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Comment by florakel | Hacker News Reader

Can you provide evidence for your claim? Most people take this statement at face value and I don’t understand why. I do some volunteer work supporting elderly people that have issues adapting to a digital only world and I am always pleasantly surprised by the performance of their old iPhones all the way down to the 8 (old phones they get from their kids)

Also the coming iOS 27 release supposedly has some big performance improvements for all supported models that people have verified in the beta releases even with the iPhone 11: https://www.macworld.com/article/3160623/apple-finally-figur...

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Apple is still paying out the 500 million dollars they lost in a lawsuit about this exact practice.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67911517

Apple admitted to slowing down iPhones to keep the batteries from failing, and agreed to stop doing it and created a new battery replacement plan. I’ve personally experienced the benefit of getting the battery on Apple devices replaced which made them behave like new again. There’s a reason old Apple devices hold their value a lot better than competing manufacturers.

It was a pretty terrible controversy at the time but I think the battery health settings pane we got out of it was a good compromise and a net positive. What would be even better would be fully user-replaceable batteries.

To be more precise, the phones weren’t slowed down to keep the batteries from failing, they were slowed down to maintain stability and stop random crashes. As batteries age they lose their peak voltage capability, so you’re basically undervolting your components unless you slow them down.

They hold value now. They didn’t if we go back to before those lawsuits. Apple can blow smoke wherever it wants, but that 500 million loss isn’t about battery health.

As an aside, I have this lovely tower from France, barely used, scrap price should be very high. Priced to sell?

Every time I upgrade iOS past a few major versions there is significant slow down. I don’t think it’s done on purpose, it’s just that software grows more demanding over time.

> software grows more demanding over time.

Nah. Adding more features to software doesn’t make software run slower. The problem is that software developers only optimise enough to make it run fast on our own computers. Because we keep getting new computers, we get lazier over time and software gets slower.

Electron is the most obvious example of this sort of thing, but examples are everywhere once you start looking.

That may be true but it did get slower. Maybe new fancy UI effects, etc.

Apple also seems hellbent on fully utilizing all available space on the low end model. IOS+ System Data is about 30GB.

The original iPhone had a 4GB model and had space left over for the user to use!

> That may be true but it did get slower.

Yes. Microsoft is scrambling at the moment because the macbook neo only has 8gb of ram and runs great. Windows 11 can't compete on that hardware because it's so bloated.

I find it strange given microsoft made windows 3.11, which ran fine on computers with just 4mb of ram. Windows 11 is of course more complex than windows 3.11. But not so much that it should need literally 2000 times as much ram.

In some ways, the memory apocalypse is a great thing. The windows start menu should never have been made in javascript and react. I'm hoping our industry uses this as a push to make our software small and fast again. If ram is 5x more expensive, we should aim to make 2gb of ram be more than enough for regular computing tasks.

TIL that the Recommended section of the Start menu uses React Native. What a world. Why...??

Windows XP (NT lineage) was easily stripped down to less than 50-100MB of both memory and disk space.

I wonder if the computing requirements of windows scale exponentially? It looks like it.

I suspect if we graphed them, they’d pretty perfectly match the computers that were available. Ie, I think windows is optimised just enough to run on the low end hardware of each generation.

There always was speculation that the “WinIntel” monopoly intentionally did exactly this!

Exactly! Having 256MB RAM used to be quite luxurious back in the day…

I agree, it’s not a natural phenomenon per-se and it is getting worse. I think this consumer hardware problem will actually help get us back on track, to a degree.

Apple is known to slow older devices intentionally. They have admitted it.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67911517

That’s the literal truth, but the subtlety behind it was that CPU spikes combined with low voltage batteries were causing phones to shut off. Apple’s slowing down the phone down was nominally because customers prefer slightly slower phones to phones that shut off unexpectedly. Should they have announced this as a feature and had a toggle switch to allow users that preferred the option to disable it? Of course. But I don’t necessarily think they did the wrong thing.

Thank you for the sanity. This is like being being mad at Ford because a 20 year old truck runs worse than a new one, and they’d want some engine design that would make it rev in to redline (and blow up while driving) to keep the original horsepower.

The devices were slowed because aging batteries creates unstable performance. It wasn't done to intentionally make them obsolete.

You say that like what they were doing was a bad thing. It was a feature.

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