France fines Apple €25M for iOS software that slowed down older iPhones • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by lallysingh » Sat, Feb 08, 2020, 12:00 AM UTC

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.

They sent an update that slowed down many phones. They didn't tell anyone how to make it not slow.

If their intent was customer happiness, they would have notified. But they didn't, and there was a lot of upgrade money to be had.

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

#222

Post by blazespin » Sat, Feb 08, 2020, 12:01 AM UTC

This is a real issue. My wife uses her Mac for netflix and maybe light photo cataloging/editing, and yet after 10 years it's now slower than molasses. Why should we upgrade? We're not doing anything that requires a new computer.

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

#223

Post by DevKoala » Sat, Feb 08, 2020, 12:01 AM UTC

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #165

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.

Fortunately, you could've just reverted to a previous OS - unfortunately, that's another thing that isn't possible with an Apple phone.

No you couldn't, I remember this being a PITA.

Unless you had done the backups of your data yourself and wiped the installation of the machine, you were screwed. This is the same situation for iOS.

https://www.overclockers.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-2889...

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

#224

Post by varenc » Sat, Feb 08, 2020, 12:03 AM UTC

flatiron wrote: post #167

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

No way they could do this securely. They would have to patch old OSes for flaws and such.

For devices that don't support more recent versions of iOS, Apple does make minor updates to old major versions. For example 6 months ago Apple released iOS 9.3.6, fixing some issues for the iPhone 4S which is forever stuck on iOS 9.

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

#225

Post by sumedh » Sat, Feb 08, 2020, 12:04 AM UTC

egwor wrote: post #68

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 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…

> We can't keep throwing away devices like this; it isn't good for the environment.

Someone should tell that to Apple, throwing devices and buying new ones their strategy when the same devices can easily be repaired but repairing things is not encouraged by Apple.

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

#226

Post by geuis » Sat, Feb 08, 2020, 12:05 AM UTC

overgard wrote: post #219

Here's a thing to consider: your current phone, in your pocket, would it not be perfectly sufficient for the next 10 years if software wasn't making it obsolete? Is there any new app that really needs twice the processing power. Is the bajillion DPI screen hard on your eyes? Like, other than wear and tear, do you really have any reason to buy a new phone? I have an iphone 7, but to be honest I'd still be using my 5c…

I’m still happily using my 6s.

What I’m unhappy about is that iOS 13 broke a few things in Safari that have affected its stability. Double-tap to zoom is incredibly unreliable now and it worked perfectly for years. There’s some weird caching going on and some rendering issues, so sometimes a site will get stuck in a weird broken state that re-navigating or refreshing won’t fix. Have to exit Safari and reload it to fix.

The email client now has a huge amount of white space at the bottom with all of the features like Mark as Read bundled under the reply arrow.

And text selection is complete crap now. Selecting text in the url bar just defaults to highlighting the entire url and it takes 5-10 taps just to get a cursor. And in regular text, it’s impossible to see where the cursor is BECAUSE ITS UNDER MY THUMB. The old magnifying glass was a way better UI.

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

#227

Post by fsh » Sat, Feb 08, 2020, 12:06 AM UTC

thedance wrote: post #202

ColonelSanders wrote: post #190

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 batt…

The battery is replaceable. It takes fifteen minutes at any Apple store.

They have to remove the glued-in screen to get at the battery. Much more difficult than it should be and with the risk of compromising the waterproofing. I don't buy the argument that this is somehow required for engineering reasons. Wristwatches have easily replaceable batteries while being a lot smaller than an iPhone and having much better ingress protection.

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

#228

Post by RL_Quine » Sat, Feb 08, 2020, 12:07 AM UTC

overgard wrote: post #209

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.

If apple was being honest they would have some interface to show the battery life. When I upgraded iOS recently I got a notification saying "hey we only charge your battery to 80% now to preserve its life." That was fine and appropriate! So it's not like Apple can't do that. But if my phone had just stopped charging to 100% with no notification I would have been annoyed. Same thing here, especially since theres a fai…

There’s literally an interface for this.

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

#229

Post by xmprt » Sat, Feb 08, 2020, 12:07 AM UTC

function_seven wrote: post #189

tambourine_man wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There are probably thousands of design decisions that go into making a phone like this. Who is supposed to decide which ones get a notice and which ones don't? Apple probably already has some sort of organization that deals with these communication issues. Is this fine a reasonable punishment for getting one thing wrong?

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

#230

Post by manfredo » Sat, Feb 08, 2020, 12:07 AM UTC

jonplackett wrote: post #128

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.

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.

Then France should issue fines for every electronic device sold that had this functionality. Except that would have meant fines being issued for effectively every laptop, phone, and tablet sold in the last decade. What Apple did is a near-universal function in battery powered devices with powerful processors.

It'd be funny id Apple disabled this functionality in France, thus bricking many old phones, and tell the French that they made this change to comply with French regulators.