Live data from Hacker News

A Message to Our Customers about iPhone Batteries and Performance

apple.com

761–770 of 878 posts

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

#761

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…

I disagree, I think this was a terrible response. They start with the following: "First and foremost, we have never — and would never — do anything to intentionally shorten the life of any Apple product, or degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades" ... and then proceed to explain why that's exactly what they did. Also, I have no reason to believe getting a new battery will fix my iPhone, especially afte…

> ... and then proceed to explain why that's exactly what they did.

Well they didn't, because "[...] to drive customer upgrades" is the key part they state they are not doing.

> lied so blatantly about planned obsolescence.

Again, they didn't, they aren't admitting to 'planned obsolescence', only attempting to prevent shutdowns.

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

#762
post #749

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was about to join this debate and then ran the numbers and realized I still don't get this right. I was going to say it's about sensor size and bigger sensors have shallower DOF. Here's where I go when I need a refresher - Tony Northrup's explanations: https://petapixel.com/2014/05/27/tony-northrup-makes-correct... There's a lot of criticisms of his series, but they're often shallow (they don't seem to watch his wh…

I'm not saying anything about sensor size or depth of field. I'm pointing out the misuse of the term "bokeh". Bokeh is not depth of field. It's the quality of out of focus areas. You want good bokeh when you have a shallow depth of field but bokeh is itself a subjective measure of quality, not quantity. Calling depth of field "bokeh" is like calling focal length "framing". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokeh

He's sorta right in the sense that most people like a "relaxed" character in the out of focus areas which is very hard to achieve with tiny sensors and lenses (while for example basically every modern large format lens is extremely "creamy").

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

#763

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it is, if it can't deliver the current the phone requires after some usage it's not fit for purpose. It's BECAUSE every single battery starts to go bad that they should have put in a battery that will work after a couple of years of degradation.

Lol. You can't just violate battery physics because you want it to be so.

Older phones manage to violate those just fine.

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

#764
post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to be glib here, but I think that the fact that you refer to your camera as a mirrorless DSLR (dslRs by definition have mirrors) is part of the reason why you can replace it with a somewhat better phone sensor. There is nothing wrong with doing that, but it's possible because you have limited needs.

So because of communication error, you can dismiss your parent commenter as having “limited” needs? Seems a bit needlessly smug, don’t you think? I also shoot with a EVIL system, specifically Fujifilm’s X system, and while my friends iPhone X I borrowed for a week won’t replace it entirely, it’s on a completely new level for smartphone photography and for the bulk of my photos it really can replace my camera! Glibly…

It think that it's an insignificant mistake that nevertheless correlated with the user being somebody who probably doesn't look very hard at MTF graphs.

I don't shoot Fuji, but I have friends that do and I wouldn't use a phone for processing the results (for software reasons, the best raw converters for x-trans sensors are Capture One and Iridient, neither of which exists for iOS - it would be nice to be able to run a good converter on an iPad pro).

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

#765

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, I think this was a terrible response. They start with the following: "First and foremost, we have never — and would never — do anything to intentionally shorten the life of any Apple product, or degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades" ... and then proceed to explain why that's exactly what they did. Also, I have no reason to believe getting a new battery will fix my iPhone, especially afte…

> ... and then proceed to explain why that's exactly what they did. Well they didn't, because "[...] to drive customer upgrades" is the key part they state they are not doing. > lied so blatantly about planned obsolescence. Again, they didn't, they aren't admitting to 'planned obsolescence', only attempting to prevent shutdowns.

Given that there is no scenario where they would literally say that, we have to judge by their actions and not their words.

What they said "[wouldn't] degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades"

What they did "degrade the user experience"

I can't think of any reason they would do that in good faith instead of simply telling users that their battery is old, this is why your phone is shutting down, please replace it.

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

#766
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…

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.

[deleted]

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

#767
post #755
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That has been my experience as well. Perhaps with each upgrade, Apple can let us know how much of a performance hit we will be taking. That way I can weigh the benefit of the new/improved features of the new OS vs the performance penalty.

Hell will freeze over before that happens.

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

#768

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that very hard to believe. We've been witnessing these slow downs since the beginning

My 3G slowed to a crawl with an update. Made me switch to Android for a few phone till I realized Apple's software was way better.

I use a powerful xiaomi android phone and an ipad pro. Apart from the amazing apple pencil enabled apps which i would never use on an iPhone i can't see any way ios outperforms android.

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

#769
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for anyone with an iPhone 6 or later whose battery needs to be replaced I'm guessing they'll have some criteria on that

Apple has criteria for whether or not they'll replace your phone's battery at all. I assume that eligibility for the lower battery replacement price will be identical to the eligibility test they're already doing for the battery replacement service. When you take your phone in, they'll do a test on the battery's current capacity and status, using a custom app. If the battery has reported errors, or if the reported ca…

[deleted]

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

#770
post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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.

I’m not saying I wouldn’t expect some slowdown but Apple essentially forces you to upgrade with no path to downgrade the os. After upgrading my iPhone 6 to iOS 11 I could not launch Lyft, uber took minutes to open, and even the built in message app would have multi-second lag on key press. If you are destroying what was a perfectly fine phone with a software release it should simply not be supported. I would have bee…

I wish someone would take the time to benchmark how stark the performance difference is between Day 0, Day 365, Day 730, etc. of doing the same exact tasks on a factory reset device with whatever is the latest software version at that time.

It's not hard to roll out new features behind flags for devices which can't reasonably support them. But your experience of ridiculous lag trying to open basic apps which have no particularly high resource requirement has been my experience exactly.

There's more going on than simply, "we added new features!" Devices which on Day 0 are blazingly fast and incredibly responsive because literally unusable in a few years doing exactly the same tasks.

Post reply on HN