Live data from Hacker News

A Message to Our Customers about iPhone Batteries and Performance

apple.com

171–180 of 878 posts

Re: A Message to Our Customers about iPhone Batteries and Performance

#171

My wife’s 6+ was incredibly slow after the iOS upgrade. My 6+ drained the battery incredibly quickly. I was told that upgrading the iOS would fix that problem [0]; it didn’t. Instead it slowed my phone to the point of being unusable. If I’d have known replacing the battery would have fixed both of them, I’d have done that. Instead, I stupidly bought two new, very expensive phones. Since we were already locked into th…

> This does nothing to compensate or win back the trust of customers like me. What is it that you want Apple to do to make you personally feel better?

[deleted]

Re: A Message to Our Customers about iPhone Batteries and Performance

#172
post #115

> Apple is reducing the price of an out-of-warranty iPhone battery replacement by $50 — from $79 to $29... > Early in 2018, we will issue an iOS software update with new features that give users more visibility into the health of their iPhone’s battery, so they can see for themselves if its condition is affecting performance. There we go. It took too much trouble and too long for it to happen, but Apple is stepping u…

> It took too much trouble and too long for it to happen, but Apple is stepping up and doing the right thing.

The right thing would have been for Apple to either stop this behaviour or give users the option (retain performance or retain battery life). They're doing neither.

Re: A Message to Our Customers about iPhone Batteries and Performance

#173
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rock and a hard place for Apple, after 600 cycles or 2 years 'average usage' (based on reports I've seen in the past) the battery might only have 50-60% of the design capacity, so their choice is between reducing battery consumption (via throttling) or having users whose phones are totally drained in significantly less than an 'average working day'.

If iPhones are really experiencing that rate of degradation, then Apple are solely to blame for using such an aggressive battery management profile. If they had given up a millimetre of thickness, overprovisioned the battery and managed it less aggressively, they could have easily reduced battery degradation to <20% after 1,500 cycles. Adding 50% to the capacity also gives you 50% more current at the same C-rate. I t…

> If iPhones are really experiencing that rate of degradation, then Apple are solely to blame for using such an aggressive battery management profile.

Consumers are responsible at least as much as manufacturers for the current state of phones. Manufacturers may create the designs for phones, but consumers vote with their wallets for what they want, and they've consistently voted for thin over longer battery life.

Re: A Message to Our Customers about iPhone Batteries and Performance

#174
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Apple hadn’t made this change those phones would have randomly turned off instead. Those people probably would’ve gone and bought either a new were iPhone or switch to android like you did. On the whole I don’t think this would have caused anyone to spend money they wouldn’t have otherwise. Perhaps they would have stayed with their phone longer. It’s hard to tell, and this is certainly worse than if they had just…

>If Apple hadn’t made this change those phones would have randomly turned off instead. Why is apple the only company with this problem?

Plenty of non-Apple phones suffer from random shutdowns and restarts due to faulty batteries.

Re: A Message to Our Customers about iPhone Batteries and Performance

#175
post #138

I think this is a good response, and I think a lot of the outrage over this issue is overblown. At the end of the day there's a fundamental tradeoff that Apple needs to make on behalf of their customers: performance or stability. They chose stability, and I think they have a convincing argument as to why: "It should go without saying that we think sudden, unexpected shutdowns are unacceptable. We don’t want any of ou…

The outrage doesn't seem overblown to me. For years I knew that my iphones were becoming obsolete not entirely from the passage of time but instead from upgrading the OS. Apple insisted they were not slowing down devices. Now they claim that they started this in iOS 10.2, without notification. My experience has been that upgrading the OS results in degraded performance 100% of the time. Whether intentional or not App…

>>My experience has been that upgrading the OS results in degraded performance 100% of the time.

Well yeah, since more features mean slower performance.

I saw a noticeable performance decrease when I went from Windows 7 to Windows 8. That doesn't mean Microsoft started throttling the CPU.

Re: A Message to Our Customers about iPhone Batteries and Performance

#176
post #138

I think this is a good response, and I think a lot of the outrage over this issue is overblown. At the end of the day there's a fundamental tradeoff that Apple needs to make on behalf of their customers: performance or stability. They chose stability, and I think they have a convincing argument as to why: "It should go without saying that we think sudden, unexpected shutdowns are unacceptable. We don’t want any of ou…

The outrage doesn't seem overblown to me. For years I knew that my iphones were becoming obsolete not entirely from the passage of time but instead from upgrading the OS. Apple insisted they were not slowing down devices. Now they claim that they started this in iOS 10.2, without notification. My experience has been that upgrading the OS results in degraded performance 100% of the time. Whether intentional or not App…

Does this include running the new OS after a factory reset?

I find that even on Android, you drop some performance after a full system upgrade and it doesn't come back until a full reset is performed with the new OS.

It's stupid that this is required, but that can be explained as a technical problem rather than planned obsolescence.

On top of that, there's the variable of increased system resources to consider, which will account for some of it, and is a no-win scenario from the manufacturer standpoint no matter what they choose.

Re: A Message to Our Customers about iPhone Batteries and Performance

#177

I think this is a good response, and I think a lot of the outrage over this issue is overblown. At the end of the day there's a fundamental tradeoff that Apple needs to make on behalf of their customers: performance or stability. They chose stability, and I think they have a convincing argument as to why: "It should go without saying that we think sudden, unexpected shutdowns are unacceptable. We don’t want any of ou…

It still sounds like a false dilemma to me. I've never had reboots on my Android phones because of battery problems.

Maybe Apple just needs to buy better quality batteries? And perhaps higher capacity that are also capable of more charges before they lose too much of their original capacity?

Re: A Message to Our Customers about iPhone Batteries and Performance

#178

I'm really infuriated about this. Since mid-2016, my iPhone 6 Plus started to act "weird". It'd shut down sporadically, would reach 40% and then suddenly deplete, and started to get slow. But the problems were not consistent. I went to the Apple Store, and the phone passed all their diagnosis checks, even the battery. A few months later, after my AppleCare+ expired, the problems intensified. And I spent most of 2017…

Your issue isn't this "scandal" though. This is about preventing sporadic shutdowns by throttling, so if your phone was shutting down it was an undiagnosed bad battery, which is a legit complaint.

Re: A Message to Our Customers about iPhone Batteries and Performance

#179
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you rather have a slightly slower phone, or one that shuts off at random due to the battery not being able to provide peak current. I think the only major mistake Apple made here was not being originally transparent about this. I don't think that Apple is being 100% noble in its intents either. In addition to driving users to buy new devices, there's the much less obvious side-effect which is a lot of people at…

> Would you rather have a slightly slower phone, or one that shuts off at random due to the battery not being able to provide peak current. I wish people would stop inventing this false dichotomy. What people want is a phone that doesn't degrade horribly after only a year, regardless of whether that degradation is that it shuts itself off at 40% (which is fucking ridiculous) or that it gets noticeably slower. When a…

It’s not a false dichotomy. That’s what the phone did before. It was a pre-existing problem.

They could choose to do nothing. They could do what they did. With either of those they could’ve chosen to be more transparent (which clearly they should’ve).

You’re arguing that given the problem they saw once the phones have been in the field for years they should have designed the phone differently originally. That’s not reasonable.

I’d be very curious to know how android phones handle this. They must, in someway. There’s another comment in this story that someone had an HTC phone that would tend to just suddenly die under 20%, that may be the same thing iPhones were doing before.

Re: A Message to Our Customers about iPhone Batteries and Performance

#180
post #41

To be fair that is a pretty decent response. The reality is batteries do degrade over time and they have to manage that. They should have been transparent about what they were doing and I'm not sure giving the user control over it is all that sensible. Are there any battery experts who can chime in with their opinion on this?

I'm not a battery expert, but it needs to be pointed out that other smartphone manufacturers do not have this problem. It was Apple specific - it's not as if every device with a lithium battery shuts off at 40%. So it still feels like they're doing it to mitigate a fault with the device, and should've been more transparent about that in the first place.

It’s been pointed out in many places that other manufacturers absolutely do have the same battery problems.

https://support.google.com/pixelphone/forum/AAAAb4-OgUsQiGBJ...

https://us.community.samsung.com/t5/Galaxy-Note-Phones/Note-...

Post reply on HN