Apple Agrees to Pay $113M to Settle 'Batterygate' Case over iPhone Slowdowns

Presumably, you had a phone before your current one. If so, you evidently have a preference between slower phone and no phone at all.

Disclaimer: I've had to deal with batteries a lot in my career so I'm familiar with their complex nature. I am not an expert though, so I'm sure there are a million more confounding variables that complicate things further.

> What I don't understand is that most other people seem to treat the percentages as meaningful. They certainly aren't based on "time until a recharge is needed", which is what people want. What are we notionally seeing percentages of?

So yes it kind of is based on "time until recharge". The problem is batteries are more complicated than that. I think a lot of people tend to view batteries as like a power supply that has a certain capacity you consume. This isn't an accurate view.

First capacity isn't static, it depends on temperature. Lithium batteries generally have thermal cut-off circuity so temperature compensation is pretty standard to add in.

Second batteries have internal resistances which affects its behavior. Internal resistances naturally rise as batteries age, or more accurately go through recharge cycles. This changes voltage sag behavior as GP noted.

Third, as GP mentioned, batteries don't supply a constant voltage. A lot of people realize battery voltage drops as a battery is used, which is true in a very simple sense. A cell can have a fully charged open circuit voltage for 4.2, but it quickly goes down to 3.7 where it spends most of its cycle around. Note that I specified an open circuit voltage. The second you apply a load the voltage will drop in relation to the load applied. This voltage sag and the subsequent recovery is not instantaneous either, it takes time to reach equilibrium states.

So in essence a battery percentage is simplistically portraying the capacity remaining in a battery, but isn't - nor can't - portray the fact that some of that capacity is unusable depending on loading conditions combined with safety cut-offs to protect the battery. Apple's solution was to change the load so there was less unusable capacity.

I'd like to re-iterate that I'm not an expert here. Batteries are complicated electrochemical devices.

Edit - Let me illustrate a hypothetical analogy. Let's say you have a car with a fuel tank and a poorly designed fuel pump. You fill up the tank with ten gallons, and start driving. The fuel pump heats up as you press on the accelerator, the harder you accelerate the more it heats up. However the fuel acts as a heat sink for the fuel pump. After driving for a while you have two gallons left. At this point you go full throttle and suddenly the engine cuts out because the thermal protection circuitry on the fuel pump kicked in. Your fuel gauge still reads two gallons, the problem is you simply can't consume it at full throttle because the pump won't operate under those conditions. You can still drive at maybe half throttle though.

Look, you can continue to stan for Apple in the comments if you like, but even they admitted they were in the wrong to the tune of a hundred million dollars.

What's the old sales motto again .. "Sometimes the customer is actually right"?

How about i realize my battery drains "quickly" now, i will go to the store & Apple advices to keep the phone but change the battery for 50 bucks. My device still runs as smooth as it was once the "flagship". But it didn't happen and my device is so slow now (as if the CPU is tired of running) and a new "flagship" is released with 2x the speed and feels so smooth but costs $1000. Hence the lawsuit.

But this case shows the exact opposite. They updated phones to last longer without unexpected shut-downs. If they didn't do that update, many people who experienced these shut-downs outside of warrenty would change their old phone for a new ones. You can usually live with a slightly slower phone when the battery is low, but a phone that randomly dies on you? Not so much.

To be clear, Apple still messed up, because they didn't communicate this at all. They could have also put in a slightly larger battery to begin with.

But in the tech world, Apple isn't the worst in pushing people to upgrade hardware, which is illustrated by the fact that people use iPhones longer before upgrading than Android users. That's the one upside of Apples crazy App Store margins... they really don't need to push new hardware on you to make a shitload of money (while for Android that money goes to Google rather than hardware manufacturers)

Apple could do better - WAY better - but I think it's a bit naive to think that this could possibly change, and is worth complaining about. The only way it would, if there was somehow significant money in spending lots of time optimizing OS updates for old devices. But most people like upgrading their phones anyway. For Apple to change, consumers must change first. I don't think there's much hope for government regulation here either. It's a problem that's too complex to regulate.