> First and foremost, we have never — and would never — do anything to intentionally shorten the life of any Apple product, or degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades.
Didn't they degrade the user experience by slowing down the cpu? I definitely wasn't enjoying my slow iPhone
Would you rather have a slightly slower phone, or one that shuts off at random due to the battery not being able to provide peak current.
I think the only major mistake Apple made here was not being originally transparent about this. I don't think that Apple is being 100% noble in its intents either. In addition to driving users to buy new devices, there's the much less obvious side-effect which is a lot of people attempting to get their batteries replaced at roughly the same time as devices age. Which creates a tremendous support burden at Apple Stores around the world as people pile in to get their batteries replaced. (Although more daring consumers may attempt the DIY route, but I expect that to be a very small minority).
I am affected by this issue. I would rather have a risk of my phone shutting down at <40% than my phone gas lighting me with performance degradation.
If my phone shut down when it shouldn't then I know to search out diagnostics about my battery. But if my phone slows down I have actually done these things:
* complained to developers that their apps are slower, wasting their time and resources when my battery should have been changed.
* reinstalled my OS. Which did not help when I should have changed my battery.
* searched and searched and searched resources online. When I should have researched a new battery.
* I also have to mea culpa all friends to whom I have ensured through the years that Apple never intentionally slows down their hardware. I have lied to my friends and need to apologise to them.
> Would you rather have a slightly slower phone, or one that shuts off at random due to the battery not being able to provide peak current.
I wish people would stop inventing this false dichotomy. What people want is a phone that doesn't degrade horribly after only a year, regardless of whether that degradation is that it shuts itself off at 40% (which is fucking ridiculous) or that it gets noticeably slower. When a phone degrades so noticeably after only a year, people feel like they've been cheated. Do any other phones turn themselves off at 40% charge? My android phones certainly don't.
It’s not a false dichotomy. That’s what the phone did before. It was a pre-existing problem.
They could choose to do nothing. They could do what they did. With either of those they could’ve chosen to be more transparent (which clearly they should’ve).
You’re arguing that given the problem they saw once the phones have been in the field for years they should have designed the phone differently originally. That’s not reasonable.
I’d be very curious to know how android phones handle this. They must, in someway. There’s another comment in this story that someone had an HTC phone that would tend to just suddenly die under 20%, that may be the same thing iPhones were doing before.
When your battery doesn't last as long, what do you think of replacing?
When everything on your device runs noticeably slowly, what do you think of replacing?
> You’re arguing that given the problem they saw once the phones have been in the field for years they should have designed the phone differently originally. That’s not reasonable.
I'm arguing that given that battery degradation curves are absolutely a known quantity, and have been for many years, they should have chosen to not put in a CPU that would, with 100% certainty, fuck itself in the eye with batteries that otherwise still appear to be reasonably healthy. 500 _complete_ charge cycles should get a battery to 80% capacity according to Apple. 80% original capacity doesn't mean suddenly turning off at 40% of current capacity because of power draw.
> they should have designed the phone differently originally
They should have. The current situation has been caused by either negligence or intent to deceive. That's what has people so upset. Did you know that you don't get the performance back if you keep the iPhone plugged in?
> I’d be very curious to know how android phones handle this. They must, in someway.
By running their CPUs at voltages farther from the absolute edge of what their batteries are capable of putting out. Possibly by displaying charge percentage differently. Definitely not by making performance unbearable.
That doesn't happen unless you have an absurd number of charge cycles. It usually takes 2-3 years of normal use to reach a point where the battery degradation is a major problem.
It's choosing the lesser of two evils. The two options are to have the phone run slower, or have the phone shut down unexpectedly with shorter battery life.
Personally, I agree with Apple's call on this one.
The right call is actually targeting performance at a level that would allow for longer consistent performance state.
If they're having to go to measures this drastic to keep their phones from shutting down, their batteries are underspec'd and their processors are overspec'd.
That's a false dichotomy; Apple has many options other than slowing down the phone and having it randomly restart.
For example, they could have altered the calibration of the battery indicator so 0% charge corresponds to the charge level where random restarts/throttling starts to occur.
Calibrating for a new "0%" effectively lead to a "shorter battery life".
I don't know the intricacies of these options, but I can make a guess. The point which a phone resets isn't accurately predicted. Some user actions may cause larger voltage drops than others. For which action do you calibrate to 0%? What if you only do that action once a day? Is this trade off worth sacrificing 1% of your full capacity? What about 10% or 30%?
As the owner of an iPhone 6 that was degraded enough that even with the mitigation I had the issue, I agree.
Any time my phone was under ~15% battery, it would randomly crash during demanding tasks. I'd think the battery had died, but turning it back on would work immediately and my battery wouldn't be at 1%/0%.
At that point the battery capacity might as well be 85% of the already degraded value since the phone stops being stable.
The other option would have been to alert the user this was going on. This didn't always happen. They were degrading users phones while showing the battery as fine. That's the problem, you can't just start degrading performance without telling people why.
When you have people running 3rd party apps to determine whether their phones are still running fine, and then going to get battery replacements and finding performance returning, and nothing the OS told them indicated anything was wrong, that's a problem.
Hmm, that could work, but I feel like that might go against Apple's ethos. Not malicious, they just seem to like telling the user what's best and surfacing fewer options. I feel like the average user doesn't want to have to make this decision
>Plus, having the phone shutdown would force users to upgrade out of necessity without feeling swindled.
I'd disagree, but may be in the minority. I would hate having to upgrade because my battery life is shot. A large reason I chose iPhone was the battery life
Rock and a hard place for Apple, after 600 cycles or 2 years 'average usage' (based on reports I've seen in the past) the battery might only have 50-60% of the design capacity, so their choice is between reducing battery consumption (via throttling) or having users whose phones are totally drained in significantly less than an 'average working day'.
If iPhones are really experiencing that rate of degradation, then Apple are solely to blame for using such an aggressive battery management profile. If they had given up a millimetre of thickness, overprovisioned the battery and managed it less aggressively, they could have easily reduced battery degradation to <20% after 1,500 cycles. Adding 50% to the capacity also gives you 50% more current at the same C-rate. I think this is a clear case of Apple prioritising shelf appeal over durability; it's the same root cause as the Galaxy S7 battery crisis.
> If iPhones are really experiencing that rate of degradation, then Apple are solely to blame for using such an aggressive battery management profile.
Consumers are responsible at least as much as manufacturers for the current state of phones. Manufacturers may create the designs for phones, but consumers vote with their wallets for what they want, and they've consistently voted for thin over longer battery life.
There's a difference between battery life and battery longevity. The Galaxy Note 7 had a fairly beefy 3500mAh battery, but Samsung tried to cram too much capacity into too little volume. The unconventional pack shape created a substantial risk of internal shorts. Poor thermal management or aggressive battery management can vastly increase the rate of battery degradation, but they're non-obvious and most tech journalists don't have the knowledge needed to identify those issues.
Most consumers don't understand battery technology and don't know what's available on the market. They go into their local cellphone store and choose whatever looks nice and is recommended by the salesman. They aren't aware of handsets with bigger or user-replaceable batteries, because the industry hasn't really offered them the choice. I use a Chinaphone with a giant battery, but I have a lot of knowledge that no average consumer has.
Idk if the grandparent comment is correct about the degradation rate, but I’d need to see more evidence supporting the claim that Apple is doing something aggressive relative to the rest of the industry. Overprovisioning the battery is silly, and would deservedly cause a much bigger controversy if it were discovered.
>Overprovisioning the battery is silly, and would deservedly cause a much bigger controversy if it were discovered.
Really? Would there be a strong negative reaction if Apple said "we've designed the iPhone 9 to give you all-day battery life for four years"? Would customers be angry that their device was built to last longer and perform better? To my mind, it's a marketable feature.
All battery management is a trade-off between capacity and durability. Manufacturers have an obvious commercial incentive to sacrifice durability - you get a thinner device with longer initial battery life.
Purchasing habits are starting to change in the mobile market. Pricing is moving away from an all-inclusive line rental price to separate usage charges and device payments. As the market matures, customers are holding onto their devices for longer. I think it's inevitable that manufacturers will have to improve durability as we move away from the lock-step of 24 month contracts.
Old batteries draining to zero quickly isn’t even the primary problem. The primary problem is phone instantly shutting off during a peak in CPU usage because the battery voltage drops below a usagable threshold. This can happen with old batteries long before the battery life meter goes down to zero.
I remember experiencing it with my six. I’d be using my phone and then the phone would just randomly shut down. I might have noticed the battery indicator saying five percent or something like that right before it died (even though that wasn’t true).
You’d restart the phone and after a second trip to the battery indicator would show the correct level (let’s say 60 to 80 percent).
It's not just battery life, some people might live with 50% battery but due to chemistry they can't put out the designed voltage leading to the iPhone suddenly turning off.
Probably because low power mode is completely different, and probably doesn’t do much to reduce the CPU usage peaks that the old battery protection code protects against.
Not necessarily, I'd rather have my phone die at 40% or something, at least I can investigate then, and replace my battery. In the other hand, throttling my system and hiding it from me...
Didn't they degrade the user experience by slowing down the cpu? I definitely wasn't enjoying my slow iPhone