I think this is a good response, and I think a lot of the outrage over this issue is overblown. At the end of the day there's a fundamental tradeoff that Apple needs to make on behalf of their customers: performance or stability. They chose stability, and I think they have a convincing argument as to why: "It should go without saying that we think sudden, unexpected shutdowns are unacceptable. We don’t want any of our users to lose a call, miss taking a picture or have any other part of their iPhone experience interrupted if we can avoid it."
I have two concerns:
1) They still haven't fully eliminated the sudden shutdown behavior. My old 5S would shut down randomly under 20% without warning. Sometimes it would make it all the way to 1-2%, but most of the time it was between 5-15%. You'd think they'd scale performance throttling untilt this wasn't an issue.
2) I think their messaging with respect to battery health and the battery being a consumable is pretty poor. As far as I can tell there's no built-in battery health indicator in iOS. Sure there are those dodgy "Super Battery Health Plus Pro" apps, but it seems like a diagnostic menu in settings would go a long way. Even more puzzling is that techs at the Apple Store have access to some sort of diagnostic that does this already. Last time I went to get another issue fixed the guy said that my battery was at 70% capacity and the voltage was pretty low. Why wait until '2018' to ship a self-serve version of this?
My wife’s 6+ was incredibly slow after the iOS upgrade.
My 6+ drained the battery incredibly quickly. I was told that upgrading the iOS would fix that problem [0]; it didn’t. Instead it slowed my phone to the point of being unusable.
If I’d have known replacing the battery would have fixed both of them, I’d have done that. Instead, I stupidly bought two new, very expensive phones. Since we were already locked into the Apple ecosystem (with paid apps and media), we bought iPhones.
This does nothing to compensate or win back the trust of customers like me.
> Apple is reducing the price of an out-of-warranty iPhone battery replacement by $50 — from $79 to $29...
> Early in 2018, we will issue an iOS software update with new features that give users more visibility into the health of their iPhone’s battery, so they can see for themselves if its condition is affecting performance.
There we go.
It took too much trouble and too long for it to happen, but Apple is stepping up and doing the right thing.
Actually, the cost of battery replacement is now excellent. If they hadn't screwed this up by not communicating what was going on, I think they could have easily justified $49 - $59.
So I take the drop to $29 as a tangible apology, which I appreciate. (Well, personally, I've already replaced my battery using a $25 kit from Amazon, but obviously that's not viable for the great majority of iPhone owners.)
This isn't the first time this has happened to Apple. They use to not sell replacement batteries for the original iPods, and when people called in to complain, they were often told to buy an entire new iPod. This was settled in a lawsuit:
Another important note is this battery replacement cost only cover the iPhone6 and up. That's only the 2015 release. That's still lubricious. If we had devices as powerful as today's cellphones that cost $500+ in the early-90s, losing support after 2~3 years would be lubricious.
In 2012 I remember seeing someone with the first generation iPhone EDGE (pre-3G). That's right; the thing was like 6? 7 years old? He really only used it on Wi-Fi. EDGE data was painful, but it was still his primary/only phone for another year.
The throwaway economy saddens me, and this move doesn't really do enough to prevent the continuing pileup of e-waste being shipped on boats to China and Africa.
What about those of us that already paid to have the battery replaced? I was having the automatic shut down issue and Apple was telling me the battery was just fine. Since they refused to warrantee the battery I just ended up paying for another battery.
This was before the issue was really well-known. They were acting as if I was making it up. But yeah, anytime the phone was below 50% battery life I was in danger of having the phone immediately turn off. In my line of work this is not acceptable. Above anything else I need a working reliable phone.
> It took too much trouble and too long for it to happen, but Apple is stepping up and doing the right thing.
Because they were hit by lawsuits.
Do not expect that this is a sudden understanding of customers' needs by Apple. They knew perfectly well what they were doing and made the choice to hide this feature. They would not have changed it without these lawsuits.
> So I take the drop to $29 as a tangible apology
I take it as an admission of guilt that they were overcharging consumers 50$ of pure margin for this.
> It took too much trouble and too long for it to happen, but Apple is stepping up and doing the right thing.
The right thing would have been for Apple to either stop this behaviour or give users the option (retain performance or retain battery life). They're doing neither.
How long ago did you updated your kit from Amazon? I did days of research and did not come up with any seller with genuine quality batteries. Since two mildly exploded and one bloated to triple the size destroying the phone (mostly the case), I would be careful putting Amazon $25 batteries kit into expensive phone.
>So I take the drop to $29 as a tangible apology, which I appreciate. (Well, personally, I've already replaced my battery using a $25 kit from Amazon, but obviously that's not viable for the great majority of iPhone owners.)
Seems pretty cheap from the worlds richest company considering it's a $5 battery in question that takes minutes to replace. Why could they not offer full RMA service?
I'd like to see them and everyone else reintroduce removable batteries. If you're "in the field" all day, it's very convenient to have a second battery to swap out and those external battery powered chargers can be just as inconvenient as being tethered to an outlet.
Considering how much a new iPhone costs and the obscene margins they get from selling these devices, Apple could just do the courtesy of replacing the battery for free a couple of times per device and would still have a decent margin.
Except the battery is not the problem, everybody's problem started when we updated to the last iOS version. This is just bullshit and misdirection to make people spend even more money to replace something that already worked.
The real question to me is what else do consumers don't know about the products they are buying from Apple, Amazon and other big companies. Look at the great length we have to go to make sure there was no foul play.
The main reason i moved away from iPhone was terrible battery life and phones obviously slowing just as the new models came out. Doubt I'll go back. Haven't missed them at all tbh.
It's more like a middle finger to all the independent smartphone repair shops that have been replacing screens, batteries, speakers, LCDs, and cameras for years.
Apple has the resources to subsidize the cost of shipping and labor for battery replacements thus undercutting the Mom & Pop repair shop by a wide margin.
> A chemically aged battery also becomes less capable of delivering peak energy loads, especially in a low state of charge, which may result in a device unexpectedly shutting itself down in some situations.
I think the people in the Silicon Valley need to take a step back and understand that people in the rest of the world don't change phone every year. If a phone become unusable because of its battery (according to them) during the expected lifetime of the device then batteries need to be easily replacable.
I'm really infuriated about this. Since mid-2016, my iPhone 6 Plus started to act "weird". It'd shut down sporadically, would reach 40% and then suddenly deplete, and started to get slow. But the problems were not consistent. I went to the Apple Store, and the phone passed all their diagnosis checks, even the battery.
A few months later, after my AppleCare+ expired, the problems intensified. And I spent most of 2017 with a very slow and unreliable phone. I honestly thought it was iOS 10. Had I known it was the battery, I'd have paid to replace it. Or I'd have forced them to upgrade it for me for free when I had AppleCare+.
I upgraded to an iPhone X, thinking the 6 Plus had reached its EOL, but now I think I've been lied to!
I swapped from an Nexus 5 to an iPhone 6+. I bought the iPhone 1.5yrs second hand to get a significant amount off its price. It is dented significantly on the back, but still serves me like a new phone apart from a noticed slow-down.
On the other hand, the Nexus randomly started shutting off and the battery only lasted half a day after charging every day for the following 2 years.
The phones are now effectively the same age and Apples fix has prolonged the apparent age of my phone, I guess (thanks).
But I think people are being harsher because Apple products have longer expected life but use the same battery technology. This isn’t really fair, is it?
Ftn. I have designed and manufactured 3 battery assemblies for electric vehicles in a racing context.
Reducing the battery replacement by $50 is a great move. While I think this is a completely manufactured scandal, this will definitely take away the last argument people have against them.
I'm sure some people will still hate them for something, though.
Tens of millions of old iPhone users were left in the dark why all of a sudden the phone was slowing down to the point where it was becoming unusable. Millions of people probably spent hundreds of dollars otherwise they wouldn't need to spend if they know this was something they can fix with a new battery.
I personally have been using iPhone 6 for 3 years until this CPU-Battery disaster struck. So I ended up buying an Android phone. I love my Android phone now, but it's still money I wouldn't have had to spend.
This is a huge scandal. I like the response by Apple, but it's too late and millions of people already spent money they could've avoided spending. Good bye iPhone. I won't be coming back.
I don't think it's a completely manufactured scandal, although most of the reporting was deceptive (as is, I'm starting to suspect, most reporting, full stop).
I think the non-manufactured part of the scandal is having your phone throttle itself w/o telling you it's doing that is pretty annoying.
You're left wondering, is my phone running slower or is my mind playing tricks on me?
I could not care less about which company did this, it could have just as easily been Samsung, LG, <put your favorite brand here>
BUT, what I do very much care about is that the company who did this does not get away with it without losing some feathers, because they did intentionally hide something from the user that did affect them quite noticeably and if they would not have been called out could have had even more serious effects in the long run.
Imagine the following scenario. The battery of your phone is happily degrading and the manufacturer of your phone puts in some serious effort to develop a strategy so you as the user don't notice it. You keep using your phone thinking everything is fine, all the while your battery keeps degrading faster and faster. Then some day you actually need the power (in terms of processing power and in terms of stored energy) because, let's say you are taking a longer high quality video of a wedding. But since your phone is now running on full throttle your battery keeps discharging uncharacteristically fast because it is already in a bad state, or the software can't keep up with the data compression and has to start dropping frames and the video of the event you wanted to keep in good memory now looks awful.
Sure, this is only a very benign scenario but it still illustrates that the manufacturer should not try to hide such important information from the user. And as I have mentioned in another thread, no one can tell me that not a single Apple engineer during this whole process has stepped up and said "Hey maybe it's also a good idea to tell the user that we are throttling the whole system so it may live a few months longer"
Personally I think this is great news. I like my 6s. I like my headphone port. I don't do anything CPU intensive on the phone. As long as security updates continue to be issued, I don't see a need to upgrade.
I got lucky and wasn't affected by the battery shutdown issue even though my serial # was eligible for a free battery replacement, so I was able to put off the free battery replacement for a couple years and get a new one free. In another 2 years I'll probably swap it again for 25 bucks :D
How is it "completely manufactured"? Apple programmed (and hid) the slowdown because it knows the batteries it is shipping with its phones won't last more than a year. Linus compared it to a car performing worse after 1 year of usage..
Props to Apple for doing the right thing. Sad that it took a manufactured scandal for iOS to provide elementary transparency into the behavior of known-to-degrade battery component.
> Early in 2018, we will issue an iOS software update with new features that give users more visibility into the health of their iPhone’s battery, so they can see for themselves if its condition is affecting performance.
If this is an issue that affects every iPhone say past 2 years (although I think I've heard reports of the issue affecting much newer iPhones), then wouldn't a much better solution (for the future) be to make iPhones with user-replaceable batteries? Why do people have to come in to the Apple Store to replace their batteries? Is Apple just counting on the fact that not too many will take them up on it?
To be fair that is a pretty decent response. The reality is batteries do degrade over time and they have to manage that. They should have been transparent about what they were doing and I'm not sure giving the user control over it is all that sensible.
Are there any battery experts who can chime in with their opinion on this?
One thing that Apple hasn't addressed is if the Geekbench results [1] over-represents or exaggerates the the throttling effect. Since Geekbench pushes the iPhone to its limits for the duration of the benchmark, iOS needs to throttle performance to prevent shutdown while being tested. This results in lower-than-expected test scores every time. But how much does this map to real-life, visible performance drop?
Edit: Another question I have is how do other devices handle battery degradation? Do Android phones just let devices shutdown unexpectedly or is there also performance throttling? Or is the problem non-existent on non-Apple devices somehow?
I still think Apple should sue some publications for defamation for the manifestly bad reporting about this story [1]. Here's John Siracusa about it [2].
"All rechargeable batteries are consumable components"
If they are "consumable", why aren't they user replaceable. As far as I'm concerned any company that seals consumable parts inside a device isn't acting the interest of their users.
The elephant in the room is, of course, Apple's obsession with thinness which makes it near impossible these days to get a usable laptop because PC makers totally copied Apple alas. It also gave us nonreplaceable batteries and any successful lawsuit that comes out of it is totally justified.
No one asked for this. Lighter, somewhat, yes but thin to the point where batteries are barely functional? Samsung's colossal Note failure is just another symptom of this. I had a Panasonic CF-Y5, a 14" 1.5kg laptop ten years ago and somehow it managed to be that light without this thinness craziness.
Lots of people saying that Apple only had two options - make old handsets slower, or have them randomly shutdown.
Might be a reflection of the culture those commenters are from, but it's disingenuous to assert.
Other options existed -- notably to advise the user, as part of the update, via mail-out, etc, that this choice had been made from them, and (optionally) what they could do about it.
The Nexus 6P recently had a big consumer backlash and refund process bc phones would shut off randomly below 20% charge once they got older. I would guess the same thing is happening here. I would have much rather had reduced performance than a phone unusable under 20%. Luckily I got a free upgrade to the Pixel to fix it.
Yeah, I have owned various Android and iPhones over the years and this was a pretty common issue especially with an older phone in either a hot or cold climate.
That's well and good, but this letter avoids the elephant in the room. Apple has gone way too far in sacrificing functionality for style.
I'll accept a seam in the phone, and a slightly thicker phone, if I could replace the battery myself. (That might also avoid the camera bump.)
The latest MBP really shit the bed with that poorly conceived touchbar, and the horribly inferior keyboard.
And in general, for many years now, Apple laptops have gotten far less serviceable in the name of sleekness.
Then there is the issue of software quality. That is a different issue, although perhaps the decline reflects corporate priorities, (sleek hardware is more important than anything). ITunes and Photos are just terrible. Bloated, confusing, inconsistent even within themselves, and certainly across releases. I dread having any contact with Apple's cloud -- it just never acts the way that I want it to, and I tread very carefully to avoid propagating deletes to places I don't want them to go. I don't want files to move seamlessly from one place to another, and to be downloaded on demand. It chews up my phone's monthly data allotment, and it doesn't work at all when I have no connection. Sharing is a disaster. I don't share anything because it is unclear who gets access to what.
Another aspect of software quality is a noticeable uptick in bugs. That iOS 11 texting bug (couldn't type "I" correctly) was a huge embarrassment, and it took an astoundingly long time to fix. And I heard many reports of crashes with iOS 11. My iPhone 6 is staying on iOS 10. Then there was the MacOS login-as-root-with-no-password bug.
I am seriously thinking about my non-Apple computer future. I have a mid-2015 MBP -- the last good one, as far as I'm concerned. I'm hoping that when I need an upgrade there will be some nice hardware compatible with Linux (fingers crossed for Razer). I'm stuck on the iPhone (because I trust Google not at all), so I'll need to figure out how to get that to coexist with Linux.
> 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
"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.
Early in 2018, we will issue an iOS software update with new features that give users more visibility into the health of their iPhone’s battery, so they can see for themselves if its condition is affecting performance."
I wonder how big a hole this is going to dig in Apple’s balance sheet. I have known many people who bought new iPhone because old one was getting too slow, not because they wanted even more thinner phone. This is especially true with families where cost of replacing iPhone is so prohibitive that no one wants to do it unless it’s absolutely needed. Now that this issue hasn’t got so much media attention I would think iPhone upgrades will hit major breaks.
This is a great response imho. It doesn't fully tackle the issues I'm having with the approach Apple is taking, but at least Apple acknowledges its customers in a human way. This is almost un-Apple.
* In the first paragraph, they only apologized after limiting the limiting the scope to "some" customers who "feel" slighted. Like an irrational person on the defensive, giving a non-apology apology.
* They didn't address issues like: the CPU throttling is 24/7, whether the device is running off A/C or not. (!) Completely unnecessary and also — inconsistent with the battery-voltage argument.
* Affected users like me have been stuck with a barely functioning phone for a year. Since it stayed nearly unusable even when plugged in, I assumed it was simply due to Apple bloatware affecting older devices.
[+] [-] tschwimmer|8 years ago|reply
I have two concerns:
1) They still haven't fully eliminated the sudden shutdown behavior. My old 5S would shut down randomly under 20% without warning. Sometimes it would make it all the way to 1-2%, but most of the time it was between 5-15%. You'd think they'd scale performance throttling untilt this wasn't an issue.
2) I think their messaging with respect to battery health and the battery being a consumable is pretty poor. As far as I can tell there's no built-in battery health indicator in iOS. Sure there are those dodgy "Super Battery Health Plus Pro" apps, but it seems like a diagnostic menu in settings would go a long way. Even more puzzling is that techs at the Apple Store have access to some sort of diagnostic that does this already. Last time I went to get another issue fixed the guy said that my battery was at 70% capacity and the voltage was pretty low. Why wait until '2018' to ship a self-serve version of this?
[+] [-] marklyon|8 years ago|reply
My 6+ drained the battery incredibly quickly. I was told that upgrading the iOS would fix that problem [0]; it didn’t. Instead it slowed my phone to the point of being unusable.
If I’d have known replacing the battery would have fixed both of them, I’d have done that. Instead, I stupidly bought two new, very expensive phones. Since we were already locked into the Apple ecosystem (with paid apps and media), we bought iPhones.
This does nothing to compensate or win back the trust of customers like me.
[0] https://i.imgur.com/OYZr7zd.png
[+] [-] jmull|8 years ago|reply
> Early in 2018, we will issue an iOS software update with new features that give users more visibility into the health of their iPhone’s battery, so they can see for themselves if its condition is affecting performance.
There we go.
It took too much trouble and too long for it to happen, but Apple is stepping up and doing the right thing.
Actually, the cost of battery replacement is now excellent. If they hadn't screwed this up by not communicating what was going on, I think they could have easily justified $49 - $59.
So I take the drop to $29 as a tangible apology, which I appreciate. (Well, personally, I've already replaced my battery using a $25 kit from Amazon, but obviously that's not viable for the great majority of iPhone owners.)
[+] [-] djsumdog|8 years ago|reply
http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/apples-ip...
Another important note is this battery replacement cost only cover the iPhone6 and up. That's only the 2015 release. That's still lubricious. If we had devices as powerful as today's cellphones that cost $500+ in the early-90s, losing support after 2~3 years would be lubricious.
In 2012 I remember seeing someone with the first generation iPhone EDGE (pre-3G). That's right; the thing was like 6? 7 years old? He really only used it on Wi-Fi. EDGE data was painful, but it was still his primary/only phone for another year.
The throwaway economy saddens me, and this move doesn't really do enough to prevent the continuing pileup of e-waste being shipped on boats to China and Africa.
[+] [-] PacketPaul|8 years ago|reply
This was before the issue was really well-known. They were acting as if I was making it up. But yeah, anytime the phone was below 50% battery life I was in danger of having the phone immediately turn off. In my line of work this is not acceptable. Above anything else I need a working reliable phone.
[+] [-] Iv|8 years ago|reply
Because they were hit by lawsuits.
Do not expect that this is a sudden understanding of customers' needs by Apple. They knew perfectly well what they were doing and made the choice to hide this feature. They would not have changed it without these lawsuits.
> So I take the drop to $29 as a tangible apology
I take it as an admission of guilt that they were overcharging consumers 50$ of pure margin for this.
[+] [-] jhack|8 years ago|reply
The right thing would have been for Apple to either stop this behaviour or give users the option (retain performance or retain battery life). They're doing neither.
[+] [-] joering2|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheOtherHobbes|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aphextron|8 years ago|reply
Seems pretty cheap from the worlds richest company considering it's a $5 battery in question that takes minutes to replace. Why could they not offer full RMA service?
[+] [-] sixothree|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonkostempski|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alien_|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EGreg|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dzhiurgis|8 years ago|reply
How does your kit ensures it?
[+] [-] baby|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perseusprime11|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waytogo|8 years ago|reply
if battery total capacity < x % then set max CPU clock speed = x Ghz?
Or whatever KPIs they use like battery wear level.
The current release doesn't say anything more than what was previously known.
[+] [-] rorykoehler|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tanilama|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacobwilliamroy|8 years ago|reply
It's more like a middle finger to all the independent smartphone repair shops that have been replacing screens, batteries, speakers, LCDs, and cameras for years.
Apple has the resources to subsidize the cost of shipping and labor for battery replacements thus undercutting the Mom & Pop repair shop by a wide margin.
[+] [-] baby|8 years ago|reply
I think the people in the Silicon Valley need to take a step back and understand that people in the rest of the world don't change phone every year. If a phone become unusable because of its battery (according to them) during the expected lifetime of the device then batteries need to be easily replacable.
[+] [-] notfried|8 years ago|reply
A few months later, after my AppleCare+ expired, the problems intensified. And I spent most of 2017 with a very slow and unreliable phone. I honestly thought it was iOS 10. Had I known it was the battery, I'd have paid to replace it. Or I'd have forced them to upgrade it for me for free when I had AppleCare+.
I upgraded to an iPhone X, thinking the 6 Plus had reached its EOL, but now I think I've been lied to!
[+] [-] aetherspawn|8 years ago|reply
I swapped from an Nexus 5 to an iPhone 6+. I bought the iPhone 1.5yrs second hand to get a significant amount off its price. It is dented significantly on the back, but still serves me like a new phone apart from a noticed slow-down.
On the other hand, the Nexus randomly started shutting off and the battery only lasted half a day after charging every day for the following 2 years.
The phones are now effectively the same age and Apples fix has prolonged the apparent age of my phone, I guess (thanks).
But I think people are being harsher because Apple products have longer expected life but use the same battery technology. This isn’t really fair, is it?
Ftn. I have designed and manufactured 3 battery assemblies for electric vehicles in a racing context.
[+] [-] leadingthenet|8 years ago|reply
I'm sure some people will still hate them for something, though.
[+] [-] jsnk|8 years ago|reply
Tens of millions of old iPhone users were left in the dark why all of a sudden the phone was slowing down to the point where it was becoming unusable. Millions of people probably spent hundreds of dollars otherwise they wouldn't need to spend if they know this was something they can fix with a new battery.
I personally have been using iPhone 6 for 3 years until this CPU-Battery disaster struck. So I ended up buying an Android phone. I love my Android phone now, but it's still money I wouldn't have had to spend.
This is a huge scandal. I like the response by Apple, but it's too late and millions of people already spent money they could've avoided spending. Good bye iPhone. I won't be coming back.
[+] [-] dilap|8 years ago|reply
I think the non-manufactured part of the scandal is having your phone throttle itself w/o telling you it's doing that is pretty annoying.
You're left wondering, is my phone running slower or is my mind playing tricks on me?
I think Apple's response here is great.
[+] [-] blensor|8 years ago|reply
BUT, what I do very much care about is that the company who did this does not get away with it without losing some feathers, because they did intentionally hide something from the user that did affect them quite noticeably and if they would not have been called out could have had even more serious effects in the long run.
Imagine the following scenario. The battery of your phone is happily degrading and the manufacturer of your phone puts in some serious effort to develop a strategy so you as the user don't notice it. You keep using your phone thinking everything is fine, all the while your battery keeps degrading faster and faster. Then some day you actually need the power (in terms of processing power and in terms of stored energy) because, let's say you are taking a longer high quality video of a wedding. But since your phone is now running on full throttle your battery keeps discharging uncharacteristically fast because it is already in a bad state, or the software can't keep up with the data compression and has to start dropping frames and the video of the event you wanted to keep in good memory now looks awful.
Sure, this is only a very benign scenario but it still illustrates that the manufacturer should not try to hide such important information from the user. And as I have mentioned in another thread, no one can tell me that not a single Apple engineer during this whole process has stepped up and said "Hey maybe it's also a good idea to tell the user that we are throttling the whole system so it may live a few months longer"
[+] [-] greggarious|8 years ago|reply
I got lucky and wasn't affected by the battery shutdown issue even though my serial # was eligible for a free battery replacement, so I was able to put off the free battery replacement for a couple years and get a new one free. In another 2 years I'll probably swap it again for 25 bucks :D
[+] [-] netsharc|8 years ago|reply
How is it "completely manufactured"? Apple programmed (and hid) the slowdown because it knows the batteries it is shipping with its phones won't last more than a year. Linus compared it to a car performing worse after 1 year of usage..
[+] [-] pacala|8 years ago|reply
> Early in 2018, we will issue an iOS software update with new features that give users more visibility into the health of their iPhone’s battery, so they can see for themselves if its condition is affecting performance.
[+] [-] baby|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] draw_down|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mtgx|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] satysin|8 years ago|reply
Are there any battery experts who can chime in with their opinion on this?
[+] [-] jlian|8 years ago|reply
Edit: Another question I have is how do other devices handle battery degradation? Do Android phones just let devices shutdown unexpectedly or is there also performance throttling? Or is the problem non-existent on non-Apple devices somehow?
[1] https://www.geekbench.com/blog/2017/12/iphone-performance-an...
[+] [-] IBM|8 years ago|reply
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15995018
[2] https://overcast.fm/+CdQP59ws/56:00
[+] [-] SimonPStevens|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chx|8 years ago|reply
No one asked for this. Lighter, somewhat, yes but thin to the point where batteries are barely functional? Samsung's colossal Note failure is just another symptom of this. I had a Panasonic CF-Y5, a 14" 1.5kg laptop ten years ago and somehow it managed to be that light without this thinness craziness.
[+] [-] Jedd|8 years ago|reply
Might be a reflection of the culture those commenters are from, but it's disingenuous to assert.
Other options existed -- notably to advise the user, as part of the update, via mail-out, etc, that this choice had been made from them, and (optionally) what they could do about it.
[+] [-] whamlastxmas|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matwood|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Fej|8 years ago|reply
Usually they send you to Huawei who wants a few hundred bucks to fix it. ...no.
[+] [-] geophile|8 years ago|reply
I'll accept a seam in the phone, and a slightly thicker phone, if I could replace the battery myself. (That might also avoid the camera bump.)
The latest MBP really shit the bed with that poorly conceived touchbar, and the horribly inferior keyboard.
And in general, for many years now, Apple laptops have gotten far less serviceable in the name of sleekness.
Then there is the issue of software quality. That is a different issue, although perhaps the decline reflects corporate priorities, (sleek hardware is more important than anything). ITunes and Photos are just terrible. Bloated, confusing, inconsistent even within themselves, and certainly across releases. I dread having any contact with Apple's cloud -- it just never acts the way that I want it to, and I tread very carefully to avoid propagating deletes to places I don't want them to go. I don't want files to move seamlessly from one place to another, and to be downloaded on demand. It chews up my phone's monthly data allotment, and it doesn't work at all when I have no connection. Sharing is a disaster. I don't share anything because it is unclear who gets access to what.
Another aspect of software quality is a noticeable uptick in bugs. That iOS 11 texting bug (couldn't type "I" correctly) was a huge embarrassment, and it took an astoundingly long time to fix. And I heard many reports of crashes with iOS 11. My iPhone 6 is staying on iOS 10. Then there was the MacOS login-as-root-with-no-password bug.
I am seriously thinking about my non-Apple computer future. I have a mid-2015 MBP -- the last good one, as far as I'm concerned. I'm hoping that when I need an upgrade there will be some nice hardware compatible with Linux (fingers crossed for Razer). I'm stuck on the iPhone (because I trust Google not at all), so I'll need to figure out how to get that to coexist with Linux.
[+] [-] briandear|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buryat|8 years ago|reply
Didn't they degrade the user experience by slowing down the cpu? I definitely wasn't enjoying my slow iPhone
[+] [-] bobbles|8 years ago|reply
"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.
Early in 2018, we will issue an iOS software update with new features that give users more visibility into the health of their iPhone’s battery, so they can see for themselves if its condition is affecting performance."
[+] [-] sytelus|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmcnl|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dogweather|8 years ago|reply
* In the first paragraph, they only apologized after limiting the limiting the scope to "some" customers who "feel" slighted. Like an irrational person on the defensive, giving a non-apology apology.
* They didn't address issues like: the CPU throttling is 24/7, whether the device is running off A/C or not. (!) Completely unnecessary and also — inconsistent with the battery-voltage argument.
* Affected users like me have been stuck with a barely functioning phone for a year. Since it stayed nearly unusable even when plugged in, I assumed it was simply due to Apple bloatware affecting older devices.