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Apple Says It Slows Older iPhones to Save Their Battery Life

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131–140 of 302 posts

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

#133
post #90

I don't get it. An old iPad 2 was running fine card games until we upgraded to IOS 9 a few weeks ago. Now it's almost unusable. Pretty sure we had the same battery before we upgrade, so why wasn't cpu throttled before we upgrade? This looks more like Apple needed to slow down devices to sell new ones and found a really good excuse for it.

There are two issues with older phones running more slowly, and you are probably encountering both of them

1. Newer versions of iOS demand more processing power because they do more (or perhaps do it less efficiently).

2. Old batteries can't deliver as much power.

So an old phone will new version of the OS mores slowly than a new one, regardless of the battery situation.

But, if the battery was marginal but hadn't hit the limit before the upgrade, then you get a double whammy

1. The phone simply can't run a more demanding OS as fast as the old one

2. The increased demand pushes the battery over the limit

At some point, the battery was going to age out anyway, so it was only a matter of time until you hit the second issue. But the upgrade made you hit it sonner rather than later.

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

#134
post #69
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment deserves more attention. And, in fact, means the headline is wrong. Apple is not slowing down devices to extend battery life. Apple is slowing down devices to prevent the thing from crapping out entirely ("unexpectedly shutting down"). Arguably, this does more to prevent obsolescence than plan it. Agreed with @djrogers suggestion to alert the user to the situation. It should not be a user choice. "Last y…

Strange, I have an old HP veer That is 6 years old and it doesn't spontaneously shut down. I have a 3 year old android phone that doesn't spontaneously shut down. What is so special about iPhones and why do they crap out in 2 years?

This post gives us an estimate for what percentage of the iPhones are getting throttled by this issue. I think it's reasonable to use this as a proxy to estimate how many units were at risk of shutting down and it is the minority of units. Happily it appears both of your devices are in the majority of units which don't exhibit this issue.

https://www.geekbench.com/blog/2017/12/iphone-performance-an...

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

#135
post #111

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…

Or make the battery replaceable... It pains me that I effectively have to choose between replaceable batteries and IPXX ratings.... T_T

The easiest way to get an IP rating is to use lots of glue.

If they went the o-ring route, it would take up more volume and would probably require replacement when the phone was opened as damage from dirt/age will make reusing the o-ring hard. Even worse is that resuse isn’t obvious to a layperson as it could be IP69 with a new o-ring and IP67 with reused o-ring.

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

#137

Had the battery in my iPhone SE replaced about an hour ago to test this out Geekbench 4 benchmark before https://twitter.com/invisiblea/status/943439761066397696 And after https://twitter.com/invisiblea/status/943891561661812736

What app or site are you using to test that?

And what battery did you (GP) replace the original with?

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

#138
post #69
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment deserves more attention. And, in fact, means the headline is wrong. Apple is not slowing down devices to extend battery life. Apple is slowing down devices to prevent the thing from crapping out entirely ("unexpectedly shutting down"). Arguably, this does more to prevent obsolescence than plan it. Agreed with @djrogers suggestion to alert the user to the situation. It should not be a user choice. "Last y…

Strange, I have an old HP veer That is 6 years old and it doesn't spontaneously shut down. I have a 3 year old android phone that doesn't spontaneously shut down. What is so special about iPhones and why do they crap out in 2 years?

what's so special is that modern iPhone CPUs are as fast as laptop CPUs (when untrottled).

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

#139
Is it ALL old phones based upon aggregate statistics and a heuristic, or are they monitoring supply voltage. Apple have not, to my knowledge, provided any data to support their claim. And even if they did, batteries vary in quality, even from the same batch. Why not a setting you can override? It is a MASSIVE performance hit. This feels a lot like Epson or whoever blocking old or third party supplies to "assure peak performance". People hate that but put up with this?

Edit: In case the subtext wasn't clear, without battery wear data, evidence of these power related resets, or active opt-in to the throttling, this behaviour is identical to an artificial hobbling of old phones to encourage future hardware sales. Yadda yadda lawyers.

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

#140
post #90

I don't get it. An old iPad 2 was running fine card games until we upgraded to IOS 9 a few weeks ago. Now it's almost unusable. Pretty sure we had the same battery before we upgrade, so why wasn't cpu throttled before we upgrade? This looks more like Apple needed to slow down devices to sell new ones and found a really good excuse for it.

Exactly! I had iPad2 working fine until upgraded to iOS 9. Then I had to upgrade the whole iPad to latest iPad Pro.
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