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Apple Says It Slows Older iPhones to Save Their Battery Life

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11–20 of 302 posts

Re: Apple Says It Slows Older iPhones to Save Their Battery Life

#11
post #7

I got down voted to hell trying to say this here on hacker news. On a side note, does anyone else feel as though there is a lot of astro turfing going on here? A few commenters owe me an apology.

> Don't accuse others of astroturfing or shillage. This always degrades discussion and rarely hits the mark. Email us instead and we'll look into it.

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Re: Apple Says It Slows Older iPhones to Save Their Battery Life

#12

THIS MAKES SO MUCH SENSE. I always thought I was going crazy, thinking my increasingly "old" phone seemed slow. This is really irritating and disingenuous on Apple's behalf - as said above, they should at least add a switch.

My smartphone in 2008 was an iPhone. It slowed down unacceptably and I never bought another piece of Apple hardware again. My 3 phones since then all remained usable past 2 years until I was ready to replace them on my own schedule.

Re: Apple Says It Slows Older iPhones to Save Their Battery Life

#13
WOW. Conspiracy was real the whole time!

Devil's Advocate to spark discussion (I'm not an iPhone owner so no dog in fight):

Apple did the right thing by not putting a switch in to toggle this slowdown[1]. For many iPhone users, the phone is a magic box that gives them videos and apps and (unlike our HN audience) don't have a clue about how it works, nor do they care. If such a switch existed, these same people would see a twitter comment saying "speed up yuor (sic) IPhone by turning off this setting~~~!!!!1" and would just do it.

The result? iPhones dying at a faster rate. Even today, as Android phones are barely updated at all, it is still a desirable selling feature of an Apple iPhone that it will be supported for years. People turning that switch on without understanding the consequences would shorten the life of their devices and then //still// complain about how the device didn't last that long.

I would think that a jailbreak-locked option would work IE you have to know enough about how your phone works to make the change, thus increasing your chances of making an informed decision on whether to shorten its life or not.

[1]Which is different than not telling people about it, which IMO is shady

Edit: remove italics

Re: Apple Says It Slows Older iPhones to Save Their Battery Life

#14
post #3

It's not only to make them run longer - they're reducing the peak demand on the batteries to avoid spontaneous shutdown when the aged battery can't handle the load. This seems like a good idea, and it appears to be well executed (ie it's not apparently based just on age or milage like a crappy car maintenance reminder), but Apple should probably have something in iOS that tells people their phone is running slow beca…

How about just the ability for a user to replace the battery? Should be a law to cut down on ewaste.

Re: Apple Says It Slows Older iPhones to Save Their Battery Life

#16

Should be a switch in the settings. Prefer battery life or prefer performance. One more setting won't kill anyone.

The whole problem is that the batteries can't deliver that performance.

They can throttle the chip to what the battery can deliver or it will crash. Maybe Apple's more conservative on the throttling, and some amount of performance could still be achieved without a crash, but there's zero chance Apple's putting a "make my phone unstable" switch in Settings.

Re: Apple Says It Slows Older iPhones to Save Their Battery Life

#17
post #10
post #3

It's not only to make them run longer - they're reducing the peak demand on the batteries to avoid spontaneous shutdown when the aged battery can't handle the load. This seems like a good idea, and it appears to be well executed (ie it's not apparently based just on age or milage like a crappy car maintenance reminder), but Apple should probably have something in iOS that tells people their phone is running slow beca…

It does say in iOS that your battery needs to be replaced [1]. Everyone keeps saying they never told anyone about this but they basically announced it to the press with a statement (as well as the notice in iOS) when iOS 10.2.1 was released [2]. [1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207453 [2] https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/23/apple-says-ios-10-2-1-has-...

Millions of people own iPhone's and don't jump up and down meticulously reading every press release or notification. Hell I can't remember the last notification that didn't catch be at a bad time, prompting me to punt it off my screen as quickly as possible.

Re: Apple Says It Slows Older iPhones to Save Their Battery Life

#18
post #10
post #3

It's not only to make them run longer - they're reducing the peak demand on the batteries to avoid spontaneous shutdown when the aged battery can't handle the load. This seems like a good idea, and it appears to be well executed (ie it's not apparently based just on age or milage like a crappy car maintenance reminder), but Apple should probably have something in iOS that tells people their phone is running slow beca…

It does say in iOS that your battery needs to be replaced [1]. Everyone keeps saying they never told anyone about this but they basically announced it to the press with a statement (as well as the notice in iOS) when iOS 10.2.1 was released [2]. [1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207453 [2] https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/23/apple-says-ios-10-2-1-has-...

I read both, and couldn't find any verbiage indicating they limited the cpu speed based upon the condition of the battery. Only that they "fixed a bug" to reduce "unexpected shutdowns."

Re: Apple Says It Slows Older iPhones to Save Their Battery Life

#19
post #3

It's not only to make them run longer - they're reducing the peak demand on the batteries to avoid spontaneous shutdown when the aged battery can't handle the load. This seems like a good idea, and it appears to be well executed (ie it's not apparently based just on age or milage like a crappy car maintenance reminder), but Apple should probably have something in iOS that tells people their phone is running slow beca…

It IS a good idea. My step mom had a high end Samsung phone (not sure exactly which one) and it’s battery degraded enough within a year that it began to shut down randomly a lot.

Re: Apple Says It Slows Older iPhones to Save Their Battery Life

#20
How come that the MASSIVE slowdown of my iPhone 6s occurred after upgrading to iOS11? TBH the spin that Apple is sending out to make us believe that this was all a clever implementation (which it still might be) does not match with the reality that iOS 11 was creating the slowdown of a device that was working 'fine' before. And yes - this 6s is eligible for the battery replacement program and the Geekbench scores also indicate that this device has an issue. tl;dr: it seems that this is not the only explanation of the slowdown. Any thoughts?
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