A Message to Our Customers about iPhone Batteries and Performance • Hacker News Board

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

#831

Post by sah2ed » Fri, Dec 29, 2017, 5:29 PM UTC

CaptSpify wrote: post #818

sah2ed wrote: post #707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple likes to set trends which means doing away with the past. The headphone jack is a 19th century invention and Apple feels that the time has come to make way for new tech as it has always done. Add to the fact that they obsess over making their devices beautifully engineered by making them slimmer and lighter to increase portability. The more portable your hardware is, the more you are likely to use it and recomm…

The big difference that you are missing is that those other technologies that they got rid of had ready and working replacements. The headphone jack does not have a ready and working replacement yet.

So you consider wireless headsets/ear phones utilizing BLE as an unworthy replacement for the headphone jack? That's fine.

I'm not Apple or its representative, merely trying to help the grandparent see why Apple would do what they did.

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

#832

Post by mthoms » Fri, Dec 29, 2017, 5:37 PM UTC

hateduser2 wrote: post #813

mthoms wrote: post #719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was a perfect opportunity for Apple to come out and explicitly state they have never slowed phones down other than in this instance . That would certainly go a long way to restoring confidence. Instead they came out with a weasely-worded statement that is designed to give the impression that they only recently starting doing this. But... they don't actually make that claim. Apple lawyers are very good at what th…

Give me a break please. From the post: >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. Our goal has always been to create products that our customers love, and making iPhones last as long as possible is an important part of that. I see 0 weasel words or dodging here. Give me a break ha…

Notice all the qualifiers? Notice that the above statement, while technically truthful does not tell the whole story?

This is not a time for vague promises IMHO, it's time for specific and clear statements. Why not just say you don't slow phones full stop?

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

#833

Post by codegladiator » Fri, Dec 29, 2017, 5:45 PM UTC

ascagnel_ wrote: post #782

codegladiator wrote: post #721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean Incorrect? >> but you need to identify the problem first Apparently apple had identified the problem first and they choose to put non user-replaceable batteries. Plus why does my 4 years old Oppo android phone is not suffering from this battery issue ? Does apple use inferior batteries ?

Battery life is somewhat random; it's why batteries as a whole are measured with MTTF. You may be lucky enough to have an outlying battery life, or you may have used the phone in such a way that the battery lived longer, or the battery itself may have had a higher MTTF due to it being a larger capacity.

>> Battery life is somewhat random

Looks pretty deterministic in case of apple. That is until the next phone release.

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

#834

Post by stouset » Fri, Dec 29, 2017, 5:59 PM UTC

blensor wrote: post #711

stouset wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multiply this idea times the six thousand other locations people think this should be done and you suddenly get an frustratingly unusable device. Everyone gets upset that their pet setting isn't available, but nobody stops to think about the consequences of having everyone else's pet setting available.

And with that comment we are back at the root of the problem. Apple is the one to evaluate what is and what is not important to the user. And many people who are currently upset think they had their priorities wrong. We can argue all day long what is and what really isn't important. The fact is they decided it isn't and the backlash showed quite strongly that it was wrong.

> The backlash showed quite strongly that it was wrong.

What backlash? This same scenario seems to play out practically every month: Apple does something that generates tons of negative comments from — as far as I can tell — people who don't actually use Apple products (removes the headphone jack, throttles performance for phones with aging batteries, releases phone with minor antenna issue, replaces TouchID with FaceID, the notch on the iPhone X, USB-C MBP, etc.). The next quarter, they announce record sales and continue their absolute domination in terms of both customer satisfaction and profit share in the overall market.

The simple reality is that these things are never as big of an issue as people out for blood make them appear (antenna issue, headphone jack, the Notch), or most consumers actually generally agree with the stance taken by Apple (throttle phones with dying batteries rather than unexpected shutoffs, FaceID).

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

#835

Post by Chaebixi » Fri, Dec 29, 2017, 6:15 PM UTC

lsc wrote: post #733

kodablah wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, for this specific issue. But the culture of increasing hardware requirements beyond the reasonable point of not-that-old phones coupled with the opacity surrounding what is done to support them is systemic (and not Apple-specific of course).

>But the culture of increasing hardware requirements beyond the reasonable point of not-that-old phones coupled with the opacity surrounding what is done to support them is systemic (and not Apple-specific of course). My recollection is that back when you needed a new computer every three years if you wanted to be able to read word processor documents from others in the office is that there was a whole lot less vitri…

> My recollection is that back when you needed a new computer every three years...is that there was a whole lot less vitriol then. Maybe I am misremembering; it has been a long time.

Back then I think people saw a lot more noticeable, and tangible process across the computing space, which made the constant hardware refreshes palatable. For instance, there was only three years between the release of Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. Plus, back then, computers were so new that people didn't know what else was possible.

Most of the recent "progress" in consumer computing have been gimmicks, IMHO, and consumers have also seen a recent period of blissful stability (e.g. the long reign Windows XP) that makes them less tolerant of a 90s-style refresh cycle.

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

#836

Post by decebalus1 » Fri, Dec 29, 2017, 6:21 PM UTC

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #825

hateduser2 wrote: post #811

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not actually true. That’s androids Demo, not apples.

There are tons of people who buy used Apple hardware because they can't afford to buy it new. If anything, Apple hardware is probably used for longer than Android phones. People who want a cheap Android phone will just buy a new low-end phone instead of a used flagship phone. People who want a cheap iPhone have to buy a used phone because there are no low-end Apple phones.

> If anything, Apple hardware is probably used for longer than Android phones.

Do you have any data to back this up? Looking at version market share, I'd say that there are way more people using older Android phones (1)(2). The second most used OS (10.X at 18.1%) goes as far back as iPhone 5 and the most used (11.X) goes as far back as 5S.

(1) https://www.statista.com/statistics/271774/share-of-android-... (2) https://david-smith.org/iosversionstats/

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

#837

Post by benp84 » Fri, Dec 29, 2017, 6:33 PM UTC

newscracker wrote: post #810

baby wrote: post #785

> A chemically aged battery also becomes less capable of delivering peak energy loads, especially in a low state of charge, which may result in a device unexpectedly shutting itself down in some situations. I think the people in the Silicon Valley need to take a step back and understand that people in the rest of the world don't change phone every year. If a phone become unusable because of its battery (according to…

Easy replacement of batteries is a problem only if you don't have an Apple store or Apple authorized service center nearby (which could be the case for many people across many countries). The batteries have been replaceable for a fee by Apple or an Apple authorized service provider.

We have very different ideas of "easy". My phone died last night after a day of heavy use, so I pulled the battery out and swapped it with the spare one in its wall charger ($14 for both, shipped) and I was back at 100%.

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

#838

Post by dogweather » Fri, Dec 29, 2017, 6:40 PM UTC

Fnoord wrote: post #759

blhack wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Questions like this always perplex me. People aren't asking for apple to do something. They're asking for them to not do something.

How about free battery replacement? That's not asking much . The solution to underclock to make sure the device doesn't go off is a hack. A cool hack, because it ensures the device stays somewhat useable, but a temporary one. Which also targets devices which don't suffer from the problem.

And it stayed under locked even when running on a/c power.

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

#839

Post by krutzger » Fri, Dec 29, 2017, 6:43 PM UTC

ovao wrote: post #502

arvinsim wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's natural since iPhones are being touted as the premium option while putting down Androids as "cheap" phones. It's all about expectations.

Others may tout Android phones as “cheap”, but does Apple? I don’t actually recall Apple doing any negative marketing against Android.

Are you kidding me? How many WWDC and product introductions have you attended?

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

#840

Post by strictnein » Fri, Dec 29, 2017, 6:48 PM UTC

MBCook wrote: post #565

mtgx wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His point was that Apple's latest chips promise something like 2x the performance of the best Qualcomm or Samsung chip. If that gain is indeed real, or mostly real, then the difference may be explained by the fact that Apple makes some compromises that other chip makers don't - such as increasing the boost performance of the chip more than the battery and the heat management can handle. As for the "on paper" claim, I…

It’s the “on paper“ that I took issue with. From what I’ve seen from developers (which is admittedly limited) the chips Apple has do seem to be incredibly fast. Between that and the benchmarks I have no reason to think Apple chips are artificially optimized to look good on benchmarks and aren’t noticeably better on normal tasks.

> I have no reason to think Apple chips are artificially optimized to look good on benchmarks

I never stated that. My point was that they wanted their processors to benchmark above everyone else's, and this quest for the highest performance numbers in synthetic benchmarks (aka on paper) has lead them to a bad place.