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France fines Apple €25M for iOS software that slowed down older iPhones

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Re: France fines Apple €25M for iOS software that slowed down older iPhones

#41

Post by zepto »

pastor_elm wrote: post #20
privateSFacct wrote: post #5

Apple implemented this to help users extend life of older devices. Apple should just have phones in France run full clock at all times to comply with this regulation. These types of things don't recognize that phone design is a CONSTANT power management / speed tradeoff. If you demand things run 100% speed at all times - poof - your batter life is gone.

>Apple implemented this to help users extend life of older devices. No they didn't. The software updates didn't properly work on phones with the older batteries, so this was their work around. The options they had were: 1. not allow the updates on those phones, 2. allow the updates and have users deal with potentially having the phones shut down. 3. Offer battery upgrades. 4. Jerry rig a hack to deal with it. They we…

What is subversive about their option?

Re: France fines Apple €25M for iOS software that slowed down older iPhones

#42

Post by simonh »

throwaway_tech wrote: post #27
privateSFacct wrote: post #5

Apple implemented this to help users extend life of older devices. Apple should just have phones in France run full clock at all times to comply with this regulation. These types of things don't recognize that phone design is a CONSTANT power management / speed tradeoff. If you demand things run 100% speed at all times - poof - your batter life is gone.

>Apple implemented this to help users extend life of older devices. Or to encourage users spending $500-$1,000 to upgrade their slowing devices. >Apple should just have phones in France run full clock at all times to comply with this regulation. Why does tech always seem to have the attitude of "we know whats best for you" and if you challenge us we will make things as bad as possible just to prove our point? Is ther…

> throttle their own devices to manage power/battery trade-off?

With modern power management, the system constantly makes decisions on throttling up and down at the sub-millisecond level, balancing performance, power usage, battery lifetime and thermal constraints which affect component lifetimes. There are probably hundreds of combinations of criteria it uses to decide what to do and when.

This has nothing to do with Apple versus Android or open versus closed. All modern phone systems do this, the Android device makers face exactly the same issues. There isn't a single modern smartphone on the market that doesn't throttle the CPU in order to preserve device lifetime, because that's a big part of what thermal management is about. It's why people overclocking their CPUs are taking a risk. That running older batteries hotter and harder degrades them rapidly and risks device outages is simply a fact of physics. Painting these practices as 'planned obsolescence' is, frankly, incredibly ignorant.

Re: France fines Apple €25M for iOS software that slowed down older iPhones

#43

Post by throwanem »

CamelCaseName wrote: post #37
throwanem wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the problem, yeah. If they'd made the tradeoff clear and advised that a battery replacement would alleviate it, that would be one thing. But the margin on a $50-70 battery replacement is a lot thinner than the margin on a $500-1000 new phone, so...

While keeping revenues and margin is certainly a priority, I think the bigger issue is a desire to not split the Apple userbase across multiple iOS versions. "Less than a year after release, iOS 12 has reached 88% of all active iOS devices" [0] By contrast, Android has an insane amount of fragmentation, though the link is outdated, at the time, Marshmellow 6.0 had the most users, at 16.9% of all Android users, while…

I'm not sure how this is relevant. Throttling has been present in iOS since at least version 10 (2016), if not longer - IIRC 10 added the settings UI to override throttling if you want to, but I'm not sure when the actual capability landed.

Preventing ecosystem fragmentation is well and good, but it's orthogonal to publicizing that the OS does CPU throttling on devices with batteries whose power delivery is compromised by age, and making clear that a cheap battery replacement will do as much to solve that problem as an expensive new phone will.

(I do my own refurbs, so I can vouch from experience for a battery replacement solving throttling. There's no deliberate derating of older devices qua older devices that I can see, but it's reasonable that people believe there is, because Apple has done a terrible job of making clear what's actually going on. One of many cases where their habitual allergy to transparency has harmed them and their userbase alike; it's hard to blame kremlinologists for being kremlinologists when that's the only way to try to figure out what the hell your company is doing.)

Re: France fines Apple €25M for iOS software that slowed down older iPhones

#44

Post by RealStickman »

azinman2 wrote: post #39
hrktb wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is punished for trying to push the issue under the rug, perpetuating a situation that was beneficial to their revenue. It would be the same if an ISP silently slowed a user's internet when detecting their ISP provided router is getting flacky. That's not the right way of handling this, users should be warned of the issue so they can act accordingly, and not stay in the dark until someone discovers the hack.

The alternative would be to have phones turn off when they requested more power than was available. What do you think would cause people to want to replace their phones faster?

> users should be warned of the issue so they can act accordingly, and not stay in the dark until someone discovers the hack.

What part of this sentence did you not understand?

It's about WARNING the user before they do the upgrade so they 1) know what will happen and 2) know how they could fix it.

Re: France fines Apple €25M for iOS software that slowed down older iPhones

#45

Post by hurricanetc »

They’ll need a forensic accountant to find this fine in their balance sheet. What is even the point of a fine of this amount?

I’m not arguing for or against Apple being fined. It’s just such a pointlessly trivial amount for Apple as to be totally meaningless.

Re: France fines Apple €25M for iOS software that slowed down older iPhones

#46

Post by martin-adams »

If my recollection of the events is correct, I do think this fine is fair as the slowing down of people's iPhones when a new iOS was released, combined with newer iPhone models being launched made people think that it was due them perceiving the phone was old tech and unable to power the latest iOS features, not the software doing it for the lifespan of the battery.

Apple were silent about this for many years and were pressured to put the option to disable this in. This is what is important. They were happy to be silent and let users feel like the only option was to upgrade to have a fast phone. And since it's not feasible to replace batteries on older phone, everything was stacked in Apple's favour.

Re: France fines Apple €25M for iOS software that slowed down older iPhones

#47

Post by fox8091 »

jey wrote: post #4

Background context: This is because Apple throttled down the maximum CPU speed of phones whose batteries were old/weak. The (claimed) intent was to prevent old phones from suddenly shutting off while running CPU-intensive apps like games.

Having used older Android phones with dying batteries, that's something that will happen. If I was under 30% battery, opening the camera immediately shut off the phone. Same for playing a video or running an intensive app.

Re: France fines Apple €25M for iOS software that slowed down older iPhones

#48

Post by javagram »

baby wrote: post #34
rbritton wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did [0], and to me it's a legitimate course of action to extend device life and minimize support load a bit. However, it should be disclosed clearly and not covered up until it blows up. [0]: https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-slows-down-older-iphone-batt...

They found a way to legitimize planned obsolescence at the eyes of the public. Apple should be celebrated for this, not sued. /s

The phone being unreliable and constantly shutting down would arguably be a way more effective method of “planned obsolescence”.

My 2015 MacBook Pro has the issue of shutting down or turning off when still at 20% or 30% battery and I find it immensely frustrating (I assume it’s a similar issue of an old battery not being consistent). I’d much rather it be throttled and be reliable.

Re: France fines Apple €25M for iOS software that slowed down older iPhones

#49

Post by throwanem »

justsayinghi wrote: post #35
throwanem wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the problem, yeah. If they'd made the tradeoff clear and advised that a battery replacement would alleviate it, that would be one thing. But the margin on a $50-70 battery replacement is a lot thinner than the margin on a $500-1000 new phone, so...

I did the battery replacement and it didn’t help at all.

I've done several, and it did. Make sure throttling is disabled (Settings, search for Battery Health); in my experience the OS doesn't do that on its own, presumably relying on the playbook they give their support techs to cover that. It also doesn't hurt to do a "battery calibration" process like the one found at https://help.ifixit.com/article/265-battery-calibration - I don't know that I've seen a huge difference from that, but I always do it, so I wouldn't really be able to say that it's not necessary even if it isn't.
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