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Comment by switch007 | Hacker News Reader

13 was solid AIUI, 14 had and still has battery issues and 15 runs hot and possibly battery issues too?

Let’s play iPhone defect excuse bingo:

- it’s just indexing data it will be ok after a week/month.

"You're using it wrong, it's designed to be used within an Apple™ brand Reality Bubble™, which naturally run cooler than the ambient temperature"

I mean is it wrong? It seems plausible to me: we know it does a lot of stuff in the background to make photos searchable, and afaik that's not really synced. When a phone is suddenly logged into iCloud and has tens of thousands of photos available, is it that implausible that it'd run hot for a while as it analyzes photos?

Not trying to excuse anything here, if you can provide a reason to believe it's not caused by those background processes I'm completely fine with the explanation that iOS is just buggy or the hardware has heat issues. Frankly the behavior does sound pretty bad even if it's "just" the photo analysis thing, the obvious solution would be to 1) make the analysis sync with the photos, and 2) make the background processing slow enough to not notably increase heat/decrease battery life, and 3) have a place in the OS where you can see the progress and tell it to go as fast as possible. Their philosophy of hiding everything from the user doesn't seem to be working well here.

A lot of the indexing should preferably happen when you’re sleeping and you’re plugged in.

We didn't accept "it's just indexing" when Windows Vista laptops slowed down after fresh installs and we shouldn't accept it now on phones.

As a software developer I find it easy to come up with good explanations for things like these, but as an end user, I don't care. My photos are searchable but I don't think I've ever used that feature, I wouldn't want my phone to get hot and waste battery life indexing a picture of a funny tree I took five years ago. Do that stuff while charging overnight, and keep thermals under control while you do it. You don't need a fancy neural processor to detect that I leave my device plugged in at 100% every night, maybe make use of that obvious excess of downtime and processing power.

My 13 Pro Max is basically perfect tbh. I won’t be upgrading until we get a complete screen iPhone with no notch or pill.

I have a 13 Pro Max as well and I've had no issues with it. The battery is certainly not as good as it used to be... I'd say its about about 80%. Only issue though, not even thinking about upgrading.

Edit: Battery efficiency says it's at 87%... feels about 80 though /shrug.

Just buy a new battery when you drop below 80%

Why a bunch of software folks think “eh, it’s just indexing” is reasonable fills me with dread. It’s almost if “indexing” is some excuse to do whatever the hell you want with the hardware in question. This isn’t beyond the realm of engineering to fix if it is the issue. Stop holding it wrong, folks.

Indexing what - photos?

It needs to identify each dog in your photos library to put them in their own album and figure out which dogs or people to suggest for the photo widget.

Which is to say it’s not unimaginable that photo indexing is part of it.

If so it’s a ridiculous trade off to make.

Someone spending $1000-2000 doesn’t want a hot draining phone just so they can search “dog” in their photo album on day 1 or 2.

They should throttle it - much better to tell the user the feature isn’t ready yet or something. Or you know, give the user the choice of running that feature fast or slow - but that would be anathema to Apple.

Ps I am an Apple fan boi. Own lots of Apple devices

They should throttle it more and have a screen in Photos where you can see progress and ask it to go as fast as possible.

they should let you turn it off in device setup (or at all..)

Indexing _everything_.

Indexing is a bitch for battery and heat, even on macOS.

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