
Opinion: How Apple could have prevented the iPhone-slowdown controversy - chmaynard
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-apple-could-have-prevented-the-iphone-slowdown-controversy-2017-12-23
======
JimDabell
> Knowing the battery size (which also limits the total peak power draw from
> the battery) and software system in play, Apple could have (and I would
> argue should have) designed a processor that would provide consistent
> performance throughout the life of the phone.

> Yes, this would result in lower peak performance for iPhone devices.

Aren't they essentially arguing that Apple should enable the throttling on day
one instead of waiting until the battery degrades? How does that benefit
anyone?

~~~
sandworm101
No. It's about building a chip that isnt going to crash when the voltage drops
for a picosecond, allowing throttling to happen only as needed without fear of
crash.

~~~
ghshephard
Are there processors out there that can handle voltage drops without crashing?

~~~
ComputerGuru
Pretty much all processors start off that way. The clock speed needs to drop
to compensate, though.

Unless you actually put some thought into your hardware designs because you're
making phones that have a life expectancy of greater than a mere 12 months
that will be used around the world for years to come... in which case you can
easily reference an electrical engineering textbook and design a circuit that
can buffer enough power and supply sufficient voltage/current to meet your
expected max sustained power draw with some very simple and cheap components.

But simple frequency scaling based off of _dynamically detected_ available
power. There's no need to slow down a CPU based off the age of the battery so
you can "guess" what the max speed you can safely run at without inducing a
brownout is (and even less of a reason to do so in discrete steps instead of
linearly scaling the performance, except if you're trying to do it discreetly)
- all you have to do is monitor available power and scale the CPU clock rate
accordingly in realtime. But if your circuit is poorly designed with no
forethought as to what you'd do if the maximum rated power of the battery
wasn't available, I suppose that's not so easy to retrofit.

------
binaryapparatus
There is a lot of gymnastics this days, from people like John Gruber and Rene
Ritchie to downplay what just happened. Truth is their 'explanations' are
disturbing to watch and extremely unhelpful to Apple.

Plain and simple, battery is shaved so much that there is no surplus left (in
the name of thinness), nothing to amortize normal battery degradation, so
iPhone only works beautifully during initial review and couple of months after
that.

I really love Apple and some of my daily living depends on it, but this crap
has to stop already. Three years back until now there are many missteps in the
name of fad and profit, couple of years more and it won't matter since I won't
have any market in that ecosystem.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
> Plain and simple, battery is shaved so much that there is no surplus left
> (in the name of thinness), nothing to amortize normal battery degradation,
> so iPhone only works beautifully during initial review and couple of months
> after that.

This is the crux of the issue. Apple is trying to "fix" a design flaw with
software.

~~~
binaryapparatus
If it is only one hiccup I woundn't react half as much but we could see
exactly the same 'form over function' flaw with Mac Pro recently. Mac Pro has
no cooling margin so it often fries graphic cards as soon as you try using it
for (surprise) pro stuff.

I really dislike gimmicks over reliability, and I count race to thinness there
too, that can be seen with Apple in last couple of years.

------
kabdib
When we were doing the Apple Newton, one of my cow-orkers noted that the CPU
had a divisor register that let you choose pretty much any clock frequency you
could want, down to kilohertz.

His half-serious proposal to guarantee users "a 12 hour battery life"
regardless of battery condition was poorly received by the rest of the team .
. .

~~~
nerfhammer
Is that different from what a prescaler is?

~~~
kabdib
It was a "CPU throttle" register that controlled the ARM's clock, with four or
eight bits of divisor from the base 20Mhz clock. It's been a long time and
it's hard to remember h/w register layouts from several decades ago :-)

(Yes, we did the whole Newton on a 20Mhz ARM with less than 512K of RAM).

------
mgiannopoulos
So his argument is that the CPU should be throttled from day 1 so that it
doesn't have to be throttled after a year of operation at a higher speed? How
is that logical?

~~~
awinder
You could provide a smaller throttle to get the same effect over longer
periods of time. Leveling the throttle over the average lifespan of the phone
would provide a consistent performance experience. That’s how I read the
argument at least.

~~~
mgiannopoulos
How does he know the CPU isn't actually throttled already per his suggestion?
:)

------
devit
The simplest solution is to just tell the user that they need to replace the
battery with a popup.

The fact that they didn't implement it and that doing so might benefit them
financially obviously leads people to assume malicious intent.

~~~
theDoug
Agreed. They can have a $79 in-warranty battery replacement program but if no
one knows about it, it does little good to point to its existence later.

------
goblins
>How Apple could have prevented the iPhone-slowdown controversy

Easy, user replaceable battery. (For clarity by "user replaceable" I don't
mean by the user paying $79 for Apple to do it; which is a rip off)

IMO if you design a phone (costing the better part of a grand) with a battery
unsuitable for a years worth of use it's a design flaw, if the battery is not
easily replaceable by the user then the phone is not fit for purpose.

~~~
greedo
I (and many other buyers) don't want a user-replaceable battery. I think they
look like crap, they make the phone look like crap, and in my history of
owning iPhones since day one, I've never had to replace my iPhones battery. I
did have one replaced through a warranty extension thing but that was because
I was reselling the phone and wanted to give the buyer a perfectly new
battery. Otherwise I would have kept the one inside.

~~~
petecox
Many phone owners these days put their device in a case.

How then can it then "look like crap" if aesthetically it's hidden under a
layer of coloured rubber?

~~~
goblins
Not to mention you'd be hard pressed telling if a phone has a user replaceable
battery just by looking at it. I should know because that's the first thing I
ask because I won't buy a phone without a user replaceable battery.

------
sigi45
"controversy"

I replacyed my old Samsung S4 Mini because the flash storage got super slow.
It is known, you can test it and because android uses sqlite and there are
apparently many small iops, the smart phone starts to become slow and lagy.

Who cares? I cared. Had to replace it because i can't / will not re solder
flash chips. Who else cared? NO ONE...

My previous smartphone was also too old for warranty and had an issue with the
mainboard. Also enough other people had this issue.

I don't mind when there are better lawys like 3 year warranty for specific
specs like battry lifetime, broken pixel and iops but this is not a
'controversy'.

------
jagger27
No one would have blinked if Apple had just built the throttle into Low Power
mode and documented the X% cut to clock speed and left stock performance
alone.

~~~
apetrovic
The problem is - when the battery is bad, the phone will shutdown even if the
gauge says 60% or so, and that isn’t obviously “low power mode”. Source: saw
it happening on my daugher’s iPhone 6, a year or so ago.

To be clear: I’m not apologizing Apple. They have “we’ll make decisions for
the user” attitude in their DNK, but this was gone too far.

~~~
StavrosK
I wonder if that's what's happening with my Nexus 6P, which shuts down at
40ish%.

~~~
dsr_
No, that's a widespread defect. I called Google Fi to complain about in
October, and they decided to replace my out-of-warranty 6P with a Pixel XL
(1st gen, but new).

Apparently they had run out of 6Ps and were trying to clear stock of 1st gen
Pixels. They probably won't be quite so nice to you, sorry.

~~~
StavrosK
Yeah, I already called them and they said I could at most talk to Huawei to
see if maybe they'll get it repaired :/

------
walterbell
Why is throttling needed when the phone is connected to AC power?

~~~
cesarb
Due to the length of the wire leading to the AC adapter, it probably can't
respond quickly enough to the voltage drop. The battery is much closer. A
solution would be to use a big enough capacitor on the phone end of the wire,
but phones are very space constrained, and since the battery is non-removable,
it can be used as sort of a "capacitor" for these instantaneous power demands,
so there's no need for the extra cost and space of beefier input capacitors.

~~~
ComputerGuru
I know what you’re saying and see where you are coming from, but that’s not
how it would work in reality. Presuming sufficient voltage at the the cable
(ie no extreme loss due to internal cabling resistance) the length of the
cable should not matter.

The real limiting factor is that a basic USB plug charger puts out only 2A
while the iPhone’s peak draw at the same 5V can be well north of 2.5A if
you’re using the GPU to its fullest.

 _However_ it’s not just the power cord that’s supplying current when you’re
plugged in - if it were designed correctly there’s no reason those 2A couldn’t
supplement whatever your battery is already putting out and only charge it
with what’s left over. In fact, that’s how iPhones can stay at 90% while
plugged in to a car charger, running GPS, playing audio at the loudest, and
streaming some data in the background while some android models would
_discharge_ even while plugged in... but both would be dead a lot sooner if
they weren’t plugged in.

The real problem is just shoddy engineering. Hardware isn’t much different
from software: what all this boils down to is the equivalent of someone
writing code that went into production across millions of devices around the
world that assumed input x would always be greater than y and didn’t bother
with any exception handling or bounds checking. And when that voltage/current
combination coming in is insufficient.. an unhandled brownout exception
occurs.

~~~
walterbell
There’s also the USB-C adapter which can fast-charge iPhone/iPad quickly via
Apple-specific charging protocol, which clearly provides much more power than
than the battery does.

~~~
DonHopkins
And if USB-C doesn't provide enough amps for you, there's always jumper
cables.

[https://www.engadget.com/2014/07/14/junojumpr-jumpstart-
your...](https://www.engadget.com/2014/07/14/junojumpr-jumpstart-your-iphone-
and-your-car/)

~~~
ComputerGuru
I have to admit I’m a bit disappointed. I was hoping to see a real, full-size
car battery.

I actually have three absorbent glass mat batteries hooked up to a Noco Genius
battery tender and a 1000W 12V inverter to provide battery backup for my sump
pumps (long story). Losslessly converting that to 5V shouldn’t be too hard.

------
herf
What if the flaw was earlier in the design? The iPhone has a battery that's
2/3 the size of other phone batteries. Would there even be a problem with a
1000mAh bigger battery?

------
sweden
Apple could have just implemented replaceable batteries and all this situation
could have been avoided.

Edit: When I mean replaceable, I mean replaceable batteries without the user
having to go an Apple store. Like in the old days, taking the cover off and
putting the new battery back in.

~~~
ghshephard
Apple batteries are replaceable. $79 and an hour at the Apple store will do
the job. If you want to save money you can get it done at a third-party shop
for less than $50.

Where Apple made a mistake was in not communicating to its users that this is
something they need to do on an annual basis, so people could budget it in to
their cost.

~~~
beamatronic
The hour at the Apple Store is the deal breaker. My time is too valuable for
that.

~~~
mewse
You don't have to spend the hour at the Apple Store.

You drop the phone off, leave, and come back at literally any time more than 1
hour later. Go to your important meeting. Do some shopping. Have that doctor's
appointment you've been putting off. Have a nice long lunch. Whatever. You
don't actually _lose_ that hour.

I mean, obviously.

~~~
rmwaite
I love Apple products. Every major computing device I use is made by them. I
am lucky to be closer than the vast majority of people to an Apple store and
even for me this is a huge pain in the ass. I think it is incredibly
unreasonable to just hand wave this away like its no big deal. It absolutely
is and to pretend otherwise is naive at best.

------
ComputerGuru
I don’t know if I’m just too old having lived through the old nickel-cadmium
“memory effect” days, it everybody I know - techie or not - already knows and
accepts that batteries “get old” and then “die faster” and “don’t charge
right” as the device ages.

Lithium battery tech today is an incredible step forward, but simply
acknowledging the still existent limitations of the battery and it’s lifespan
seems like a much simpler and saner solution than building a house of cards
trying to hide that reality.

Battery dying in 2 hours after a full charge? Time to get it replaced. If your
device is still under warranty, it’s free. Otherwise it’s 80 bucks and you’re
golden. What’s the big deal?

Instead we have this nonsense approach to pretend that batteries live forever
at such a cost.

And then you have the people that pop up out of the woodworks in each and
every single iPhone battery life thread to say "it's not that the battery dies
faster, it's that the phone suddenly shuts off at 60% [or whatever]," which is
an absolute load of BS. The iPhone 6S was the first device to have that
problem (I went to the Apple store within a year of its release with my iPhone
6S and spent over 3 hours explaining to the tech what was going on despite
what his fancy charts and on-chip reporting software saw until he relented and
gave me a replacement phone well before Apple ever acknowledged the issue and
initiated the limited recall) - and it's the equivalent of a bug in the
hardware design.

As a battery ages, the "definition" of 100% slides (as the charge cycles go up
the charge capacity goes down - although it's not that simple since li-ion
batteries also retain some form of the old cadmium cell memory effect that
doesn't scale in a directly linear fashion with the charge cycles, but not to
an appreciable extent that would have a bearing on this particular matter),
but there's no reason that a device should die at 60% of its _remaining_
battery life. Except that the iPhone 6S' hardware was designed in such a way
that it demanded current that could only be supplied at a voltage in excess of
what the reduced-capacity battery could supply, leading to the problem at
hand.

This is just me guessing, but I'm fairly convinced of the truth here: Apple
didn't implement CPU scaling to improve the end user experience nor to make
money off of "planned obsolescence" but rather to avoid having to replace
phones/batteries within and without the warranty period (as a recall was
warranted due to the faulty design) and decided to implement a software
_workaround_ (and decidedly _not_ a _fix_) to get all but the most susceptible
phones to avoid the scenario that would trigger the brownout.

~~~
xenadu02
There is no such thing as "100%" or "60%" or any other battery meter number.
They are all guesstimates based on the battery's history and cycle count.

Li-ion batteries don't have a simple voltage-charge relationship like lead-
acid batteries do so you can't actually know the real charge state of the
battery (and even those have a number of ways the battery chemistry can get
messed up).

I'll also note that your specific battery history matters a lot. If you leave
your phone on a hot car dash in the summer even once it will dramatically
alter that battery's performance. It isn't as simple as saying it cuts the
lifetime... the battery's ability to deliver peak current is affected.

------
iamgopal
The fun part is, everybody easily accepts that battery degrades. But thinks
hardware shouldn't.

~~~
deckar01
I have a 6 year old battery in my 2011 Macbook Air and it seems to handle the
peak load of my quad core i7 just fine.

~~~
jws
Phones and laptops are different beasts. I'm going to make up some numbers
here to simplify, but the idea is the important part.

 _Note: I wrote this whole comment with C inverted the first time. Too little
sleep. It is now fixed thanks to user revelation._

First: Battery people like to talk about discharge and charge rates in a unit
called "C". If you drain a battery at 1/10C, you will totally use it up in 10
hours. If you drain it at 1/2C you will totally use it up in 2 hours.

Laptop: 5000 milliamp hours at 10 volts for 50 watt hours of energy. This will
last for 10 hours of use if you average 5 watts. You will be discharging at
0.1C on average. Your CPU might be a 15 watt CPU, so you can burst to maybe 20
watts total, or 0.4C.

Phone: 1500 milliamp hours at 4 volts for 6 watt hours of energy. This will
last for 6 hours of active use, so that is 1 watt. You are discharging at
0.16C on average. Let's guess the CPU can surge to 5 watts. That takes you to
6 watts total use and a discharge rate of 1C.

So that is a 2.5x safety margin that the laptop has for degraded batteries
over the phone.

Summary: Phones operate much closer to the current limits of batteries
compared to older laptops. Accumulated wear or damage to the battery will
affect them sooner.

~~~
revelation
I think you got it backwards, "C" is for capacity (useful since (dis)charge
current obviously scales with capacity, ceterus paribus) and a 2C discharge
rate is twice the current of a 1C rate.

You also need to be careful in your calculations. Battery discharge rates are
given in Amps (or C multiples) not Watts because over a cycle, cell voltage
will naturally drop. Discharging at 5 Watts puts more strain on an empty than
a full cell since the first requires higher current to compensate for the
lower voltage. Amps reflect the "demand" better.

Your summary is still correct though, there is more margin for degradation in
a laptop battery and space for decoupling.

~~~
jws
Yes I did write it all backwards. I'm going to go back and fix the post, so
your comment is not going to look insane.

------
IBM
The lede of the story and pretty much every one I've read is false.

>For years consumers have complained and theorized that Apple would purposely
degrade the performance of older iPhones, pushing them to upgrade faster than
they normally would.

>This week the theory of slowing iPhones was validated by external sources and
eventually corroborated by Apple.

The conspiracy theory we're talking about is that Apple slows your old iPhone
to make you upgrade to new ones and it goes back all the way to the first
iPhones. It's false on its face because this fix wasn't added until iOS 10.2.1
[1] and it wasn't what Apple "corroborated" at all. And for the "Apple should
have been transparent" crowd, here's what it said in the release notes:

>iOS 10.2.1 includes bug fixes and improves the security of your iPhone or
iPad.

>It also improves power management during peak workloads to avoid unexpected
shutdowns on iPhone.

>For information on the security content of Apple software updates, please
visit this website:
[https://support.apple.com/HT201222](https://support.apple.com/HT201222)

There's some extremely bad writing on the internet about this story meant to
capitalize on the general controversy. Honestly, Apple should find the most
egregious one and sue for defamation, and relish the opportunity to testify
under oath if it goes to trial.

[1]
[https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1893?locale=en_US](https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1893?locale=en_US)

~~~
ryanmarsh
_The lede of the story and pretty much every one I 've read is false._

Meta comment: Why is it that we routinely debunk shoddy journalism here on
Hacker News but struggle to see why people call the vanguard of mainstream
media "fake news"?

I see articles from all venues get eviscerated here on Hacker News. Can we be
honest with ourselves and just say that if they're this bad about complex
technology subjects, perhaps they might be equally as bad on complex
geopolitical or economic issues?

~~~
thewayfarer
Because we shouldn't think about the media categorically one way or the other,
as if it's either all fake or everything in the media is true. The media gets
things wrong, and we should correct their mistakes.

However, the political aspects of discrediting entire news outlets or the
entire news community because of critical or negative coverage of certain
politicians or political parties is an attitude that promotes mistrust in our
society and creates an environment where nefarious political actors can
successful avoid scrutiny.

------
thecollate
What happens if you charge your throttled iPhone. Does the performance improve
while charging vs running on battery ?

------
ankushnarula
Rather than throttle, Apple has done something similar since the A10/A11
processors with their additional low-power cores. Presumably this should
reduce the short-term wear on the battery and extend the life of the cells.

------
catilac
then they should have charged less for their products. or created a more
environmentally friendly design. my guess is that apple's PR team made this
article happen

------
CamperBob2
Just add a setting. Prefer performance, or prefer battery life.

Is that so hard?

What arguments are there against this _other_ than planned obsolescence?
Educate me. Downvotes aren't arguments.

~~~
twotwotwo
Performance isn't lowered to extend battery life, it's lowered because the
degradation in old batteries makes it impossible to reliably run the processor
at max clock; if you flip a switch to force high clocks despite an old
battery, your phone will randomly shut down sometimes.

So they couldn't really run the CPU full speed for years. They sure could
have, say, highlighted to users that a battery replacement can make an old
phone run better for longer, but of course they'd much rather users replace
their phones. Or, as another comment here suggested, they could have left more
margin--overspecced the battery so it could run the CPU at higher speeds even
once it was somewhat degraded, rather than putting so much of the efficiency
gain over iPhone generations into thinness and lightness. Might also help
battery life for heavy users.

~~~
CamperBob2
_Performance isn 't lowered to extend battery life, it's lowered because the
degradation in old batteries makes it impossible to reliably run the processor
at max clock; if you flip a switch to force high clocks despite an old
battery, your phone will randomly shut down sometimes._

That may be what they're telling people, but there is absolutely no
engineering basis for it. Battery voltages decrease gradually under all normal
operating conditions, and switched-mode converters can extract useful energy
from them throughout the entire discharge regime.

The main constraint on battery voltage isn't some mysterious "random shutdown"
effect, but the health of the battery itself. If you allow the battery voltage
to fall too low -- which will, again, happen gradually and not instantaneously
-- its service life will be greatly impaired. This is not something that
happens without warning. It's a perfectly well understood effect. Once the
phone's CPU sees this happening, it will have plenty of time to post a
"Shutting down in xx seconds" message to the user, go into emergency low-power
mode, or otherwise take action to protect the battery.

~~~
twotwotwo
Even those that skeptical of what Apple did here seem to think there's some
real limit on safe power draw involved. If that can be shown false it could
probably be a popular blog post here at least.

------
chmaynard
From Apple's statement: "Lithium-ion batteries become less capable of
supplying peak current demands when in cold conditions, have a low battery
charge, or as they age over time, which can result in the device unexpectedly
shutting down to protect its electronic components."

Apple seems to be saying that throttling might occur even if the battery is
perfectly fine. This points to a fundamental design flaw across many different
models and generations, which is the main conclusion of this article. One
could even argue that Apple is using a "cheat device" that produces different
performance during benchmarks vs. actual real-world use. Sound familiar? This
is exactly what VW did. Is it illegal? We will find out as the lawsuits
proceed.

