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

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

#191

Post by djmobley »

Spooky23 wrote: post #107
crazygringo wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's very strange, I had an opposite experience twice with my original SE (Apple store in NYC). It similarly showed 80+% battery health, but I showed them the battery charge history in Settings (dropped from 40% to 0% instantly) and they replaced it under warranty. Happened a year and a half later, exact same scenario, and paid the ~$30 to get it replaced. I suspect they didn't have any monitoring to detect or log…

All of these anecdotes are hard because people tend to leave out or forget key details. I'd guess the date is a key factor, as I'm sure thousands of people showed up at the Apple store because they heard on CNN that their battery was broken.

The experience I described was in Oct 2016, before the iOS update in Feb 2017 which introduced the throttling, and fixed the unexpected shutdowns for me.

At the time they just refused to even consider the possibility it was a genuine hardware issue. I got the lecture about batteries being consumable items, mine was somewhat degraded (82% health), etc. They suggested I do a software reset, etc.

I like to think maybe in hindsight someone at Apple HQ looked at the diagnostics from my Genius Bar visit as part of the decision to introduce throttling, and realised they were wrong.

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

#192

Post by Ygg2 »

arcticbull wrote: post #155
Ygg2 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your point was that throttling is better than not working. But that's a false dichotomy. Rather than throttle. You can show less charge. It's what other phones do.

Why would I want the phone to turn off sooner?

Why would I want phone with worse performance?

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

#193

Post by bengale »

dlubarov wrote: post #147
arcticbull wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The device is fine, and so's the battery. What I'm suggesting is that you consider the 100% performance mark to be far side of the performance curve at the end of the expected life of the device, so 80% capacity after 1000 charge cycles or 2 years, give or take. With that as your baseline ("100%"), if you can make the phone perform better than the that in the first few years you're offering an early-life performance…

For the sake of argument, let's go with your framing: the device starts out at "120%" performance, then degrades to "100%". The argument others have raised still applies. If Apple had informed users about the transition from 120% to 100%, some portion of users would have enjoyed the 120% experience so much that they would have replaced their batteries in order to get back to 120%. Apple concealed that option by not i…

The problem is a battery engineer can't seem to explain this to people here who are ostensibly smart people, though that does somewhat go out of the window when apple is the subject it seems. How on earth could they be expected to explain this to everyone?

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

#194

Post by thaumasiotes »

aetherspawn wrote: post #43
Karunamon wrote: post #6

Worth mentioning here is that this wasn't just about the "sneaky" fix for battery degradation, it was about doing this without notice , and having internal tooling that would deny a replacement (even at full retail price) if the battery was above an arbitrary health threshold (but still low enough to cause throttling). Before Apple changed their tune, if you read about this, and went into an Apple store for a replace…

Hi, Battery engineer here at an electric vehicle company. The crux of it is this: when you draw high current from a small battery, the voltage will sag (1). The manufacturer has an on-board battery management system that MUST turn off the battery if it goes below a certain voltage threshold. As the battery ages, the sag effect increases significantly, up to 2-3x. Thus, when your phone clearly indicates say 20% batter…

> Thus, when your phone clearly indicates say 20% battery remaining, if a high load were to be applied, the last 20% would be inaccessible because the battery sag from the spontaneous high load would cause a reboot.

So, I treat the battery readout as basically a scale of "high / medium / low". This works well with the empirical fact that a 20% readout might in fact last longer than a 50% readout.

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?

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

#195

Post by saiya-jin »

arcticbull wrote: post #145
greggman3 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's imagine it's a electric car. The car goes 70mph when you buy it. Suddenly it only runs at 45mph. You want to buy a new battery to fix it but the car company refuses even though you're willing to pay. Why should you have to put up with a car that only goes 45mph when it went 70mph when you bought it? What part of this is hard to understand. I don't want a phone that runs slow.

It's different in that the electric car is marketed as capable of achieving 70mph, Apple does not market iOS devices in terms of performance. No promises were made in that regard - at all, IIRC.

I can't believe how much of an echo-chamber these discussions get. Its like proper politics - once people chose their branch of religion, be it faith in god or in their phone manufacturer, they go to great lengths to twist reality so that their favorite comes always as good guy. Cognitive dissonance anybody?

I have no stake at this topic, never owned an Apple device and I don't feel other manufacturers are significantly better, but its a bit sad to see so much apologism at otherwise great place like HN. Or its just paid comments either from employees or otherwise employed, I mean we're still just on general internet and its still 2020 so its unfortunately pretty normal.

In any case, if you guys try to defend these seemingly amoral actions of Apple, the real effect is exactly opposite.

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

#196

Post by [deleted] »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #161
udba wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A high power workload on a phone might require ~5-10W over 100ms, i.e. ~0.5 joules. At 4V capacitor voltage, you would need ~30mF capacitor. Not likely to fit in a phone. This assumes you’re powering the phone solely off the cap. Even with a battery you’d still need something in the mF range to make up for the battery’s degradation.

The first data sheet I pulled up has an option for 47mF at 4.5V in 20x15x2.3mm of supercap. So it would fit if you really wanted.

[deleted]

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

#198

Post by itsthetruth »

gpm wrote: post #32
ptudan wrote: post #8

As of two years ago, apple had sold 2.2 BILLION iphones. The cost of this scam per phone was $.05.

This isn't the only cost. There was also another $500 million us settlement, a $27 million dollar fine from France, and probably others, and probably more outstanding liability.

Damn bro. That's like $0.25/phone! Sending Tim Cook my thoughts and prayers.

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

#199

Post by krtkush »

mlindner wrote: post #180
reducesuffering wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is the crux of the issue. Apple had to make a call for their customers: ensure the low battery is as long-lasting and predictable as possible around 1-5%, or keep high performance as the phone battery degrades quicker and shuts off. I think many people thoroughly understand how crucial it can be to have that last 1-2% and going into a situation where you think you have 5%, but then the phone dies, is a p…

You're not understanding the issue here. This had nothing to do with how fast the battery degrades. This was only ever about how the phone acts with an already degraded battery. The two choices are 1. Shut off the phone suddenly if any high performance tasks are attempted 2. Throttle the phone performance to keep it from shutting off. Apple chose #2, which is best for customers, and got forced to pay $113M from it. I…

> Apple chose #2, which is best for customers, and got forced to pay $113M from it. It's ridiculous.

You're missing out the part where they did not inform the user why their device was being throttled and nor did their internal tooling inform the genius that a simple battery change can fix the issue.

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

#200

Post by KuhlMensch »

aetherspawn wrote: post #43
Karunamon wrote: post #6

Worth mentioning here is that this wasn't just about the "sneaky" fix for battery degradation, it was about doing this without notice , and having internal tooling that would deny a replacement (even at full retail price) if the battery was above an arbitrary health threshold (but still low enough to cause throttling). Before Apple changed their tune, if you read about this, and went into an Apple store for a replace…

Hi, Battery engineer here at an electric vehicle company. The crux of it is this: when you draw high current from a small battery, the voltage will sag (1). The manufacturer has an on-board battery management system that MUST turn off the battery if it goes below a certain voltage threshold. As the battery ages, the sag effect increases significantly, up to 2-3x. Thus, when your phone clearly indicates say 20% batter…

I'd rather they just consumed the battery of my 4 year old iphone 4, until it was useless.

What they did was practically make my iphone 4 useless, forcing me to abandon the phone due to an OS upgrade.

This single experience re-defined my relationship with Apple. Much more than the butterfly keyboard fiasco.

I certainly don't buy the "good faith" invocation.

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