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Comment by theshrike79 | Hacker News Reader

It's not a matter of "charging more often". The phone just shut down when the battery was somewhere between 0-40%

Source: had two 6S's in the family. In the cold it could just suddenly shut down mid-call from 60% battery.

Indeed; while I've not had this specific issue with the phones, I do still have a mid-2013 MacBook Air lying around (it's now too old to realistically sell), and the battery on that was so worn by the time I got an M-something to replace it that would go from "fine" to "emergency shutdown" during boot if I forgot to plug it in. And then report something like 20% if I plugged it in and immediately booted it again.

Then the battery percentage is miscalibrated. The solution to that is to recalibrate the battery level, so that the old 40% is the new 0%.

It's not like the battery is actually empty. The phone is still able to run at 40% if it limits CPU power draw. As long as the throttling curve is accurate to the battery quality, it's all upside. A slow device is better than a turned off device. And if you want to keep your phone above 40% charge so it runs faster, go for it.

The root problem was not the throttling, it was the phone's inability to run at expected speed after a couple years.

The root problem is that Apple won't let you replace your battery.

However they applied it to all phones of that model, not just ones with degraded batteries

No, it was dynamic based on voltage. iPhones with worn batteries had higher performance at full battery and swapping the battery with a fresh replacement restored full performance even at low battery percentage. In fact this is how the slowdown was discovered: someone replaced their iPhone battery with a non-genuine replacement and it got noticeably faster.

you are still missing the point.

USER should chose that. not apple.

not all of them shut down, someone might get a battery replacement.

What apple should've do is to introduce a toggle, give a warning in notification. and in case of crash, display it again.

Apple (IMO rationally) chose that people would prefer a working phone, one they can use to call emergecy services, for example, to a phone that just suddenly dies.

After the massive hissy fit the Internet threw (along with lawsuits), they added a switch. Now you can choose to have your phone suddenly die.

But the legend lives on that "Appple slowed down phones permanently!!" - even though the fix for that is a 40€ battery swap that takes 30 minutes in any mall phone repair shop.

Again, let user chose. apple sold a product, it's out of their hands to decide what users do with it.

Maybe i want to use the device in a way that's 100% connected to the charger and repurpose it.

It's not apple's business what I'm doing with it

If you left It hooked up to a charger, their fix would never have affected you. It only slowed down the cpu when the risk of catastrophic shutdown was imminent.

I like a toggle for features like this, but it was a pretty standard user experience / reliability choice imho.

what if i want to do that AFTER fix was applied?

what if you replace battery AFTER the fix was applied? you can't rollback.

again, it's about user's choice. it's not apple's device, but whoever bought it. they shouldn't be even allowed to DECIDE which option is better. user should be able to pick whichever they want to go with.

With a new battery, the throttling goes away. The cpu throttling only kicks in if your battery condition is poor, and then only at lower charge levels where the risk of unplanned power loss is imminent.

I get it, but if you’re going to accept binary blob updates from a manufacturer at all, this one wasn’t bad.

If there was a toggle, Would you really run your phone in “reckless disregard for battery condition” mode?

Because that is what this fixed, a flaw in the firmware where the power management subsystem made incorrect assumptions about the battery condition. All new phones come with this baked in and working properly, so your phone doesn’t randomly die in the middle of calls when your battery gets old.

People pitchforked over this update without understanding what it was designed to do. If your phone has a good battery, it does not throttle the cpu. It just adjusts the power management profiles to reflect battery aging.

Yes this would have been better.

But the way they did it was far from malicious. It only affected users who were actually in danger of an emergency shutdown, during times when the shutdown was imminent. While I don’t want anybody diddling my firmware without giving me a choice, this particular issue was really a nothing burger in the end.

It was discovered when it became apparent that replacing a defective battery made the phone faster. Seems like a standard reliability / user experience fix to me. Not Many people would choose the “don’t adjust system power consumption to prevent unplanned shutdowns when the battery is about to fail” toggle.

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