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

491–500 of 878 posts

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

#491

Post by unclebucknasty »

Spivak wrote: post #450
unclebucknasty wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but Apple is stepping up and doing the right thing... People are letting them off the hook too easily. I don't believe having even a perceived legitimate reason to slow down the phones explains why they didn't own up to it earlier. In fact, seems all the more reason they should have explained it, especially given the rumors that have swirled for so long. In short, they certainly benefitted from the upgrades encoura…

What is their end game though? * Do nothing and people's phones degrade over time with an ever shortening battery life. * Slow down phones so that people still get a full day charge with less battery. Option B seems like it enables people to keep their phones longer when performance is annoying but battery is a showstopper. A notification might have been appropriate when it happens but then people would still complai…

>Better is worse?

I'd say "transparency is better". They should've done years ago what they're now doing, especially given the rumors that have swirled about phone slow-downs for so long. By not addressing them when they knew them to be true, they were tacitly denying them or--and this is a very generous read--at least denying even their concerned customers the right to know.

>people would still complain that Apple is pushing users to replace their batteries

You seem to be suggesting that purposely deceiving customers is better than being honest with them and having them think they are being deceived. I don't see a moral universe where that's the right choice. At the end of the day, that argument essentially says that a company is right no matter what it does, as long as it can get away with it.

From a technical perspective, their scheme was certainly explicable, as evidenced by the fact that so many people are willing to accept it now. So, they could've just as well been forthright years ago and taken precisely the same approach they are taking now, without having to be "caught" first.

But, in the meantime, they enjoyed years of upgrades, many of which can reasonably be assumed to have been at least partially incentivized by performance issues.

I don't think you have to be a conspiracy theorist to find this a little too coincidental.

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

#492

Post by qaq »

raquo wrote: post #474
qaq wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are these magical "they" we own Apple we vote in people in congress and on and on.

What's your point? Neither you nor me personally can tell Apple what to do, and certainly not congress. That's the point of my pessimism – modifying your own behaviour does not make any difference. Even if millions of people boycotted iPhones that would still be a smaller loss for Apple than changing how they're doing things, because doing things right is suicidally expensive when most of your customers don't care. A…

We can't because we do not care enough. You don't have to boycott Apple largest apple shareholders are pension funds so intermediaries owning shares of Apple on your behalf.

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

#493

Post by danbolt »

phonon wrote: post #126
tschwimmer wrote: post #111

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…

> My old 5S would shut down randomly under 20% without warning. Sometimes it would make it all the way to 1-2%, but most of the time it was between 5-15%. "avoid unexpected shutdowns on iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus, and iPhone SE[...]we recently extended the same support for iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus" They did not apply the change to the 5S.

I had the same issue with the 5S I'm typing on now, and replacing the battery a few months ago entirely solved that issue for me.

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

#494

Post by cik2e »

arstin wrote: post #359
chrisballinger wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The iPhone 6 was released September 9, 2014, which is about 3.3 years ago.

Exactly, only 3.3 years ago. :) I still use a beat-up 6 with a wonderful patina and have no interest in upgrading. For me the 6 seemed to be the point where everything was "good enough". Until there's a big advance in what phones are and can do (a bit more than the iPhone X ha), I'd rather just repair what's there.

5s here and still running iOS 8 to avoid the planned obsolescence. The phone is still blazing fast, but in the last year or so I've been out of luck with installing a majority of the apps that I've wanted.

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

#495

Post by mikeklaas »

reaperducer wrote: post #87
netsharc wrote: post #48

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?

Huh? By that logic, the car performs 40% worse _seconds_ after it leaves the lot.

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

#496

Post by omegaworks »

manigandham wrote: post #476
qaq wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are these magical "they" we own Apple we vote in people in congress and on and on.

Politicians in the US do not do what their constituency wants. This is before getting into the numerous issues like gerrymandering, lobbying, lack of education and informed public, propaganda and social media, etc. As far as owning Apple, unless you are a major (read: majority) holder, good luck trying to make any difference because the actual majority holders want the profits, and they are not (as much) concerned ab…

> Politicians in the US do not do what their constituency wants.

Actually they do, if enough of them care loudly enough to organize and push back. Constituent participation in the ACA Repeal debate earlier this year caused the measure to fail. They had to sneak a small, partial repeal into the huge tax bill they just passed. When the dust settles, blowback from that sneak might cost more then a few their jobs.

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

#497

Post by freeflight »

qaq wrote: post #464
raquo wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because everything is so cheap nowadays, because all the externalities that we worry about (pollution, resources running out, etc.) are left for the public and future generations to bear, with those who actually cause those externalities not paying their dues. Unfortunately, I don't see this changing within our culture of mindless consumerism and a governance system based on what is essentially legalized bribery…

Who are these magical "they" we own Apple we vote in people in congress and on and on.

That's quite a simplification of the situation. While shareholders technically "own" a company, they usually don't have that much influence over a companies policies.

This holds even more true with matters that will cost the company a lot of money while giving no added value to the shareholders, such as those externalized costs by polluting the environment.

Why would any Apple shareholder willingly take a hit to their portfolio just for a "nice feeling in the tummy about having done the right thing"? Not to mention that with most publicly traded companies there's only one "right thing": Increase shareholder value, everything is optimized around that and pretty much only that.

And sure you can vote people into Congress, but what leverage do you have that those people actually stick to their word once they are there? Imho that's one of the major flaws with most representative democracies: There's only positive voting, you can't "vote out" people who didn't hold up their end, you can only try to replace them with somebody who got more votes and hope he/she keeps their word.

In the end, this is also a question of how do we want our economies to be built: For supposedly perpetual gains and growth or for a sustainability which accounts for the actual scarcity of resources not easily measured and accounted for, like a clean environment.

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

#498

Post by fortylove »

MBCook wrote: post #440
DSMan195276 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You completely missed his point. If Apple had made the issue clear, he could have just paid for a battery replacement instead of a completely new phone. And they clearly knew the battery was the problem.

Apple certainly should have communicated the real issue, I have no problem with that idea. The idea I’m arguing against is that Apple either did nothing or purposefully made it worse. They tried to fix one bad problem (random shutdowns) and it caused a different, although less severe, problem. Apples move to retard performance to keep the phone from suddenly dying was a GOOD move. It wasn’t a scam as some others have…

Obviously.

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

#499

Post by Izkata »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #433
orev wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your issue wasn't because of a faulty battery though, it was normal battery degradation. You would have had to pay for a new battery in any case. If it was less than a month ago you might want to try to press them to refund the difference, but otherwise you did get a tangible benefit from the new battery in the time since you replaced it, so there's a cost for that.

Normally degraded batteries are still usable at 50% charge. If the remaining capacity was truly unavailable they should not have been displaying a fictitious state of charge. But of course, then the pitchforks would be out right away with no chance of hiding this slick way to force upgrade sales. The real reason why they implemented this extreme method of "protecting" the battery is that they are deathly afraid of wh…

This happened regularly on all my laptops, though, so it doesn't surprise me it was happening to people's phones. Reported percentage was based on design capacity instead of last-full capacity, and shifted so 100% is "Full". So when the percentage reaches right about the point where all that's left is the degraded part of the battery, it suddenly jumps to about 3%.

(Since figuring that out almost a decade ago, I've been using my own battery-monitor script to see both percentage and health, so it's easy to see what's going on and just how bad my battery has gotten. Maybe the default notifications are better now?)

Post reply on HN