Live data from Hacker News

A Message to Our Customers about iPhone Batteries and Performance

apple.com

261–270 of 878 posts

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

#261
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…

Isn't this a time-limited offer? I understood it was valid for a year only.

> starting in late January and available worldwide through December 2018

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

#262
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's a completely manufactured scandal, although most of the reporting was deceptive (as is, I'm starting to suspect, most reporting, full stop). I think the non-manufactured part of the scandal is having your phone throttle itself w/o telling you it's doing that is pretty annoying. You're left wondering, is my phone running slower or is my mind playing tricks on me? I think Apple's response here is gre…

> I think Apple's response here is great. I have bought a device of a certain performance, fully expecting that the battery will degrade and hold a smaller and smaller charge, but NOT expecting the performance of the device to suffer. I was given absolutely no warning that, come a certain age or use-pattern, the performance of the device will degrade. Apple went behind my back and installed software that prevented de…

right, i agree! original behavior was shitty, but their response is good.

their response is

- an apology

- a promise to update the software so you know when you're getting throttled

- cheap battery replacements

i think that's pretty solid.

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

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about those of us that already paid to have the battery replaced? I was having the automatic shut down issue and Apple was telling me the battery was just fine. Since they refused to warrantee the battery I just ended up paying for another battery. 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…

> What about those of us that already paid to have the battery replaced? Devil’s advocate: one doesn’t complain if they buy something the day before it goes on sale at a store. It’s just bad luck.

Actually, you do complain and then get the store to match it or use your credit card price protection.

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

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was pretty fantastic on the Samsung hardware that was contemporaneous with many iPhone designs. Sadly the Galaxies have jumped on that bandwagon.

Do you ever wonder if there's a reason why that's the case?

I'm sure it's cheaper to solder it in, and you don't have to make the components sturdy enough to stand up to repeated assembly and dissassembly.

I still hate it. It was nice to be able to have a stack of charged batteries and not worry about being away from an outlet for three or four days. Especially with a phone that had its USB port melted by a shoddy cable.

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

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you mean ludicrous instead of lubricious, just fyi.

Apparently it's a real word! Here's the excerpt from dictionary.com ------ lubricious [loo-brish-uh s] adjective arousing or expressive of sexual desire; lustful; lecherous ------ It kinda defeats the purpose of using the word if no one else understands what it means :)

Sexualising battery replacement schemes needs to stop.

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

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about be more open and acknowledge problems sooner? While Apple always eventually gets to the right response, they can sometimes take too long to do so. In the case of these iPhone batteries, I think Apple's response was relatively timely. But there have been cases where well known problems took over a year to acknowledge and remedy (like the early 2011 15" Macbook Pro GPU problems).

This story broke less than 2 weeks ago. So 10 business days (minus holidays) to put together a corporate response that affects hundreds of millions of devices seems pretty damn quick.

As soon as iOS 11 came out, there were widespread complaints from iPhone 6 owners. Your timeline is about determining the cause which had to sadly be done independently. Ask yourself why they had to wait for outrage about the cause for this response instead of the symptoms (which should have provoked research into the cause)?

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

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently it's a real word! Here's the excerpt from dictionary.com ------ lubricious [loo-brish-uh s] adjective arousing or expressive of sexual desire; lustful; lecherous ------ It kinda defeats the purpose of using the word if no one else understands what it means :)

> no one else understands I understand fine.

/r/iamverysmart?

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

#268
post #245

How could iOS (definitely) detect if a battery is chemically degraded? If they slow down performance based on the "expectation" that device is old and it's battery _must have_ degraded, then it is obviously a slowdown for many unsuspecting users, whose batteries might be in fact absolutely fine. I have SE and never had any shutdowns; fortunately staying on 9.3.3, without any need nor desire to upgrade. I'd be utterly…

Charging and usage stats are logged so it should be pretty easy for Apple to spot the problem.

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

#269
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…

Nothing truly unexpected.

Just one more shinny, almost perfect PR reaction... after the fact actually facts which "just incidentally?" helped the sales of newer/replacement products?

That does neither give money back to ppl. who actually replaced their phones for big bucks "because it was slow" nor undoes the unnecessary waste, tactics like this produce, in which waste I guess the Management-Team of the company would not like their children to play in.

We know, we know totally unintended... "the corporation" says after being caught. U It's simple: gauge your internal enterprise tendencies towards the right-thing-to-do-by-default (in some countries by-the-law btw) or pay up big time.

It's new kind of mass-market tech news too; vw and other car makers, now apple, many more to come:

very nasty tricks we benefit(ed) from and got caught doing.

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

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like this comment referring to someone else's (Linus Sebastian of Linus Tech Tips) opinion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16013565 How is it "completely manufactured"? Apple programmed (and hid) the slowdown because it knows the batteries it is shipping with its phones won't last more than a year. Linus compared it to a car performing worse after 1 year of usage..

> Linus compared it to a car performing worse after 1 year of usage I hate to break it to him, but a one-year-old car will perform worse than a brand new car. A car is a hugely more robust piece of machinery than a telephone, so the degradation is less noticeable, but it's there. Why do you think the car depreciates the second you drive it off the lot?

It's not less noticeable. It's unnoticeable to anyone who isn't a professional mechanic.

How many people complain that their new car is slowing down significantly after less than a year, or becomes inexplicably unusable around the time the year+1 model appears?

This is very much not the case with the iPhone slowdown, where a lot of people were noticing issues, on a product which already has a pitiful and barely practical battery life.

Post reply on HN