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Comment by Reason077 | Hacker News Reader

> "What Apple did was clock down the CPU of iPhones with degraded batteries in order to reduce peak load"

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.

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>People just started noticing their phones slowing down without explanation.

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

Well, duh. You're holding it wrong. /s

I never could get that to not work. No matter what I did the signal didn't degrade.

because by the time you tested they had already boosted signal power beyond all guidelines

Thin hands and hollow bones?

I wonder how many products have components that downgrade under specific situations and they never explicitly tell the customer - and most customers don’t ask because it’s “complicated tech” they don’t want to know about it.

I think a lot of laptops do this because their cooling system is too weak for the CPU.

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.

IMO, at least with x86, there is a point where it simply doesn’t make sense to cram higher clocks into a laptop. The last Intel MBP could be had with an i9, and IME if you left turbo enabled, even at idle the fans were annoyingly loud. If you pushed it, you’d get a quiet jet engine as they struggled to keep temps just below 95 C.

It was usually less annoying for me to just disable turbo, and only turn it on if I really needed the boost.

Thinkpads, for a long time have had a fan speed that's possible, but never reached by the firmware's automatic mode. On Linux, this sets the fan to its true maximum:

    # echo disengaged > /proc/acpi/ibm/fan

I use the thinkfan utility to run the fan more aggressively, including 'disengaged' over 70C.

How's your hearing? If any left.

I put in foam-tipped earbuds if I'm doing a big compile or something, but the Ryzen 6850u runs pretty cool most of the time.

Indeed, and for the t480s we could undervolt the CPU to help with thermals but these are not normally accessible to the end user.

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.

This is likely the case with all but gaming laptops. Most users won't care about performance under consistent, heavy workload, as much as it loading that .docx in 2 instead of 6 seconds. That burst of performance is what makes the system feel snappy and fast. If the user is happy, it was well worth the money too.

plenty. But normally the degradation is more gradual and automatic. For example, as the innards of your clothes dryer gets clogged up with lint, at some point the thermal cutout will cut in and out to briefly reduce the heat.

End result is your old clothes dryer starts taking longer and longer to dry clothes.

A lot of laptops do this when running on battery power. Do they pop up notices telling users they are running in reduced power mode?

I recall mine sometimes doing so if I unplug while it is on. Never occurs while it is booted on battery.

Laptops and phones also notoriously slow down to manage heat, and that is also never told to the user.

Clog the heatsink on just about any PC and it'll happily and silently thermal throttle itself.

That stretches the definition of silent. On MacOS you need command line utilities or third party software to observe throttling, but on Windows this information is easily viewable in the performance tab of the task manager, and Linux exposes this information in /proc.

Being buried away in technical debugging tools is 'silent' for 99.9% of users.

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.

Maybe this is just me but I always assumed USB cables had indefinite lifespan until I happened to read a datasheet.

Maybe.

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.

When this came out, most people were distrustful because it was a secret. It was seen as a way to force device upgrades, not save devices. If they had been transparent, even in documentation, (and allowed opt out) it would have curbed some of this backlash.

It may well have, but that doesn't mean the backlash was reasonable.

I believe it was perfectly reasonable based on the information at hand. Apple gave no reason to believe otherwise and behaved in a way that appeared deceptive.

I was an iPhone 6 user at the time and an Apple fan. I think the secrecy surrounding the move means that the backlash was reasonable.

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"

iPhones with degraded batteries have the tendency to shutdown on peak loads. Default is fine but only after a big fat pop-up with the option to deactivate it.

As if the typical user (not anyone that browsers hn) actually reads the _big fat popup_ and would just click through anyways. With no care or worry about what that pop up said or the implications.

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?

Because one looks like a hardware defect and the other like a problem of old age and is "easier" to accept for most people.

Default to speed and then the first time a device has crashed "your battery has worn to a level that we will have to start slowing down your device or it will keep crashing, will you accept these crashes or slow your device?"

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.

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