
iPhone 6 slows down by 28% after just 4 months use - falsedan
https://simplyfixit.co.uk/iphone-battery-slow-benchmarks/
======
cjsuk
I call bullshit. Reading the cached version, this is poorly disguised
marketing lies for a third battery replacement service.

The test scenario was not described, this is only one sample which could have
been selected and the source is not credible.

After 12 months of heavy daily usage on my 6s, I'm seeing 87% battery capacity
left as an example after over 312 cycles. I am also seeing the same benchmark
as the day I got it.

~~~
styfle
When can you find battery capacity?

~~~
phete
I'm using [https://itunes.apple.com/se/app/battery-life-
doctor/id116593...](https://itunes.apple.com/se/app/battery-life-
doctor/id1165930552?l=en&mt=8)

------
kipari
I know that this article states a well-known fact at this point, but I can't
overlook that it is on the homepage of a company that sells battery
replacement services for iPhones.

EDIT: Also note that Apple as of today is offering battery replacement
services themselves at $29. [1]

[1]: [https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/12/30/29-battery-
repl...](https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/12/30/29-battery-replacements)

~~~
Nullabillity
Better that people give their money to a third party, than to the company that
created the problem in the first place.

~~~
ianlevesque
Apple invented battery physics now?

~~~
TallGuyShort
Battery physics? No. But they're definitely pioneers in the field of covert
downclocking.

------
throwaway12351
Everyone defending Apple's behavior is missing the point _completely_. Yes,
it's a reasonable way to manage degrading battery life and related electronic
issues.

What's NOT reasonable is Apple CONCEALING this behavior. This led people to
believe that they needed a new $1000 phone, instead of a $79 battery
replacement.

~~~
CydeWeys
My phone gives me a warning notification if performance might be getting
degraded because the storage is getting full, and provides suggested actions
to delete stuff stored locally.

Something about replacing the battery would have been perfectly reasonable for
Apple to have suggested similarly, since we know the hardware can detect poor
battery performance. Of course, we know why they didn't do this; it would cut
into sales of new models.

~~~
JacobJans
Ironically, I regularly get a warning on my Macbook Pro that I am running out
of disk space, even when I have over half left.

The kicker? They try really hard to sell me on paying for iCloud.

Scammy?

Absolutely.

Someone who is NOT computer literate will likely pay for iCloud storage based
on false information.

~~~
matthewmacleod
Do you, though? That sounds like a bug. I have also seen that warning, but
only when I have about 10% free space.

~~~
JacobJans
Do I what? I have a 512gb disk. It has over 300gb free.

~~~
matthewmacleod
Yeah, this is definitely not a normal thing then. It's certainly not a
standard Apple feature to start warning people that they're running out of
disk space when there's so much free.

------
spiderfarmer
I bought a new iPhone every 2 or 3 years because of the slowdowns. I would
have paid 29 euros for a new battery had I known that it would restore
performance. Shit like this makes me hate the iPhone X I’m typing this on. I
was thinking of getting an Apple watch but I will _not_ buy it because I don’t
trust them anymore. They better restore trust or it will cost them a lot of
sales in the long run. Making phones with replacable batteries would be a good
start.

~~~
jmull
It looks like the CPU-slowdown-for-old-battery thing was only introduced about
a year ago. So you can probably blame your X purchase on this (especially if
you came from a 6 or maybe 6S -- a 7 should not have been significantly
affected unless there is a bigger battery issue with it), but before then your
older phone were probably "naturally" slow.

~~~
spiderfarmer
At this point how do we know Apple doesn’t make intentional decisions that
slowdown older phones? Maybe CPU benchmarking tools where given all CPU power
in the past and they forgot to implement it now, just like the GPU
manufacturers were caught cheating.

------
LinaLauneBaer
I always wonder if slowing down the phone is a good solution. By slowing down
the CPU the CPU needs less energy. But at the same time the user has to wait
much longer in order to finish what he was trying to do. Thus the screen is on
for a longer period of time. Isn't the screen one of the main energy consumers
in an iPhone?

Launching apps on my iPhone 6 (which needs a new battery) takes for ages (even
when compared to my older but less used iPhone 5S). I can't imagine that the
extended "screen lit"-time does not have a big impact as well.

Also: I am one of the few users who would be totally fine with the iPhone
shutting down at 20% or so (if I have the full performance as I used to)
because my iPhone is rarely going near 20%. At work I can charge. At home I
can charge. When I am on the go I usually am not using the phone that much...
However playing hearthstone when I am in bed, loading the phone, everything
takes much longer as well which makes playing games less fun...

~~~
matthewmacleod
The issue is not specifically about battery life, but about the ability of the
battery to provide a stable voltage under load. The voltage of the cells sags
more under high current draw as the battery ages; reducing the current draw by
throttling the maximum SoC frequency seems to be intended to avoid the problem
where the voltage dips to a level that causes the SoC to shut down suddenly.

------
icegreentea2
How did they generate this data? The screenshots say that all of the
benchmarks were made within an hour of each other, and out in order of the
charge cycles. Are they swapping out batteries?

------
bane
So,

\- Apple makes phones that have batteries normal owners can't replace.

\- When the battery degrades the phone's performance degrades.

\- Users either pay for a new phone or were paying $80 for new batteries.

\- Apple admits the ruse, lowers the replacement cost to $30, basically
admitting that $50 was profit.

\- Turns out another company already did replacements for $30 and was probably
making money on it. So Apple's still likely making money on it.

\- Users get upset but line up around the block to buy whatever Apple puts out
anyways -- sight unseen.

We get the behavior we incentivize. In this case we get planned obsolescence
and shakedowns for repair. Until consumers vote with their wallets, all this
kvetching doesn't mean shit.

~~~
mcphage
> another company already did replacements for $30

£30, which is $40.

------
pasbesoin
I don't know about 28% in four months.

But this whole controversy reminds me of a few years ago. When people were
very happy with their iPhones (including some of my friends), because they
manifested and maintained "battery life" that their friends' Android phones
did not.

Maybe Apple shouldn't have hidden what they're doing. Maybe it's arguably a
legitimate trade secret (I'd hardly be in favor of "patenting" the
functionality).

Anyway, now Apple's "shit" for how they manage battery degradation. A couple
of years ago, or whenever, before all this upset: They were "the shit" with
respect to battery durability -- as perceived by users in their charge
lifetimes. At least, among some of my friends. And some press, IIRC. And
whatever.

Apple's not magic. Their batteries degrade, too. On the other hand, the
vertical integration and efficiencies they are engineering into their newer
chipsets? Pretty amazing.

P.S. I'm no Apple Fanboy. Just recalling how perspectives change.

~~~
viraptor
I think you're making a mistake of treating users of X as a homogenous group.
Some users were not happy with how the performance and the battery degraded.
Some were happy with the power usage over time. Some were happy to point out
how they're better than the users of Y.

All of that is still the case. What changed is that "I think my iPhone is
getting slower, but I'm going to replace it with a new one anyway" is not
interesting news, but "it's been proven why it's getting slower, now I feel
ripped off because I didn't actually need to upgrade the whole phone, just the
battery" is interesting.

~~~
pasbesoin
Regarding the first, Apple has -- since its renaissance -- consistently had a
limited number of products. Limited product lines. They themselves lump users
together, to some degree; and many argue for this advantage: High quality
products that "just work", and don't make me choose between fifty-odd
variations.

Regarding the latter, I generally agree. I'd much rather know what's going on
and have the choice of spending circa $100 (supposedly formerly $80, now $30
for a year), to replace the battery. (And a separate pox on "thin" making all
these batteries unremovable; but I guess that's my personal preference.)

Maybe Apple knowingly benefited from uninformed user upgrading. How much of
that was battery/throttling, and how much of that was Apple users wanting to
have the latest and greatest -- for functionality and performance, or just for
status? We may never know.

But, as I mentioned, the perceived charge lifetime and durability of same,
were -- as far as I saw -- major marketing/selling points of iPhones. And I
recall myself grumbling about how my Android phones' charge lifetimes were
decreasing, mere months into the devices lives.

I don't know whether this could have been patented (like stupid rounded-
corners patents and so many other things). But, it wasn't. Was Apple obligated
to reveal this "secret sauce"? I don't know.

For _most_ people, the implementation seemed to work out fine. Friends with 3
and 4 year old iPhones, while many Android users could barely make it to 2
years (for multiple factors, not just charge lifetime -- e.g. timely and
ongoing updates, anyone?).

I wish there was a phone that wasn't so wholly owned by big corporations. As
opposed to its users. But it seems to be the nature of our world.

------
KKKKkkkk1
I dunno. I've been using my iPhone 6s for 1.5 years. Maybe it's slowed down,
but it's not anything that I've noticed.

------
hnarayanan
Cache:
[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:gaYTRe...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:gaYTRe-
jJhoJ:https://simplyfixit.co.uk/iphone-battery-slow-benchmarks/)

------
knolan
Geekbench CPU scores from the release iPhone 7 running iOS 10 show scores of
around 3400/5500\. My 14 month old iPhone 7 running 11.2 reports around
3500/5900.

So no slow down on this model. Battery capacity it as 87%.

~~~
lukewrites
I have an iPhone 6 that’s about a year and a half old, and although I
experience frequent & noticeable slowdowns while using it, and although my
battery life has noticeably decreased since I started using it, the Geekbench
score for the phone is higher than the average iPhone 6. It makes me wonder
what’s going on.

~~~
knolan
GPU and CPU being run separately perhaps?

------
nofilter
It's funny that most everyone I know with 6 or 6s has problems (slow, bad
battery) and everyone I know (including mysel) with 7 has no problems what-so-
ever. Maybe 6 was just a bad product?

~~~
williamstein
I have a 6 plus. I broke the screen a few months ago, so they replaced it with
a brand new 6 plus (hence new battery). It is very slow in much the same way
that many other people describe -- it will just pause for a long time (a
minute or more) in some weird stuck state. The old phone that I broke had the
same problem. I have the minimum apps installed, and background refresh
disabled. My wife and mother both have 6 pluses, which exhibit the same weird
long pause slowdown behavior. After trial and error, the best hack to get
around it is: (1) when it happens, immediately turn the phone off and on with
the upper right power button, then (2) immediately after the phone turns back
on, close all running or suspended apps. If you don't do (1), then you're just
completely stuck for a long time. I've had this problem before and after iOS
11, and with my new and old phones.

~~~
kayoone
I have had a 6 Plus for 3 years, my girlfriend has a 6 as well but none of us
have the issues you describe. Yes it got quite slow with iOS 11, but it's just
a bit laggy at times, no long pauses that require a reboot.

------
jug
I don't think this is true beyond benchmarks. They stress test the CPU and
that's when the throttling hits the hardest. It's throttling peaks in CPU
usage, and a benchmark is all peak.

So this sounds like a worst case scenario. Actual use can be completely
different.

Not defending Apple though. This complete lack of communication over an
obviously controversial choice is amateurish. So much of this could have been
easily avoided by clearly mentioning it in a Beta release, along with of
course implmenting an on/off switch!

------
TazeTSchnitzel
Do bear in mind the issue in question is voltage spikes (which cause
unexpected shutdown), that's what Apple is trying to prevent. Most of the time
there'll be no performance impact, it would just lower how far the phone can
boost clock speed when it needs it, I'm guessing? So it would affect the peak
(and therefore mean) performance, but not the mode or median, I think?

Correct me if I'm wrong.

~~~
icegreentea2
Modern CPUs will pretty much always try to boost as long as they have the
thermal and power headroom to do so (see race to sleep). Talking about mean,
median, and 'mode' of performance is going to be tricky because it'll be
heavily dependent on how the tests are being run. Things like, is there enough
time to rebuild thermal headroom between iterations, or does a single
iteration ever actually run enough to exhaust its thermal headroom will effect
the results of multiple runs.

So returning to the base point, any reduction in boost frequency in -normal-
usage (seperate from benchmarking) will cause (machine) measureable (but maybe
not perceived) performance loss because everything is built around trying to
crank out work as quickly as possible for as short of a time as possible.

------
snissn
Shouldn't this study take 4 months to complete?

~~~
viraptor
Not for a company getting multiple iPhones of various age every day in for
repair. If they can do a check on some percentage of their customers, they're
likely to get tens/hundreds of data points a day and be able to graph an
average age-vs-slowdown relation.

If they started after the original forum post, they should have a pretty good
idea already.

------
j45
This is making an interesting case for using an external battery case to keep
the phone at 100% more often and reduce charge cycles.

I wonder if the comparable battery performance gaps perceived by for many
Android users will be seen as closer than we thought - of Android devices
secretly dialed down its devices would they have much better battery life.

------
drinchev
Interesting for me is that my iPhone 4 is much faster than my iPhone 5S. And
the battery lasts much longer on my 4.

I think what Apple changed these days is that the latest version of iOS works
both on 5+, while I remember my iPhone 4 was stuck with old version and I was
never able to upgrade it.

------
kayoone
I just tested my own iPhone 6 Plus that i bought in early 2015 and that i have
been using daily ever since.

Single Core Score 1518, Multicore 2607

These are better than the 0 day scores in that article, which seems weird. My
phone must have close to 900 charging cycles by now, if not more.

------
p0wn
I have an android phone - the nexus 5 and it's a total shitbag right now. It
seems like it's slowed down massively. I can't imagine this is only apple.

~~~
rhizome
I also still use a stock N5 and I've noticed it really taking a nosedive over
the past few months.

~~~
post_break
The nand memory could be degrading.

------
bluedino
I don't see the actual age of the battery mentioned

~~~
achamayou
Nor the operating conditions (temperature in particular), which as Apple
mentioned rightly in their press release can have quite a substantial impact
on how quickly capacity degrades.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Would the type of case used contribute to premature wear? Thinking Otterbox
rugged type cases causing the battery to retain excessive heat while charging.

------
exabrial
Does it even bother anyone at Apple that their company has a problem with
ethics?

It would seem as an engineer, if your boss told you to write code that
intentionally slowed a user's device down (for ANY reason), wouldn't the
proper response be "Will do, but how do we inform the user so they can avoid
it?"

What frustrates me most is Apple won't learn a lesson from this, they just
merely "got caught" this time.

~~~
comex
Well, all phones intentionally slow themselves down (throttle) when they get
too hot; peak CPU performance can only be maintained for a certain amount of
time until it cools back down. I don't think any mobile OS directly exposes
this to the user. Lowering peak performance in the long term is different, but
I suspect they didn't see it as all that different.

~~~
exabrial
I think the difference is that the user will notice their phone is hot and
running slow, so there's some sort of feedback available.

------
misio
Utter crap, marketing rubbish. I'm pretty critical of apple but this is
incredibly off.

------
1337biz
Is there some data on iPads as well?

------
brentis
Forced obsolescence.. so many other things could have been done. A battery
saver option could let users pick their performance options, but no, just get
a new iPhone for $800...

~~~
LoSboccacc
the problem is not performance vs power usage, the problem is the cpu faults
and the device reboots because they fucked up completely on engineering safe
voltage margin into the thing

all cpu faults if undervolted. tipically the more the clock speed, the higher
the voltage needed so that transistor keep working correctly.

on a mobile device battery degradation is normal, with that comes less viable
battery life but also a lower voltage

when you put togheter the two things you just need to plan accordingly. that's
what was the whole kerfuffle: they didn't

it doesn't help that they use short lived batteries in iphones (go check it,
ipads are rated twice the cycles) but the whole issue comes from bad
engineering of the cpu/gpu or whatever they put into that doesn't work with
the degrading battery output the device should have been built to cope with

------
starsinspace
There's absolutely no good reason why iPhone batteries are not easily user-
replaceable. All the reasons usually given are weak excuses for an essentially
consumer-hostile hardware design.

~~~
sbuk
Strawman.

~~~
starsinspace
How so?

If the battery was easily replaceable, then I doubt there would be much
outrage about this issue. But with the iPhone, device and battery are fused
together and are thus seen as a single unit.

