The outrage doesn't seem overblown to me. For years I knew that my iphones were becoming obsolete not entirely from the passage of time but instead from upgrading the OS. Apple insisted they were not slowing down devices. Now they claim that they started this in iOS 10.2, without notification.
My experience has been that upgrading the OS results in degraded performance 100% of the time. Whether intentional or not Apple would not acknowledge the issue. The phone shutting down at X% charge has always started after an OS upgrade.
What people are missing here is that while Apple now confess that they did slowdown the iPhone 6 and 6s when they released the 7, they are not saying anything about earlier models.
They are however lowering the price to exchange batteries even for older models. Why would they do that if they where not affected? Why don't they say this practice started with the IOS 10 update? They just say they did it in the 10 update. For me it's obvious this is just a PR "puff piece" and looks like a majority here is buying it... So well played Apple.
This was a perfect opportunity for Apple to come out and explicitly state they have never slowed phones down other than in this instance. That would certainly go a long way to restoring confidence.
Instead they came out with a weasely-worded statement that is designed to give the impression that they only recently starting doing this. But... they don't actually make that claim.
Apple lawyers are very good at what they do. Well played Apple indeed.
>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. Our goal has always been to create products that our customers love, and making iPhones last as long as possible is an important part of that.
I see 0 weasel words or dodging here. Give me a break hacker news. Thanks.
What qualifiers? They said they haven’t and never would do anything to shorten or harm device life. That’s as direct as it gets. This isn’t a weasel word message, sorry.
The reduction in battery replacement is only for anyone with iPhone 6 or later, not older models.
"Apple is reducing the price of an out-of-warranty iPhone battery replacement by $50 — from $79 to $29 — for anyone with an iPhone 6 or later whose battery needs to be replaced, starting in late January and available worldwide through December 2018. Details will be provided soon on apple.com."
> They are however lowering the price to exchange batteries even for older models.
No, they’re not:
> Apple is reducing the price of an out-of-warranty iPhone battery replacement by $50 — from $79 to $29 — for anyone with an iPhone 6 or later whose battery needs to be replaced, starting in late January and available worldwide through December 2018.
Sure, for this specific issue. But the culture of increasing hardware requirements beyond the reasonable point of not-that-old phones coupled with the opacity surrounding what is done to support them is systemic (and not Apple-specific of course).
>But the culture of increasing hardware requirements beyond the reasonable point of not-that-old phones coupled with the opacity surrounding what is done to support them is systemic (and not Apple-specific of course).
My recollection is that back when you needed a new computer every three years if you wanted to be able to read word processor documents from others in the office is that there was a whole lot less vitriol then. Maybe I am misremembering; it has been a long time.
We did joke. "What Intel gives, Microsoft takes away" - I do remember that every upgrade came with complaints of "Bloat!" - but I remember there being a lot more excitement than complaints, (modulo really bad ideas... Did anyone like Microsoft bob? I mean, I understand where they were coming from, but it was just a really terrible implementation)
I personally find it super amusing that I now have two laptops in front of me; one that is a year old, and one that is seven years old. Both running modern software, and they both work just fine. The new one uses a lot less power, of course, and doesn't get as warm on my lap, and the old one has some physical problems; I need to take apart and clean out the keyboard, but it mostly just works.
I wonder if cellphones will be that way in twenty years?
> My recollection is that back when you needed a new computer every three years...is that there was a whole lot less vitriol then. Maybe I am misremembering; it has been a long time.
Back then I think people saw a lot more noticeable, and tangible process across the computing space, which made the constant hardware refreshes palatable. For instance, there was only three years between the release of Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. Plus, back then, computers were so new that people didn't know what else was possible.
Most of the recent "progress" in consumer computing have been gimmicks, IMHO, and consumers have also seen a recent period of blissful stability (e.g. the long reign Windows XP) that makes them less tolerant of a 90s-style refresh cycle.
There's a trade-off. Either your device becomes obsolete because it doesn't have the hardware capacity to support the requirements of a newer OS so you are stuck at an older version, or it becomes obsolete because the vendor allowed an upgrade that was detrimental to performance.
For the vendor: damned if you do, damned if you don't.
There's no problem with having an older iOS that still runs as fast as the day you bought the phone. Many people I know purposely hold off the upgrades just to retain the same speed, and are satisfied with it
Or a third option: invest in software that doesn't have strict absolute hardware requirements. A lot of the hardware requirement inflation is due to unoptimized software. Which is not a quality failing as much as a deliberate choice. Apple could absolutely include older device performance in their QA testing.
Mobile CPUs have quadrupled since 3.5 years when the 6 came out. Most normal people want cool new features. If you are in the minority, don’t expect it to be fixed just for you — especially since the old OS is optimized for you and you can use it just fine.
This is not true. Apple does not let you install old versions of iOS and if you try to avoid upgrading you’re bombarded multiple times per day with pop ups asking you to either upgrade now, or install overnight. There’s no option to skip the new os. You can only click install overnight, then cancel out of the passcode prompt.
It's a simular situation on the mac os. I remember reading a post here a little while back about some security flaw in the new mac os that allowed unauthorized access to root. The fact that i have to go through the process you deacribed evry day is very frustrating.
They push way to hard to be constantly updating os versions, especially given the serious bugs that people seem to be finding.
> […] especially since the old OS is optimized for you and you can use it just fine.
This is inaccurate. The fundamental issue is that Apple doesn’t backport security fixes to old iOS versions. This makes it untenable to use older iOS versions, unless you don’t care about the security of your data/device. If Apple changed their policy on backporting security fixes, they’d be able to offer iOS downgrades without compromising user security.
The problem is not new features, but bloat. Look at stack traces on recent versions of iOS, or at the view hierarchy, or at the method table of NSObject. Apple is rushing out junk software by adding another fat layer of duct tape every year.
iOS 11 is just as terrible on the 5s as iOS 9 was on the iPhone 4s. Within two years, the OS has caught up with a 4.5x increase in CPU performance! I'm not talking about 3D games, just unlocking the phone, taking pictures, launching apps, chatting on iMessage/WhatsApp. And iOS 11 should actually be more lightweight since it has dropped support for 32-bit apps.
They literally said it was new in the 8th paragraph in the link, consistent with the patch notice from that release. The second paragraph plainly says they have never engaged in planned obsolescence. As a business they’d never make so blunt a statement if it weren’t true, as they’d get sued into the ground if it came out otherwise.
Just judging from my own experience, I do believe it is new.
I have had a 5S for around 3 years now, my wife just finished her 2 year contract on her 6.
She has been noticing a slow down on her phone, while I have not on mine. I thought this was strange before reading this press release, but now it seems to fit.
Does this include running the new OS after a factory reset?
I find that even on Android, you drop some performance after a full system upgrade and it doesn't come back until a full reset is performed with the new OS.
It's stupid that this is required, but that can be explained as a technical problem rather than planned obsolescence.
On top of that, there's the variable of increased system resources to consider, which will account for some of it, and is a no-win scenario from the manufacturer standpoint no matter what they choose.
Yes, the "upgrade" to ios 11 slowed down app load/switch times on my ipad by several seconds, even after a full reset (made no difference). It's nonsense that I am now stuck with it.
Maybe it's from this link on Daring Fireball? [1] A wipe and reinstall via iTunes is also an extremely painful process. Since the ability to transfer apps from iOS to iTunes was removed long ago (for reasons — like App Thinning — that don't make any sense to me), once the reinstall and restore of the data (alone) from iTunes is done, one would have to wait a long time for all the apps to download via WiFi from the App Store. For people with many apps and games (that are quite large), this wipe and reinstall would cost them several GBs in download traffic and several minutes to several hours (depending on where one lives and the Internet connection).
No, reset from ios. I'm not aware of a difference with doing it from iTunes, either way you get an empty ios that first asks you the os language you want.
Battery performance is just one of the ways your phone becomes useless. Apple is notorious for pushing iOS updates that basically make a phone useless.
Apple has been trying to trick me into upgrading to iOS 11 which will make my phone useless junk.
I’m not saying I wouldn’t expect some slowdown but Apple essentially forces you to upgrade with no path to downgrade the os. After upgrading my iPhone 6 to iOS 11 I could not launch Lyft, uber took minutes to open, and even the built in message app would have multi-second lag on key press. If you are destroying what was a perfectly fine phone with a software release it should simply not be supported. I would have been content with an old version of iOS that had reasonable performance and did not result in my phone shutting down at 30%, which was a problem introduced with iOS 11.
I wish someone would take the time to benchmark how stark the performance difference is between Day 0, Day 365, Day 730, etc. of doing the same exact tasks on a factory reset device with whatever is the latest software version at that time.
It's not hard to roll out new features behind flags for devices which can't reasonably support them. But your experience of ridiculous lag trying to open basic apps which have no particularly high resource requirement has been my experience exactly.
There's more going on than simply, "we added new features!" Devices which on Day 0 are blazingly fast and incredibly responsive because literally unusable in a few years doing exactly the same tasks.
> My experience has been that upgrading the OS results in degraded performance 100% of the time.
I have the same experience on Android. Of course I rarely received OS updates, but even that's better than Google making the device practically unusable.
Be it a marketing ploy, a conscious decision trying to protect me, or just a mistake, I don't care. It's bad.
I have the opposite experience with Android. My Nexus 5X now went from version 6 to 7 to 8, and that's not including the minor version updates. It hasn't gotten any slower. Looks like it will last a few more years easily.
Storage degradation is the only thing that worries me, I wish more companies made phones with microSD slots. Modern microSD cards are cheap and fast.
My old Apple devices, for comparison, are useless bricks.
That's nice. I don't remember which Android version it was, but it made my Nexus 7 unusable. After the update it would take minutes to start a web browser. I put it in a drawer and haven't used it since.
My Samsung is definitely slower than it was few OS upgrades ago. It's becoming an annoyance. My at-the-time-google-owned-Motorola did't receive any updates. My Google Nexus tablet became completely unusable (like, really, really unusable, not just slow). With older devices, Android 2.x was horrible from the go, so I don't know if it could get worse (and there were only minor updates anyway).
A very small sample, I know. But part of my post was to point out that Apple users can consider themselves lucky at least in the regard that they do receive updates.
You're confusing the slowness caused by the updates (which doesn't exist on Android) with the slowness caused by the flash storage degradation (which absolutely does exist). I too have an old Nexus 10, which died from that cause, a common problem.
That's exactly why I think microSD support is so important. Your old card got slow? Buy a new one for $20, copy the files over, done.
Ah, I see. Well that might be the cause for the Samsung device. It has an SD card slot, but I don't think that will help much now (good to know for future I guess). As for this
> which doesn't exist on Android
it's simply not true. Google pushed updates[1] to old Nexus devices that extremely hindered the performance. Downgrade made them fine again. I'm fairly certain it isn't a unique case, and Google wasn't the only one forcing shit upgrades on their customers.
There's absolutely no way updating a few dozen apps takes 6 hours because of the OS. It's the classic flash degradation symptom. My Nexus 10 is the same. It didn't get slow after the updates, it progressively slower over a couple of years.
My experience has been that upgrading the OS results in degraded performance 100% of the time. Whether intentional or not Apple would not acknowledge the issue. The phone shutting down at X% charge has always started after an OS upgrade.