
Apple has admitted to purposely slowing down iPhones - uptownfunk
http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-explains-why-older-iphones-appear-to-be-slowing-down-2017-12
======
reacharavindh
Two things could've made this situation better.

1\. Make the damn battery user replaceable! If you know it is depleting
resource and you designed the phone to last longer, this should be the case.

2\. Be transparent to the user. Show in Battery Settings how the battery is
doing and whether or not the OS is throttling itself.

There is a third one, put in a bigger battery. I think Tesla does this with
Model S. Be nice to customers.

/rant

\- pissed off customer with a slow iPhone 6 that is probably affected by this.

~~~
jlebrech
i miss swapping batteries, or carrying more just in case.

they could actually make phones with batteries just small enough to swap out a
bigger pack

~~~
reacharavindh
Yes. If they could make a tray and flap to hold the nano SIM card and still
make their phone water resistant, they can engineer the phones to have user
swappable batteries. They just choose not to because it is not in their
interest for their customers to keep the phones longer.

~~~
gozur88
That may be part of it. It's also that people like thin phones, and
replaceable batteries place mechanical requirements on the phone that make it
thicker.

~~~
reacharavindh
I'm surprised this is not being used as a competitive marketing strategy. If
another major company developed a phone with removable battery and still be as
trustworthy as Apple, it would be great and put pressure on Apple..

------
jtbayly
Short version: My 6S with a "healthy" battery is severely throttled. It
normally runs now at 911Mhz and often less. It is practically unusable, and it
happened suddenly, recently. Something about Apple's story doesn't add up
still.

Longer version: My 6S battery got replaced back when the sudden shutdown at
20% thing first started happening. (I actually got them to do it out of
warranty for free.) One app says it is at 87% health 1500mAh vs 1715mAh
original capacity. I've read that Apple won't even replace the battery for you
until it drops below 80%, but my phone is unusable right now. Basic animations
don't work right. (I might get two frames of an animation.) Siri is unusable,
as another commenter described. Another app reports the speed the phone's
processor is running at. The majority of the time, mine is throttled to
911Mhz. Sometimes it's a bit more, if my battery is at 99-100%. Other times
it's even lower. This is a 1.8Ghz processor, according to what I've read
online. Turning low power mode off and on doesn't change anything.

Something just doesn't add up about this.

~~~
coolwhhip
How cold is it where you live? What happens if you keep your phone at room
temp for a few days?

~~~
jtbayly
It's starting to get cold, but I work inside, and my phone almost never drops
below room temperature.

------
mankash666
Let's cut into Apple's bullshit. LiOn ageing is not unique to Apple. The
problem is that their batteries are so horribly low powered (1800 mAh for
iPhone 6s), especially for the price of the overall phone, that normal known
ageing patterns would render the battery below spec of max power the iPhone
draws at peak performance. It's BAD design. Note 8 ships with 3300mah and
iPhone X with 2700mah. Both cost a $1000. Which one do you think will last
longer if 2500mah were the max power threshold?

~~~
mrmondo
Android as an OS is far less power efficient than iOS, vendors combat this by
supplying hardware with larger batteries while often sacrificing the quality
of abilities of other components with the applicable space on the PCB / main
board layout.

~~~
mromanuk
Indeed. Anyway, I hope that Apple release a thicker iPhone, with bigger
battery. Maybe we are reaching a maturity level of the market, where they can
differentiate the iPhone more.

~~~
mrmondo
If you want a thicker phone, why not put a battery case on it?

------
dirtbox
If improving stability was the intention, why haven't they ever warned anyone
that it would make their expensive, perfectly functioning phone relatively
useless?

Nothing about their reason rings true. If it were the case then why didn't the
previous IOS installation have limited performance before the update?

------
andrewmcwatters
A big learning experience for me has also been that you shouldn't ever update
an iPhone.

Whatever version of iOS you got out of the factory, stick to it, because
developers just don't give a fuck about performance.

Between iOS updates, performance considerations aren't made for older models
at all. Newer iOS versions are developed against higher end models. I don't
give a fuck what the compatibility charts say, of course Apple's iOS team
ensures that it works, that doesn't mean it works _well_. And it definitely
doesn't mean it was intentionally designed to work against that model
whatsoever.

As a reminder, iPhone 6's original iOS version was 8. We're coming up on 12.

------
workmandan
I've used coconutBattery to check the health of the battery in my 6s and it
reports the number of charge cycles and the maximum capacity. Is this data
stored in the battery or the phone? Does replacing the battery reset the
cycles counter?

------
xt00
How does the iPhone know the battery has been replaced? Cycle counter? If the
cycle counter is stored on the battery then fine but if stored on the phone
then it seems like replacing the battery might not solve the problem..

~~~
mankash666
It's simple voltage/current measurements. An iPhone 6s might start off with an
effective capacity of 1800mah, that reduces to, say 1250mah in 2 years. If
your iPhone requires 1350mah for peak performance, you're out of luck

~~~
xt00
Yea I’ve used a variety of battery charging circuits in designs I’ve done and
measuring voltage and current are pretty easy but measuring capacity is not
obvious instantaneously — you have to store a history of how voltage changed
while charging or discharging. And sometimes you don’t get a full discharge or
recharge and the person may use the phone while charging. As a result you have
to save a history of multiple cycles to try to average and account for various
situations like that. So the result is that you have some driver that saves a
value or set of values someplace. And replacing the battery I would assume
would not reset this unless there was some Id or value stored in the battery
in an eeprom. So my assumption would be that simply replacing the battery may
not immediately fix the problem, you may have to totally discharge and
recharge your phone multiple times to essentially reset the low pass filtered
history of your battery charge discharge cycles. So I guess my question would
be if somebody tested if after replacing the battery they instantly had higher
performance or not..

------
Spivak
I can attest that the problem Apple is describing happened to me on Android.
After about 2 years of heavy my Nexus 6P started shutting off immediately at
15-20% battery. I poked around the internet found lots of other people with
the same problem, almost always recommending calling support rather than any
workarounds -- I give it a shot and two weeks later I have a new phone.

~~~
SpikeDad
Except of course your Android phone SHUTS OFF when the battery is degraded.
Apple has designed iOS to let you keep using the phone (perhaps at a slower
speed) even with a degraded battery.

Apple keeps your phone working longer. Why isn't this the story? Because this
is exactly opposite to the agenda of people that want to knock Apple. The
stories of how Apple designs devices to fail and require new devices is
totally false.

------
leowoo91
Can't they just admit they retract support from old OS versions that works
best with older hardware?

------
hguhghuff
I want the option to turn this off.

~~~
jandrese
I bet the Jailbreak community will come up with a workaround, assuming your
phone has a Jailbreak option.

------
sreenadh
Why not just have removable battery? It can be easily replaced.

