Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Message to Our Customers about iPhone Batteries and Performance

apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 878 posts

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

#381

Post by LaGrange »

mschuster91 wrote: post #315
goialoq wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s also a waste of human labor to throw away devices when they could still be made useful with some simple repairs. Are you sure? Assembly line production is highly efficient, that's why warranty service usually means "throw way the old one into the refurbish or recycle pile and give you a new one", not "fix your old one"

> Assembly line production is highly efficient The highlevel production may be, but rare-earth mining is incredibly dirty (and some of them, if not sourced from fair trade, directly fund warring groups), and IC manufacturing isn't exactly environment friendly too, lots of nasty chemicals used there.

There's quite a bit of work into recycling those, and Apple has already has the means of recovering much of it - pity people don't generally return their used phones to them, though. Your replacement battery is unlikely to be recycled better than when it's done in an automated manner on a fairly large scale.

Of course Apple can get away cheap because of that "people don't even try to recycle" thing. Forcing the industry to do the same thing that happened with bottles (everyone has to accept bottles over certain capacity they sell, and _pay for them_ — though right-wing governments are shuttering those programs) would work wonders, and likely be far better than the romanticised "repairability."

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

#382

Post by lapdanz »

After the galaxy note 7 disaster and the apple throttlegate I think it is time for us all to admit the fact that we have reached the limits of lithium batteries. We need to compromise the size of our smartphones if we want to continue seeing progress in their performance and features.

Or wait for a miracle from the electrochemists.

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

#383

Post by ArlenBales »

blondie9x wrote: post #75

Apple is doing what is best for the user and the battery. This was poorly reported on by those without technical backgrounds.

No. They did what was best for their bottom-line.

It was common knowledge that lithium batteries chemically degrade over time. It was not common knowledge, even to those with technical backgrounds, that the iPhone compensated by degrading performance. That was only made recently public by user research.

Many consumers have been buying new iPhones after at least 1 year because of this performance degradation. Had Apple been transparent about its performance degradation strategy from the beginning, people would have spent far less money.

This will have a substantial effect on Apple's revenue next year as people buy new batteries instead of new iPhones.

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

#384

Post by Mikho »

> 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.

So depending on the implementation of the feature iPhone users would be able to see how fast the battery degrades due to its low capacity. Apple could do what every other manufacturer did—provide phones with higher capacity batteries to start from for phones not to burn the battery with too many recharging cycles in the first year. The thing is Apple deliberately supplies small batteries for them to require many recharges and degrade fast. Androids now have on average 3000 mAh batteries. I got 5300 mAh. Small iPhones—1800 mAh.

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

#385

Post by kryptiskt »

wodenokoto wrote: post #196
jhack wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

So the right thing is to have phones crash as the battery age? This is not a question about battery life in terms of how many hours the phone can run. This is a question about the phones ability to draw high amounts of power for short intervals.

As the ultimate cause is a bad design where they have underprovisioned the battery with little margin for degradation, presumably in order to fit it into a thinner phone, it becomes Apple to handle the issue in a transparent way. The right action for Apple then is not to degrade the performance to hide the problem under the rug, but to make it clear to the customer how they can have the phone serviced in order to make it work like before.

Apple is so lucky that this got noticed and they got called on it. The alternative is that millions of customers would continue to get an inexplicably bad user experience, which would chip away on their reputation in a more indirect but not less dangerous way than facing the press.

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

#386

Post by loeg »

mschuster91 wrote: post #315
goialoq wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s also a waste of human labor to throw away devices when they could still be made useful with some simple repairs. Are you sure? Assembly line production is highly efficient, that's why warranty service usually means "throw way the old one into the refurbish or recycle pile and give you a new one", not "fix your old one"

> Assembly line production is highly efficient The highlevel production may be, but rare-earth mining is incredibly dirty (and some of them, if not sourced from fair trade, directly fund warring groups), and IC manufacturing isn't exactly environment friendly too, lots of nasty chemicals used there.

Recycling old phones in bulk may still be cheaper than individual phone repair.

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

#387

Post by loeg »

spondyl wrote: post #239
samb1729 wrote: post #210

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 :)

It's a real word, but one that doesn't seem to fit in context nearly as well as the similarly spelled "ludicrous."

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

#388

Post by Aaronn »

notfried wrote: post #94

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…

Were you on a version of iOS 10 before 10.2.1?

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

#389

Post by astrange »

eh78ssxv2f wrote: post #310
blensor wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you think a Popup "Hey you're battery is going bad. Do you want to [keep the performance] or [save the battery life]?" Would be too much??

I think the question is: "Hey you're battery is going bad. Do you want to [keep the performance] or [shutdown the phone]?"

You'd never want an instantaneous shutoff of your phone, which is what you'd get from a brownout. That's just asking for data corruption.

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

#390

Post by freedomben »

goialoq wrote: post #322
tigershark wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3.3 years on the iPhone 6 charging it once a day is 1000 cycles, well above 500..

Cycles are floats, not integers. It's only a full cycle if the battery is discharged very deeply. http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_li...

Fascinating. Some tidbits to save others time:

> The worst situation is keeping a fully charged battery at elevated temperatures.

> Avoid so-called ultra-fast chargers that claim to fully charge Li-ion in less than one hour.

Post reply on HN