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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

#141

Post by kneel »

wmeredith wrote: post #124

This is so dumb. Apple has a lot of flaws but old hardware support certainly isn’t one of them. Firstly, they only slowed down older phones to prevent them from crashing as they had less and less reliable battery draw. Secondly, Apple’s support for legacy phone hardware is the best in the market. It’s absurd that they’re being punished for this.

Funny they always released software to slow down your phone the week before the new iphone released.

They also denied they were slowing down old phones for several years.

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

#142

Post by ceejayoz »

choward wrote: post #103
egwor wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might be one of the few, but I think it does warrant it. People buy devices and expect them to work and keep working. If the battery had an issue then it should have flagged up that the phone was saving battery life and that they should replace the battery. We can't keep throwing away devices like this; it isn't good for the environment. Why do I think it is important to be told? My old iPad has almost overnight sl…

Not having easily replaceable batteries is definitely the root problem. Everyone knows that batteries can't last forever and the weak link in having something last for years yet everyone is perfectly fine with non replaceable batteries. I know so many people who have bought new phones when all they need is a new battery. It's mind boggling.

Apple replaced my battery for $29. Not bad.

Replaceable batteries come with their own trade-offs, namely water intrusion through failing seals. I'd rather pay occasionally for someone skilled to replace the battery than replace the entire phone after a drop in the sink.

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

#144

Post by hinkley »

wmeredith wrote: post #124

This is so dumb. Apple has a lot of flaws but old hardware support certainly isn’t one of them. Firstly, they only slowed down older phones to prevent them from crashing as they had less and less reliable battery draw. Secondly, Apple’s support for legacy phone hardware is the best in the market. It’s absurd that they’re being punished for this.

This is less true now than it once was, but one of the things Apple used to be good at is producing a new OS for the last generation of hardware that made it faster. Most manufacturers unerringly make the old hardware slower.

There's an old trick in software development, some of us learn it by example, others by experience: be conservative when rolling out performance improvements. If you have a feature you know will make things slower, pair it with changes to improve performance. If you make version 1.2 faster, and version 1.3 is as slow as 1.1, people will feel robbed (because performance is a feature and you just removed a new feature).

Pulling this off can be problematic unless you happen to work on both features. What if one slips to the next release? One of the perks of being a generalist and having some seniority is that you have a degree of control over such things, where others might not.

If Apple had wedded the clock throttling to a new major revision of the OS, people would hardly have noticed.

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

#145

Post by eugeniub »

wmeredith wrote: post #124

This is so dumb. Apple has a lot of flaws but old hardware support certainly isn’t one of them. Firstly, they only slowed down older phones to prevent them from crashing as they had less and less reliable battery draw. Secondly, Apple’s support for legacy phone hardware is the best in the market. It’s absurd that they’re being punished for this.

It's a pretty tiny fine (0.04% of Apple's yearly revenue) for a pretty major offense: quietly slowing down old phones without telling customers that they could replace the battery to make it fast again. We can have a conversation as to whether this rises to the level of planned obsolescence, but this was absolutely not the correct way for Apple to handle this.

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

#146

Post by atoav »

wmeredith wrote: post #124

This is so dumb. Apple has a lot of flaws but old hardware support certainly isn’t one of them. Firstly, they only slowed down older phones to prevent them from crashing as they had less and less reliable battery draw. Secondly, Apple’s support for legacy phone hardware is the best in the market. It’s absurd that they’re being punished for this.

Apple is not really known for their fantastic repairability and this is for sure a field in which they could do better work (as opposed to work against repairability).

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

#147

Post by chipotle_coyote »

vbezhenar wrote: post #140
88840-8855 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true, however, their software is slowing down the phone. I recently compared the iPhone 7 with iOS10 vs iPhone 7 with iOS13: the camera app got slower and is shooting blurry pictures often, the gallery app is slower and less responsive, the keyboard takes a significant time to open now vs. always instantly available. The phones do "get slower" - and this is annoying af.

The problem is only partly with slow OS. For me the real culprit is inability to downgrade OS and apps. I have iPhone 4S. It was amazing phone when it was running iOS 6. Now it's slow as molasses. May be it should not be one-click, as it causes security issues and user must understand the implications. But there must be a way for official downgrade.

> Now it's slow as molasses

Given that the iPhone 4s can't run iOS versions past 2015's iOS 9, "now" would seem to be fairly relative. Also, I'm not sure I'd describe iOS upgrades as "one-click"; IIRC, you need to click through at least one screen telling you about the new OS and enter your passcode before the install. A lot of people probably do breeze through that without really understanding they're going through a major OS upgrade, but that's awfully hard to address. (People tend to just breeze past any boilerplate-text dialog unless it looks threatening and dire.)

I agree that Apple should make it much easier to downgrade the OS, though. (I'm not 100% sure it's even possible, although I think you may be able to do a clean install of an earlier version from iTunes if you've archived a backup.)

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

#148

Post by scarface74 »

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.

You mean the government full of non technical politicians make bad choices when regulating technology? Who would have thought?

Next thing they will be telling phone companies what types of cords to use....

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

#149

Post by scarface74 »

bgorman wrote: post #59
ogre_codes wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple throttling phones to preserve battery life was the right thing to do. Doing it without telling users their batteries were expired and causing their phone to slow down was the wrong thing to do. Whether that merits a $27m fine is debatable.

I absolutely disagree. These phones were unusable with the throttling. I switched to Android because my iPhone 6 was unusable less than 3 years after getting it. This is like saying that an appropriate fix for a car manufacture is to limit the maximum speed of a car to 25 miles per hour. It breaks so many use cases that the car becomes worthless.

So does Android use some type of magical battery technology that doesn’t degrade over time?

And good luck getting operating system updates after only two years on Android.

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

#150

Post by cptskippy »

wmeredith wrote: post #124

This is so dumb. Apple has a lot of flaws but old hardware support certainly isn’t one of them. Firstly, they only slowed down older phones to prevent them from crashing as they had less and less reliable battery draw. Secondly, Apple’s support for legacy phone hardware is the best in the market. It’s absurd that they’re being punished for this.

> Firstly, they only slowed down older phones to prevent them from crashing as they had less and less reliable battery draw.

Yes, and they did this to avoid a recall of millions of iPhones because the batteries were unable to provide necessary current for designed operation less than 2 years after purchase.

Then when they got caught, rather than issue a recall they instead offered replacement batteries at a discount from their normal price.

Basically they sold a defective product, hid it with a behavioral change after launch that encouraged users to upgrade, and when caught swindling people managed to convince everyone to instead pay them to fix the issue.

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