they already got caught artificially slowing older iphones on ios updates, remember that?
this is a way to slow older models and get away with it.
this is a way to slow older models and get away with it.
- Slow down the phone so that it still works
- Crash phone immediately
They did fix it by giving people the option, but I wonder how many still opted for "yes, I want my phone to suddenly just die instead of slowing down".
And the fix for all this was a 50€ battery replacement.
'Hey, there's an issue with your battery so we've slowed down your phone to prevent it going off. Please visit your local apple store to address this.' As opposed to misleading them that their phones are old and slow/crashing and they need to buy new ones?
Communication: at no point has Apple tried to communicate "your phone's battery has gone bad, the device now suffers for it" to the user. Even though they obviously knew that this was what was happening.
Trust: with how openly anti-repair Apple was at the time, how can you trust that this was a honest oversight, and not another malicious action designed to prevent people from repairing their devices?
Apple has improved upon both since. But they're still not anywhere near perfect - and it took a lot of getting their shit kicked in by the media, the public and the regulators for Apple to get even this far.
That only covers a few basic repair types, the tooling is clunky (for a reason - those tools are designed to allow cheap-and-replaceable official employees to perform basic repairs to an Apple-acceptable quality) and the parts are hilariously overpriced. But it's considerably better than nothing. They also enabled a few repairs that were previously hard blocked by software, and required some incredibly complex hardware workarounds because of it - like FaceID replacement.
Make no mistake - I have zero faith in this being Apple actually trying to be better. It's much more likely that this was them walking back their "no third party repairs never ever" stance under pressure from consumer rights activists and regulators in places like EU. But it's a change for the better either way - and it would be good to see more of that in the future.
I make no comment here on whether such suspicion is justified. But let’s imagine that the current behavior (showing the battery warning) had been the original behavior. Then people would no doubt have complained that Apple was trying to pressure people into unnecessary battery replacements.
People want to know this is what happens. If a slow down is not communicated, the average person doesn't go "Oh, I need a new battery.". They are going to buy a new phone because their old one is slow.
> - Slow down the phone so that it still works
> - Crash phone immediately
Three, actually:
- Inform the user and provide decent repair and parts."oh we're protecting you. it's not like we have a dozen voltage and temperature sensors, and not like we already throttle when those sensors detect any of the things we're claiming in the excuse" ... and everyone fall for it. geez.
I wonder why... /s
Most phone PCB designs do not account properly for the scenario "battery gone bad leads to undervolting of components" at all, the best you're gonna get is the BMC cutting off everything when the voltage at the battery drops way too much - but that is a failsafe mechanism, the flash, memory and processor chips will have undergone brownout events before the BMC emergency shutdown hits.
We were talking about Apple here. If they don't know that a battery can get discharged, maybe they shall do something else. For a SWE might be ok. For a HWE no.