Apple Addresses Alleged Throttling of iPhones With Degraded Batteries

[Makayla]

so maybe the best thing we can do is once the device is at a good iOS version we stay put.

With that in mind, does anyone have battery problems after getting iOS 11 on iPad Pro 9.7?

Also, how about iOS 11.2.1 on 8 and 8 plus?

 

[maknik]

In the last year, how many thousands of people have called Apple or visited an Apple Store asking for help with slow phones, only to be told to reset the phone, reinstall the OS, or buy a new phone? Every single time Apple sent one of those people away without telling them that their battery could be the cause of the slowness, they were committing fraud.

 

[dumastudetto]

I think Apple should have not throttled any phone ever, let the phone tank when the battery capacity is shot, replace customer batteries if the phone has battery issues within the warranty period, and advise that out-of-warranty batteries can be replaced in-store for a few $$. Be honest, direct, with no discernible BS. I think it’s a perfectly reasonable thing to expect to have to replace a phone battery when it’s dead or dying.

Why would Apple let phones randomly shut down when they could come up with a software solution to prevent it? Stories of iPhones randomly switching off would be terrible for Apple, and would lead to customers thinking these devices are hopelessly unreliable.

The batteries clearly are not shot in many cases since the software fix has worked. Perhaps Apple could have done a better job of informing people about what is happening under the hood as others have suggested, but hiding complexity away from users is something Apple consistently strives to do.

 

[bighype]

If there's no class action lawsuit that I can join, I'll file a lawsuit and demand refunds myself. This is a disgrace and a fraud. Tim Cook must go!

 

[rootee]

In the last year, how many thousands of people have called Apple or visited an Apple Store asking for help with slow phones, only to be told to reset the phone, reinstall the OS, or buy a new phone? Every single time Apple sent one of those people away without telling them that their battery could be the cause of the slowness, they were committing fraud.

I would imagine that the only people who have the real deets are that small team of enginerds that write the battery control software. The Apple store employees don’t know squat, and that’s why I still like them!

 

[Wildkraut]

Lol and 5-10 years later with AppleCar: Suddenly people notice their car isn’t driving over 50km/h anymore. And Apple: “w00t? Our goal is to deliver the best experience for customers, which includes overall performance and prolonging the life of their cars.”

Class action, please!

 

[C DM]

If that’s the case you will forever be living with a slower phone after Apple decides arbitrarily to slow down your phone? When do they do this? 5 charges in? 10 charges in?250 charges in? Batteries of this kind have a discharge curve that is evenly distributed with some variance. What do they consider a break point for them to start their throttling?

Seeems like it's not supposed to be arbitrary and not something that just starts at some preset number or something like that, but basically if at some point battery instability is detected due to some wear/degradation.
[doublepost=1513839766][/doublepost]

Lol and 5-10 years later with AppleCar: Suddenly people notice their car isn’t driving over 50km/h anymore. And Apple: “w00t? Our goal is to deliver the best experience for customers, which includes overall performance and prolonging the life of their cars.”

Well, if you are going with car analogies, that behavior can likely be seen better by many than the car suddenly unexpectedly just dying while you are driving, for example.

 

[dumastudetto]

If there's no class action lawsuit that I can join, I'll file a lawsuit and demand refunds myself. This is a disgrace and a fraud. Tim Cook must go!

Given Apple continues to scale unprecedented levels of revenue and profitability, I have a feeling Tim Cook will be sticking around for awhile yet.
[doublepost=1513840022][/doublepost]

I would imagine that the only people who have the real deets are that small team of enginerds that write the battery control software. The Apple store employees don’t know squat, and that’s why I still like them!

Correct.

 

[simonmet]

The part about "Apple offers battery replacement in stores" is not really true. I've gone twice to an Apple store to have them assess my battery. They refused to let me pay them to replace the battery because their diagnostics passed.

I'm in the situation where Apple won't even let me pay to replace my battery even though I have random shut downs and blatant CPU throttling when below 50%.

This was my experience too. I had a 2-3 year-old 5s at the time with well over 500 cycles, more like 8 or 9 hundred I think.

The battery lasted way less than half its original and stated battery life according to Apple’s tech specs, less than a third even. It barely lasted a couple of hours and would frequently shut down randomly at less than 30% capacity, yet it somehow managed to pass Apple’s test. I’ve no idea how. They then suggested a bunch of features I could turn off as if that was somehow an acceptable solution.

What this tells me is that Apple’s test isn’t very good and is overly optimistic about a battery’s health. I understand that they don’t want people to replace perfectly fine batteries just because they’ve lost 5 or 10% capacity - that would be wasteful and bad for the environment - but something is clearly wrong with their testing.

In the end I upgraded to an iPhone 7. I could’ve bought a third-party battery but there were a number of other features I wanted in the new model: bigger, better screen, much faster performance, low-power cores etc. I wanted those features but the one thing I really needed was decent battery life, so that was by far the key reason I upgraded.

I’m a natural cynic but I think Apple knows poor battery life is one of the main reasons people upgrade. A phone that can’t hold a decent charge is infuriating. I had to carry spare battery packs with me wherever I went. It’s at least possible if not likely that they engineered the test to be harder to fail in order to encourage upgrades. It seems anything short of not being able to turn it on can pass the test.

Apple should have a zone in their test where battery replacement is optional at users expense. I’m sure the battery would’ve met the criteria for an optional replacement. Even though I was probably going to get the iPhone 7 anyway I at least wanted future users of the 5s to be able to use it for more than an hour without risk of shutdown.

 

[firewood]

I have to admit I don't understand why the throttling needs to remain in place when iPhones are connected to a charger.

Possibly because a charger cable or connector can be very suddenly unplugged, and the power management circuits can't switch to a lower power state fast enough to avoid a crash and shutdown. Safest to just run at whatever power level that the battery alone can support rather than risk a crash just when the user grabs their phone off of the charger, which is probably when they need to use it the most.

Laptops usually don't have to deal with this problem because they have much larger batteries that can better support a suddenly higher current draw when unplugged from the charger... unless the laptop has a battery that is near dead. I've seen more than one old MacBook like with that problem (crashed when unplugged if the 5+ year old battery was below 10%)

 

[dumastudetto]

Seeems like it's not supposed to be arbitrary and not something that just starts at some preset number or something like that, but basically if at some point battery instability is detected due to some wear/degradation.
[doublepost=1513839766][/doublepost]
Well, if you are going with car analogies, that behavior can likely be seen better by many than the car suddenly unexpectedly just dying while you are driving, for example.

Yes there's not much point maxing out performance if the thing isn't going to keep running long enough in order for you to complete your journey, or in the case of an iPhone still maintain a charge while you're still out and about so you can make an urgent call.

 

[pran76]

Seeems like it's not supposed to be arbitrary and not something that just starts at some preset number or something like that, but basically if at some point battery instability is detected due to some wear/degradation.

I wish I could agree with you. Wife’s iPhone 5s didn’t go through the same debacle. Why does this issue only affect phones after the iPhone 6?

I am 100% certain my wife’s phones battery was worse off than mine considering she had it for 1 year more and more charging cycles than mine.

If there was any semblance to their behavior I can understand their logic. They throttled it to BELOW 5s speeds? The 5s didn’t have the same issues with an older battery with a higher clock speed? Worst case throttle a 6s to a 6, a 6 to a 5s... throttling a 6s to maybe between a 4s and 5? That’s just idiotic.

 

[dumastudetto]

Possibly because a charger cable or connector can be very suddenly unplugged, and the power management circuits can't switch to a lower power state fast enough to avoid a crash and shutdown. Safest to just run at whatever power level that the battery alone can support rather than risk a crash just when the user grabs their phone off of the charger, which is probably when they need to use it the most.

Laptops usually don't have to deal with this problem because they have much larger batteries that can better support a suddenly higher current draw when unplugged from the charger... unless the laptop has a battery that is near dead. I've seen more than one old MacBook like with that problem (crashed when unplugged if the 5+ year old battery was below 10%)

Yes that makes a lot of sense.

I've seen something similar with an old laptop too, I just forgot about that until you mentioned it.

 

[C DM]

I wish I could agree with you. Wife’s iPhone 5s didn’t go through the same debacle. Why does this issue only affect phones after the iPhone 6?

I am 100% certain my wife’s phones battery was worse off than mine considering she had it for 1 year more and more charging cycles than mine.

If there was any semblance to their behavior I can understand their logic. They throttled it to BELOW 5s speeds? The 5s didn’t have the same issues with an older battery with a higher clock speed? Worst case throttle a 6s to a 6, a 6 to a 5s... throttling a 6s to maybe between a 4s and 5? That’s just idiotic.

Well, there are a lot of variables there. The chips and systems are different. The battery and/or other hardware technology can be different. Any of those things could potentially be behind the differences that affect it all.

Even throttling doesn't appear to necessarily be the same for those who do experience it (which isn't everyone by far). So more variables there too.

 

[IG88]

For a technical publication with technical readers its absolutely ludicrous that Apple needs to explain itself to the tech world. This is a brilliant management tool in the best interests of the user experience.

Are you that worried about your stock tanking, that you feel the need to restort to unpaid shillery?

 

[Wildkraut]

Seeems like it's not supposed to be arbitrary and not something that just starts at some preset number or something like that, but basically if at some point battery instability is detected due to some wear/degradation.
[doublepost=1513839766][/doublepost]
Well, if you are going with car analogies, that behavior can likely be seen better by many than the car suddenly unexpectedly just dying while you are driving, for example.

They should have simply warned users before trottling all the iPhones. Apples behavior sets the newest iPhone to a performance level lower than any el’cheapo 0815 Android device. There is absolutely no acceptable excuse for doing this hidden in background. We pay first class prices and want their original first class performance and also decide ourselves if we want a new battery in exchange. People might not notice the throttled cpu while using WhatsApp, but they notice it for sure while UI movements, playing games, etc.
The forums is full of “wohhh, laggy” comments, and it might be all related to this battery fiasco. And it pisses me off even more, when i read about people being rejected from Battery replacement. Apple is just trying to avoid battery replacements, because their devices sucks to open up. New battery means in many cases “hand out a whole new device”, which simply put them in a “no-win” sittuation.

 

[FX120]

[doublepost=1513839766][/doublepost]
Well, if you are going with car analogies, that behavior can likely be seen better by many than the car suddenly unexpectedly just dying while you are driving, for example.

How about fixing the hardware problem rather than crippling it with software?

 

[pran76]

Well, there are a lot of variables there. The chips and systems are different. The battery and/or other hardware technology can be different. Any of those things could potentially be behind the differences that affect it all.

Even throttling doesn't appear to necessarily be the same for those who do experience it (which isn't everyone by far). So more variables there too.

Agreed there. There is also more RAM and additional chipsets that likely are at play. However making the user experience worse than a phone 2 cycles ago, is what I am emphasizing.

It honestly was horrendous, and to the point I wanted to fling my phone against the wall in frustration watching it going slower than my wife’s running the same exact app. I thought there was a hardware issue(which in this case it essentially is forced into becoming)

 

[simonmet]

I could be imagining it, but for a while now I could swear my iPhone 7 Plus feels faster when it’s fully charged and plugged in even though the battery is still fine.

 

[PickUrPoison]

I think Apple should have not throttled any phone ever, let the phone tank when the battery capacity is shot, replace customer batteries if the phone has battery issues within the warranty period, and advise that out-of-warranty batteries can be replaced in-store for a few $$. Be honest, direct, with no discernible BS. I think it’s a perfectly reasonable thing to expect to have to replace a phone battery when it’s dead or dying.

I know some want to think Apple is doing this with malicious intent, but that really doesn’t make much sense. You don’t get people to love your products and continue to buy them by giving them a crappy experience with a throttled to death iphone. That’s what you’d do if you were trying to drive them into the arms of Samsung.

This started with 10.2.1, released almost a year ago. It’s interesting that it’s only now been noticed; that suggests it was working well for many months. Maybe it was broken in a recent release, who knows. Also, Apple is saying that it’s the very act of running a processor-intensive benchmarking program that actually triggers the throttling in the first place. In normal use, the downclocking should be very short term and not particularly noticeable.

But in addition, there are quite a few reports of iPhones on ios11 exhibiting a very unusual lag problem, where people report apps taking up to 20-30 seconds to open, lag even in typing where words take many seconds to appear, etc. Users have reported this even with phones operating at full speed, even with brand new batteries and excellent geekbench scores.

I can see how those with the super-slow iPhone problem would like to blame the downclocking behavior for their phones slowness, but their speed issues are far worse than can be explained by a CPU running at 1/3 of maximum. And why would people with new batteries and perfect geekbench scores also be having the super slow iPhone issue?

1) There’s more to learn, and hopefully Apple will be able to fix the iOS 11/super slow iPhone issue soon.

2) Also, Apple should figure out a way to tell users when their batteries need to be replaced, before it affects the user experience in a negative way. I’m sure they don’t want to intentionally create a negative user experience.

3) The battery replacement policy needs to be updated to allow users who want to have their batteries replaced—even if Apple doesn’t think they need replacing—to pay the $79 fee to have it done. It’s good for customer satisfaction.

Of course it won’t help if the problem is a crappy app draining their battery like YouTube was doing until they fixed it a couple weeks ago. I’ve also encountered websites that drain my phone very quickly, and heat it up hot enough to cook an egg (well, not that hot, but almost lol). But if the customer wants it, Apple should just give them a disclaimer that it may or may not solve the problem they’re having, and do it.

Anyway, those are my suggestions.

 

[C DM]

They should have simply warned users before trottling all the iPhones. Apples behavior sets the newest iPhone to a performance level lower than any el’cheapo 0815 Android device. There is absolutely no acceptable excuse for doing this hidden in background. We pay first class prices and want their original first class performance and also decide ourselves if we want a new battery in exchange. People might not notice the throttled cpu while using WhatsApp, but they notice it for sure while UI movements, playing games, etc.
The forums is full of “wohhh, laggy” comments, and it might be all related to this battery fiasco. And it pisses me off even more, when i read about people being rejected from Battery replacement. Apple is just trying to avoid battery replacements, because their devices sucks to open up. New battery means in many cases “hand out a whole new device”, which simply put them in a “no-win” sittuation.

I didn't say anything about notifications or anything like that in the post you quoted.
[doublepost=1513841383][/doublepost]

Agreed there. There is also more RAM and additional chipsets that likely are at play. However making the user experience worse than a phone 2 cycles ago, is what I am emphasizing.

It honestly was horrendous, and to the point I wanted to fling my phone against the wall in frustration watching it going slower than my wife’s running the same exact app. I thought there was a hardware issue(which in this case it essentially is forced into becoming)

Yeah, that shouldn't be happening. It does sound like that's not quite what the whole throttling was going for though. Either there's some issue with how it works for some, or there's something else in play (in addition to it all) perhaps.
[doublepost=1513841482][/doublepost]

How about fixing the hardware problem rather than crippling it with software?

Certainly, if that's doable. I didn't make a comment about that aspect of it there though.

 

[Wildkraut]

I didn't say anything about notifications or anything like that in the post you quoted.

Nope you didn’t, Sorry! I’m just pissed off at Apple. Nothing personal. What they are doing lately is simply too much.

 

[Altis]

Yes there's not much point maxing out performance if the thing isn't going to keep running long enough in order for you to complete your journey, or in the case of an iPhone still maintain a charge while you're still out and about so you can make an urgent call.

Neither of the situations are acceptable. It should be fixed properly.

And it's a good thing that third party testers discovered this so we now know what may be causing serious slowdowns.

If it were up to Apple, they'd have said nothing and let you believe it's just because your device is getting old -- especially since they'll report your battery as being healthy and in no need of replacement while your phone throttles your CPU down based on battery degradation.

 

[and-weis]

What is the reason for activating this feature a year later? On the figures of the Geekbench researcher you can see that with iPhone 7 this mechanism was activated on iOS 11.2, with 11.1.2 it did not exist. It can also be seen that at 6s this mechanism on 11.2. would be significantly tightened again. What is the reason for both? I mean, either I build something out of the box and tune it to the battery or I leave it. But unlocking one year later or even exacerbating does not shine on me!

 

[clauzzz203]

This is ********. My 6 year old 4S has 45% battery health (top charge 650mah out of 1430mah).

Despite this, the CPU still gets full score on Gerkbench 4 (290 single core, 500 multi core).

If this six year old battery at 45% health can give full cpu performance (with no shutdowns!), why it cannot in the 6, 6s and 7?

My 6 is at 81% battery health and 600mhz limited out of 1400mhz.

It is a manufacturing defect! Apple must replace the batteries with a mass recall!

I hope this goes to Congress.