I’ve always thought the coverage of this issue got things completely backwards.
Apple had an issue with old phones unexpectedly shutting down. They determined this happened because aged batteries were not capable of delivering peak current anymore and the CPU was “browning out” under heavy load.
They added a software feature in an iOS update that throttled the CPU in this condition to prevent a crash, at the expense of lower peak CPU performance.
From my perspective, this demonstrated real dedication to customer care and old device support from Apple. A phone that is moderately slower is still more valuable than one that randomly crashes. Intuitively, I’d expect that this would decrease sales of replacement iPhones, not increase them.
People latched onto the fact that Apple did this “secretly” - but Apple has never exposed this sort of implementation detail, and they’ve never wanted battery replacement to be part of the normal user experience for their devices. If Apple had shipped an iOS update that started telling people “Your battery is degraded, pay us to replace it to stop the crashes!” they obviously would’ve been raked over the coals also. There is no magic solution here.
So I never saw any indication that this was malicious on Apple’s part.
It's shocking to me that even in a technical audience like HN, so many people don't understand the fairly simple story that you've outlined here. Look around this thread and see how many people spread the narrative like "Apple intentionally slowed phones down" or even "Apple tried to extend battery life at the cost of performance". Reiterating the summary:
- Some iPhones in this generation began randomly shutting down as their batteries aged.
- While looking into this, Apple determined it happened because certain aged batteries could no longer deliver enough current to sustain peak workloads (computers use more current when performing more intensive tasks). This is probably due to Apple underprovisioning the battery capacity in this generation, but that's not something they could fix in existing devices.
- Apple added a mechanism to detect when these random shutdowns occurred on a specific device due to insufficient power from the battery.
- Once the random shutdown had been detected on a specific device, that specific phone would instead throttle its CPU when the system was under heavy load to prevent the random shutdown from occurring.
In short, your phone was not affected unless your battery had already degraded and was experiencing power-related random shutdowns. The changes Apple made to deal with this were an unequivocally user-friendly change to work around a hardware shortcoming and keep peoples' phones working well for longer than they otherwise would have.
The mistakes Apple made were:
- Designing the phone hardware with barely enough battery capacity, such that some moderately old phones might not be able to keep working properly when the batteries decayed.
- Not being transparent with the hardware design flaw above, such as proactively replacing any customer whose device was being affected by this flaw while still under warranty.
- Not going far enough with the software changes to initially add something like the battery health info they later added in response to this PR fiasco.
They didn’t tell retail. They also didn’t tell customers why their phones were slow. Customers called/came in complaining of slow phones, and often times assumed it was because their phone was “old.” Many new iPhones were likely sold as the result, as retail/customer service couldn’t give an explanation for slowness.
Malicious or not, they profited, likely heavily, from the lack of communication/transparency.
The problem is that there was a narrative for years that Apple was intentionally slowing down older phones with software updates, but there wasn't any proof. The fact that they were caught doing it in this case was considered validation of the broader theory, which is why it's been blown out of proportion.
> They added a software feature in an iOS update that throttled the CPU in this condition to prevent a crash, at the expense of lower peak CPU performance.
The user friendly approach would have been to pop up a warning message on next boot:
"Hey Avalys,
We detected that your battery has degraded, and so your phone's performance has been lowered to prevent your phone from crashing. To restore performance please take your phone to the apple store to get your battery reset.
Give them code AH534 to get $25 off battery replacement. Offer is valid for the next 14 days."
> People latched onto the fact that Apple did this “secretly” - but Apple has never exposed this sort of implementation detail, and they’ve never wanted battery replacement to be part of the normal user experience for their devices. If Apple had shipped an iOS update that started telling people “Your battery is degraded, pay us to replace it to stop the crashes!” they obviously would’ve been raked over the coals also. There is no magic solution here.
Oh come on. Macs tell you you need to replace your battery and I've never heard anyone complain about this. I have no idea if this behaviour was malicious, but a slowdown without any indication of technical issues is a horrible experience that just invites phone replacement. I'd much rather have random crashes than a non-notified slowdown- at least then I know something is wrong, rather than just my hardware is aging out and I need to get a new phone.
The solution is to let people do whatever the fuck they want with their devices and replace broken parts as they see fit. You can't have it both ways. This sort of a strawman is more baffling than the actual issue.
I think it would have shown more dedication to customer care if successive updates to iOS weren't increasingly CPU-intensive for the same functionality and/or weren't mandatory.
> So I never saw any indication that this was malicious on Apple’s part.
They intentionally slowed down all iPhones in the face of more user-friendly options to fix an issue a minuscule percentage of people had. I think you can choose to view this as a solution, but I'm leery of anyone who thinks this was an appropriate solution.
> They determined this happened because aged batteries were not capable of delivering peak current anymore and the CPU was “browning out” under heavy load.
This is kinda true but ultimately more misleading than insightful. It makes it sound like it's just the batteries' fault and nothing can be done. Aged batteries are perfectly capable of delivering all the peak power necessary for operation. The only time it's possibly an issue for the LiCo oxides the iPhone uses is at a low SoC after a relaxation period (which is amplified if the battery itself is physically cold). So, in a perfect storm of events you'll have a phone that will die from 10% SoC.
But then your SoC isn't really at 10%, innit? Your SoH is actually lower, so your SoC needs to diminish faster to accurately map to your reduced capacity. SoC isn't a mystery either. Because this issue is prevalent after a relaxation period on the LiCo batteries, you can get pretty accurate SoCs from simply reading OCV. Remember, OCV:SOH mapping is only difficult for non-Cobalt Lithium chemistries, and even then often only in the middle range. Reductions in SoH speed up passage along the OCV:SOC curve, not chop the ends off--and the ends are the most prominent.
> A phone that is moderately slower is still more valuable than one that randomly crashes.
There are other things Apple could have done. Like, actually accurately report the SoC. Or reduce screen brightness at lower SoCs. Further, it's not "randomly crashing"--it's shutting off at low charge% (but higher than people would expect).
I don't know if it was malicious, but if not, it's a surprisingly stupid fix from an otherwise brilliant engineering team, and it seems the judge agreed.
In an earlier thread I said I think their only (proverbial) crime was that they should have added that feature in an OS update that included performance improvements.
You gonna want to sit down for this one: a standardized battery that can be replaced by the user without having to disassemble the device, maybe through a removable back cover or something like that.
> So I never saw any indication that this was malicious on Apple’s part.
The problem is that if Apple admitted to the fact that old batteries were the problem they would get a class-action lawsuit to force them to allow batteries to be replaced ... like every other bloody phone.
Apple absolutely deserves this. They hid it intentionally because they knew what the followup was going to be and they didn't want to do it.
This entire mess could have been avoided if Apple was just upfront about what they were doing. There is nothing wrong with throttling the SoC so that the phone doesn't shut down when a degraded battery can't provide sustained peak voltage.
Apple has been, and still is, the industry leader in providing software updates for older devices. You can install the latest version of iOS on an iPhone 6S, a phone that was released in 2015. The fact that they chose to make this throttling change and keep it a secret was a major whiff on their part and destroyed a fair bit of goodwill they built up from their long support cycle.
I don't know why half of HN shows up to vehemently defend Apple whenever an article like this is posted. There was a time when mobile phone batteries were easily removable and replaceable. Apple got us to a place where it is now expected that instead of a $25 annual battery swap you should spend $700+ on a full replacement (and send the old one for "recycling" where it will likely end up in a landfill). It is also the company that aggressively sues repair shops and is fighting against right to repair bills.
Question to those affected: When Apple had throttled the CPU due to old batteries, did they suspend throttling if the phone was connected to a charger?
It did not appear to for me. Back when this was first unfolding I tried running geekbench both plugged in and not and got about the same score (and started getting a much higher score once I replaced the battery).
> It calls for Apple to pay consumers $25 per iPhone
I wonder if I owned one of these iPhone models but then re-sold it to a friend before it was slowed down, who gets the compensation? Presumably it'll be me, because Apple wouldn't have records of the second sale? Unless my friend logged in with an iCloud account in which case they might be able to tell?
If you sold it after the big slowdown, the slowdown presumably reduced the value of the phone and the price you got, so you deserve the money. If you sold it before, than it was your friend who experienced the drop in value.
Is there any precedent for a company to pay damages in a combination of money and goods. For example paying N dollars in legal fees, and issuing new phones to those affected within some filter criteria?
I ask because the only people who tend to benefit from from issues like this are the lawyers involved. Besides the damages being potentially punitive to the company responsible and maybe preventing recurrence of the same issue, nothing really improves for the people personally affected by the problem being sued over.
I wonder if from a cost perspective, they actually benefited from doing this. $500 million to make people buy newer iPhones. Wouldn't be surprised if they did the math here to justify the cost of a lawsuit.
So you moved away from Apple because they implemented a software fix to prevent your phone from crashing when the hardware eventually degrades? Sounds like a kneejerk reaction based on misleading headlines.
> Friday's settlement covers U.S. owners of the iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6s, 6s Plus, 7, 7Plus or SE that ran the iOS 10.2.1 or later operating system.
The settlement should cover all iPhones and iPads, not just the ones affected by CPU throttling. iOS 4 made anything older than iPhone 3GS nearly unusable. iOS 9 did the same for my iPad 2. I completely gave up on Apple mobile devices because of this.
The battery was too a bit too small, and this was a design flaw.
But overall, I think third-party developers are more at fault. The biggest reason that old phones get slow is because third-party developers get new phones and don't worry as much about optimization for older models.
> quietly slowing down older iPhones as it launched new models, to induce owners to buy replacement phones or batteries
This happened to me a long time ago and it made me a permanent Android user, not that I don't have issues with that ecosystem but I use an isolated google account that isn't tied to my real email and desktop activity.
But after 3 Android phones, each was still completely usable after 3 years and each was able to be replaced on my schedule instead of being required after an OS update "surprise" which is what happened with my only iPhone.
Too little! The cost of replacing an iPhone dwarfs $25.
The reason they settled was likely due to guilt, because proving innocence is cheaper than $500M. They should not be allowed to get away with a slap on the wrist
They made a decision to try to keep battery life closer to constant at the expense of performance, believing it was a better UX (slow phone > no phone).
I think this was totally defensible, and I also think that the people who claim it's some sort of malicious activity are unhinged. That said, it makes sense to avoid a lawsuit where you'll spend a fortune in legal fees, then roll the dice on the verdict possibly losing _billions_ instead, and definitely earning a lot of ongoing PR along the way. Better to just pay it once, get one more round of dumb "Apple slowed their phones because they're evil hurr durr" commentary out, and then get back to business.
The cost of proving innocence may be less than $500M. The risk of the ruling going against you even if innocent resulting in a higher penalty still exists. The calculus needs to also include that. $500M settlement is probably cheaper than the risk of court not ruling your way and being left with a larger penalty.
Agreed that the penalty is too little. $25 doesn't even cover the cost of replacing a battery one time.
This is a civil case. There’s no guarantee the plaintiffs would be able to prove guilt here. They’re not under any obligation to settle if they thought Apple was clearly in the wrong.
[+] [-] avalys|6 years ago|reply
Apple had an issue with old phones unexpectedly shutting down. They determined this happened because aged batteries were not capable of delivering peak current anymore and the CPU was “browning out” under heavy load.
They added a software feature in an iOS update that throttled the CPU in this condition to prevent a crash, at the expense of lower peak CPU performance.
From my perspective, this demonstrated real dedication to customer care and old device support from Apple. A phone that is moderately slower is still more valuable than one that randomly crashes. Intuitively, I’d expect that this would decrease sales of replacement iPhones, not increase them.
People latched onto the fact that Apple did this “secretly” - but Apple has never exposed this sort of implementation detail, and they’ve never wanted battery replacement to be part of the normal user experience for their devices. If Apple had shipped an iOS update that started telling people “Your battery is degraded, pay us to replace it to stop the crashes!” they obviously would’ve been raked over the coals also. There is no magic solution here.
So I never saw any indication that this was malicious on Apple’s part.
[+] [-] bgentry|6 years ago|reply
- Some iPhones in this generation began randomly shutting down as their batteries aged.
- While looking into this, Apple determined it happened because certain aged batteries could no longer deliver enough current to sustain peak workloads (computers use more current when performing more intensive tasks). This is probably due to Apple underprovisioning the battery capacity in this generation, but that's not something they could fix in existing devices.
- Apple added a mechanism to detect when these random shutdowns occurred on a specific device due to insufficient power from the battery.
- Once the random shutdown had been detected on a specific device, that specific phone would instead throttle its CPU when the system was under heavy load to prevent the random shutdown from occurring.
In short, your phone was not affected unless your battery had already degraded and was experiencing power-related random shutdowns. The changes Apple made to deal with this were an unequivocally user-friendly change to work around a hardware shortcoming and keep peoples' phones working well for longer than they otherwise would have.
The mistakes Apple made were:
- Designing the phone hardware with barely enough battery capacity, such that some moderately old phones might not be able to keep working properly when the batteries decayed.
- Not being transparent with the hardware design flaw above, such as proactively replacing any customer whose device was being affected by this flaw while still under warranty.
- Not going far enough with the software changes to initially add something like the battery health info they later added in response to this PR fiasco.
That's about it, I think?
[+] [-] dirkdigles|6 years ago|reply
Malicious or not, they profited, likely heavily, from the lack of communication/transparency.
[+] [-] kylec|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ballenf|6 years ago|reply
It’s weird that your defense comes down to “there was no way for Apple to avoid reputational damage so it was ok.”
No one is suggesting that there is always a win-win.
The “magic” solution here was simply transparency. Even if people aren’t going to like the message.
[+] [-] gumby|6 years ago|reply
If anything Apple could include a switch (like "low power mode" but for old batteries) and let people upset with it disable the feature.
[+] [-] flavor8|6 years ago|reply
The user friendly approach would have been to pop up a warning message on next boot:
"Hey Avalys,
We detected that your battery has degraded, and so your phone's performance has been lowered to prevent your phone from crashing. To restore performance please take your phone to the apple store to get your battery reset.
Give them code AH534 to get $25 off battery replacement. Offer is valid for the next 14 days."
[+] [-] AlisdairO|6 years ago|reply
Oh come on. Macs tell you you need to replace your battery and I've never heard anyone complain about this. I have no idea if this behaviour was malicious, but a slowdown without any indication of technical issues is a horrible experience that just invites phone replacement. I'd much rather have random crashes than a non-notified slowdown- at least then I know something is wrong, rather than just my hardware is aging out and I need to get a new phone.
[+] [-] bubblethink|6 years ago|reply
The solution is to let people do whatever the fuck they want with their devices and replace broken parts as they see fit. You can't have it both ways. This sort of a strawman is more baffling than the actual issue.
[+] [-] totalZero|6 years ago|reply
Companies don't usually hide "features" from customers.
Companies don't usually pay fines for hiding "features."
[+] [-] SilasX|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sov|6 years ago|reply
They intentionally slowed down all iPhones in the face of more user-friendly options to fix an issue a minuscule percentage of people had. I think you can choose to view this as a solution, but I'm leery of anyone who thinks this was an appropriate solution.
> They determined this happened because aged batteries were not capable of delivering peak current anymore and the CPU was “browning out” under heavy load.
This is kinda true but ultimately more misleading than insightful. It makes it sound like it's just the batteries' fault and nothing can be done. Aged batteries are perfectly capable of delivering all the peak power necessary for operation. The only time it's possibly an issue for the LiCo oxides the iPhone uses is at a low SoC after a relaxation period (which is amplified if the battery itself is physically cold). So, in a perfect storm of events you'll have a phone that will die from 10% SoC.
But then your SoC isn't really at 10%, innit? Your SoH is actually lower, so your SoC needs to diminish faster to accurately map to your reduced capacity. SoC isn't a mystery either. Because this issue is prevalent after a relaxation period on the LiCo batteries, you can get pretty accurate SoCs from simply reading OCV. Remember, OCV:SOH mapping is only difficult for non-Cobalt Lithium chemistries, and even then often only in the middle range. Reductions in SoH speed up passage along the OCV:SOC curve, not chop the ends off--and the ends are the most prominent.
> A phone that is moderately slower is still more valuable than one that randomly crashes.
There are other things Apple could have done. Like, actually accurately report the SoC. Or reduce screen brightness at lower SoCs. Further, it's not "randomly crashing"--it's shutting off at low charge% (but higher than people would expect).
I don't know if it was malicious, but if not, it's a surprisingly stupid fix from an otherwise brilliant engineering team, and it seems the judge agreed.
[+] [-] hinkley|6 years ago|reply
Nobody would have been any the wiser.
[+] [-] oauea|6 years ago|reply
They created these locked down devices. Let them feel the pain.
[+] [-] SkyBelow|6 years ago|reply
Lack of ability to replace the battery seems to suggest otherwise.
>There is no magic solution here.
Replaceable battery with a message indicating when battery health is low enough it needs to be replaced seems close enough to a magic fix.
[+] [-] seemslegit|6 years ago|reply
You gonna want to sit down for this one: a standardized battery that can be replaced by the user without having to disassemble the device, maybe through a removable back cover or something like that.
[+] [-] bsder|6 years ago|reply
The problem is that if Apple admitted to the fact that old batteries were the problem they would get a class-action lawsuit to force them to allow batteries to be replaced ... like every other bloody phone.
Apple absolutely deserves this. They hid it intentionally because they knew what the followup was going to be and they didn't want to do it.
[+] [-] hurricanetc|6 years ago|reply
Apple has been, and still is, the industry leader in providing software updates for older devices. You can install the latest version of iOS on an iPhone 6S, a phone that was released in 2015. The fact that they chose to make this throttling change and keep it a secret was a major whiff on their part and destroyed a fair bit of goodwill they built up from their long support cycle.
[+] [-] pwenzel|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] larrik|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] syspec|6 years ago|reply
Ah of course...
[+] [-] ping_pong|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] birdyrooster|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dangus|6 years ago|reply
Without lawyers, you get zero.
[+] [-] paxys|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] klingonopera|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] plorkyeran|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rzimmerman|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zoonosis|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MockObject|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notRobot|6 years ago|reply
I wonder if I owned one of these iPhone models but then re-sold it to a friend before it was slowed down, who gets the compensation? Presumably it'll be me, because Apple wouldn't have records of the second sale? Unless my friend logged in with an iCloud account in which case they might be able to tell?
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deeblering4|6 years ago|reply
I ask because the only people who tend to benefit from from issues like this are the lawyers involved. Besides the damages being potentially punitive to the company responsible and maybe preventing recurrence of the same issue, nothing really improves for the people personally affected by the problem being sued over.
[+] [-] 1123581321|6 years ago|reply
A free phone would be an absolutely enormous settlement, which would raise the legal fees commensurately.
[+] [-] babycake|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ceejayoz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] conqrr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gentle|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] somehnguy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] driverdan|6 years ago|reply
The settlement should cover all iPhones and iPads, not just the ones affected by CPU throttling. iOS 4 made anything older than iPhone 3GS nearly unusable. iOS 9 did the same for my iPad 2. I completely gave up on Apple mobile devices because of this.
[+] [-] herf|6 years ago|reply
But overall, I think third-party developers are more at fault. The biggest reason that old phones get slow is because third-party developers get new phones and don't worry as much about optimization for older models.
[+] [-] gdulli|6 years ago|reply
This happened to me a long time ago and it made me a permanent Android user, not that I don't have issues with that ecosystem but I use an isolated google account that isn't tied to my real email and desktop activity.
But after 3 Android phones, each was still completely usable after 3 years and each was able to be replaced on my schedule instead of being required after an OS update "surprise" which is what happened with my only iPhone.
[+] [-] throwGuardian|6 years ago|reply
The reason they settled was likely due to guilt, because proving innocence is cheaper than $500M. They should not be allowed to get away with a slap on the wrist
[+] [-] powowowow|6 years ago|reply
I think this was totally defensible, and I also think that the people who claim it's some sort of malicious activity are unhinged. That said, it makes sense to avoid a lawsuit where you'll spend a fortune in legal fees, then roll the dice on the verdict possibly losing _billions_ instead, and definitely earning a lot of ongoing PR along the way. Better to just pay it once, get one more round of dumb "Apple slowed their phones because they're evil hurr durr" commentary out, and then get back to business.
[+] [-] oarsinsync|6 years ago|reply
Agreed that the penalty is too little. $25 doesn't even cover the cost of replacing a battery one time.
[+] [-] avalys|6 years ago|reply