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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

#181

Post by simion314 »

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

If you put aside any fanboys and think the reasons why Apple did this behind the user backs:

- maybe the user won't notice and ask for a free battery replacement

- maybe the user feels that the phone is slow and buys a new one and Apple makes more money

- fixes the PR issues that phones close unexpectedly

Tell me any other reason Apple hid this from the users and from power users and the press(the issue is this thing was hidden and users did not know they had the right or option to get a new battery).

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

#182

Post by sequoia »

Bud wrote: post #171
jonplackett wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is they didn't tell anyone they were doing it. So people thought their phone was just old and slow and bought a new one, when they could have just replaced the battery and made it fast again.

This is total bullshit. I would bet real money that a grand total of ZERO users "thought their phone was just old and slow and bought a new one" as a result of this issue. Zero.

I would very gladly take you up on this bet. You name the stakes.

What do you think the average user thinks when their older phone performs worse after an OS update? "Aha, I bet the vendor is throttling the performance to preserve battery life, which I can fix by replacing with a new battery, a repair process which the vendor makes clear and easy!"

This has not been my experience. I'm a technical iPhone user and I don't even research it this much, I just think "%#&* they updated the OS again and now my phone is slow again"

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

#183

Post by jonplackett »

ShinTakuya wrote: post #169
jonplackett wrote: post #126

Fined $27 million. Made $64 billion in the last 3 months. So that's about 1 hour of profit. I'm sure they've been taught a lesson they'll never forget. EDIT: as pointed out below, that was revenue not profit. But apple make so much damn profit it's not as crazy different as it would be for most companies. So it's more like 2.5 hours.

Classic mistake of conflating revenue with profit. They made closer to $25 billion. Ignoring that, it's a mistake to think that these "small" amounts don't matter to companies. They just lost the yearly salaries of 150 or more engineers. It's worth it for them to assign 5 guys to add and maintain a feature that notifies customers of the performance drop.

Yeah you're right. Just did a quick google for profit and can see it's actually revenue I got back.

OK, so it's 2 and a half hours.

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

#184

Post by laumars »

jonplackett wrote: post #168
teddyuk wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you bought a top of the range machine for windows 95 and put windows 98 on it, it would have been slow.

Pretty sure windows 98 was about the same speed as windows 95. (And this is from someone who still remembers their windows 98 25-digit key by heart!) But regardless, this is not the point. The point is they misled people and let them think it was that the new OS was slow, but it was not! When you replaced the battery the phone became very noticeably faster.

> Pretty sure windows 98 was about the same speed as windows 95.

A base install of Windows 98 was a hell of a lot slower than a base install of Windows 95. But that was mostly down to the IE4 integration. Once you installed IE4 on Win95 the two platforms were pretty similar.

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

#185

Post by dcmlx »

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.

Sorry. I don’t buy this. I had an iPhone 6S+ that slowed down massively when I upgraded to iOS (can’t remember the major version). I had no battery issues prior to the upgrade. Then when they brought out the fix to reverse the issue, my phone was back to normal. They definitely throttled the CPU so consumers would upgrade.

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

#186

Post by dirtydroog »

tambourine_man wrote: post #177
jonplackett wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is they didn't tell anyone they were doing it. So people thought their phone was just old and slow and bought a new one, when they could have just replaced the battery and made it fast again.

> The problem is they didn't tell anyone they were doing it. That’s called design. You have to make the decisions yourself. Customers are paying you to do that, not present them with a million checkboxes. Apple deserves a lot of criticism but this is a complete non issue. Having your phone slow down instead of shutting randomly down when the battery can’t supply the proper current is the best choice for the customer…

Or, you know, the OS could have displayed a prompt screen to the user telling them that the battery needed to be replaced.

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

#187

Post by adwf »

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 the most naive nonsense I've ever heard.

"Only"?

Of course a company doing good by its customers will try to hide the good PR for years - that it was just helping people by slowing their phones - nothing secretive there /s.

Nothing weird about releasing slowdown patches the week before a new phone release.

Nothing to do with pushing people to get the latest "faster" phone for $$$ when they only really needed to spend $ on a new battery if they'd known...

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

#188

Post by swsieber »

tambourine_man wrote: post #177
jonplackett wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is they didn't tell anyone they were doing it. So people thought their phone was just old and slow and bought a new one, when they could have just replaced the battery and made it fast again.

> The problem is they didn't tell anyone they were doing it. That’s called design. You have to make the decisions yourself. Customers are paying you to do that, not present them with a million checkboxes. Apple deserves a lot of criticism but this is a complete non issue. Having your phone slow down instead of shutting randomly down when the battery can’t supply the proper current is the best choice for the customer…

Personally, I'd like to know when I can just fix something instead of getting an entirely new one.

"This thing is mysteriously slow, so I guess I'll get a new one" is much more profitable for apple, and more user hostile than "You're phone is slow because the battery is old. It' x% slower now than at purchase".

So in my view, it's a dark pattern.

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

#189

Post by function_seven »

tambourine_man wrote: post #177
jonplackett wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is they didn't tell anyone they were doing it. So people thought their phone was just old and slow and bought a new one, when they could have just replaced the battery and made it fast again.

> The problem is they didn't tell anyone they were doing it. That’s called design. You have to make the decisions yourself. Customers are paying you to do that, not present them with a million checkboxes. Apple deserves a lot of criticism but this is a complete non issue. Having your phone slow down instead of shutting randomly down when the battery can’t supply the proper current is the best choice for the customer…

No need for checkboxes. Or offloading decisions on the customer.

It's simple. Don't hide what you're doing. Either a notice in the UI, or even a press release at minimum. Something.

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

#190

Post by ColonelSanders »

These electronics are marketed to perform better than the one before. They shows big numbers flaunting how the thing zips, has more cores, whatever.

Therefore, it makes sense that patches curving or throttle performance are made transparent to the consumer. If anything, these patches should ask for permission from the user and toggle-able via settings. Performance was promised.

If the "wear and tear" argument of batteries aging is true, they should be made replaceable. If an item is subject to wear and tear - it should be serviceable, not soldered.

It would be pretty ridiculous to have a firmware update for a car that makes it use more gas, in hopes they'll buy a new one. Especially if it was snuck in.

Maybe we need a regulatory bureaucracy to audit software patches and wire refunds when performance advertised degrades.

Perhaps the cost of the electronic should be held in escrow by the regulatory authority, made into a security for the model of the unit, and only vest to Apple/Lenovo/etc based on a timespan. That escrow can subsidize the cost of a $1000 soldered logic board replacement on their own balance/tab.

Or they could just make the units serviceable from the outset. The path of least resistance.

That way, it incentivizes honesty and success for businesses like Apple by tying their products to sustainability. Them being all about the environment: https://www.apple.com/environment/.

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