101–110 of 287 posts
Apple used to be a rare exception of making old hardware run with the latest OS. Old iMac would still operate fine with the newest OS X years later.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> Would you prefer the car simply turn off entirely while driving at highway speeds? If the vehicle's age is only the equivalent of a phone being two or three years old, I would prefer a real fix, free of charge, in addition to any safety mitigation. I wouldn't want the mitigation to be regarded as the fix. People have decade-old phones that aren't throttled and still have usable battery life at the same time.
Nobody’s saying their initial fix wasn’t flawed, I’m only saying that “throttling is bad” is an ill-thought-out knee-jerk reaction.
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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…
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…
I used the original Pixel for 3 and a half years and at this point it's gotten completely unbearable to use. If it wasn't so I wouldn't have felt forced to upgrade to a phone lacking the features I wanted. Maps takes half a minute to load, the share dialogue is O(n) since the list of targets is regenerated every time you open it, the screen runs at 30FPS or something, taking pictures has several seconds of delay between shutter presses and a quarter of them come out as a solid green, and there's just general slowness of several seconds on nearly every app. And that was after I downgraded to LineageOS from Android 10, when I was getting four hours of standby time (!) and a hole burnt in my pocket.
The thing was as smooth as the OnePlus 7 Pro I'm using now at the time I got it. It was criticized at the time for being overly expensive and an iPhone clone. And now, using it in 2020 feels like using a $20 knockoff device. It was released in 2016. Three years isn't terribly long in the span of human life - at this rate I'll have to buy about 17 new phones if I live another 50 years just to be able to use them at a bearable level of performance. (Certainly a lot of potential money to be extracted for the manufacturers.)
Three years later I'll have to remember this post to see if this still holds true for this new phone.
Also there are practical reasons for this besides social ones (the insistence that OS and hardware refreshes are pushed out yearly or so at the cost of increased CPU and battery usage for existing devices). Flash memory has a limited lifespan and I would imagine it's incredibly cumbersome to replace. It's one of those things where you would just buy a new phone with the money it would cost.
Reusability in the phone market is severely lacking. I run Linux on a ThinkPad manufactured a decade ago and have zero issues running 2020 software. You can't realistically expect to do the same on a smartphone that old. PostmarketOS can't become polished soon enough - I just need to be able to make calls and can't do so using it yet.
If my recollection of the events is correct, I do think this fine is fair as the slowing down of people's iPhones when a new iOS was released, combined with newer iPhone models being launched made people think that it was due them perceiving the phone was old tech and unable to power the latest iOS features, not the software doing it for the lifespan of the battery. Apple were silent about this for many years and wer…
> users feel like the only option ...
A fine is fair because people jumped to conclusions because of the proximity in time of an OS release and a new product release? No, that's called a conspiracy theory.
If people had convinced themselves this was a ploy to sell more phones, then why on earth would they go back to Apple for another round?
I think it's in everyone's best interest for Apple to have been more transparent, but there was not a shred of proof of intention of harming users, and they ran a battery replacement program likely at a loss for a year.
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.
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.
My pretty new phone will also throttle when the battery gets low (at close to 1%). It's very noticeable, but there's no warning. Where do I collect my $27M?
It's also a bit nefarious that the slowdown coincided with a new product launch, so side-by-side comparisons show that the new devices are much, much "faster" than the old ones (which were slowed down without any notification). It's borderline fraudulent.
Good thing we've got people like you standing up for the trillion dollar companies of the world, though. They really need your help.
I think the more important issue is when Apple doesn't provide some features of newer iOS versions to older iPhones, even though they can perfectly run the features. A classic example is the Airdrop which wasn't available for iPhone 4s, but people got it running on their gadgets anyway. I know that new iOS features are supposed to drive the customers to switch to newer iPhones, but to exclude other users from such fe…
For instance, I publish a kext that patches the macOS kernel to enable you to use certain Thunderbolt devices that are blacklisted. They are probably blacklisted because they do not follow the Thunderbolt spec properly, and could destabilize your system. Just because I can hack it to work, doesn't mean it's a good idea.
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…
Personally the turnaround time on new device updates has caused me to stop believing that I can expect to use the same device three years from now. I used the original Pixel for 3 and a half years and at this point it's gotten completely unbearable to use. If it wasn't so I wouldn't have felt forced to upgrade to a phone lacking the features I wanted. Maps takes half a minute to load, the share dialogue is O(n) since…
I did have an awful experience with the original Google Nexus phone and its updates.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally the turnaround time on new device updates has caused me to stop believing that I can expect to use the same device three years from now. I used the original Pixel for 3 and a half years and at this point it's gotten completely unbearable to use. If it wasn't so I wouldn't have felt forced to upgrade to a phone lacking the features I wanted. Maps takes half a minute to load, the share dialogue is O(n) since…
I am sorry to read that you have problems with Google Pixel, but I wouldn't extrapolate it to all phones in general. I'm writing this on an almost three year old Huawei P10, and frankly the device works as well as new. I do miss its original camera and alarm apps, which were replaced with more generic versions in Android 9, but speed, stability and battery life are OK. I did have an awful experience with the original…
Having to install LineageOS just to be able to keep using it invalidates the "first-party" argument though.