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A Message to Our Customers about iPhone Batteries and Performance

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

#861
post #832

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What qualifiers? They said they haven’t and never would do anything to shorten or harm device life. That’s as direct as it gets. This isn’t a weasel word message, sorry.

they would never do it "to drive customer upgrades".

That isn't never do it. That's never do it for a single specific reason. Why add that clause?

I guarantee no word in that statement is wasted on meaningless fluff.

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

#862
post #827
post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think the response is good enough. - They make no promise of the target lifespan of their devices. It appears that their internal culture believes that devices that last only 1 year is acceptable. They do not say if they want to deviate from this. - No transparency on the expected battery degradation and performance impact over time.

batteries seem to be tricky for everyone (remember the exploding samsung notes?). visibility into the battery status and official replacements after 1 year for $30 seems pretty darn good to me.

more generally the useful lifespan of iphones is definitely more than a year. i was recentlu able to sell still-perfectly-functioning iphonr 7 for almost half it's cost new. my 3-year-old ipad mini only started feeling slow a couple months ago. this seems better than what my friends with android experience, anecodotally.

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

#863
post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bokeh is the quality of blur, not the quantity, and it’s determined mostly by the lens, not the sensor.

OK let's talk about depth of field. DOF is both a function of sensor size and lens aperture. That's why small sensors even with 1.8 aperture have no bokeh comparable to 35mm at 1.8. And anyway with very small sensors you can only get blurriness if you are extremely close to the subject, while 35mm and higher sensor formats allow for MUCH more creativity.

> OK let's talk about depth of field... small sensors even with 1.8 aperture have no bokeh comparable to 35mm at 1.8.

Bokeh is not depth of field. That’s the point.

Yes, small sensors cannot get extremely shallow depth of field. However, shallow depth of field is not bokeh. If you want to say that small sensors cannot achieve narrow depth of the field or massive subject separation or a “destroyed” background or whatever, fine. But don’t call it bokeh because that’s something else.

A lens could yield the same bokeh (blur quality) at f/2 and f/4 even though the depth of field (blur quantity) would be much different.

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

#864
post #820

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pro-customer would be: 1. Measure the battery, see that it is not optimal. 2. Tell the user: "your system has been slowed down due to non-optimal battery performance. Please replace the battery as soon as possible." 3. Let the user replace the battery. Instead, this phenomenon is being exploited to prompt people into dumping the old phone and upgrade to the new one.

As I said, I don't disagree with warning the user > There are two choices (besides warning the user): either you make the phone use less electricity (slowing down the CPU, dimming the screen, etc) or you let it shutdown unexpectedly and without warning. > The pro-customer behaviour is the first one

Option Alpha: Tell the User, let them Fix the Consumable Themselves.

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

#865

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies like Apple actually take accessibility really seriously though, which I applaud. That said, there's a pecking order to disabilities that these companies have to service. I can tell you that blindness is top of the heap and cognitive disabilities are bottom of the heap. It's a crummy situation for users like you when a disability doesn't weigh as heavily as the product design goals - grumble, the world is br…

There are other smartphone companies, albeit with inferior products, that have models with headphone jacks.

Design is a big priority for all these companies. :shrug:

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

#866

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Fac…

Don't you think the response from Apple (lowering battery replacement costs, modifying the OS to show the user what is happening) is a clear indicator that they really fid feel a backlash rather than the usual Apple bashing by non Apple customers?

I don't. This is about the smallest possible response you can imagine. If anything it's Apple doubling down on their original decision — they think they made the right call, and they're standing by it, but throwing a bone to customers by offering essentially at-cost battery replacement.

And honestly? I think they made the right call, even if the implementation details were off. Phones shutting off randomly is something that appears common on Android phones but not on iPhones, and throttling them to prevent this was the right decision to make. Warning that this is occurring is something that, in retrospect, was warranted. But it's easy to see how the teams in question for implementing this could have underestimated the performance impact, the scale of how many phones this would affect, or both. And it's easy to see how adding a warning might have been considered a v2 of the feature, whereas v1 was the quick band-aid needed to ship to prevent a problem that might have affected large numbers of phones in the wild.

In my opinion, Apple has so much goodwill built up from making difficult-but-principled decisions, I'm more than happy to give them the benefit of the doubt. If anything, their response reinforces my belief that they thought this was the right decision from the get-go. They didn't roll back the feature as other companies would have done. They stuck by it because it's the right move for the vast majority of their customers.

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

#867

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> The first ancestor of this comment chain is saying, that they were locked-in partly because they couldn't move media out. This contradicts you. Sorry, you are just making things up. The first ancestor did not complain about moving media out. That is something that you invented. Btw I do not know what your purpose here is... lying... to get what? Upvotes? Are these really worth... this? Just asking.

Yelling at commenters that they have an "upvote agenda" for being educational and informative, by giving useful advice....it seems rather crude. Please be a little more thoughtful and give others the benefit of the doubt. Even if you work for Apple's marketing department..

So you say that I accuse people of having "agenda" (and, presumably, such accusations are bad), then you accuse me of having agenda.

That's funny. I hope you can see how it is funny.

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

#868

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not true according to my experience. See https://imgur.com/a/VH0Bs . Note that in my case the performance restoration came about after I had my battery replaced -- no data wiping or other system cleaning occurred. > Lost in all the media reports is that the throttling only happens at peak system power demand. Throttling at least occurs during app loading. Apple admits as much and it was true (subjectively) in…

I can't claim to know what was going on with your phone, of course. But artificial benchmarks that push the system to its limits seem more likely to trigger this behavior than everyday usage, so I wouldn't take those results as evidence. I didn't see the app loading bullet point and agree with you there. In my own case, everything was slow. Loading apps, loading web pages, whatever. And the difference after a clean i…

I'd assume that these processors use the same 'race to sleep' philosophy that Intel CPUs have been using for a while, which would mean that peak power draw would be requested very frequently in short bursts.

The degree of throttling that seems to be occurring does seem to be quite excessive. Excessive enough that I wonder whether they've had unexpected battery degradation in the field, or unexpected degradation of the power delivery circuit, or unexpectedly high load consumption or some kind of fault with the SoC.

Either that or they have just pushed the envelope a little too much knowing that their customers are likely to get fed up and buy new phones... hmmm...

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

#869
post #831

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And I'm just explaining why that is a bullshit. It's clear that the real reason Apple is doing this is to make more money by selling accessories.

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

#870
post #736
post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, I simply don’t believe that the iPhone is not designed to be able to run at full speed a reasonable fraction of the time. The implication that I keep getting from people seems to be that Apple is running their phones at 140% and when the battery can’t keep up they then slow it down to make up for the CPU being underprovisioned on battery. I think it’s far more likely that Apple is running the phone at 100% o…

In that case, why don't Android devices face sudden shutdowns as frequent as iOS devices (yes, you can point to isolated cases, but it is nowhere as prevalent as Apple devices pre-throttling)? Note that this problem only occurred on devices where Apple fully designed the chips (iPhone 6 and later). "Off the shelf" chips, and those used for Android, simply have a lot more of a voltage window.

Because no one cares or names it a "-gate" when one Android phone, consisting of <10% of the whole Android phone market has the same issues.
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