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iPhone Performance Degrades as Battery Ages

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Re: iPhone Performance Degrades as Battery Ages

#91
post #4

> This will likely feed into the “planned obsolescence” narrative. well, non-replaceable battery and all...

After having retired a couple of phones due to crappy battery life, my most recent phone purchase has a removable battery. I'll probably buy a new battery in ~4 months, when the phone is a year old. I'm happy I decided to follow that path, because I really like the phone (LG G5), and a replacement battery is less than $20 USD.

Re: iPhone Performance Degrades as Battery Ages

#92
post #62
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything his seems like a reaction to the yearly ‘planned obselescense’ stuff where people claim Apple killed their battery life to make them upgrade. People don’t want to lose battery life? Ok, we can adjust so it doesn’t change much over the life of the phone. Of course that just lead to ‘Apple slows your phone down’. You’re right, it’s a tough spot.

Another idea: Apple could pop up a dialog at a certain point saying your battery is sub-optimal (but not doomed) and you should replace it for the best experience. I’m sure that would go over GREAT.

That would cost Apple a lot if those people had Apple Care. Better for Apple if the minority people who perceive a problem come in and ask for a replacement/

Re: iPhone Performance Degrades as Battery Ages

#93
post #8
post #3

How do non-apple devices cope as they age ? Any word on what Nexus, Galaxy or Pixel devices of a similar vintage do? does the performance stay the same but the battery life becomes shorter?

I worked on Android power perf (frequency scaling in particular) for the last 18 months and I'm not aware of any linkage with the battery state, except for the Battery Saver mode. So yeah same perf, just shorter life. There could be something in vendor Android builds I don't know about, but it isn't there in AOSP and almost certainly isn't in Pixel/Nexus.

I vaguely remember the dram and camera clock rates being reduced when the battery SoC went under 40% in the nexus 5, and then when users complained of early shutdowns when using the camera with HDR mode, an update changed it to 60%.

I think I even commented on the bugreport that it would be best to do the frequency scaling based on interrupts from the voltage regulators on board, but that piping all the necessary drivers/events to do that with low enough latency to not cause an under-voltage reset was far more work than was feasible.

Thats also why 60fps video dropped frames at the start of the video if you were recording video with less than 60% battery.

Anyone care to dig out the relevant commit...?

Re: iPhone Performance Degrades as Battery Ages

#94
post #48

I feel like more transparency would have been welcomed, but aside from that this is a "no win" situation, since you have to pick a winner: - Do you degrade performance but leave screen-on time relatively unchanged? - Do you degrade screen-on time but leave performance relatively unchanged? Most Android devices seem to do the opposite (lose screen-on time, but keep performance relatively unchanged). Different people w…

How about a bigger battery? My primary criterion with each iPhone purchase is which has longest battery life.

Or a battery that can be replaced.

Re: iPhone Performance Degrades as Battery Ages

#95
post #3

How do non-apple devices cope as they age ? Any word on what Nexus, Galaxy or Pixel devices of a similar vintage do? does the performance stay the same but the battery life becomes shorter?

I have a Nexus 6P and its battery is going bad. It just shuts down when it reaches 20-30%. Kind of annoying because I never know quite how much battery life I actually have remaining.

That's really strange. Because most/all modern systems build statistics about your battery as it charges and drains, to predict the life left. Without those statistics they'd have no idea how long it will last because it changes over the life of the battery. In Linux you can even see pretty graphs showing "confidence" for each percentage of battery vs "how confident" Linux is of remaining power.

https://www.makeuseof.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/power_s...

My Samsung Android phone shuts down at 5-7% battery life. And the battery dies much faster these days. But it's never "inaccurate." It doesn't jump from 50% to 2% over a course of five minutes.

Other than something else being wrong with your OS, my only guess there would be the battery got bad so quickly the OS hasn't adapted to the new life cycle yet by removing enough of the old datapoints.

Re: iPhone Performance Degrades as Battery Ages

#96

I feel like more transparency would have been welcomed, but aside from that this is a "no win" situation, since you have to pick a winner: - Do you degrade performance but leave screen-on time relatively unchanged? - Do you degrade screen-on time but leave performance relatively unchanged? Most Android devices seem to do the opposite (lose screen-on time, but keep performance relatively unchanged). Different people w…

The solution is a battery you can replace, like every phone used to have.

There aren’t only two solutions to this problem.

(Technically you can still replace the iPhone battery, unfortunately it isn’t trivial like in the bad old days when phones didn’t have high def touch screens.)

Re: iPhone Performance Degrades as Battery Ages

#97
Finally the data to prove what I’ve always felt. I knew my phones were getting slower even on the same iOS versions. I always assumed flash, but suspected that there was a time-based clock slowing... lo and behold! Fucking Apple, I’ll be happy to join the coming class action!

Re: iPhone Performance Degrades as Battery Ages

#98
post #3

How do non-apple devices cope as they age ? Any word on what Nexus, Galaxy or Pixel devices of a similar vintage do? does the performance stay the same but the battery life becomes shorter?

I have a Nexus 6P and its battery is going bad. It just shuts down when it reaches 20-30%. Kind of annoying because I never know quite how much battery life I actually have remaining.

Effectively the same, but it just quickly degrades from 60-0 for me (like 20 mins of just reddit/hn).

100-60 is still decent.

Re: iPhone Performance Degrades as Battery Ages

#99
The problem here isn’t that iOS throttles the CPU when your battery can no longer properly power the phone.

(This is a really nice feature, compared to, e.g., sudden shutdown when voltage drops too low to run the CPU at normal speed.)

The problem is that iOS doesn’t alert you about what’s happening. If it said something like, “Your battery needs to be replaced. Until it is, your phone will run with reduced speed.” Then you would have the information you need to make an intelligent choice.

You have to suspect Apple doesn’t do this because if you don’t know what’s going on you’re likely to assume your phone is just old and needs to be replaced.

Re: iPhone Performance Degrades as Battery Ages

#100
post #99

The problem here isn’t that iOS throttles the CPU when your battery can no longer properly power the phone. (This is a really nice feature, compared to, e.g., sudden shutdown when voltage drops too low to run the CPU at normal speed.) The problem is that iOS doesn’t alert you about what’s happening. If it said something like, “Your battery needs to be replaced. Until it is, your phone will run with reduced speed.” Th…

It does do that.. it tells you your battery needs servicing.
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