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iPhone Performance Degrades as Battery Ages

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Re: iPhone Performance Degrades as Battery Ages

#121

Post by kalleboo »

disconnected wrote: post #77
plushpuffin wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have a similar situation. My Android (1st Gen Moto G, running Lineage OS, about 3 years old) shuts down once the battery level hits 15%. You can actually see it change from 15% to 1% for one brief moment before it shuts down. Sure, the battery is old, but this behavior is unlike the behavior of any other OS/device I've seen. I've seen some laptops with seriously messed up batteries and as far as I can remember, the…

My old MacBook Pro battery got so bad that it would jump down and back up 20% randomly.

Re: iPhone Performance Degrades as Battery Ages

#122

Post by bri3d »

UncleEntity wrote: post #90
tormeh wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Li-ion batteries also last longer when kept between 30% and 90%. Several car manufacturers don't let you completely charge or expend your battery for this reason.

I wonder how much driving style effects that too, racing around vs Driving Ms. Daisy?

Discharging lithium batteries at a high C rate (C = Instantaneous Draw / Capacity) causes a different form of degraded life than storage at a high state of charge. And the major killer of lithium batteries is heat, which Tesla are known to manage well.

The biggest killer, though, is storage with the graphite electrode more than 50% lithiated - there is a gigantic step-up in capacity fade when batteries are stored with the State of Charge over around 90%, which Tesla are very smart to avoid.

http://jes.ecsdl.org/content/163/9/A1872.full

Re: iPhone Performance Degrades as Battery Ages

#123

Post by userbinator »

raz32dust wrote: post #118
Someone1234 wrote: post #6

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…

I am sure they could make an iPhone with replaceable batteries. I actually wouldn't mind paying $100 every 18-24 months for a genuine iPhone battery replacement if the perf and battery life is restored with that. But of course they won't. If iPhone X lasted 5 years with the same perf and battery life with two $100 battery replacements, I would happily shell out $1200 for it. But I know it won't last more than 2 years…

Of course Apple can make an iPhone with a replaceable battery. A small Chinese company made an Android-based iPhone 4/5 clone with one, and also the option of having a 50% larger battery with a slightly thicker phone:

http://www.jiayu-store.com/jiayu-g5-quad-core-mtk6589-4-5-in...

https://www.gizchina.com/2013/11/07/jiayu-g5-unboxing-hands-...

The Jiayu also has dual SIM, microSD, USB, and costs a fraction of the Apple while having a more rigid and expensive housing (stainless steel, not aluminium.) Apple could, if they wanted to, make a phone with as much user-friendly features if not more, but they deliberately chose not to.

Re: iPhone Performance Degrades as Battery Ages

#124

Post by slantyyz »

yoodenvranx wrote: post #50
pbreit wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Apple has decided that people want to buy razorthin phones and there is just not way to fit a large battery in there. I wish there were phones built like the old IBM thinkpads. Bulky, square, ugly but also indestructible and fully user servicable with replaceable batteries.

>> Apple has decided that people want to buy razorthin phones

I wonder what percentage people who buy those razorthin phones end up adding a millimeter or more to their phones by adding tempered glass screen protectors and cases over them. IMO, that defeats the purpose of the thinness.

Re: iPhone Performance Degrades as Battery Ages

#125

Post by sithadmin »

lallysingh wrote: post #101
delecti wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think out of the two options, Apple picked the far more deceptive one, or at least the one that will be perceived to be deceptive (which IMO is the same thing). Few people would be surprised that batteries degrade over time, eventually causing noticeable drops in battery life, many people seem surprised that performance is intentionally and artificially reduced over time.

I completely disagree. Apple chose to have the phone continue to work all day. That will keep it useful more than being fast. A better option is a larger battery, but without that, I think they make more customers happy than I'd they did the alternative.

Nothing you've expressed is an effective counterclaim to the assertion that Apple chose a more deceptive route to dealing with the inevitable degradation of batteries in its devices.

On balance, the expected behavior for an aging phone is to suffer from decreased battery life as total battery cycles increase. Apple instead has chosen to decrease system performance to hide diminished battery life, and failed to disclose this. This kind of behavior wouldn't be tolerated in other market segments. Can you imagine the public backlash against an auto manufacturer that shipped a vehicle which intentionally decreased performance as its fuel tank drained in order to boost their 'maximum range' metric, but never disclosed this 'feature' to the public?

Re: iPhone Performance Degrades as Battery Ages

#126

Post by habosa »

Can someone explain to me why (outside of this one issue) phones get so slow over time? As a professional programmer I though I understood computers but I clearly don't.

What's going on my phone that it grinds to a halt? Why does a factory reset sometimes help, but sometimes not?

It can't just be that the workloads are more resource intensive. If I go get an old tablet it will take 5x as long to load google.com as the day I bought it.

Re: iPhone Performance Degrades as Battery Ages

#127

Post by derefr »

ac29 wrote: post #104
derefr wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not thin; light. Phone makers make phones lighter so that people can hold them up longer before their hands get tired. A battery is massy, however dense it is, whatever the shape. You can only add so much battery before your phone gets too heavy to comfortably hold. (Unlike, say, an external camera lens, which increases volume but not really mass.) Thinness is just a side-effect of lightness, because the alternative—…

>Not thin; light. An interesting thought, but is it true? I cant really think of people complaining of arm fatigue from holding up a ~150-200g phone -- the effort of holding up your arm and hand alone are going to be substantially more than additional weight of the phone. I also dont really see any evidence of phone manufacturers decreasing weight over the years, at least with a quick review of Apple's iPhones, which…

They don't complain, no. It's not a user-requested feature. But it's been observed (in at least one internal study I know of) that people just end up using their phones longer, the lighter they are.

And increasing the length of a phone use-session is important, because it "unlocks" experiences people wouldn't otherwise bother with, that might then increase their total satisfaction with the ecosystem, and so increase brand loyalty. For example, some people just don't want to read books on their phones... but hand them a lighter phone, and they suddenly change their minds. They don't realize that that's the difference; it just is. And this might be the first device that got them to read e-books—which means they now associate the positive feelings of reading books in situations they wouldn't have otherwise been reading, with your device.

> which have definitely increased in weight over the past decade

They do increase, but only to a point; far less than if it weren't an optimization problem between increasing battery mass to power the features promised, vs. decreasing total mass.

Also of note is the fact that as phones are made more durable, people use cases less, which decreases total in-hand weight. So switching various pieces from plastic to aluminum, or one type of glass to another, may be a win even if it increases the base mass of the phone, as long as it decreases the probability that the user will feel the need to buy a case.

Re: iPhone Performance Degrades as Battery Ages

#128

Post by userbinator »

derefr wrote: post #31
leeoniya wrote: post #4

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

It's replaceable, just not as a DIY. Apple encourages people to take their phones into Apple stores/authorized dealers to get the battery replaced. (Also, the repair is free if the battery's capacity has declined to <80% while under warranty. If you pay for two-year AppleCare+ [$99], you've basically pre-paid for a free battery replacement [normally also $99] at the two-year mark, as long as you've used—abused?—your…

What people usually mean (and it used to mean only this) by a "removable"/"replaceable" battery is that you can change the battery entirely by hand in less than a minute, without needing any tools. Until recently, this was possible with just about every other smartphone except Apple's.

Re: iPhone Performance Degrades as Battery Ages

#129

Post by plaguuuuuu »

endorphone wrote: post #60
izacus wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most Android devices have rather severe issues with flash degradation (due to use of cheaper chips, controllers and connection... cheap MMC controllers are still very standard) which makes them practically unusable after a few years.

Most? Absolute nonsense. The Nexus 7 have a small issue that was resolved when Google added TRIM support for Android. That was years ago. I have a long history with almost every Android device. The device doesn't get slower, the battery life just gets terrible.

My Nexus 6P's performance has degraded considerably over the past couple of years. It's actually quite laggy now. A few of my friends report the same with their 6Ps. To be fair I haven't tried factory resetting it in a while, although I shouldn't need to do that in the first place..

Re: iPhone Performance Degrades as Battery Ages

#130

Post by asimpletune »

ohyes wrote: post #115
jamesrom wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't a solution. It's a trade off like every other decision.

Yeah thats true it’s a tradeoff, but by that definition there are no solutions to anything. So I’d argue it’s both a solution and a tradeoff.

There are definitely still solutions.
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