But this won't happen because reduced battery life is a big direct and indirect(by reducing performance like Apple does with old iPhones) driver of phone upgrades.
What Apple did was clock down the CPU of iPhones with degraded batteries in order to reduce peak load which would otherwise result in crashes that would have made the device borderline unusable below some charge percentage.
Yes, they should have shipped the feature off by default and with a toggle, but the feature itself was amazing as it let already old phones last longer than they otherwise would have.
Apple deserves a lot of shit for their bullshit surrounding replacement parts, but this particular topic is something they get an undeserved amount of shit for in my opinion.
Still to this day people on HN repeat it like it's fact, and when you correct them, shift the goalposts to "well they didn't TELL people."
Apple provides a very comprehensive user manual that ships as a pre-installed app on every phone. There are large headings describing the latest features right when you open it.
I don’t recall being unaware of this feature before it became a “scandal”, but I’m one of those weirdos that reads the release pop-ups.
What do you do now? Your phone is laggy and there's no setting to disable the feature or a way to revert to an old iOS version. You go to the store and they don't tell you anything about a battery replacement, but instead suggest a new iPhone!
The feature was useful, the implementation wasn't. The issues weren't caused by the user not reading the changelog.
You keep repeating this, but battery replacements were a thing before this whole debacle. I got them a few times, I think they were like $79 (yes definitely more money than the sus extended batteries I'd buy off eBay for my HTC Evo). I realize society collectively forgot about them once the back stopped coming off the phone, but surely a tech savvy hackernews would realize that they couldn't use the same battery forever without replacement.
I don't blame him for recommending a new phone, after all apparently Apple didn't inform all their stores about the change, so they probably had no idea that the fix was a cheap battery replacement.
They knew that old devices (especially common with the well-selling iPhone 6) would fail at peak demand, and wanted to address that, but they probably didn't have an accurate figure of exactly how many devices would be covered by the feature as initially configured.
That it took them as long as it did to react to the resulting situation is unfortunate, but could probably be explained by corporate culture at Apple, they don't generally like to admit mistakes (see the Trash Can Mac Pro press meeting a few years back).
In the end it was just a huge PR fuckup, if they had properly considered how many devices would be affected they would have realised they needed to communicate more clearly, they could have avoided lawsuits and honestly if they had played their cards right from the get go they would probably have received praise instead of backlash, but instead here we are 7 years later still explaining how battery chemistry affects integrated circuits on technical forums.
I'm an avid reader of pop-ups and release notes. They didn't tell people.
From people I've talked to, it seems like the VAST majority of people are under the impression that Apple does this as a planned obsolescence practice.
In fact, this thread is the first one I've come across where most people seem to get the point of the feature
Notably, this will no longer be an issue on modern iPhones because they have much more reasonable batteries.
Apple underspecced the batteries in iPhones and then hid the software kludge they made to hide that fact. That's why the reaction is warranted.
Designing a product to fail gracefully is good engineering practice.
Apple made the right decision to make the phone go slower instead of crashing. Somewhere out there, there's someone making a 911 call on an iPhone with an old battery.
- The phone became slow, laggy animations, etc.
- I had no idea what was causing the problem.
- There was no way to return to an older iOS version or a way to disable the new behaviour.
- I went to an Apple store and was told that I probably should get a new phone.
I'm sure they had some good intentions, but in practice they degraded my experience too much and profited from new iPhone sales that didn't need to happen. Apple had to be sued first to add a setting to disable this feature and start offering cheap battery replacements (by then I had already moved on).
From the implementation of this feature to the way they handled it, it was all Apple. Samsung had nothing to do with my bad experience.
Not everyone was affected this much by the change, but some where. And that's a problem.
My 2008 MacBook Pro was able to detect battery problems one year before they started to manifest physically. They did it by adding another controller and an independent firmware to the battery itself, but there was no better tech at that time.
M powered MacBooks added auto hold-off (discharge to 80%, keep it there) or postpone charge (because the battery is used too rarely), to the list of tricks they know, and these are just the visible ones to the user.
Where? AFAIK this is a feature you need a third party app like Aldente for. The OS does not offer any way to control battery charging level. Yes, it tries to be smart and guess when you need full charge and sometimes decides to charge to only 80% but that doesnt work for all users except the ones with very regular routines and there is no manual control.
Sometimes it flat out refuses the charge. Then I disconnect and use the battery until 30% or so. Then charge when convenient (clarification: It'd possibly charge if I hit a certain percentage, but I always disconnected voluntarily, to give a good use to battery. I lasts a day. Why not?).
My MacBook Air M1 has 165 cycles in 3 years, at 90% of design capacity. I think this is a very solid management of the battery for a computer used every day literally.
My MacBook Pro is at ~85% after 8 years. I don't remember total cycles now.
I find running on battery, lots of things are throttled or disabled. CPU is slower for example. That's probably a good reason for why not.
FWIW, the performance and CPU features are the same on Mx based MacBooks whether they're plugged in or not.
> M powered MacBooks added (...)
Things that Lenovo laptops have had for a generation?
It was also present in HP and Dell's business notebooks for quite some time, but again, it's not smart. Just a pre-defined percentage.
Apple manages maximum charge capacity automatically depending on the way you use your computer.
For this to be happening in 2023 means that some manufacturers at least, seem to be not managing this potential problem at all.
Every company makes big mistakes. Also Apple once built laptops with self-cooking GPUs, a couple ones very fragile keyboards, a series with too-sensitive screen coatings.
We can write tons of problems with every producer. The most important metric is whether they're learning from that or not. As far as I can see Samsung and Apple learnt their lessons.
Apple cannot predict where you are going to use laptop on AC power at home or whether you are going somewhere and need a full charge. So manual control is better.
Yes, it does. Even my 7 years old iPhone X does it. I use some features at very specific times, and it suggests me "do you want to do X?" around the time I do that. So the models work well.
Also, the phone generally enables optimized charging if I put it to charge too early. Scheduling to finish a couple of hours before I wake.
You're conceding that you have a predictable schedule. Folks on the other side of this (who believe it can't work nearly as well as manual control) don't have a predictable schedule. Think of it like {hybrid workers who use a desk all day the same 3 days a week, and are nomads the other 2 days a week, and the ML system can figure this out} vs {on-site workers who use a desk all day 5 days a week, but are nomads a few random days a year, which always catches the ML system off guard}.
Both are valid. A setting that caps it at 80% unless you hit a button for "I'm about to spend a lot more time unplugged than usual, so prepare the battery for that" is the only way to handle unpredictable circumstances. Just like preparing an EV for a road trip.
My Macs charge routine is way more hectic than my phone's which is very predictable, and both of them guesses what I'm trying to do correctly 99% of the time, and that's fine by me.
What I said is, it's working fine for me, but the system is open to tuning both out of the box (I need this now, please charge), or with some small tools (it was called Aldente IIRC), for differing, equally valid needs.
I don't think we're in disagreement here.
BTW, your nick reads ********. Is it hunter2 or something? ;)
That may or may not be noteworthy. Despite half my family using MacBooks, and some having had major battery problems, I’ve never heard of such a notification as you describe (including at least one where I’d certainly have expected to hear about it). And the similar system SMART for storage devices is notoriously unreliable: I’ve personally had devices with dire warnings chug along merrily for plenty more years, and observed one or two failures that never received any warnings.
Oh, don't bring up SMART. I remember long-testing >100 disks, and most of them passed (it took hours), and all of them failed within 10 days after facing real workloads. We needed a temporary storage for migrating things, but we lost no data, because it was just a copy operation.
It wasn't what Apple was doing that was the problem, it was the fact that they were initially quite secretive about it! People just started noticing their phones slowing down without explanation. Now days iOS tells if your battery no longer supports peak performance, which is the right thing to do.
> "Yes, they should have shipped the feature off by default and with a toggle"
Oh, it should always have been on by default. Most people would much rather their phone run a little slower than risk random crashes and shutdowns! But iOS should have told you about this from the start.
The Lenovo Thinkpad t480s comes to my mind: with factory settings, the CPU was unable to reach its advertised boost frequency nor maintain its max non-boost frequency for more than a few minutes. After 5 to 10 minutes, the machine was usually running at 300/400mhz under its advertised clock speed.
Undervolting helped a lot but could not fix the issue completely, under clocking was the only solution to maintain a consistent clock speed.
It was usually less annoying for me to just disable turbo, and only turn it on if I really needed the boost.
# echo disengaged > /proc/acpi/ibm/fan
So if you are an average user of a Lenovo laptop without technical skills, you probably have a machine that does not meet the advertised performance, and no way to fix it.
End result is your old clothes dryer starts taking longer and longer to dry clothes.
Laptops and phones also notoriously slow down to manage heat, and that is also never told to the user.
A common task that repair shops do to "fix a slow PC" is clean dust from the fans and heatsinks to reduce throttling. Users don't know or understand that this is happening, they just know their system is slow.
Also, Apple already had somewhat of a reputation; this was far from the first time they would do shitty things, blame the users, and/or refuse to communicate what's going on.
It's a classic case of 100% right and 100% fired: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDO24U3hMkU
Apple “You clicked a pop up that said you accepted random shutdowns and reboots due to a degraded battery instead of allowing us to degrade performance to enable a stable experience with a degraded battery.”
How would you explain the above to tech illiterate people? Increase suppose calls because you allowed a user to chose between degraded yet stable performance versus seemly random (to the user) reboots and shutdowns?
That would be transparent and also allow decisions, if AppleCare also allowed for free battery replacement after receiving that message it would be a PR boon, not a kerfuffle.
But you might overestimate technical understanding of people.
"Letting people know" comes with it's own challenges.
There are a lot of choices an OS makes without letting it's users know.
It would be quite overwhelming to communicate all. And in making choice what to communicate mistakes might be made.
Screaming disgrace is a bit exaggerated.
Consider: a pop up saying "Your battery need replacing, it is operating in slow mode to avoid crashes" v people thinking "Damn, my phone is slow - I better buy a new phone"
By itself this is already a problem, but they also decided to not allow you to disable the feature or reverse to an older iOS version. I don't think they informed their Apple store employees either, at least I was told to buy a new phone. They had to be sued first to add a simple setting, ffs!
So yeah, I think the criticism is valid and deserved. I'm sure they had good intentions, but the implementation was shit and not only they created issues for some iPhone users, but also profited with new iPhone sales (not me, that was my last iPhone).
Either Apple did the proper QA of the battery to understand how it would behave as it got to end of life and knowingly put a battery into a $800 phone that wouldn't be functional before the phone would run out of software updates, or they FAILED to do proper longevity testing on the battery of a $800 phone.
It wasn't planned obsolescence when they added that code to keep the older phones working. It WAS planned obsolescence when they put a pitiful and underspecced battery into their $800 phone.
It's just that the manufacturers idea of what "100%" should be generally skews more towards the immediate battery life end of the tradeoff, whereas some users prefer to have "100%" closer to the maximizing long term lifetime end of the scale.
Some devices do let you configure stuff like this - I know my android phone will let you cap max charge at an arbitrary level (although it won't report that level as 100%). Many laptop bioses will have a similar setting (good idea to set this to ~50% if you're using the laptop plugged in all the time, or just using it like a server with a builtin UPS).
Yeah I used to have old Pixel phones as Home Assistant clients on my walls until they all started bulging one by one and I had to treat them as a fire hazard.
I now use Samsung tablets, ironically, that have a cap at 80% feature and they seem to be doing fine.
Yes, this feature is one of the most underrated features on Samsung devices. Massively underrated.
Yes, devices do not charge batteries to 100% as that is directly damaging. And they don't discharge to 0% for the same reason.
So they charge to something slightly less. But that slightly less is for all intents and purposes the only definition of 100% we, as end users, have.
It's like saying that your CPU is actually only running at 70% clock frequency but overclocking it to 100% would require massive cooling and reduce the lifetime to months.
I agree a better definition and preferably one directly comparable to all brands and battery types were available, but I'm not aware of any and I'm sure that even if we had it you wouldn't trivially be able to get that information.
Noone should ever charge to more than 80%. That is short sighted and environmentally moronic. After less than two years a device will have more capacity at 80% than the same battery will have at 100% if it was charged to 100%.
To take the phone example, mine usually ends the day around 85%. I just don't use it too often. But I sometimes absolutely do and would trade months of battery life for not being left without battery in the middle of nowhere. And the 20% can make all the difference.
A few years ago, I rented a car in a foreign country on a foreign continent. It didn't come with a USB port, and I didn't have a cigar adaptor. When I arrived at my destination, at night, my phone's battery was 10%. I sure as hell am happy that it was charged to a "full" 100% instead of dying on me one hour earlier.
Sure, I could have grabbed an external battery or something. Not sure how much environmentally smarter that is, since it would basically rot away in a drawer somewhere, since I would basically never use it.
---
[0] Where does this 80% come from? Would it be even better if I stopped charging at 60%? I rarely use more than 20% of my phone's battery, so that would be largely enough, but I sometimes absolutely do and would hate to have to lug around external batteries "just in case".
Don't forget, "100%" isn't really 100% any more after a year or two of charging to 100% all the time. You've probably lost 20% or so of your battery's capacity and it will be charging slower due to increased internal resistance.
> "Where does this 80% come from? Would it be even better if I stopped charging at 60%?"
Yes, but only marginally better since there's diminishing returns. 80% is generally considered to be the sweet spot that best balances practicality with battery health.
Can you please direct me to where this is possible in MacOS? I can't see any option to configure a charging cap except some "smart" option which has been on this whole time but always charges to 100%.
I was referring to the built-in "Optimised battery charging" feature. When this is active and has decided it will cap charging at 80% [2], you get a "charge to full now" option in the battery menu.
[1] https://apphousekitchen.com
[2] I do agree that this feature sucks and rarely actually works, unless you have a very predictable charging schedule.
I suspect quite a few people do that so it probably is net-good overall, but agree it doesn’t work well if you’re moving around a lot.
But my response was to the parent comment (emphasis mine):
> Noone should ever charge to more than 80%. That is short sighted and environmentally moronic. After less than two years a device will have more capacity at 80% than the same battery will have at 100% if it was charged to 100%.
My point is that I find there are legitimate uses cases for sometimes charging to 100%. And, indeed, those cases are much better served if most of the time I only charge less. In my case, this could be much less (50% of my iphone's battery is more than enough 360 days a year – and I know beforehand when it's going to be one of those 5 remaining days)
Otherwise the opposite is true. Refraining to charge fully makes all the difference and saves you from a tough spot.
Which in turn is why (was a bigger problem before) the sentiment that it doesn't matter how good/bad battery life I have as long as it lasts me a day. Well, if you do a complete cycle every day a year old phone will not last a day anymore...
Shame that seems to be harder and harder to find on new phones.
Many, many confused and complaining posts are to be found on Reddit and elsewhere about this even if it’s explained in the docs and I think next to the setting itself. It should show a notification when it goes to 100%.
It's a really tiny amount, like 101% or 102% is the maximum. It becomes obvious on phones if you have an app that shows battery percentage over time - above 90% on a slower charger (like using USB instead of AC) it tapers off in a curve, even on a brand-new battery.
When charging a lithium battery, your termination point is tied to only one value: voltage. 4.2v per cell is generally considered the maximum safe termination voltage. This is the theoretical 100% charge. And yes, if you keep pushing volts in, it will keep taking them until the call fails catastrophically.
Personally, I use 4.1 as my termination voltage. That's somewhere around 90-95%. You 'lose' a little of the maximum capacity, but lifespan is increased. I find it's fairly common for battery charge controllers to use either 4.1 or 4.2 as their default termination, but it's almost always selectable. You have to make a decision somewhere.
The flaw in this is that you're trading away a banner spec for something that users won't appreciate. You have to decrease the stated capacity and runtime of your battery in exchange for an indefinable amount of extra total lifetime. That's not something that consumers can/will take into account. They just look for the device with the most mAh or runtime.
I honestly don't understand how people worry about their batteries in their devices so much. I give pretty much zero care into how I treat the battery in my devices other than to try to charge them before it drops down too low (which is where most of the damage occurs if you do it repeatedly) and I can only think of 1 or 2 times where my devices battery has worn out before I end up replacing it.
Even with all the nice features apple offers for battery management they still design their phones to have undersized batteries and encourage usage patterns that degrade the battery in ~2 years, when they could just slightly increase the thickness of the phone and increase the lifespan to ~5 years.
Very conservative depths of discharge and charging termination voltages can extend life spans into the 10,000 cycle ranges which is effectively forever for a device with a finite lifespan. And it wouldn't increase the weight of the phone too much: doubling battery capacity isn't doubling the size of the phone or even the battery itself. Just the active material in the battery.
Remember, there are multiple factors when it comes to batteries degrading. Voltage (how far the battery is charged) is one of them, but so is the charging current (how fast) and also the temperature during and outside of charging.
Personally, I usually use slower chargers for my laptops and phones to prolong the device lifetime.
When voltage goes down with temperature, the charge state does not change. But drawing a certain amount of joules will be very different because at lower temperature you'll need more coulombs for the same amount of joules, aka VAh.
And at nontrivial discharge throughput, observed voltage will drop to much lower values than what a snapshot of the current ion-dance state would look like at steady state. This is the "smartphone SoC must not try performance bursts as it used to" scenario.
There were more limitations on cpu speed also. Could turn on the super low power mode (which above setting did), custom max cpu frequency or temperature.
Idk about max battery charge but it was nice to be able to control those things. Could make a battery last much longer and phone would not heat up too much. I considered downgrading to get the many features back.
These are all electronic devices. You can also just put big warnings in software instead of calling it 125%.
It's not any different from filling up a blender, water bottle, etc. to 80% instead of 100% to avoid creating a mess. Sooner or later people will know to avoid charging batteries to 100%.
> that they are reducing the battery life by overcharging
Unfortunately their capitalist asses probably want you to reduce the battery life faster and buy a new device, which helps boost sales, boost revenue, boost shareholder happiness, boost stock price, and ultimately boost CEO net worth
This tactic would work great in a world with only one phone manufacturer.
https://www.cnet.com/culture/iphone-or-android-your-phone-ch...
https://metro.co.uk/2021/12/26/owning-an-android-is-a-major-...
https://www.vogue.com/article/breathless-couples-who-are-not...
Innovating more battery life and leaving 20% battery life on the table sounds extremely pointless for what costs 20-30$ a year but lets you use the device all day instead of just shutting before the end of the day.
If you specifically seek out devices with cheap replaceable batteries, sure. But this isn't the case with a lot of devices.
If you pull statistics you also have to filter out the sub 150 dollar Andoid phones which may well have shorter average usage life.
Even if it were the case, it does not matter. What does matter is the amount of matter that ends up in landfills. As a matter of fact, we should be pushing for better built, longer lasting devices even if it means spending a bit more in the short term.
> It's not because the actual quality would be better.
Second-hand iPhones are all over the place here in a way that Samsung Galaxies are not, even though they are more popular. You can argue that it is not a proof of high quality, but it is at least a proof that build quality is high enough that 4 years old devices are on average in a good enough state to retain a high resale value.
> If you pull statistics you also have to filter out the sub 150 dollar Andoid phones which may well have shorter average usage life.
Which precisely is the problem. “But they were cheap” is a terrible excuse as we keep burning more non-renewable resources and shovel up heaps of electronic waste in landfills. Besides, we need to look at cost per year, not cost per device as a cheap device you have to change often is more costly over the long term. I am not saying only Apple devices can have high build quality, but it seems nobody is pushing OEMs towards that direction in Android-land.
Delay because it's more expensive? How about delay because it's good enough? My iPhone XS is just fine thank you. There's no point in upgrading it yet.
That's not snark. I want things from my phone that an iPhone can't give me.
The battery replacement ecosystem in Android land is pretty dismal.
I couldn't find anyone to replace the battery in my Google Nexus phones, every time I tried, in a major metropolitan area. Ended up having to do it myself.
You can walk into nearly any cell phone shop in the world with an iPhone and walk out with a replaced battery because the staff know them and they stock parts for them.
Source: I replaced my iPhone battery last week.
Maybe if you have a lot of money to waste, but people should have the option to choose
Also, we're talking in the context of a $1000-1200 phone for the base config. 10% of that cost for a replaced battery does not seem outrageous to me.
As someone else pointed out, the cheaper phones Apple sells have correspondingly cheaper battery repair costs.
At some point in the future, we can start mining old landfill.
But yes, it's easier (and more efficient) to recycle before putting them in landfill.
Cobalt, Neodynium and the other rare earth metals, though, those are highly valuable; and the processes to manufacture them are usually toxic. So do it for the rare earth elements, but don't do it for Lithium.
I'll probably get a fairphone next so I don't need to worry about this. But the people with glued-in batteries definitely have to.