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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

#191

Post by swsieber »

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.

But how much money did they save by not notifying users, who would then demand a new battery?

You're view is right if the only reason they didn't inform people was the engineering demand. I personally don't think that was the only cause.

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

#192

Post by sov »

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

I see this posted a lot and I honestly just don't buy it.

Processor power draw for most high-priority OS tasks (eg: keyboard input) are virtually zilch compared to keeping the screen lit for that much longer.

Everything says this happens to older phones, not phones with high usage. If you get the battery replaced--will Apple speed up the phone again? If I am on my iPhone 24/7 and constantly discharge down to 5% SOC, how come Apple doesn't slow down my phone more than someone with scarce use?

Even unreliable power draw makes no sense. You may be not able to predict the SOC from the OCV of the cell as accurately as SOH diminishes than when it's 100%, but cell phones largely use lithium cobalt oxides which have well-defined OCV:SOC curves! There should be no need to guess how close to a low SOC you are--you can just read the OCV.

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

#194

Post by hrktb »

blakesterz wrote: post #122

> The French watchdog said iPhone owners "were not informed that installing iOS updates (10.2.1 and 11.2) could slow down their devices". I think that's reasonable. I doubt many people would've cared if Apple had TOLD us that's what they were doing, and also made it an switch. "Hey you can slow down your phone so the battery lasts longer now that you've upgraded" or something like that. It still feels like they made…

> I doubt many people would've cared if Apple had TOLD us that's what they were doing, and also made it an switch.

It’s just a few dozen of bucks to change a battery, and people did it in droves when Apple told what they were doing.

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

#195

Post by pbhjpbhj »

ninkendo wrote: post #74
bgorman wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. Would you prefer the car simply turn off entirely while driving at highway speeds? Because phones with this issue would turn off entirely below certain charge levels, when the batteries had this issue. A more appropriate analogy wo…

Standard practice is engine check light, then mechanic looks at it, then you replace the part for £X using one of several generics, or a first-party part if you want.

So, Apple could instead have had a "battery EOL" warning, sold batteries and specs to 3rd party market, and ensured batteries were easily replaceable.

Oh, why didn't they do that I wonder, maybe because they've spent the last decade making their stuff hard to repair and ensuring parts aren't available in order to encourage upgrades instead of repairs? Surely not, not Apple, they hate sacrificing the welfare of others for the sake of their profit!

If the idea that Apple would rig this didn't fit perfectly in the rest of their narrative then perhaps the judgement wouldn't have come.

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

#196

Post by BubRoss »

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.

Selling something and using your software updates to bait and switch people is not ok, whatever the rationalization is.

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

#197

Post by ShinTakuya »

jonplackett wrote: post #183
ShinTakuya wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, I know, but as I mentioned it's a deceptive way of looking at things. Every 0.1% matters to companies at this scale.

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

#198

Post by 1123581321 »

dhimes wrote: post #134
wolfpwner wrote: post #123

I thought they did this before because of the degraded battery over time.

I have an iphone 6 (not even 6s), with the original battery. The battery health says capacity is 96%. Maybe that's a poor estimate? There are some things that run down the battery at a fascinating pace, but that's a very recent event. For instance, I can lose 20% charge in airplane mode. I now have to turn the phone completely off when I want to store it somewhere like in a locker when I work out (yeah, I'm a boomer…

Definitely a bad estimate if that is an original battery. 500 charges should bring the health down to about 80%. Presumably yours has been charged 1000-1500 times since it was purchased new from Apple.

My 11 Pro is at 96% and it is only a few months old.

Lithium battery degradation is a chemical fact; it happens as reliably as, say, car brakes do with use.

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

#199

Post by ShinTakuya »

swsieber wrote: post #191
ShinTakuya wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But how much money did they save by not notifying users, who would then demand a new battery? You're view is right if the only reason they didn't inform people was the engineering demand. I personally don't think that was the only cause.

I mean, by the time your battery is in that state, you're well out of warranty. So they'd have to pay for the new batteries.

I do agree with your key point though, but from a different perspective - they'd probably make more money from people upgrading their phones to the newest model.

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

#200

Post by ogre_codes »

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.

$27m plus...

... the massive amount of bad PR this issue has garnered them over the past 3 years.

... the other fines in other geographies.

... the cost of the massive battery replacement program they put in place.

... the cost of software updates, legal, marketing, and managing this mess over the past few years

...etc etc.

This issue has dragged out for 3+ years and affected big parts of the company. Painting it like it was a drop in the bucket hiccough is just flat wrong.

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