This seems like a good idea, and it appears to be well executed (ie it's not apparently based just on age or milage like a crappy car maintenance reminder), but Apple should probably have something in iOS that tells people their phone is running slow because the battery is 2 years old.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/20/apple-addresses-why-people...
Apple is not slowing down devices to extend battery life. Apple is slowing down devices to prevent the thing from crapping out entirely ("unexpectedly shutting down"). Arguably, this does more to prevent obsolescence than plan it.
Agreed with @djrogers suggestion to alert the user to the situation. It should not be a user choice.
"Last year we released a feature for iPhone 6, iPhone 6s and iPhone SE to smooth out the instantaneous peaks only when needed to prevent the device from unexpectedly shutting down during these conditions [cold, low battery, battery age]."
Why not simply make the battery replacable?
Where does that leave us? People that must have newest and fastest are encouraged to upgrade every year. Others accept slow downs due to old batteries and new iOS.
This is definitely not 'planned obsolescence' because your phone still works. Maybe 'encouraged obsolescence' is a better term.
In reality, it's probably some mix of both sides.
Yes. I used to have spontaneous shutdowns on my iPhone 6 in cold weather when the fuel gauge indicated a number like 20% and it was this sort of problem that was meant to be fixed: the CPU using too much current, causing the battery voltage to drop enough to trigger the low-voltage/brownout detector, causing the phone to die. The battery would last long enough (from last full charge to needing to recharge) -- it wasn't inadequate in the energy department -- it just couldn't deliver enough power in cold conditions.
Throttling the CPU in those cases (when the aged battery can't deliver enough current) is sensical and extends the life of the phone -- the only serious issue is that the user might think that there is a problem with the CPU or the software (and replace the whole phone) when the problem can be adequately fixed with a new battery (far less expensive than a new phone).
The feature is good but Apple's software should be far more proactive in notifying users that this is happening, if only because users jump to a conclusion of "my old phone can't handle this new iOS update, damn Apple making me buy a new phone" rather than "my battery is too old to reliably deliver whatever current the SOC wants".
I had the exact symptoms of this issue with my one year old iPhone 6 Plus in fall of 2015. Add in some very strange battery % readings: Even when it failed to shut down, the phone would drop rapidly from 20% to 1% but then remain there for ten minutes or more.
Bizarrely, this behavior (albeit less frequent or severe) jumped to my brand new iPhone 6S Plus in November of that year when I restored it from a backup of the 6 Plus. Both phones had Geniuses run battery diagnostics without finding any unusual degradation.
My guess: Apple’s battery “farming” code designed to maximize its life, level drain and charge across the cells, manage load, estimate charge % remaining... is incredibly sophisticated, even so far as to profile your typical use of a device to inform these decisions and estimates. There have been user-visible bugs in this code related to manual clock updates (something I did a fair bit while traveling), and I bet some fraction of these downclocked users have been the victim of that or related bugs. If the code is “farming” the battery incorrectly, some cells may be charged or drained too much for too long, and greatly increase a phone’s susceptibility to these voltage drops, even while the global status of the battery reads as fine.
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207453
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/23/apple-says-ios-10-2-1-has-...
I'll run the speed test later to confirm. But there is absolutely NO warning in iOS that I can see that says it's been put into low-speed mode.
If my device has to substantially throttle the performance to avoid a complete shutdown I expect a major notification that something is terribly wrong and I better do something about it.
My car had an occasional issue with an exhaust regulation valve and drastically reduced the performance in those situations. Every time I received a notification on the dashboard that the power was reduced but that I can continue driving but that I should visit a service partner as soon as possible. That would be exactly what I expect from a smart device
s/user/buyer
Selling a car that markets 300,000 miles but can't drive over 3,000 rpm anymore after the first year is not a car, and marketing it as such is fraud.
I've got a phone that is nowhere near to needing a new battery. It holds 87% of its original charge capacity. Yet it never runs above 50% speed unless it is above 97% charged, and even then it only runs at 2/3rds original speed.
If you consider that you can't easily change the battery in an iPhone without voiding the warranty or paying a premium price to Apple Support then one can make a strong argument that it's sneaky planned obsolescence.
Then again, a battery that dies down after a few years and is so difficult to replace is also planned obsolescence.
It's pretty obvious what apple is doing. We need a law to make them stop or at least one which requires them to declare in obvious language about the things that reduce the functioning of their devices over time.
In which apps would I notice a significant difference if I replace my battery?
If Safari page load speeds increased I would be happy, but I assume that is more influenced by bandwidth and mobile optimization.
It doesn't seem to help my gf had an iPhone 5 that started dying on peak demand but only after it got upgraded to new ios (i guess 8.0).
We replaced it (it had bad battery from the start and apple had a program for replacing those). After few years on new battery it started doing the same thing again. I replaced the battery and it stopped. But I know what I can expect in two years or so. Maybe I should stock on iPhone 5 batteries? Do they age less if they are unused?
Or a disclaimer telling people the caveats (or cons) of upgrading their OS.
More transparency would be great instead of making people feel like the company is pushing them out of their, otherwise, perfectly functional smartphone which cost them a fortune.
This doesn't make sense to me. I've been playing with LiPo batteries on quadcopters for a few years now, and I've found that battery capacity is directly related to its voltage, and the voltage decreases in a deterministic fashion according to use. High quality and well maintained LiPo batteries just don't behave randomly - that's why we feel safe attaching them to our houses in the form of Tesla Powercells.
Or, in other words, if a phone is showing 40% charge when it shuts down, that's not the battery "spontaneously" being unable to cope with load; that's a bad charge indicator.
Geekbench 4 benchmark before https://twitter.com/invisiblea/status/943439761066397696
And after https://twitter.com/invisiblea/status/943891561661812736
However I've had batteries replaced (different phones) at the Apple Store before and it took about an hour.
This looks more like Apple needed to slow down devices to sell new ones and found a really good excuse for it.
I mean, to all those who might think "well, old phones be old", it's not that simple. The OS was running very smoothly, it's Apple, after all, but then I installed an OS update and after the update everything was slow and painful and took long to load, etc. It was night and day, pre-update: perfection, post-update: laggy as hell.
You can't tell me that this is anything but a way to force users of older models to upgrade.
1. Newer versions of iOS demand more processing power because they do more (or perhaps do it less efficiently).
2. Old batteries can't deliver as much power.
So an old phone will new version of the OS mores slowly than a new one, regardless of the battery situation.
But, if the battery was marginal but hadn't hit the limit before the upgrade, then you get a double whammy
1. The phone simply can't run a more demanding OS as fast as the old one
2. The increased demand pushes the battery over the limit
At some point, the battery was going to age out anyway, so it was only a matter of time until you hit the second issue. But the upgrade made you hit it sonner rather than later.
Does anyone have a citation for this? I know capacity falls, but what fraction of peak current is lost with age? And what fraction with throttling just the CPU to 50% save in total load?
Did your iPad have any problems with spontaneously rebooting?
https://www.geekbench.com/blog/2017/12/iphone-performance-an...
She’s recently upgraded from 10.x to latest version. She’s noticed an actual decrease in performance to the point where she’s nearly punching the phone. It just locks up for no reason.
I’d like to blame this on the battery or age of the phone but I can’t. It is an iPhone 6 but it is only half a year old.
I believe that this phone should be able to handle the latest release just fine.
She’s now looking at upgrading the phone.
Also, battery age isn't actually time based, it's cycle based. If your wife uses her phone so heavily that she has to recharge it multiple times a day, she's putting more cycles on the battery. Still should last more than 6 months though.
I’m going to install the app to check what the CPU is running at.
It’s still ridiculous that she was running 10.x fine, she only updated because someone sent her some emojis that her phone didn’t understand and now is it’s running like crap
Just because Apple replaced the phone doesn't mean the battery isn't deficient.
Devil's Advocate to spark discussion (I'm not an iPhone owner so no dog in fight):
Apple did the right thing by not putting a switch in to toggle this slowdown[1]. For many iPhone users, the phone is a magic box that gives them videos and apps and (unlike our HN audience) don't have a clue about how it works, nor do they care. If such a switch existed, these same people would see a twitter comment saying "speed up yuor (sic) IPhone by turning off this setting~~~!!!!1" and would just do it.
The result? iPhones dying at a faster rate. Even today, as Android phones are barely updated at all, it is still a desirable selling feature of an Apple iPhone that it will be supported for years. People turning that switch on without understanding the consequences would shorten the life of their devices and then //still// complain about how the device didn't last that long.
I would think that a jailbreak-locked option would work IE you have to know enough about how your phone works to make the change, thus increasing your chances of making an informed decision on whether to shorten its life or not.
[1]Which is different than not telling people about it, which IMO is shady
Edit: remove italics
It pains me that I effectively have to choose between replaceable batteries and IPXX ratings.... T_T
Making iPhone batteries user-replaceable means making the phone worse, heavier, larger, more expensive and with worse battery life.
If they went the o-ring route, it would take up more volume and would probably require replacement when the phone was opened as damage from dirt/age will make reusing the o-ring hard. Even worse is that resuse isn’t obvious to a layperson as it could be IP69 with a new o-ring and IP67 with reused o-ring.
No, because this is a new feature as of the iPhone 6. The conspiracy way predates that.
If only we had such a technology as a scary warning message with a 5 second wait time before you can toggle the switch... Maybe in 10 years, meanwhile we'll just have to keep crippling old phones and tripling revenue!
They can throttle the chip to what the battery can deliver or it will crash. Maybe Apple's more conservative on the throttling, and some amount of performance could still be achieved without a crash, but there's zero chance Apple's putting a "make my phone unstable" switch in Settings.
Over the course of many discharge cycles, the battery will lose capacity, and the point when the voltage is no longer sufficient to power the phone will come sooner.
But this is overly pedantic. People generally consider this point to be simply an "empty battery."
Android phones do not suffer these performance changes. Instead, the phones lose battery life over time, and within a year or so, you might be lucky to get 12 hours of life out of a full charge.
You can make an argument that we should optimize for duration or performance, but the difference is that casual Android users are aware that their battery is deteriorating, while casual iPhone users believe their phone is itself deteriorating, or else much slower than the newer models.
This is something that is burning the good will towards apple. Something that is in shorter supply since the days of Steve Jobs. You can see the polarization about it on social media.
Again whether the feature was good/bad, there is clearly something to be learned from the shitstorm that it is causing. Something I hope Tim Cook learns quickly.
MAKE . IT . EASIER . TO . REPLACE . THE . BATTERY !!!
Many people are reasonably asking that they be made aware of the problem instead of quietly kneecapping the phone.
(Also worth noting that the battery in my phone still holds 87% original capacity.)
It is one thing for Apple to compensate for weaknesses of current phones in the field. It would be another story if they plan to do this going forward without telling consumers at the time of sale. Car companies got in trouble over mileage...
Edit: In case the subtext wasn't clear, without battery wear data, evidence of these power related resets, or active opt-in to the throttling, this behaviour is identical to an artificial hobbling of old phones to encourage future hardware sales. Yadda yadda lawyers.
I have an Android phone which apparently has a 40% degraded battery (60% total capacity remains, at least according to a battery health estimation app that I used since Android does not appear to surface battery wear via API) that is always painfully slow, even if I'm careful to ensure that at least 10 gigs of free space to avoid storage slowdown.
All these three should explain Apple's behavior.
Or even better, provide a level of battery saving.
So it wouldn't be unprecedented. And I wouldn't be surprised if other manufacturers do the same.
This is an utterly absurd apology on behalf of Apple, something very common in this thread it seems.
Alternatively, perhaps Apple should sell their high-end model with an appropriately powerful AC adapter, regardless of the absence of the battery?
After an explanation, everybody applauds this wise choice, protecting their phones from not working at all!
Likewise with old computers.
And as someone else commented, "apple will never add a MAKE MY PHONE UNSTABLE switch."
The iPhone 5s should have hardware that is much faster than what's in a Moto G2. Yet, my friend's Moto G2 feels smoother in use, transitioning between apps and the like, than the 5s. I bought the Honor 8 to replace it, a somewhat cheap, midrange android device. Everything on it feels so fast I probably won't replace it until its battery gives out completely. On the paper, the hardware of the Honor 8 is not as fast as modern iPhones. In practice when I open apps it's pretty much instantaneous. The device has enough RAM to keep everything running.
People keep complaining android manufacturers aren't updating the OS fast enough. I'd say good on them to make sure they only give us an OS build that's actually usable on said hardware. Apple doesn't even let you install previous iOS versions. Unlike iOS, most of Android's platform APIs are updated through the Play Store. Things like your web browser are also updated through the play store. So unlike iPhones where refusing new iOS updates means being stuck with browser engines that can't keep up with the web, your android handset stuck on older android is not actually becoming obsolete.
No matter how much nicer Apple's hardware looks and feels in the hands, I ain't ever giving them more of my money again. Premium prices should command more durability in time than this. Chosing to stay on an old iOS means you can't install new apps built on newer SDKs or get newer browsers and so on, so you really have to suffer the slow down treadmill with Apple. You don't have to on Android.
"New" features usually are not a motivation for me to buy a new phone, but a slow phone will make me get a new one right away...
(Wow, that was downvoted almost instantly.)
Calling it a "scam" in any capacity is already a stretch. Calling it a scam in "trillions" is utterly hyperbolic, and equally stupid.
iPhones are the only device sold by Apple that are only rated for 500 charge cycles before degradation starts. Macbook, iPads and Apple Watches are rated for 1000 cycles. In the case of the Apple Watch I'd guess it's because despite being tiny, the SOC also doesn't ask for as much peak voltage as the phone SOC.
I've had the Honor 8 for a year. It's still holding a great amount of charge and running fine and as fast as the day I bought it. And unlike my 5s, no phone update is coming to turn it into a slow crawl.
The iPhone battery problem with regards to the topic, spontaneous shutdown at 30% and less battery remaining, is probably exacerbated since the evolutions that made those SOC more powerful than before. There wasn't a large wave of 5s owners having spontaneous shutdown requiring an OS update to throttle the CPU. That only started with the iPhone 6. A combination of paltry battery and modern SOCs having peak power usage that stress such battery more than before.
