Worth mentioning here is that this wasn't just about the "sneaky" fix for battery degradation, it was about doing this without notice, and having internal tooling that would deny a replacement (even at full retail price) if the battery was above an arbitrary health threshold (but still low enough to cause throttling).
Before Apple changed their tune, if you read about this, and went into an Apple store for a replacement, they absolutely would not give you one, even if you paid full retail for it.
This left people in a no-win situation. The only way you could get a working device was to have a third party replacement done (and kill your warranty) or shell out for a new phone.
Battery engineer here at an electric vehicle company.
The crux of it is this: when you draw high current from a small battery, the voltage will sag (1). The manufacturer has an on-board battery management system that MUST turn off the battery if it goes below a certain voltage threshold.
As the battery ages, the sag effect increases significantly, up to 2-3x. Thus, when your phone clearly indicates say 20% battery remaining, if a high load were to be applied, the last 20% would be inaccessible because the battery sag from the spontaneous high load would cause a reboot.
Thus, Apple acted in good faith to maximize the battery life on these older devices. The reason is technical, so it's hard to communicate this in a way that all consumers can understand. Yes, they failed at this. Look at all the confusion.
(1) Exercise:
Suppose no-load 3.4V corresponds to 20% remaining.
Suppose that the battery cut-off is set to 3.2V.
The battery % is usually derived from a current sensor (coulomb counting), NOT from the measured voltage.
But the battery cut-off is a safety feature and needs to be measured hard against the voltage (and the current sensor needs to be ignored due to cumulative error).
On a new phone, fully loaded voltage drop = 0.1V
On a used phone, fully loaded voltage drop = 0.3V
Low-load condition, @20% = 3.4V, OK
Full-load condition, @20% = 3.4 - 0.3 = 3.1V, Emergency OFF.
Again, it's not that Apple didn't violate the laws of physics on their "magical" device, it's that they:
1. Applied the throttling fix silently
2. Denied warranty replacements
3. Wouldn't even replace the battery with cash in hand until after the suit was filed
4. ..leaving people with no good way to have a working device.
Apparently Apple doesn't agree that this is covered under warranty since they have denied wrongdoing (at least last I saw as of the $500M settlement, can't access the latest one).
No, exactly. I got a free battery replacement on my Macbook Pro after 3 years of having it because the battery was unusable.
After going into the Apple store, they said that the battery was a "consumable part" and therefore not covered by the warranty. However, when I asked what the part number was and how I could order a replacement myself, they said that the batteries weren't serviceable and even they had to replace the keyboard unit as that contained the battery and it was all glued together.
I pointed out that they've therefore designed this product to fail after a few years as you can't order replacement batteries as a consumer, and they agreed to replace it for free.
That is definitely an issue. I guess apple somehow calculated that an occasional free replacement is more economic than not binding the battery to a non-consumable part?
Yes, of course it is. Most users can’t replace tires, spark plugs, or even oil in their cars. Parts are considered consumable if they are reasonably expected to be consumed during normal operation. No court is going to hold a company liable for basic physics.
> Most users can’t replace tires, spark plugs, or even oil in their cars.
They don't want to, but they could with a 5 minute YouTube video and probably $10 in parts (plus the cost of the new tire, or oil, or whatever). Doing so also does not void the warranty on your car (maybe not true for spark plugs? Tires and oil can certainly be changed)
You mean unless you pay for a special policy? I think it typically comes with its own warranty. The replacement prices differentiate between in-warranty and AppleCare versus "out of warranty" price. Which seems to imply they do provide it by default, until it just expires.
They do state it is a consumable and that it should maintain a certain level for a certain number of recharge cycles. Of course not sure what kind of careful wording they were using pre-controversy. But obviously it should all come down to what they promise to be covering.
The other option Apple had at their disposal was basically to throttle the device literally all the time so that even when the battery was old the phone would never draw enough current to trigger a brown out condition. Instead what they did was make the most power possible available from the battery at all times, and yes that changed over time. This seems like a much better alternative. I really don’t understand the criticism.
The marketing is at issue here. If instead of calling it throttling down when the battery was old they called it boosting up when the battery was new it would have been a best in class feature instead of a $100 million dollar settlement.
And yes, at the point where the throttling was taking place, the battery wasn’t defective. That was a completely expected place along the performance curve of a consumable part. So why replace it when it’s working as designed? In my opinion this is the opposite of planned obsolescence, they took devices that would otherwise have to be replaced due to shut downs and allow them to remain in service.
The other option Apple had here was notifying people their battery was bad, not hiding the throttling, and letting people buy new batteries for a reasonable profit.
It's not bad though, it's normal, and functioning as expected at that part of the age curve. You can avoid this by reducing performance for the entire time you owned the device so nobody noticed, I guess, but that's all.
Let's imagine it's a electric car. The car goes 70mph when you buy it. Suddenly it only runs at 45mph. You want to buy a new battery to fix it but the car company refuses even though you're willing to pay.
Why should you have to put up with a car that only goes 45mph when it went 70mph when you bought it?
What part of this is hard to understand. I don't want a phone that runs slow.
It's different in that the electric car is marketed as capable of achieving 70mph, Apple does not market iOS devices in terms of performance. No promises were made in that regard - at all, IIRC.
> Apple does not market iOS devices in terms of performance.
Come on dude, stop bullshitting. Every Apple device promotion shows how it is faster or better than the previous device or its competitors. Even the new Apple ARM processor touts how it is equal or better than other processors.
This right here is the reason Apple fans irritate me.
I love Apple devices but the quality regressed in recent years, to the point that I left most of the ecosystem.
But you can not have a healthy discussion about that because some people will come out and defend apple with their blood and tears. No matter ridiculous their stance is.
(1) I'm a right-to-repair activist, I believe that batteries should be user-serviceable and preferably end-user-serviceable. The fact that Apple refused to replace batteries in exchange for a fee is nutters to me. Apple's general disdain for third-party repair is indefensible.
(2) I want a system that tries to get as much performance as possible at all times, and that means as a consumable part (the battery) ages, less performance is available because less instantaneous power is available. This aging process begins on the first day and first charge cycle of ownership. That means if the device is always pulling the most power possible out of the battery, the performance characteristics of the device change over time, like balding tires or razor blades. A balding tire or razor blade is not defective, even if I can't take corners as tightly or have to slow down my shave to avoid cutting up my face.
(3) I would prefer a device that ramps down peak performance over time to match the capabilities of a consumable part rather than one that artificially limits peak performance early on to avoid a ramp-down. And I would certainly prefer a device that throttles at 20% capacity to one that takes a dirt nap at 20%. I had one of those, and it was awful. I couldn't rely on it to get home, for instance. The patch at issue here resolved that completely. I'd also prefer a device that is on at 20% to one that shuts down before it gets to 20% in some effort to avoid throttling.
(4) I don't think that a battery that is able to supply less instantaneous power over time is defective so long as its reduced capability is in line with expectations for the given age and number of charge cycles, and therefore shouldn't be eligible for a complementary automatic in-warranty battery replacement.
(5) Ok, say you prefer the other. Fine, don't buy an iPhone. It's not a 100 million dollar lawsuit worthy issue. It's at most a good will issue for the few folks who would prefer the other behavior, and having a switch resolved it.
Is that really such a ridiculous stance? Does this really irritate you?
When the first iPhone came out in 2008 Apple's rabid fan base came out just to keep saying "why would anyone ever want MMS and copy/paste?" It really didn't make any sense... I would have been somewhat interested in buying one if I could afford one, so I wasn't a hater.
The early iPhone adopters, myself included, were focused on all the amazing new stuff the iPhone gave me over my Motorola Pebl, like a giant screen, a full desktop web browser, unlimited (albeit very slow) mobile internet in the middle of absolutely nowhere, and a buttery-smooth UI experience.
Remember the state of the art at the time was the Razr for consumer phones, Rokr for music phones, and the N900 for smartphones. Put them side by side with the original iPhone and you'll understand why copy-paste and MMS was the last thing on our minds.
There was no Android, that came out a year and a bit later. And Android 1.0 was hot garbage.
My first Mac was an SE/30 then an LC475 when I was a kid, and an iMac G4 15" (2002) and iBook G3 Snow (2003) are the machines I learned to write software on.
This right here is the reason Apple haters irritate me.
I love Apple devices and the quality improved in recent years, to the point that I will never leave the ecosystem.
But you can not have a healthy discussion about that because some people will come out and attack apple with their blood and tears. No matter ridiculous their stance is.
It’s a real shame if hate and anger are more socially acceptable than defending something.
Don’t customers have a reasonable expectation of roughly consistent performance of their device?
And to your point, car companies don’t market their cars using ‘achieving 70mph’ as a feature. It’s just a reasonable expectation of performance. They might mention the top speed, but that’s more of a specification than a marketing feature in most cases.
I can't believe how much of an echo-chamber these discussions get. Its like proper politics - once people chose their branch of religion, be it faith in god or in their phone manufacturer, they go to great lengths to twist reality so that their favorite comes always as good guy. Cognitive dissonance anybody?
I have no stake at this topic, never owned an Apple device and I don't feel other manufacturers are significantly better, but its a bit sad to see so much apologism at otherwise great place like HN. Or its just paid comments either from employees or otherwise employed, I mean we're still just on general internet and its still 2020 so its unfortunately pretty normal.
In any case, if you guys try to defend these seemingly amoral actions of Apple, the real effect is exactly opposite.
Performance characteristics aren't exactly "amoral" -- if you want to talk "amoral," I'd suggest focusing on their stance on reparability, to which I'm very sympathetic. Eventually you have to run the car much more gently before replacing the tires to avoid putting yourself at risk.
Consumer expectations matter. People would be rightfully mad if cars changed in performance after you test drove them, after all, even with no explicit promises.
And Apple does advertise benchmarks on their slides.
Again, the battery is not defective, it is a certain number of years old. That is how batteries perform at a certain age. Batteries are consumable parts like tires and ink cartridges.
It's like returning an ink cartridge at 50% capacity because it's only got half the ink left. Yes, that's the point, that's what cartridges do.
This feature is designed to always get the most out of a battery. Is that really something to complain about?
I guess this is where it's a perspective issue.
- You're saying that a new battery starts out at "100%" and that after a year or so, Apple throttles is down to "80%" because it can no longer keep up with how it came out of the factory. Apple designed a function that reduces the performance of a system that's defective to hide the defect. That would be strictly negative.
- What I'm saying is that the battery starts out at "120%" out of the factory (which you can confirm, when you buy a new mac check out the Batter mAh vs. design rating in System Report) and eventually drifts towards "100%" over time. Apple designed a system that allows you to get that extra 20% at the start, when it's available. That would be strictly positive.
The battery may not be defective, but the device is. It previously performed acceptably, then started performing poorly, with no indication to the user that there was an action needed to restore acceptable performance. Nobody expects a magic battery fix, but they do expect to be told that their device has been slowed down.
What I'm suggesting is that you consider the 100% performance mark to be far side of the performance curve at the end of the expected life of the device, so 80% capacity after 1000 charge cycles or 2 years, give or take.
With that as your baseline ("100%"), if you can make the phone perform better than the that in the first few years you're offering an early-life performance boost over the baseline, not a late performance degradation. Otherwise, the far end of the curve is the performance level you'd have to artificially limit the device to in order to avoid any change in performance over time. The phone was defective before the update was shipped as it didn't appropriately account for this normal battery degradation curve.
Apple was basically giving you more performance than you paid for, for free, early on -- not stealing your performance down the line.
The only time you should be told your battery is defective is if it reaches the 80% mark in less than 2 years or 1000 charge cycles along the defined anticipated performance curve. I do agree, however, that a battery replacement should be available at a fair price to those who want one.
Your definition is not common to the market. Users can’t possibly anticipate whether the phone will provide acceptable performance when it reaches this ‘100%’ state. The devices are reviewed based on as new performance. The device provides adequate performance for some time, subsequently stops providing adequate performance, without notifying the user that there’s a way to restore acceptable performance. This is extremely user hostile behaviour.
I would literally rather my phone started randomly turning itself off at 30% power. At least that way I might take it for repair, have the reason diagnosed, and get it restored to acceptable performance, rather than simply assuming that software has moved on and I have to live with a slow device or purchase a new one.
For the sake of argument, let's go with your framing: the device starts out at "120%" performance, then degrades to "100%".
The argument others have raised still applies. If Apple had informed users about the transition from 120% to 100%, some portion of users would have enjoyed the 120% experience so much that they would have replaced their batteries in order to get back to 120%. Apple concealed that option by not informing users about the change.
The problem is a battery engineer can't seem to explain this to people here who are ostensibly smart people, though that does somewhat go out of the window when apple is the subject it seems. How on earth could they be expected to explain this to everyone?
Everyone here understands the behaviour of the battery. At issue is the way the customer experience is handled on top of that behaviour. Pretending otherwise is simple condescension.
Apple has already fixed the problem in a satisfactory way, so presumably it wasn’t impossible after all.
The initial state is what the devices are reviewed on, and bought based on. And that's really the only reasonable approach, you can't really delay the reviews until the model is already dead and buried.
Ok, and customers should still be informed of whatever it is that you think the situation is, and they should be allowed to purchase a replacement.
> This feature is designed to always get the most out of a battery. Is that really something to complain about?
They should have still told the customer and allowed people to buy a replacement.
> I guess this is where it's a perspective issue.
No. My perspective is not that. Instead my perspective is that the consumer should have been told about that, and offered the ability to buy a replacement.
This issue impacts literally every phone ever sold.
Manufactures can hide it any number of ways, but a new battery is always better even if your phone is exactly 1 day old. That’s what continuous degradation means.
> This issue impacts literally every phone ever sold.
No, actually, most phones did not release an update like this, deny the situation, and then also refused to let people purchase replacement batteries.
The issue is that Apple did this update, did not tell people about the whole thing, however you want to describe it, and then also did not allow people to buy replacement batteries.
All that tells me is that other phones aren't getting the most out of new batteries, and are instead limiting themselves to the performance of an old battery. But yes, I agree, they should have permitted replacements - in fact replacements should have been permitted at home. Batteries deserve to be user serviceable.
> All that tells me is that other phones aren't getting the most out of new batteries, and are instead limiting themselves to the performance of an old battery.
That's only one possible explanation.
Imagine two phones that can both draw 5 watts max. Phone A has a battery that can supply 5 watts brand new, and phone B has a battery that can supply 10 watts brand new.
It's true that phone A is "getting the most out of new batteries", and phone B isn't. But phone B isn't "limiting itself to the performance of an old battery". The 5 watt limit is there for efficiency and heat reasons, and it just so happens that the battery is never the limiting factor.
Is there some reason to think that's the case? Batteries are pretty consistent technology, roughly equivalent across manufacturers and all sourced from a pretty small pool of OEMs. If that's the case I'd love to know more!
Lithium ion chemistry can vary things significantly, but I was picturing simply putting in a larger battery for the hypothetical. The motivation is more hours of runtime, but as a side effect you have more peak watts available.
Now you’re paying to change voltage, which adds cost and heat. Sure, users don’t really notice that something’s wrong, but they get a worse device that costs more money and needs to heat throttle anyway.
> Voltage drop is minimally impacted by battery size
That makes the job easier! Just cut the battery in half. Let's say the original battery could handle 5 amps before the voltage drop got too bad. If a half-size battery can handle 4 amps, and you put in two of them, now you can handle 8 amps.
Most phones aren't redlining the battery when brand new. There's degradation but it only affects battery life. By the time you have performance impacts you're typically in "replace the battery" territory.
Then you are being deliberately obtuse as many here have already explained that this case was never about the throttling. Quoting another user (Karunamon):
> Again, it's not that Apple didn't violate the laws of physics on their "magical" device, it's that they:
> 1. Applied the throttling fix silently 2. Denied warranty replacements 3. Wouldn't even replace the battery with cash in hand until after the suit was filed 4. ..leaving people with no good way to have a working device.
Basically they were slowing down people's device, without informing them, and forcing them to buy new devices as they refused to replace the battery even when customers were willing to pay for a new battery!
I would maintain that the device that didn't throttle, taking into account the real capabilities of the battery, and instead shut down unexpectedly at 20% was broken. It was fixed by this patch.
> 2. Denied warranty replacements.
There's as much reason to replace a battery under warranty that has maintained 80% charge capacity after 1000 cycles or 2 years, as there is an ink cartridge starting to run low. Batteries start getting worse after each charge cycle, and my understanding is that they followed the prescribed policy.
> 3. Wouldn't even replace the battery with cash in hand until after the suit was filed.
I'm very much against this policy, as a right-to-repair advocate I believe battery replacements should be simple and end-user achievable. Short of that I agree that the replacement should have been carried out on a cost-plus basis on request.
> 4. ..leaving people with no good way to have a working device.
This is where we disagree except as I replied in (3).
All MacBooks throttle performance when heat gets too high. It prevents unnecessary damage to the chip and battery.
We can all hear the fans spin up and usually we know why. We also know the machine is going to slow down.
The difference on iPhone is there was no precedent and user expectation for this behavior. Apple did not offer a setting for this, though I imagine if they did almost everyone would have turned it on.
Should Apple have explained this up front? Yes. Should they have replaced people’s batteries? Yes.
Was this a 100 million dollar set of mistakes? Probably not.
Probably much more in the loss of good will.
I agree w the poster elsewhere this is a marketing and customer support problem.
Sometimes apple makes mistakes and lose in court to great humiliation, like when they tried to force Apple Store employees not get paid to follow their security requirements.
I think it’s good to keep the company on its toes, but this particular case seems pretty mild to me.
When my phone battery is low I often can charge it. Most of the time I have opportunity to charge multiple times a day if needed. If I need long life I can switch to battery saver mode; in normal operations I prefer better performance.
> And yes, at the point where the throttling was taking place, the battery wasn’t defective.
Sure, but if I decide I really need a top-shape battery, and I go into an Apple Store and offer to pay full retail price for a new one, shouldn't they give it to me? GP says they were refusing if the battery was above a certain threshold (but low enough that performance adjustments were kicking in.)
I had two iPhones with the “balloon battery” problem, after they tested them for speed performance - they reluctantly replaced them even though they were 1 and 2 point Over their threshold even though the batteries were clearly pushing the screen out of the body...
Would this count in this case although this was san francisco
The issue is that Apple knew about the bad batteries* , denied it and discouraged battery replacement, thus leading to increased iPhone sales if users wanted a decent experience - defrauding its own customers.
That's not good faith at all. That apologists keep talking about batteries but ignore the real problem smacks of a PR campaign.
* We actually don't know if the slowdown was only for bad batteries - that's Apple's version, but it could be that they applied the throttling generally. I'm unaware of any third party who has verified this.
It's not a bad battery. The degrading performance over time applies to every battery ever sold. Apple decided that keeping your device functional by slightly reducing the performance once the battery is degraded is preferable to randomly shutting your device down. I agree with them.
The battery isn't good for the entire warranty term. Sure it's bad. Apple decided to lie to users about this, and that just happened to encourage expensive iPhone sales, rather than a cheap battery replacement.
I sure hope Apple isn't taking your approach to HW reliability across the board. After all, memory and disk eventually go bad too.
>The reason is technical, so it's hard to communicate this in a way that all consumers can understand
"The battery in your iphone has degraded. Phone performance will be lowered to ensure stability. See an apple store or visit apple.com/battery to have a replacement battery installed"
For reference, the actual message they added later, which should have been included at the same time as the performance limiting feature:
"This iPhone has experience an unexpected shutdown because the battery was unable to deliver the necessary peak power. Performance management has been applied to help prevent this from happening again. [Disable…]"
Which still isn't perfect because "performance management" is such a weasely way of saying "reduced performance", but it's a lot better than nothing.
> Thus, Apple acted in good faith to maximize the battery life on these older devices. The reason is technical, so it's hard to communicate this in a way that all consumers can understand. Yes, they failed at this. Look at all the confusion.
Nothing in your longwinded explanation of battery basics says anything about why I can't go into an Apple store and pay full price for a replacement.
The fix for this is simple. Appropriately size the battery when designing and manufacturing the device so that it is still capable of running the device a few years into it's lifetime, instead of a few months.
The after the fact fix for this is also to not refuse to fix your defective devices when customers bring them in under warranty claims, and definitely to not lie about them not being defective.
You don't make pay out the better part of a billion dollars in settlements and fines because you acted responsibly in a way that is hard to explain to consumers. You pay out a billion dollars in settlements because you broke the law.
I'm on year 3 of my iPhone 8, with 82% battery health. My total talk time is over 36 days, and I probably actively use it for non-talk tasks for 3-4 hours/day.
In my experience, which included managing and oversight of the operations/budgets for BlackBerry, iPhone and Android fleets with 10-50k devices, early battery death is usually accounted for by poor environmental conditions like temperature extremes. The AFRs didn't change in my experience much at all over time, except that legacy BlackBerries would get battery replacements.
The only outlier was failure rates for Samsung Galaxy phones, which was an operational issue (about 40% more failures if memory serves) -- NOT a defect or problem with the phone itself. They were mostly deployed to field workers operating out of cars or outdoors because Samsung allows a much broader operating range. Extreme cold especially would kick the crap out of the Samsung batteries, especially if they keeping them in outer pockets of winter coats or leaving them mounted to vehicles. Apple is conservative with battery management because the public perception cost of any battery issue is nuclear, as anything Apple is a headline. iPhones have strict shutdown temperatures for both cold and heat. (which make them useless in many outdoor work environments)
>iPhones have strict shutdown temperatures for both cold and heat. (which make them useless in many outdoor work environments)
Absolutely, I'm in the middle of Saskatchewan where it can get down to -40 and this was my biggest gripe with some of my old iPhones. Weirdly enough my BlackBerries (including my Key2!) managed a bit better. Only major issue I noticed was that capacity would rise when coming into a warmer environ. The Titan seems to be faring pretty well so far this winter, but it also is more battery then phone.
Was always funny walking in and having my phone restart, just to shutdown though.
Not sure in terms of numbers, you might be able to find it if you dug through the court documents. It's not a rare anecdote though, for instance see this comment currently slightly below this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25144122
> Thus, when your phone clearly indicates say 20% battery remaining, if a high load were to be applied, the last 20% would be inaccessible because the battery sag from the spontaneous high load would cause a reboot.
So, I treat the battery readout as basically a scale of "high / medium / low". This works well with the empirical fact that a 20% readout might in fact last longer than a 50% readout.
What I don't understand is that most other people seem to treat the percentages as meaningful. They certainly aren't based on "time until a recharge is needed", which is what people want. What are we notionally seeing percentages of?
Disclaimer: I've had to deal with batteries a lot in my career so I'm familiar with their complex nature. I am not an expert though, so I'm sure there are a million more confounding variables that complicate things further.
> What I don't understand is that most other people seem to treat the percentages as meaningful. They certainly aren't based on "time until a recharge is needed", which is what people want. What are we notionally seeing percentages of?
So yes it kind of is based on "time until recharge". The problem is batteries are more complicated than that. I think a lot of people tend to view batteries as like a power supply that has a certain capacity you consume. This isn't an accurate view.
First capacity isn't static, it depends on temperature. Lithium batteries generally have thermal cut-off circuity so temperature compensation is pretty standard to add in.
Second batteries have internal resistances which affects its behavior. Internal resistances naturally rise as batteries age, or more accurately go through recharge cycles. This changes voltage sag behavior as GP noted.
Third, as GP mentioned, batteries don't supply a constant voltage. A lot of people realize battery voltage drops as a battery is used, which is true in a very simple sense. A cell can have a fully charged open circuit voltage for 4.2, but it quickly goes down to 3.7 where it spends most of its cycle around. Note that I specified an open circuit voltage. The second you apply a load the voltage will drop in relation to the load applied. This voltage sag and the subsequent recovery is not instantaneous either, it takes time to reach equilibrium states.
So in essence a battery percentage is simplistically portraying the capacity remaining in a battery, but isn't - nor can't - portray the fact that some of that capacity is unusable depending on loading conditions combined with safety cut-offs to protect the battery. Apple's solution was to change the load so there was less unusable capacity.
I'd like to re-iterate that I'm not an expert here. Batteries are complicated electrochemical devices.
Edit - Let me illustrate a hypothetical analogy. Let's say you have a car with a fuel tank and a poorly designed fuel pump. You fill up the tank with ten gallons, and start driving. The fuel pump heats up as you press on the accelerator, the harder you accelerate the more it heats up. However the fuel acts as a heat sink for the fuel pump. After driving for a while you have two gallons left. At this point you go full throttle and suddenly the engine cuts out because the thermal protection circuitry on the fuel pump kicked in. Your fuel gauge still reads two gallons, the problem is you simply can't consume it at full throttle because the pump won't operate under those conditions. You can still drive at maybe half throttle though.
I’m a software developer contractor. By the nature of my work I often have to suffer the “corporate fog”, a sort of induced stupor caused by multiple layers of middle management, generic performance objectives, knowledge loss due to churn and ineffective information management.
This drama sounds like a typical corporate misunderstanding: engineers follow technical specs, no written requirements, management doesn’t understand the subtleties - nor do their care for them and they’re busily enough already with all the other tugs.
Eventually shit hits home, PR digests and translates into requirements, management gropes along in the fog.
There’s no malice, it’s just a large org, and there’s no SJ that agonizes over the details (and even then, he also let big fuckups slip past, remember the iPhone antenna issue)
Have the plaintiffs requested some kind of battery notification? Their angle has always been accusing Apple of planned obsolescence, which seems laughable compared to how little long-term support Android phones get.
I think they added that around the time the lawsuit was initially filed. You'll get a popup notice when throttling is applied, you have an option to disable throttling (at risk of shutdowns at low charge), and the health metric is exposed in settings now.
Their angle has always been accusing Apple of planned obsolescence, which seems laughable compared to how little long-term support Android phones get.
Apple making phones that last a little longer than Google doesn't mean Apple make products that last. That just means that both Google and Apple are designing products that fail unreasonably quickly.
Then they should show battery at 0% or 1%, so we can go and update the battery not the device itself. Instead they decided to throttle CPU silently. And oh it conveniently timed with new product launches and iOS version releases, so your then flagship device now "feels" sluggish compared to the new models.
It either "feels sluggish" or shuts itself down when the power draw peaks. Those are the only two options, and neither looks good compared to a new phone with a new battery.
How about i realize my battery drains "quickly" now, i will go to the store & Apple advices to keep the phone but change the battery for 50 bucks. My device still runs as smooth as it was once the "flagship". But it didn't happen and my device is so slow now (as if the CPU is tired of running) and a new "flagship" is released with 2x the speed and feels so smooth but costs $1000. Hence the lawsuit.
The lawsuit wasn't over the characteristics of the known degradation curves of the batteries, but how Apple mishandled this by 1) not acknowledging the performance characteristics to customers with sufficient clarity or notice, depriving them of information required to make a reasonable choice to repair their phones over promoting sales of their newer phones, and 2) denying legitimate battery claims, forcing customers to seek out and pay for aftermarket service and parts in lieu of receiving warranty support.
The problem was that engineers up and down the chain could say with complete honesty "this isn't a problem because there's nothing unusual about how these are failing", missing the point entirely that no customer would ever be happy knowing they could have fixed it for free/$45 instead of $1000.
Phone is not an electric car. Capacitors are a feasible solution for momentary high load.
Those phones just had tired depleted batteries and the proper thing to do was offer users battery replacement, not lie to their faces while upselling new model.
A high power workload on a phone might require ~5-10W over 100ms, i.e. ~0.5 joules. At 4V capacitor voltage, you would need ~30mF capacitor. Not likely to fit in a phone.
This assumes you’re powering the phone solely off the cap. Even with a battery you’d still need something in the mF range to make up for the battery’s degradation.
Okay the reply got deleted but I already did all this math so I'm going to post anyway.
> [only able to use the cap from 4V to 3V]
> (C * 1V * 1V)/2
> [you'll need 1000mF]
Wrong equation. That's the energy from 0V to 1V. Each incremental volt stores more power than the last. 0V-3V is 9x that amount, and 0V-4V is 16x that amount, so 3V-4V is 7x that amount, and you'll need 140mF.
But also it shouldn't be connected directly in parallel to the battery; so I'd think of it more as 4.2V to 2V of supply. That would mean you need 74mF.
So put in two and you'll more than hit the target.
Even better, if you expect the battery to contribute some, you only need the one.
Computers don’t create transient loads that last only a few hundred ms. (The components are already decoupled for that kind of transient).
When you open your mail and it has to perform a sync, for example, the transient may last for 10+ seconds and it’s not something you can fix with a supercap. You’d be better off adding more battery at that stage, as a larger battery has lower proportional sag for a given current (coulomb rates).
Another thing you can do is size your battery, say 20% larger than you require it, and only charge to 80%. This reduces ageing significantly, BUT consumers would never see this as a feature. They would just complain that the latest Apple phone has 20% less battery than the competitor and is $50 more expensive and heavier than the last model.
I’m taking it at a punt that 99% of regular consumers want to change their phone every 2-3 years (to get the latest camera, Face ID or car keys or whatever feature it might be), so that’s what Apple has targeted for the maximum age of their battery. Anything more is making a collective trade-off for the, perhaps, 1% no?
Using iOS feels like someone developed it without using it ever. The iPhone is the most obtuse and mindless device I’ve ever used. I daisy chain Rune Goldberg-style systems to do basic tasks involving a PDF or large file.
Save the PDF to iBooks, oh I can’t export it now let me try the print to PDF trick etc etc.
All this seems designed to encourage me to pay more for iCloud or other Apple products. Nothing makes sense, everything’s broken and people still love it.
Look, you can continue to stan for Apple in the comments if you like, but even they admitted they were in the wrong to the tune of a hundred million dollars.
What's the old sales motto again .. "Sometimes the customer is actually right"?
So what? You can still recalibrate the battery estimator and show that the battery each time last less, hiding that was bad faith, and you saying this shows bad fairh too.
You don't know how much time you have less though. You could last 30 minutes on the home screen or you could go flat instantly when you load a 60fps video.
Most people here are aware of this, at least at the university I went to this was explained in physics class and anyone who's messed with an arduino has experienced it.
The problem is that you really need to be able to override things like this. Sometimes users do in fact have a better grasp of the nuances of the particular situation they're in than the programmers do. Sometimes it makes a lot of sense to make this kind of trade off of stability vs performance.
> it was about doing this without notice, and having internal tooling that would deny a replacement (even at full retail price) if the battery was above an arbitrary health threshold (but still low enough to cause throttling).
Do you have a source for that? This would change my opinion on this story.
Reminds me of hot coffee where it sounded a bit ridiculous until you got the full story.
> Do you have a source for that? This would change my opinion on this story.
I can vouch for this. My iPhone 6 was under 2 years old and had 82% battery health according to the Apple diagnostics when I experienced the unexpected shutdowns.
The shutdowns were frequent (at least once per day) and, because the phone had to be plugged in before it could be restarted, were incredibly frustrating.
I took it to an Apple Store. The Genius refused to acknowledge any fault. They ran the diagnostics which showed 82% and refused to replace the battery, even if I paid, as it was above their 80% threshold for replacement.
I spoke to the manager, and they stood firm. No replacement, even if I paid. I was extremely persistent and they simply would not budge.
That's very strange, I had an opposite experience twice with my original SE (Apple store in NYC).
It similarly showed 80+% battery health, but I showed them the battery charge history in Settings (dropped from 40% to 0% instantly) and they replaced it under warranty.
Happened a year and a half later, exact same scenario, and paid the ~$30 to get it replaced.
I suspect they didn't have any monitoring to detect or log the shutdowns at the time. But I find it extremely confusing why different Apple stores would have such different policies or manager discretion.
I may be mistaken, but I don’t believe there was any battery charge history (at least not accessible to users) in iOS at the time?
In any event, I am not sure the unexpected shutdowns would have manifested themselves as sudden reductions in charge. Once restarted, the iPhone reported a similar charge to before the shutdown.
All of these anecdotes are hard because people tend to leave out or forget key details.
I'd guess the date is a key factor, as I'm sure thousands of people showed up at the Apple store because they heard on CNN that their battery was broken.
The experience I described was in Oct 2016, before the iOS update in Feb 2017 which introduced the throttling, and fixed the unexpected shutdowns for me.
At the time they just refused to even consider the possibility it was a genuine hardware issue. I got the lecture about batteries being consumable items, mine was somewhat degraded (82% health), etc. They suggested I do a software reset, etc.
I like to think maybe in hindsight someone at Apple HQ looked at the diagnostics from my Genius Bar visit as part of the decision to introduce throttling, and realised they were wrong.
They are correct in a sense that it was doing it "without notice". But they had a good reason to do the slowdowns, no malice needed, their one and only big mistake here was doing it without a notice.
The reason they did it was to prevent battery degradation and bad battery life by throttling the CPU. Except back then, iPhone CPUs weren't overperforming monsters they are today, so the slowdown was fairly noticeable. And when done without a notice or reason, you get a perfect publicity shitstorm.
In fact, this feature actually still exists for iPhones, except it now officially exists in settings and can be disabled. It throws a notification on yours screen and auto-activates if your battery degrades below certain level, but it can be disabled (so you can choose whether to prioritize performance or preventing battery from further degradation) by a simple click in a settings menu. And it also explains exactly and in very simple language what this feature does. It isn't hidden behind a million menus either, it is right there in settings => battery => battery health.
EDIT: to clarify, Apple throttling was not only done to prevent it from holding less charge due to battery degradation. Battery degradation to a certain level also led to iPhones rebooting randomly. And apparently it was not that rare of an issue, because the reason I posted this edit in the first place was due to seeing more than a few comments in this thread mentioning that it had happened to them.
Karunamon made a very specific claim in this thread that I quoted. Your response doesn't discuss this claim. I'm interested in what data we have backing that claim.
Nothing you'll be interested in, only very many stories of people taking their phones in once the throttling news dropped (IIRC, with accompanying geekbench scores showing the effect quantifiably), and being told to pound sand. A couple are downthread.
Besides, it's not as if this is a strange policy. Apple never has arbitrarily replaced phone parts by user request, even with cash in hand, unless the techs could point to a specific problem. Try walking into an Apple store today and ask for a new screen without an obvious problem.. you will not get one.
Your quote mentioned "without notice", which was responded to. I would also like to see a response to this part of the quote:
> and having internal tooling that would deny a replacement (even at full retail price) if the battery was above an arbitrary health threshold (but still low enough to cause throttling).
This was exactly what happened to me. My phone slowed down drastically after an update, and so I took it in. They confirmed to me that it was this update that throttled everything if the battery health was degraded "in order to prevent further battery degradation". But when I pointed out to them that my phone was less than a year old and still under warranty, they tested it again and told me my battery didn't meet the threshold for warranty replacement.
I pointed out the absurdity of their double standard, and resolved to never buy an apple device ever again.
This is an absolutely terrible customer service story, and IMHO there should definitely be compensation for that. But it also undercuts the "they are trying to make people upgrade" story, because I think nearly any sane person would abandon shop rather than put up with this sort of big-Corp idiocy.
How many people didn't bring it to a store and instead thought "Ah my phone is slow, thats what happens when they get old, the new one is meant to be way faster"
Let's compare to a Google phone of that era with the same issue.
>If you're among those affected, your phone will randomly shut down and completely die, even though your battery indicator might have said you had plenty of juice left. It's not a simple system crash, because your phone will stay dead until you connect it to a charger.
We've seen reports of the battery dying from a charge as high as 67% to as low as 15% on both Android Marshmallow and Android Nougat. So it's not a problem with the recent Android update, and it's not as simple as the battery meter just being off by a few percentage points.
> third party replacement done (and kill your warranty)
Just a reminder to everyone in the U.S., it is illegal for a company to revoke an item's warranty if you open it up, have a third party fix it, etc. It's the exact same law that applies to cars: The Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act
If you're in a state where one-party consent audio recording is legal, it's a good idea to always record your conversations with customer service.
Exactly. It is not about the technical or physics, it is the way they deal with it, and how they handle it. And Tim Cook was blaming the user for not reading the release note of an iOS update. ( He did it in one of the many TV Interviews )
The only thing we got out of this, is the Official battery replacement from Apple are now slightly cheaper at $69 for iPhone X+, and $49 for iPhone 8 and below.
Apple has completely wiped their battery-gate "apology"[0] letter from their website. It simply doesn't exist any more. If you visit that URL, you're immediately redirected (301) to a general battery information page which (surprise!) has no mention of the surrounding controversy.
So, I'm somehow developing a pro-Apple bias these days. This whole batterygate to me is kind of based on conjecture-- that Apple slowed old phones with the intention to sell more new ones. If there's any supporting evidence, or anything that's come up in discovery that Apple acted in bad faith, I'd possibly change my (admittedly biased) mind.
But really, slowing the phones down to extend battery life is a reasonable tradeoff and there's just not a preponderance of evidence suggesting Apple acted in its own interests and hurt existing users. The main problem is this "feature" wasn't out in the open, but again, it just doesn't seem that bad to me.
I think this is the crux of the issue. Apple had to make a call for their customers: ensure the low battery is as long-lasting and predictable as possible around 1-5%, or keep high performance as the phone battery degrades quicker and shuts off. I think many people thoroughly understand how crucial it can be to have that last 1-2% and going into a situation where you think you have 5%, but then the phone dies, is a pretty bad experience for the "premium experience" that Apple sells. So for most customers they made the right call to preserve the battery.
This is an engineering trade-off and not something that typically gets publically broadcast to customers. I'm sure there's lots of other niche feature tweaks like this to the iPhone that we're unaware of. They definitely could've and should've been more transparent about this, but I understand why it didn't occur to them.
You're talking about 'transparency' but as the article points out, Apple flat-out denied the issue existed.
Apple had a call to make: Inform the users of the battery issue, or deny the issue and reap extra sales from iPhone replacements. That's not an 'engineering trade-off' but a ripoff.
No it is not an engineering trade off. If you had one of these phones you would know.
The throttling here was so bad, the phones were completely unusable during the throttling. Sure, the operating system was running but doing basic tasks like using Apple maps or even sending a message would be effectively impossible. Imagine trying to play a video game at 2 frame per second. Unusable.
The real decision was that Apple didn't want to pay for millions of battery replacements, so Apple came up with a "software" fix for a hardware problem... Except that the software fix made the phone unusable.
I experienced it as well and this isn’t true either. The throttling was significant (40%, rough ballpark) but the phones were usable. A game that played that poorly would not have run well at full power. Maps and messaging was functional.
They should have communicated the change, in case that qualification is needed.
Have you ever considered that multiple generations of phones were effected by this issue and your single anecdote doesn't describe the full spectrum of behavior.
I don't appreciate being called a liar, especially about an issue that personally effected me to the point I left the Apple ecosystem for years. (I gave up my iPhone before the revelations, but I am 100% sure in retrospect I was being throttled)
> I experienced it as well and this isn’t true either.
I think you'd have to be knowingly looking the other way to take this so positively. Telling someone that what they said "isn't true" is analogous to calling them a liar.
Yes, I apologized to them for that reason. While I did mean to suggest they perhaps misremembered, I don’t think that is the same as lying, and either way the wording was too strong.
Did you ever confirm if the device was being throttled? It was only not user-discoverable for a few months before a point release added the ability to see it from the Settings>Battery menu.
You're not understanding the issue here. This had nothing to do with how fast the battery degrades. This was only ever about how the phone acts with an already degraded battery. The two choices are 1. Shut off the phone suddenly if any high performance tasks are attempted 2. Throttle the phone performance to keep it from shutting off.
Apple chose #2, which is best for customers, and got forced to pay $113M from it. It's ridiculous.
Apple chose to silently degrade the performance of their device, which would lead customers to think that their device wasn't capable of keeping up anymore, rather than that they just needed to change the battery. My guess is that they made a good portion of $113M from this (it's best for customers to drain their bank accounts) so no need to cry for them.
edit: and I'm reading that this would happen within the warranty period. It's best for customers to keep them from getting their device fixed during the warranty period.
> Apple chose #2, which is best for customers, and got forced to pay $113M from it. It's ridiculous.
You're missing out the part where they did not inform the user why their device was being throttled and nor did their internal tooling inform the genius that a simple battery change can fix the issue.
I own an iPhone because I got sick of these kinds of issues I was having with my Pixel phones. (would last ~1yr of perfect bliss. Then the honeymoon ends and the phone would just behave like crap). I decided to give another brand a shot.
I'll tell you what will really tick me off in another year or so... If my device is, without warning, notification, ability to change, etc, purposefully nerfing itself for ANY REASON. That will make me really upset. Especially since I can't just pop the back off and toss a new battery in there.
Good faith or not. It's an anti-consumer move. If my battery even pretended to be removable, you might convince me otherwise. But gluing the battery in under a glued in screen and then throttling my device based on the battery's age... Just really bothers me.
Before this the old iPhones used to randomly reboot when the battery wasn’t able to keep them alive. (I had such phone.)
I don’t think slowing it down is “nerfing” compared to that. I speak also as someone who used an old iPhone 6 which was slowed down this way. Btw they throttled based on battery health, not age.
Yeah I definitely had that experience a few times.
Using the maps on my phone in a different country where nobody spoke my language and I didn't speak theirs with 25% battery life and having it suddenly shut down wasn't the funnest moment of my life.
When my Laptop runs low on power it pops up something like, "You're running out of power." They clearly have the technology to detect if the battery itself is going bad. Why can't my phone boot into that mode and say, "It looks like your battery's life is at X% would you like to slow your phone down to concerve power? [Yes] [Yes, always] [No, ask again when it's more dead] [No, Don't ask any more]"
The "behave like crap" comes from Google constantly bloating their apps to drive upgrades. New phone: maps run smoothly. One year later: maps is a laggy POS.
I agree that it's possible they weren't being malicious. The part that gets me is that they didn't decide to instead allow folks to set a max battery charge to extend their battery life. It's pretty widely accepted that charging a battery to 100% over-and-over will cause battery degradation.
It seems fair to me that decisions that are hidden from consumers and obviously degrade the consumer's experience should negatively affect a company (and more than just the loss of goodwill).
>The part that gets me is that they didn't decide to instead allow folks to set a max battery charge to extend their battery life.
That's a fairly unusual feature to have for a consumer device. Support for it is spotty on laptops, and on androids the only way of doing it (I'm aware of) involves rooting your phone.
iPhones also have that feature, but they're both introduced fairly recently. Furthermore, it's not a general "max charge %" limiter, it's a system that's supposed to automagically guess when you're not going to use your phone (eg. at night), and won't charge to full during that time, but will otherwise charge to 100% (eg. in the morning).
The alternative is that the phone shuts off spontaneously and reboots if power draw gets too high, which also degrades the consumer’s experience and looks a lot scarier and more obviously broken to most people.
Crashing has implications for data integrity which laypeople do not fully understand to this day,
despite it having been a problem for the entire history of computing. I don’t think giving users a choice between potentially catastrophic failure and inconvenience is wise. Notifying them of the slowdown is a good idea, and these days you can go into the settings to turn off the slowdown manually, but I think making people look for it is a good idea.
Did I say Apple was a victim? No. They should have notified people. But the conspiracy theories are silly, as are people who act like there isn’t a clearly correct default behavior in this case.
You said that their decision obviously degrades the user experience. They were dealing with an engineering trade off and picked the side that didn’t risk data loss. I contend that that’s better than the alternative, irrespective of whether or not they tell people what’s going on.
You're ignoring the point that these weren't the only two choices - even after both 'invisible' and 'bigbubba' suggested alternatives (admittedly not as profitable for Apple).
I’m really not. I said they should have notified people. You’re ignoring that there’s no solution to this problem that doesn’t degrade the user experience in one way or another, which is the point I was making.
The reason for the lawsuits and bad PR wasn't that user experience was degraded, but that it was done in a way that was close to planned obsolesce. Apple had ways to avoid this.
There's only so much you can do to make lithium batteries last forever. These days the phone tries to figure out when you need it charged by in the morning so it's not sitting on the charger at 100% for eight hours overnight, and this is supposed to help.
That replacement program was for a different problem, not battery degradation per se but a manufacturing error; The throttling affected other models too (and replaced 6s batteries after enough time I guess).
It's true that battery degradation can't be avoided eventually; but there's a reason why these complaints are rarer on high-end Androids (Also low-end, but it's likely users have appropriately lower expectations for these).
Apple doesn't manufacture the batteries. And you can't magically make batteries that perform identically. Every battery made has variation in it and that variation can't be seen until it starts causing failures.
The change would have been to simply advertise the service life was shorter than it actually was, to account for various worse batteries, but the long tail of worse off batteries would have still been there regardless.
That's what they added. There's now a full Battery section in the Settings app which shows you your current battery health, whether the life has declined to the point where it is limiting performance, and an optimized charging setting which is enabled by default so the phone won't charge past 80% unless it's at a time of day where your usage history suggests you'll need the full charge.
It is far more likely that these CPUs have the capability to throttle power usage instantaneously. If the battery monitor detects a problematic energy draw, it should have the capability to correct it before the CPU shuts down.
Or slow the phone down and inform the customer their phone is running in "Reduced mode" or whatever due to their battery being old. It's honestly not that hard.
It actually makes most sense that they weren't being malicious. Half the posts on this thread don't even understand what the problem is. Namely throttling to prevent the device from shutting off as if it was some kind of anti-consumer feature when it was actually pro-consumer.
Exactly this. As someone who experienced the unexpected shutdowns (described my experience elsewhere in these comments), the throttling fixed my issue until I ended up getting my battery replaced by a third party.
I think what a lot of people miss is that it was not just a restart, but a shutdown that would then require a charger be connected before the phone could be turned on again, even though it would then report similar charge to before the shutdown.
If you were out of the house and did not have a charger readily accessible, it was equivalent to the phone randomly turning into a brick for several hours at a time.
I can’t speak for everyone on this thread, but the combination of “hiding” and “degrading” are what make this anti-consumer. If your car wouldn’t go over 30mph and the manufacturer wouldn’t disclose why, how would you feel?
From the article:
>Apple, the most valuable company in the world, acted deceptively by hiding the shutdown and slowdown issues, according to the court filing.
>"Many consumers decided that the only way to get improved performance was to purchase a newer-model iPhone from Apple," Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich wrote...
> If there's any supporting evidence, or anything that's come up in discovery that Apple acted in bad faith
I know it's not apple's way of doing things, but can you think of a legit good reason why they couldn't service your phone with a new battery for a price instead?
> The main problem is this "feature" wasn't out in the open, but again, it just doesn't seem that bad to me.
It seems pretty bad to me. If they had told customers "Hey, we're slowing down your phone because your battery needs replacement", most would pay $100 for a battery replacement and happily continue using their phone for another 2-3 years. Apple phones last a long time. By hiding it, a non-zero number of customers chose to upgrade their phone which netted
Apple > $100/ customer. It's obvious why Apple chose to hide it.
I believe it wasn't slowing down the phones to extend battery life, it was slowing down the phone's power draw because as the LiPo battery wore out it could no longer give the peak power like it used to. The only real fix was to throttle the phone, which apple did a horrible job communicating on.
There is definitely business aspect in terms of warranty and customer support. In New Zealand for example, legislation guarantees a warranty window on new devices that the manufacturer cannot opt-out (Consumer Guarantees Act).
Highlighting either option for consumers would bring attention to the fact this is a hardware issue, which would void acceptable use warranties if the battery was degrading to be insufficiently usable within one or two years.
Australia too (under the Australian Consumer Law which guarantees goods are of acceptable quality). Apple has been found in breach of this law by misleading consumers as to their rights in the past.
As a remedy for a number of years they were required to display at the genius bar a sign outlining your rights to a repair, refund, etc in addition to any apple warranties.
Oh man you would not like the accessories for a BMW or Audi then. Because what you're describing is not unique to Apple, it's a defining feature of being a luxury brand. They want price conscious consumers to choose another brand.
When there's a rich kid in town, everyone will turn him upside down to see what change falls out of his pockets. Apple is where Apple is because it doesn't put all of its features "out in the open." I don't want 500 config settings for my phone and a lot of other's don't either. If you want to run a webserver on your phone that's cool, there are products for you, but some people want the idiotproof solution.
Yet they're still ignoring Flexgate which affects devices made across a number of years. I paid an arm and a let for a Macbook Pro (that's what they cost in my country), only to have it turned into a paperweight by a manufacturing defect that Apple acknowledges but won't remedy except for devices made in 2016.
EDIT: Astounding to see I'm getting downvotes here. I mean, what kind of mindset must one have to see regular people getting screwed over by a multibillion dollar corporation like this, and then side with the corporation. It boggles the mind.
I upvoted you. I have had people downvoting me as well for sharing an experience with Lenovo where they took about 100 days to repair my motherboard within warranty period. Sigh.
I am in the same boat with a 2017 Macbook Pro that I bought in late 2018 :( It is the most expensive thing I've ever bought in my life. Apple is asking for 65% of the original price just to replace the display.
In my experience it's better to go to an 'Authorized Service Provider' for repair.
They have an incentive to do repairs and get paid, and it's quite easy for them to get Apple to pay the repair cost.
E.g. on my machine that had the Keyboard repeating issue I also received a topcase as there was some slight de-lamination. Seems your model was affected (at least nominally) by the same keyboard issue so just send it in for a repair of the keyboard and also note the other issues; they will likely be repaired for free.
> I think it's clear Apple intentionally* degrades software quality on older iphone/mac models in order to drive purchase of newer hardware.
I don't think that's clear at all.
> * By pushing software updates optimized to new hardware with obvious regressions on older models.
New software can come with increased hardware requirements, yet customers want to benefit from new software. It's a compromise. You could simply not update if you're worried about that.
> I've been considering switching away from Apple hardware, not because of hardware quality, but because of software.
I'm sure software updates long after your device's release won't be a concern with the competition. You probably simply won't receive any.
But this case shows the exact opposite. They updated phones to last longer without unexpected shut-downs. If they didn't do that update, many people who experienced these shut-downs outside of warrenty would change their old phone for a new ones. You can usually live with a slightly slower phone when the battery is low, but a phone that randomly dies on you? Not so much.
To be clear, Apple still messed up, because they didn't communicate this at all. They could have also put in a slightly larger battery to begin with.
But in the tech world, Apple isn't the worst in pushing people to upgrade hardware, which is illustrated by the fact that people use iPhones longer before upgrading than Android users. That's the one upside of Apples crazy App Store margins... they really don't need to push new hardware on you to make a shitload of money (while for Android that money goes to Google rather than hardware manufacturers)
Apple could do better - WAY better - but I think it's a bit naive to think that this could possibly change, and is worth complaining about. The only way it would, if there was somehow significant money in spending lots of time optimizing OS updates for old devices. But most people like upgrading their phones anyway. For Apple to change, consumers must change first. I don't think there's much hope for government regulation here either. It's a problem that's too complex to regulate.
Users who complained about things being slower were hinted that perhaps the new models would be faster.
It was not a communication issue that damaged Apple; but the contrary, it helped sell more units. The only "bad" thing is that it got a lot of scrutiny.
To clarify, since I think this is not obvious to the other commenters here.
(1) The company ships software updates that happens to be near the launch of a new model. It's not by accident, there are often major software changes to take advantage of the new hardware that is soon to be released.
(2) Users start complaining that they are seeing regressions: everything seems a bit more slow, or it's less reliable (things crash or freeze more often), other bugs requiring the device to be rebooted, etc.
(3) After the product launch, some of the users try the new model, and that runs very well compared to the older device with the degraded software (because the software was just optimized to it and extensively tested)
(4) Executives get reports about the user complains on older models.
Some internally wonder if better software practices or better QA would avoid such regressions on older devices.
Others quickly point out that doing so would be bad in two ways: it costs more; and it reduces revenue by removing an incentive for users to buy newer models.
> I think it's clear Apple intentionally* degrades software quality on older iphone/mac models in order to drive purchase of newer hardware.
Completely false. What's clear is that most posters on hacker news don't understand basic battery chemistry. Apple made a decision to help customers and got blamed for it because they didn't properly explain what they were doing. You can only please people so much.
Apple's market cap is $2 Trillion. Apple settling for $113M is like someone worth $2 million settling for $113. I don't think anyone at Apple is losing any sleep over this.
> As part of Wednesday's settlement, $113 million will be distributed among the states, including California, Tennessee and Pennsylvania. The funds will cover attorneys' fees and will be used to fund future consumer protection investigators.
Honestly, a voucher for 1 free battery replacement usable at any-time for every class member would have been a fair-enough settlement IMO.
- Would mitigate damages to the class
- Relatively low cost to Apple, but enough to make a dent and deter future shenanigans. Considering a no-name battery can be had for 6$, I will assume that Apple's cost for a genuine one is that number. (could be lower, could be a little higher but doubt it.)
The Google Nexus 6 has some fatal flaw and went into a bootloop after a year of use. As part of the class action settlement, I got most of the purchase price back. I liked that phone a lot though...
The good news is - partly as a result of this, anyone can get a genuine battery replacement by paying $79 to Apple or an AASP. If you have a phone that's an iPhone 8 or later, you can definitely skip upgrading this year and get a battery replacement instead.
This isn't the only cost. There was also another $500 million us settlement, a $27 million dollar fine from France, and probably others, and probably more outstanding liability.
I agree... but I don't care enough to figure out how many users are actually covered under each of those fines (under the relevant jurisdiction and having bought the relevant product).
still less than what they made on "oh yeah your phone is old and slow, but totally not broken!!1. Let me upgrade you for only $499.95" bullshit up-sell
> The tech titan also agreed for the next three years to provide "truthful information" about iPhone power management across its website, software update notes and iPhone settings.
Great! They must be truthful for the next 3 years... and then?
I bet it's less than the profit made from people upgrading their iPhones early, or not sending them in for battery replacement while they were still under warranty.
Last update recently applied to my iphone 6 is doing it again... touchscreen lockups to the point of frustration ( can't scroll, can't type when messaging, etc... ), whereas 2 months ago it wasn't a problem... seems to me every product cycle for apple soon causes degredation of older phone's perceived GUI performance, and what a coincidence, just in time for Christmas!
Look in the Battery section of Settings. The health will be displayed and there is an indicator if performance is being throttled due to battery degradation.
Before Apple changed their tune, if you read about this, and went into an Apple store for a replacement, they absolutely would not give you one, even if you paid full retail for it.
This left people in a no-win situation. The only way you could get a working device was to have a third party replacement done (and kill your warranty) or shell out for a new phone.