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Apple faces lawsuits after admitting it slows down aging iPhones

abc.net.au

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Re: Apple faces lawsuits after admitting it slows down aging iPhones

#91

Post by wojcikstefan »

zwily wrote: post #79
wojcikstefan wrote: post #47

Before iOS 11 my 3 year old iPhone 6 behaved perfectly fine. After the upgrade it's so painfully slow it's basically unusable. For example, the Messages app maintains a lag of a few characters when typing, the Camera app freezes for ~5 seconds every time you open it, each tap on the screen has a perceivable delay, etc. My battery life hasn't been a problem over the last 3 years and I have not experienced my phone ove…

The throttling code change happened in 10.2.1, not 11.

Thank you for the clarification. That means my phone's performance after the iOS 11 upgrade dropped due to something other than the battery-related throttling. Not sure if that's good news or not...

Re: Apple faces lawsuits after admitting it slows down aging iPhones

#92

Post by wojcikstefan »

scarlac wrote: post #54
wojcikstefan wrote: post #47

Before iOS 11 my 3 year old iPhone 6 behaved perfectly fine. After the upgrade it's so painfully slow it's basically unusable. For example, the Messages app maintains a lag of a few characters when typing, the Camera app freezes for ~5 seconds every time you open it, each tap on the screen has a perceivable delay, etc. My battery life hasn't been a problem over the last 3 years and I have not experienced my phone ove…

> I do not believe Apple shipped the slowdown to "protect my battery" So you believe they only slowed down your phone to have you buy a new phone and hoped not to get caught? My GF and I were affected by the voltage issue on iPhone 6 & 6S. If Apple can fix it by limiting voltage, it will give a better experience. Alternative is literal data loss which I consider much worse. BUT: They do need to tell users about this…

> So you believe they only slowed down your phone to have you buy a new phone and hoped not to get caught?

I don't feel comfortable speculating about their real intentions. Regardless, my main qualm is that they made my user experience worse without warning me about it during the upgrade nor providing the exact reason for it. I guess we can both agree then it's primarily a communication issue.

Re: Apple faces lawsuits after admitting it slows down aging iPhones

#93

Post by garyrob »

alecthomas wrote: post #29

My wife and I both just upgraded our iPhone 6's because they became unusably slow after iOS 11. Prior to the upgrade they had been running fine with no issues. We tried many things including disabling all background app usage, full wipe and restore, etc. My wife eventually took hers into the Apple store and they said they didn't know why it was slowing down but that she shouldn't have upgraded and that there was noth…

Why not just replace the battery rather than get new phones? My iPhone 6's lightning port broke around the time iOS 11 appeared, so I used the insurance we had on it to get a replacement. The replacement was another iPhone 6, with a new battery.

That new battery is working fantastically well for me under iOS 11. I have gotten through 2 days straight of use without a recharge. No exaggeration. It happened to be relatively light use, but it wasn't in low-power mode, and it did everything I wanted it to do for 2 days.

Re: Apple faces lawsuits after admitting it slows down aging iPhones

#94

Post by washadjeffmad »

simonbarker87 wrote: post #6
chipperyman573 wrote: post #2

I really like Linus' (Sebastian, not Torvalds) thoughts about this: https://youtu.be/TJUeHmdzSx4?t=11m22s Basically, Apple chose to tune the phones to run at a dangerously high configuration to increase benchmarks, knowing that the battery will degrade like this (and that when the iphone X2 comes out, nobody will be talking about this, instead they'll be talking about how much faster the X2 is than the X). His exact…

If Apple slowed the phone down upfront then people would complain that Apple were throttling as the user is “too dumb to look after their battery properly” so instead they are doing when they can point to a proven need to throttle the device. This feels like a no win situation for Apple unless they had/will put in “throttle my phone so it doesn’t go weird” switch in settings. Side note: we’ve known for years that ham…

Not quite the issue. Batteries have known charge-loss curves, and they lose capacity in a way that can be predictably engineered for. This is why during the first month or so, they seem to stay on for days barely losing charge, then they seem to keep on about a day or two at general use after that.

So the battery loses down to maybe 90% capacity very quickly, then falls a little more slowly to somewhere around 70% by the next year or so, and will much more slowly lose after that.

But engineers that choose the batteries and design the electronics know this, so they plan the phone around the battery having that 65-85% capacity, never the 100%. That's what I think Apple did knowingly wrong and against good conventions.

Apple designed those iPhones in a way that either prematurely decreased the life and ability of the batteries they chose to power them (evidenced by the shut-offs), or they used inferior batteries that unpredictably or improperly lost the ability to maintain the required draw. That they only issued the scaling patch after shut-offs became an issue tells me that this was an engineering failure, whether by Apple, ATL, or TLB- not user error.

Re: Apple faces lawsuits after admitting it slows down aging iPhones

#95

Post by frik »

chipperyman573 wrote: post #2

I really like Linus' (Sebastian, not Torvalds) thoughts about this: https://youtu.be/TJUeHmdzSx4?t=11m22s Basically, Apple chose to tune the phones to run at a dangerously high configuration to increase benchmarks, knowing that the battery will degrade like this (and that when the iphone X2 comes out, nobody will be talking about this, instead they'll be talking about how much faster the X2 is than the X). His exact…

Why is this news hidden? Every second interesting news gets hidden away these days

Re: Apple faces lawsuits after admitting it slows down aging iPhones

#96

Post by waterphone »

jackvalentine wrote: post #77
abalone wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just sensationalist poorly sourced crap. > "they are making these devices that it's difficult to replace the battery for..." No. It's free under AppleCare and a whopping $79 out of warranty, and you can do it via mail. > "they are running them so close to the redline that they can only handle it for a year" No source cited for this. There is no indication that iPhones are regularly degrading beyond 80% within…

I'm one of the people defending Apple's charge for battery replacement as reasonable, but his point is it's actually a physically difficult thing to do, to replace the battery. It takes real skill to replace a modern iphone battery without ruining it. > "they are running them so close to the redline that they can only handle it for a year" As for this, he's citing the fact the iPhone 7 is affected - a phone that came…

It doesn't really take that much skill. I did it in 15 minutes for the first time with no advance reading/watching. The kits you can buy online come with a full set of tools and instructions.

Re: Apple faces lawsuits after admitting it slows down aging iPhones

#97

Post by SauciestGNU »

crypt1d wrote: post #48

As far as I'm concerned, this is a deal breaker. I've been an iOS user since 3GS and now I'm ready to jump ship. Apple has been disappointing me since few years now, and I've postponed migrating to Android mostly because I'm accustomed to its UX. But this is enough of a push for me to make an effort to give Android a try. I'm looking into Oneplus 5T and Pixel 2 XL. Any other suggestions?

OnePlus has become a bad actor, possibly worse than Apple here. They ship spyware, refuse to update their flagships, and let's not forget they started by obscuring their ownership to hide that they're a division of Oppo.

Re: Apple faces lawsuits after admitting it slows down aging iPhones

#98

Post by SauciestGNU »

goldenkey wrote: post #59
crypt1d wrote: post #48

As far as I'm concerned, this is a deal breaker. I've been an iOS user since 3GS and now I'm ready to jump ship. Apple has been disappointing me since few years now, and I've postponed migrating to Android mostly because I'm accustomed to its UX. But this is enough of a push for me to make an effort to give Android a try. I'm looking into Oneplus 5T and Pixel 2 XL. Any other suggestions?

I have the Pixel 2 XL. Had the Pixel 1 XL before. Pixel 1 was great. But 2 is meh.. The screen quality is lackluster. The lack of a home button is annoying. Its not a great phone in terms of build quality especially for the high price. I dont know much about the OnePlus but I had a Galaxy Note beforehand and I absolutely loved it. Samsung has been making really great phones other than the battery explosion blip. If I…

I've been extremely happy with my Nexus 6p. So much so that I bought a Huawei laptop and would probably consider their flagship mobile device before even a pixel these days.

Re: Apple faces lawsuits after admitting it slows down aging iPhones

#99

Post by mmjaa »

konceptz wrote: post #83
mmjaa wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple decided to not let the consumer have the choice or ability to swap their own batteries. They've painted themselves into a corner here - and I think they should pay for this, indeed. Its clear that these moves were made solely to maximise profit for Apple, not to protect the consumer and provide them the best-quality experience.

It shouldn’t be hard for Apple to “prove” that there are benefits, outside of maxing profit, to having a sealed battery.

Its also not hard to prove that it was a big mistake and they shouldn't have devolved this feature.

Re: Apple faces lawsuits after admitting it slows down aging iPhones

#100

Post by newscracker »

Vintila wrote: post #86
simonbarker87 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Apple slowed the phone down upfront then people would complain that Apple were throttling as the user is “too dumb to look after their battery properly” so instead they are doing when they can point to a proven need to throttle the device. This feels like a no win situation for Apple unless they had/will put in “throttle my phone so it doesn’t go weird” switch in settings. Side note: we’ve known for years that ham…

Maybe the attitude to run the battery low before charging it comes from NiCd batteries which have the so called memory effect [1]. Could education be the answer? I've never bought an iPhone, do they include a few paragraphs about proper battery care? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_effect

Apple has had a web page about batteries and good maintenance practices [1] for several years now. But most people wouldn't know about it or read it unless they searched for it.

[1]: https://www.apple.com/batteries/

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