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iPhone Performance Degrades as Battery Ages

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Re: iPhone Performance Degrades as Battery Ages

#141
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 disclo…

For people familiar with electronics yes. Most people don’t understand this and think the phone is a cheap piece of crap if the battery starts dying early.

>For people familiar with electronics yes.

Familiarity with electronics doesn't matter. We can't allow vendors to simply simply cover up what are normal behaviors from components given typical operating conditions.

Re: iPhone Performance Degrades as Battery Ages

#142
post #126

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 th…

If I go get an old tablet it will take 5x as long to load google.com as the day I bought it.

Once upon a time, google.com was like five lines of HTML. Google loved to brag about how they didn't even close their tags, because the page still rendered and it saved bytes.

Now I measure it at 300+ lines and 200KB, not counting assets.

Same generally goes for every software you know and love.

Re: iPhone Performance Degrades as Battery Ages

#143
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just you. Take a look at the google trends data for "iphone slow": https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=iphone%2...

That chart would seem to indicate that every release of iOS (usually in September) results in some people experiencing their phone as slow. Except, strangely, for iOS 10 last year, which had an extremely minor bump in comparison to the rest. Anyone know why? Was iOS 10 the "Snow Leopard of iOS releases", with more of a performance focus?

It is my understanding (possibly mistaken?), that after a major upgrade iOS reindexes spotlight metadata. This is done in the background, but drains battery and kind of makes the device perform a bit more slowly. Same day right after an upgrade, my phone tends to be a bit pokey and the battery drains pretty quickly. Next day after an upgrade, my phone usually "feels" fine again and battery life is back to normal.

Re: iPhone Performance Degrades as Battery Ages

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It doesn’t defeat the purpose of the thinness, most obviously because screen protectors and cases are optional.

Re: iPhone Performance Degrades as Battery Ages

#145
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Other than:

1. Allow performance to degrade

2. Allow longevity to degrade

3. Allow the battery to be replaced

4. Some revolutionary battery technology that doesn't degrade??

What solutions are you thinking of?

Re: iPhone Performance Degrades as Battery Ages

#146
post #76
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My 2011 MacBook Air has been saying this for YEARS

I know they do it when the battery gets really bad, they could move it up to happen sooner. I just imagine it would fit into the planned obsolescence narrative too easily.

My 2014 MBA has recently started saying this, but I haven’t noticed any sudden change in battery life, I still get 5-6 hours.

Re: iPhone Performance Degrades as Battery Ages

#147
post #104
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…

iPhones haven’t increased monotonically. The iPhone 5 was significantly lighter than the 4s, which was by far my favorite feature of that upgrade. Then they started creeping up, which the exception of the 7 (which was slightly lighter than the 6s) and the SE (which is essentially the 5 form factor).

The iPhone X is significantly heavier than any previous (non-plus) iPhone, which is by far my biggest complaint about it.

Re: iPhone Performance Degrades as Battery Ages

#148
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.

A larger battery isn’t going to solve the problem of degradation, unless they limited battery life in software until the battery degraded below that limit, which would be absurd.

Re: iPhone Performance Degrades as Battery Ages

#149
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This post is written as if it wasn't Apple that introduced the hard-glued battery. They made a consumable hard to replace As others have pointed out in this thread the batteries aren’t hard to replace; this is just not something you can do directly as a user. That probably makes sense; it’d be difficult to make a super-thin smartphone while at the same time provide an easy way to replace each part.

The problem isn't necessarily the replacement, even though it's certainly not for a large majority of iPhone customers. The problem is sourcing the battery in the first place. Apple certainly isn't supplying any of them. In the best case you get one that works properly, if you're unlucky you might get one that has lower capacity, and if you're very unlucky you might just get one that puffs up and catches on fire.

They’re not user replaceable. Apple and their certified shops will absolutely repair the battery for you, although I don’t know how many generations of iPhones they support.

Re: iPhone Performance Degrades as Battery Ages

#150
post #31
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…

Apple says that battery replacements are $79.

https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/battery-power

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