181–190 of 878 posts
This whole battery scandal is ridiculous. It's literally the opposite of planned obsolescence, they're prolonging the usable life of these phones by underclocking them enough to stay functional for a full day, when otherwise they'd be shutting off randomly. I wish I could underclock even with a fresh battery in order to have solid 2-day battery life.
> 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.
Most users shouldn't need to manage their battery performance actively at all. What's next? Users should manage their own RAM usage? Absolutely not.
They're giving away batteries for free, and giving users more visibility into the health of their battery in an upcoming update. That's the right thing.
I swapped from an Nexus 5 to an iPhone 6+. I bought the iPhone 1.5yrs second hand to get a significant amount off its price. It is dented significantly on the back, but still serves me like a new phone apart from a noticed slow-down.
On the other hand, the Nexus randomly started shutting off and the battery only lasted half a day after charging every day for the following 2 years.
The phones are now effectively the same age and Apples fix has prolonged the apparent age of my phone, I guess (thanks).
But I think people are being harsher because Apple products have longer expected life but use the same battery technology. This isn’t really fair, is it?
Ftn. I have designed and manufactured 3 battery assemblies for electric vehicles in a racing context.
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It's choosing the lesser of two evils. The two options are to have the phone run slower, or have the phone shut down unexpectedly with shorter battery life. Personally, I agree with Apple's call on this one.
That's a false dichotomy; Apple has many options other than slowing down the phone and having it randomly restart. For example, they could have altered the calibration of the battery indicator so 0% charge corresponds to the charge level where random restarts/throttling starts to occur.
That seems almost useless. Certainly worse than having a slower phone that has hours of battery life.
Reducing the battery replacement by $50 is a great move. While I think this is a completely manufactured scandal, this will definitely take away the last argument people have against them. I'm sure some people will still hate them for something, though.
BUT, what I do very much care about is that the company who did this does not get away with it without losing some feathers, because they did intentionally hide something from the user that did affect them quite noticeably and if they would not have been called out could have had even more serious effects in the long run.
Imagine the following scenario. The battery of your phone is happily degrading and the manufacturer of your phone puts in some serious effort to develop a strategy so you as the user don't notice it. You keep using your phone thinking everything is fine, all the while your battery keeps degrading faster and faster. Then some day you actually need the power (in terms of processing power and in terms of stored energy) because, let's say you are taking a longer high quality video of a wedding. But since your phone is now running on full throttle your battery keeps discharging uncharacteristically fast because it is already in a bad state, or the software can't keep up with the data compression and has to start dropping frames and the video of the event you wanted to keep in good memory now looks awful.
Sure, this is only a very benign scenario but it still illustrates that the manufacturer should not try to hide such important information from the user. And as I have mentioned in another thread, no one can tell me that not a single Apple engineer during this whole process has stepped up and said "Hey maybe it's also a good idea to tell the user that we are throttling the whole system so it may live a few months longer"
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They wouldn't have to give anything for free if, like for many other phones, the owner could replace the battery in 1 minute flat with no special tools...
I would love HN to force people to explain why they are downvoting something. Batteries fail after a while, it has been a constant for a very long time. What has changed is that in many recent phones it is a pain to replace it yourself.
> 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…
This was before the issue was really well-known. They were acting as if I was making it up. But yeah, anytime the phone was below 50% battery life I was in danger of having the phone immediately turn off. In my line of work this is not acceptable. Above anything else I need a working reliable phone.
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What does "locked in the Apple ecosystem" imply? Apps that don't have a satisfactory equivalent on Android, integration between Apple devices or general usability/user experience?
Probably having tons of photos, contacts, email and whatnot in the apple cloud instead of Google or Amazon or local.
Other than that, nothing should really keep you "locked-in" on iOS. Not even iMessage. You can use WhatsApp or FB Messenger with friends or family. It's not a big deal.
Reducing the battery replacement by $50 is a great move. While I think this is a completely manufactured scandal, this will definitely take away the last argument people have against them. I'm sure some people will still hate them for something, though.
How is this a "completely manufactured scandal"? Tens of millions of old iPhone users were left in the dark why all of a sudden the phone was slowing down to the point where it was becoming unusable. Millions of people probably spent hundreds of dollars otherwise they wouldn't need to spend if they know this was something they can fix with a new battery. I personally have been using iPhone 6 for 3 years until this CP…
Enough with the hyperbole already. Yes, a few (rather outspoken) users had this issue. For everyone else, slowdowns were noticeable, but they barely made the phones "unusable".
That's why this is a manufactured scandal. Yes, Apple could have (and should have) been more transparent. But their decision to throttle the CPU was based on sound engineering principles, rather than a nefarious attempt to get people to upgrade.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's choosing the lesser of two evils. The two options are to have the phone run slower, or have the phone shut down unexpectedly with shorter battery life. Personally, I agree with Apple's call on this one.
That's a false dichotomy; Apple has many options other than slowing down the phone and having it randomly restart. For example, they could have altered the calibration of the battery indicator so 0% charge corresponds to the charge level where random restarts/throttling starts to occur.
Calibrating for a new "0%" effectively lead to a "shorter battery life".
I don't know the intricacies of these options, but I can make a guess. The point which a phone resets isn't accurately predicted. Some user actions may cause larger voltage drops than others. For which action do you calibrate to 0%? What if you only do that action once a day? Is this trade off worth sacrificing 1% of your full capacity? What about 10% or 30%?