recognise the power source and start the loop again. The entire cycle took about 17 seconds, like clockwork. Not sure quite why it went like that; historically it had been willing to charge from flat, and since then I think it is too, though I haven’t used it much for the last couple of years, and I can’t remember whether it normally powers on automatically in this case. I tried almost all combinations of four USB cables and five power sources (Surface Book, car with 12V → USB adapter, Surface Book AC adapter which has an additional USB outlet, Surface Dock, and a wall charger) before finding some combination that worked, not triggering the untimely and defective power-on.

A battery management IC will be able to discern a battery's health.

Not saying you're wrong, but it could easily be the case that the iphone runs from wall power if it detects a healthy battery, but doesn't allow that if the battery is very dead.

I'm no EE, but I think Kirchoff's current law says something about that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirchhoff%27s_circuit_laws#Kir...

The battery is either charging or discharging on net.

I sometimes see colloquialisms like "The laptop isn't really running off AC power, the AC is charging the battery and the laptop is discharging it to run". I also see people say that it's bad to keep a phone or laptop on its charger all day, and I usually do that to no ill effect, so I stopped trusting common wisdom on batteries.

When you get down to the cell level, each cell has 2 terminals, and it's either charging or discharging, right? Unless the charge circuit is doing some green-blue trick to charge half the cells and discharge the others, nothing that runs off a battery can be running AC "through" the battery. They taught us in A+ class that UPS' run power "through" the battery but I think it's objectively wrong. Especially if it's a lead-acid battery which I _know_ only has two terminals.

You can draw a boundary around the battery and charging stuff and say, if 90 watts is going in and the computer is pulling 80 watts, the battery must be charging at 10 watts. If the computer is pulling 120 watts, the battery must be discharging at 30 watts. But there is not 90 watts of power flowing "through" the battery in either case. Adding a load just causes it to charge slower, or discharge instead of charging.

It's probably true that the power supply only converts from mains to whatever the battery charger wants, and there's no path from mains to the load without going through the battery's voltage, but as other posters said, the reason you can't run some phones with a dead battery is more related to peak load. I have definitely owned mobile hardware that worked _pretty well_ without a battery, but worked better with a battery to smooth out load during startup or CPU load spikes.

Could you not have some sort of circuitry that causes the battery to be completely bypassed when AC is connected

(Obviously the AC would be going through a power supply to convert it to DC of the proper voltage, but still)

TI has a nice overview of how most of these systems work. https://www.ti.com/lit/an/slyt769/slyt769.pdf

Figure 1 shows the architecture pretty much everything uses. It's done this way because it's simple and effective.

Basically ReactiveJelly has it right and there is KCL at a node that joins the DC output of the power adapter, the system and the battery. When the adapter is present, if the system draws more than the adapter can supply, the difference comes from the battery, discharging it. if the adapter can provide more than the system needs the difference goes to the battery, charging it.

The main issue is modern systems can change their load way faster than the adapter can respond. Therefore it's up to the battery to make up the difference during these rapid transients preventing system shutdown. As long as it doesn't happen too much (and the system might choose to throttle to guarantee this if is not true) the battery charges on average.

In the end the systems are a complicated thing because they are balancing: safety, battery lifetime, wanting to support many sizes of adapters, thermal considerations, charge time and system performance. And everyone has their own opinions on how to prioritize things.

I had few phone which can run off the charger without battery.

The power spike issues is easily solved with some judiciously placed capacitors.

But the overall issue of Pphone > Pdc longer than few millisecons can only be solved by shipping more poweful power supply.

I’v found this out when looking at what are the purpose of various chips on MacBook Air motherboard.

And suddenly things that didn’t make sense now makes sense: laptop with a dead battery is unbearably slow due to CPU throttling to 600 or 800Mhz. Unusable piece of trash until battery changed.

Do most phone chargers supply enough current to charge the phone when it’s running at full power?

> But, if my memory is good, when Apple was fined in France, it was shown that the throttling was performed without consideration for the battery state. So was done even with a new battery (or the power cord plugged)

I don't think you're correct here. The way this behaviour was initially discovered was that a reddit user ran a benchmarking app before and after a battery replacement, showing a substantial increase to performance afterwards.

It would not surprise me if this only applied to first party batteries, though I have no information one way or the other.

Battery not removeable was a stopper since year one. (Why would anyone not want to wait for a charge?)

A "nice" user feature would be a preference to self-throttle a step or two. Else it's like they think they own the phones you bought years ago... or don't trust their own developers to do it right.

Besides the more obvious reasons, making the battery swappable would compromise other things like thickness, weight, waterproofing, and so on.

Perhaps.

I used to carry a rugged android that could be operated underwater or in the presence of some explosive gasses. It was a bit heavier, but it was also the equivalent to normal device with a rugged case.

A company with the sophistication of industrial design like Apple could build a moderately more rugged device that would be very close to the existing iPhones.

The real and obvious reason for Apples decisions is that both high margin extended warranties and cases for iPhones probably generate more income than the Mac.

A curious thing about consumer behavior is that they never report phone thickness being a top concern but in practice it is actually one of the top criteria by which they judge phones.

Apple may benefit from planned obsolescence but they can (and do) just stop updating the software to achieve the same end. I suspect that if they made two versions of the iPhone, one like now and another along the lines you suggest, the current design would sell much better.

> they never report phone thickness being a top concern but in practice it is actually one of the top criteria by which they judge phones

So much true. I'm on iPhone 12 Pro right now but I am always tempted to play with my Moto 5g Plus. It is quite a bit thinner or at least feels like that and it feels so much better in my hand.

IMO Apple's planned obsolescence is based on ridiculously low RAM. Modern phones are running same workloads as modern computers. Browser engine is the same, kernel is the same. Phone CPU is as powerful as laptop CPU with similar power budget. Developers use same or similar frameworks to write apps. Imagine buying premium laptop with 2 GB of RAM. That's iPhone 8 while high-end Androids were shipping with 8+ GB of RAM at that time.

RAM requirements of OS and apps will increase every year, so it'll be obvious to stop supporting old phones because of lack of RAM, even if CPU and Disk are more than capable.

My iPhones have always gotten software updates much longer than my Android phones so I’m always curious why Apple gets targeted so often when talking about phasing out old phones. Heck half of the new Androids had trouble getting software updates in a timely manner.

Android phones are not better in this regard, I agree.

Assuming you aren't one of the very few people on earth that make those decisions (made obvious by your choice of phone earlier), then saying your pet theory is real and obvious.. is unhelpful. I would posit (as the most profitable company on earth) that the reason Apple makes iPhones they way they do is simply because they sell better to normal consumers.

If you carry a phone based on which explosive gasses it can operate near, you are an extreme outlier when it comes to consumer behavior. Perhaps the things that are "real and obvious" to you.. aren't.

Just because something or someone is successful doesn't mean all decisions that are made are optimal, close to optimal, or even not an active detriment.

The famous example is people conflating Steve Jobs being an asshole with being successful.

I generally agree with you, but in this generic case, phones are actually truly packed to the max. Similarly to how you could easily fix your older car with just a few tools, modern engines are so complex that such home-twinkering is impossible. Phones go in the direction of having less and less separate parts, which is bad from a repairability pov, but the reason why these gigantic screen sizes are the new norm is also the side-effect of having to put n cameras, 5G, a huge battery, LiDAR and what not into a comparatively small body, while at the same time making it dust and water proof.

Yes, but those are all choices, and they're all vendor-driven. It's not users demanding these things - users just select from what's available on the market.

And here, it's not even the case of all those weird nerds complaining about missing headphone jack. Go poll normies about screen sizes. Regular people complaining about phones being too large is pretty much a meme now.

(Engineering-wise, phones do get thermal advantage from the current form factor trends - thinner but larger -> more surface area. But I suspect it's more than compensated by the extra heat from the larger screen.)

Apple released a smaller phone called the Mini and it only makes up 5% of their sales: https://9to5mac.com/2021/07/15/iphone-12-line-accounted-for-...

Those are the revealed preferences of millions of customers. How many people did you poll?

A smaller underpowered phone.

You aren't calculating the effect of phone size correctly.

Other than screen resolution and smaller battery (due to the size difference), the 12 mini and the 12 have the exact same specs.

You might be thinking of the iPhone SE, which is the budget offering that’s almost as small as the Mini and has lower-end specs.

Not only that but the 12 Pro Max sells substantially better than the 12 Pro, according to the chart.

Most people I know keep buying bigger phones even though smaller ones from the same companies exist now

Agreed. It's like saying mid-engine cars are intentionally made complex to repair to make more money of service whereas it's more likely that the primary driving factor is better performance & handling and the extra service revenue is an added benefit.

In this case, I carried a phone that works outdoors in typical field conditions, including high heat, cold, and high background noise. iPhones are designed with assumptions that make them inappropriate for outdoor work — they have an operating range that leads to shutdown in outer pockets in the winter or in hot summer conditions.

With respect to the warranty and accessory stuff, I spent several years in that part of the hardware business — a product like AppleCare has 70% margins at retail (minimum), and unbranded cases identical to Apple branded sell for 60-80% less at retail.

Am I wrong about Apple’s abilities to manufacture durable products with different design goals? Maybe, but I doubt it.

MacBook Pros are a great example, when transitioning to unibody design, the MacBook lost replaceable batteries and other components, in exchange for a more structurally rigid frame and a very marginal weight/thickness savings. What they did achieve is a higher margin design by focusing on production efficiency and an attempt to push higher service costs to the consumer. (Which partially failed with the defective keyboards) The engineers produced a product that met its design goals, with the exception of the garbage keyboard.

I can change my watch battery and maintain waterproof. Seems like a solvable problem.

Phones have much larger batteries and pack far more functionality into a small space than a regular watch. Hard to see how the constraints are comparable.

The battery size and device's functionality are the two most irrelevant factors. Water doesn't care if the thing has Bluetooth.

Whether it's a watch or a phone, you don't want water or moisture inside. Simple as that. Watches do have the advantage that they can be built so that they're 100% filled with a lubricating fluid, making them more or less immune to outer pressure.

The guys at the watch store would always warn that changing the battery could compromise the water resistance of the watch and, based on some bitter experience, not without reason.

In the past Samsung built phones with both a swappable battery and a headphone jack and in a test it survived a run through a washing machine. No problem if there's an incentive to do it right. Not to mention Apple was pretty much the last to the waterproof smartphone party even though they always locked their phones down the most.

And I don't mind thickness. Thicker means better ergonomics in my experience, at least compared to today's oversized sheets of metal and glass. And I bet you put those in a case which adds 2-3mm thickness. Well, that sure paid off, did it?

And weight? I can't even come up with a scenario where I'd care about that. Make it weigh less than a pound and I'm okay with it.

Notice you said in the past. Samsung got rid of those things to save space and cost while making room for other things

You may not care about weight or thickness, but HN is a horrible gauge of typical consumer behavior with regard to tech.

Just stop already. We had waterproof gadgets with removable batteries, we still have them. Phones thickness bever was an issue.

IP68? The 6 stands for absolutely dustproof and the 8 means it can be submerged more than one meter in water and still work. Wasn't there a case of a working iPhone from a lake?

Disclaimer: prefer changeable batteries and don't own Apple devices.

iPhones are not waterproof. Warranty do not extend to water damage and iPhones have internal indicators of water leakage. If Apple is not confident with iPhones waterproof properties, neither should users.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207043

You're right that water damage isn't covered but they're still pretty resistant:

> iPhone 12, iPhone 12 mini, iPhone 12 Pro, and iPhone 12 Pro Max have a rating of IP68 under IEC standard 60529 (maximum depth of 6 meters up to 30 minutes).

I have to say that I never find it convincing when people baldly assert the opposite conclusion of what I said without any explanation of why I should change my mind.

I have couple of iDevices lying around in need of battery replacement, I decided to remove the bulged battery from iPad Air 2(for safety) and in the process destroyed the display, The ribbon cable tore like tissue paper) and cut my finger(I've been repairing my electronics all my life, this was the first time with Apple devices).

My next plan was to order replacement display, batteries for that iPad and iPhone from iFixit but after a hard-thought I decided to not put any more money into this ecosystem and rather buy a PineTab (which cost cheaper than the replacement parts for the iDevices).

That doesn’t make any sense. It’s not throttling if that’s already what it’s like out of the box. Or is every manufacturer that doesn’t overclock the chips in its devices guilty of throttling?

Your memory isn’t good, but there is a constant stream of misinformation regarding this so I don’t blame you.

The issue was referred to as batterygate for a reason - it was entirely to do with battery condition.

I think it has less to do with battery and more with each OS version packing more features and being more resource-hungry.

>and more with each OS version packing more features and being more resource-hungry.

planned + designed obsolescence

Nobody puts a gun to the head and says "Do a major OS update", right?

Always buy the model with the most RAM and it’ll last a long time. iPhone 6s (from 2015!) is still a perfectly functional phone.

I am running a 6s, can confirm. Battery is a little thirsty, but it runs just fine.

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