Apple Addresses Alleged Throttling of iPhones With Degraded Batteries

[Wildkraut]

The problem here is transparency, not the fact that Apple wants everyone to have a good user experience.

Yes missing transparency, which also leads to iPhone upgrades(due to game lags, fps drop, UI lags), with a battery replacement rejection topping.

To me it smells like done primary to fool customers and shut them up, like:
- Play the good guy, and fix the mass shutdowns(lower cpu frequency) due to bad stock batteries.
- Make next gen iOS device feels faster/greater by playing with peoples perception(nice side effect)
- Avoid battery replacements during the AppleCare period, because its too costly and leads to less profit.
Apple or the Insurance Company behind AppleCare just profits from not used AppleCare services.
Which also applies to non AppleCare replacements, else they would unmask their unacceptable practices.

Fishy 

 

[Leomon84]

Just curious, does anyone know how Samsung or other Android manufacturers deal with this battery issue?

If its an actually battery issue under warranty they will replace it.
If its out of warranty then your out of luck for the most part.

However they do NOT throttle their phones. Further android updates will speed up or at minimum keep your phone at the same speed. (code and OS is more efficient over time) If your battery cant handle it over time, it shuts down the phone.

Thats all

 

[firewood]

I am an electrical engineer also.

Straight answer is that if what Apple says is true, they under sized their batteries. A 1000$ phone should have batteries that can handle peak current draw after 1 year or more of usage.

Doing that would artificially limit the peak current draw setting (related to processor performance) to that which a typical (or worse case, but within manufacturing acceptance range) battery has at the end of the year. So your solution would cripple the iPhone at the beginning of service life (by not allowing the processor to run at the boost power level permitted by a new battery), instead of providing extra bonus performance levels when the battery performs above its end-of-service term specification.

I would rather have bonus performance in my new iPhone than limiting the processor to the same low speed it would run over the total service life of a normally aging battery. Which is what Apple seems to be doing, by measuring battery capacity and internal resistance and metering peak current draw to stay close to the battery's aging curve.

Integrate speed over time, and the typical user gets a higher total lifetime value by varying performance over service life to fit the typical Li-ion battery aging curve.

Lowering performance at the beginning of service life and increasing the likelihood of sudden shutdowns on a device many consumers expect to be able to use immediately for emergency communications seems quite suboptimal.

 

[GoldenJoe]

"Feature" my ass. Caught red handed. Has nobody here owned electronics before the iPhone? If the batter wears out, then the amount of time you can use the device simply decreases. The processor doesn't suddenly start melting. How absurd. Hopefully Trump's FTC uses this against Apple once they get around to breaking up apple, google, amazon, facebook, microsoft, and the other tech monopolies/duopolies.

 

[apolloa]

Good, this story and the excuse from Apple is mainstream news here in the U.K.

http://news.sky.com/story/apple-admits-slowing-down-old-iphone-models-11179571

 

[617660]

The CPU throttling should be made part of AppleCARE program. If they didn't care, they would have this 'feature' in place.

 

[scottrods]

Even at $100, a new battery is a great deal. If you can replace it yourself.”, a battery for the 6 is pretty cheap too... 25 bucks or so... I can’t see really well and have huge hands... it’s a little difficult but I can do it fine.

 

[I7guy]

Or apple could make a phone that doesn't slow down after a year. Kind of like every phone before the 6/s. I know my phone didn't come with a warning on it that said phone will run 20-50% slower after a year
[doublepost=1513879799][/doublepost]
I don' know if they did. After all is was patched in after phone were on the maket

Do you think it is possible to manufacture 10s of millions of phones with a zero defect rate on every component?

 

[NT1440]

"Feature" my ass. Caught red handed. Has nobody here owned electronics before the iPhone? If the batter wears out, then the amount of time you can use the device simply decreases. The processor doesn't suddenly start melting. How absurd. Hopefully Trump's FTC uses this against Apple once they get around to breaking up apple, google, amazon, facebook, microsoft, and the other tech monopolies/duopolies.

Here we have an excellent example of a know-nothing conflating battery capacity with the output current. One is related to the issue, the other is not.

I'll state outright that I'm not an electrical engineer, but the problem Apple is addressing here is NOT battery capacity so the notion that a larger battery solves this problem is completely off base.

 

[Nixir]

Let's all give our thanks to the wonderful software engineers at Apple who released iOS11 upon us. If iOS 11 hadn't been so ridiculously bad performance wise, nobody would've went looking for every which possible way to test their phones and we may never find out about this super magical secret "feature".

Truly the heroes we need!

 

[Radon87000]

Do you think it is possible to manufacture 10s of millions of phones with a zero defect rate on every component?

Is it possible to warn me my battery is defective instead of slowing down my phone?

 

[Analog Kid]

I have already responded to this.

Including Battery degredation into the design will lead to an overall better experience and less throttling required over the lifetime of the phone. All you need to do is oversize the battery slightly. Apple engineers are not stupid, they make good products. They willingly knew this was going to happen.

I am an electrical engineer also.

Straight answer is that if what Apple says is true, they under sized their batteries. A 1000$ phone should have batteries that can handle peak current draw after 1 year or more of usage.

In the industry it is an IEEE standard to oversize size batteries to include battery degradation so that after 5 years you can still expect your UPS to have 4 or 8 hours of backup.

We do this all the time in heavy industrial designs. Its common knowledge..

Not sure if you’ve looked at an iPhone lately, but it isn’t a heavy industrial design. As an engineer you should know that engineering is the art of making trade offs and a good engineer will make different trade offs for different situations. I don’t think it makes sense to use a bank of lead acid cells in an iPhone, as would be used in a UPS. A UPS doesn’t have control over its load the way an iPhone does. A UPS it generally idle, so the wear from trickle charging is constant and predictable, where the iPhone battery usage is unpredictable and so measured in cycles. Nothing here really suggests they haven't reached their planned cycle life of 500. A bigger battery in an iPhone means compromise somewhere else, whereas space constraints are less critical in heavy industrial UPS systems and they tend to have fewer other functions that compete for volume. A larger battery would also make it possible to run the iPhone CPU faster on day one, but to avoid throttling later you'd have to degrade initial performance, essentially stealing it up front.

 

[I7guy]

Me too! Or unless you need speed at a point where you might be dead permanently! *someone is chasing you* can you stop chasing me so fast! I need time for my phone to load the phone app!

Your phone can't do both be speedy and under power management at the same time, so pick a scenario. It's like the market, it can either not move, go up or go down, but can only do one thing. And since we're discussing scenarios whilst splitting hairs, what good does a speedy phone do for you if it dies while in the middle of call?

 

[Tor Eckman]

Or maybe Apple is just intentionally crippling older hardware to force people to upgrade; they would love to sell everyone on the planet a new phone, watch, macbook/imac, once a year. They are never going to admit that, not with a convenient excuse like the one proposed in this article.

 

[I7guy]

Is it possible to warn me my battery is defective instead of slowing down my phone?

It's possible but apple decided not to do it and to automatically engage power management as needed.

 

[NT1440]

Or maybe Apple is just intentionally crippling older hardware to force people to upgrade; they would love to sell everyone on the planet a new phone, watch, macbook/imac, once a year. They are never going to admit that, not with a convenient excuse like the one proposed in this article.

So one scenario involves a technical reason, the other being just an online poster making claims without anything other than a chip on his shoulder.

Guess which one holds up better.

 

[Leomon84]

Not sure if you’ve looked at an iPhone lately, but it isn’t a heavy industrial design. As an engineer you should know that engineering is the art of making trade offs and a good engineer will make different trade offs for different situations. I don’t think it makes sense to use a bank of lead acid cells in an iPhone, as would be used in a UPS. A UPS doesn’t have control over its load the way an iPhone does. A UPS it generally idle, so the wear from trickle charging is constant and predictable, where the iPhone battery usage is unpredictable and so measured in cycles. Nothing here really suggests they haven't reached their planned cycle life of 500. A bigger battery in an iPhone means compromise somewhere else, whereas space constraints are less critical in heavy industrial UPS systems and they tend to have fewer other functions that compete for volume. A larger battery would also make it possible to run the iPhone CPU faster on day one, but to avoid throttling later you'd have to degrade initial performance, essentially stealing it up front.

It doesnt have to be heavy industrial.

We use alot of lithium ions in industrial applications too.

Nope not correct, some UPS systems are in constant usage. Critical systems are sometimes used directly through the UPS with no bypass. So cycling of batteries exist for the lifetime of the operation. This is all factored in during the engineering phase of the project. How the UPS is used, peak loads, estimated number of charges and battery degradation.

Now where you mention bigger battery would compromise.. Compromise what? The number game of thinnest phone? Is it not thin enough already? What happened to engineering a good product that can last?

A larger battery with a high peak current will allow the CPU to not SHUT DOWN after a year of usage with battery degradation factored in. The CPU does not operate "faster" with a bigger battery. It can only operate at peak frequency and consume its rated current.

 

[I7guy]

It doesnt have to be heavy industrial.

We use alot of lithium ions in industrial applications too.

Nope not correct, some UPS systems are in constant usage. Critical systems are sometimes used directly through the UPS with no bypass. So cycling of batteries exist for the lifetime of the operation. This is all factored in during the engineering phase of the project. How the UPS is used, peak loads, estimated number of charges and battery degradation.

Now where you mention bigger battery would compromise.. Compromise what? The number game of thinnest phone? Is it not thin enough already? What happened to engineering a good product that can last?

A larger battery with a high peak current will allow the CPU to not SHUT DOWN after a year of usage with battery degradation factored in. The CPU does not operate "faster" with a bigger battery. It can only operate at peak frequency and consume its rated current.

At the expense of being a brick like Samsung phones. Lead acid battery optional accessory.

 

[opfreak]

I'm not sure what reference notes you're referring to.

10.2.1 was released 16 months after the 6s, so repeating "a year" over and over again undermines your point. Nothing we're discussing here affects anything advertised by Apple, so while you might be upset that there's something happening under the hood, claiming that they aren't delivering what they advertised is undermining your point.

Also you keep suggesting that this is happening with certainty to everyone you're addressing. I don't know if you know how to read a statistical distribution, and I'm not going to bother carefully integrating the probability densities, but it looks like maybe 20% of phones that submitted themselves to Geekbench were affected at all. There is selection bias in these results. People running Geekbench may be more likely to be power users, and power users may be more likely to deep cycle their batteries. Apple spec for warranty battery repair is 80% health after 500 charge/discharge cycles. 10.2.1 was released 486 days or so after the 6s, so if you charge your phone more than once a day, as you would almost certainly need to if you're regularly running up against the performance limits of your device, then you're likely past the warrantied life of the battery.

We don't have multidimensional data so all we can do is look at broad generalizations. There's a lot of inference happening from what we have, but I don't see anything that can be called "proof of failure". What I see is that right around the time we'd expect to see the first heavily used batteries start to degrade, Apple started mitigating the risk of random restarts. I don't see anything insidious in that, I see incremental improvement in reliability via a point update which is exactly how the release notes identified it.

Good design is giving the user the most from what they pay for. This throttling mechanism is doing that. Your alternative of maintaining identical performance for some arbitrary time period (measured by you in years, not battery cycles, so it's only loosely correlated to the actual hardware constraints) means denying the user the full capability of their hardware for that same time period.

Better batteries won't change this truth. All batteries degrade, so setting the maximum performance at the worst case, high usage, 1 year, cold temp performance level will always mean you get less performance out of the box.

You stated that apple put the changes in the reference notes not me. Now you can't produce them? The 16 months between releases makes my cases even stronger. Apple noticed their batteries failing to provide enough power and instead of replacing bad batteries covered it up in software. You seem to be ok with the iphone running slower over time to cover up for under specified batteries I am not.

 

[dougsarr]

It is unacceptable. Specially in the case of the iPhone 7. Imagine, brought the phone less than one Year back, December came and this frantic updates came through to slow down the phone?
WTF is this? I have about 10 Apple devices, I spend regularly with their subscription services. As a customer, I really feel cheated with this absurd. Let's see what comes in the next few days. As many, I may let Apple out of my future choices.

 

[Leomon84]

It is unacceptable. Specially in the case of the iPhone 7. Imagine, brought the phone less than one Year back, December came and this frantic updates came through to slow down the phone?
WTF is this? I have about 10 Apple devices, I spend regularly with their subscription services. As a customer, I really feel cheated with this absurd. Let's see what comes in the next few days. As many, I may let Apple out of my future choices.

Dont settle for less

You worked hard for your money and deserve a good product.

Dont reward apple for their short comings. Throttling a device a year in is not and should never be accceptable

 

[ArneK]

You're not getting 800mHz speed. You see benchmark charts and think somehow you're getting screwed when you never really had an issue with the phone before you saw it.

False, opening the camera taking 10s, sometimes it takes seconds to close an app with the home button... all started somewhere in between 3-6 months after getting the iPhone replaced with a new one

 

[Vorkeyjones]

I wouldn't be surprised if the batteries were designed to ware out quickly as well. The whole thing just feels like a scam to get people to buy new iPhones.

 

[KingslayerG5]

Samsung has batteries in the S8/S8+ that degrades 50% slower. If Apple is all about sealed batteries since the iPod days, why can't they put a battery with 1000 cycles like they do on the MacBooks? We have a thread saying MacBooks can last 10 years.Oh yeah, because of money.

Welcome to an era where phones are as disposable as toothbrushes, shavers, shoes, socks, lightbulbs, etc. But we wear those out from our own personal usage. Not deliberate choices from a company after a certain amount of time.

If Google did this to their Pixels, I would be ticked off too. Tim Crook was caught red-handed. Thank goodness for my 2016 LGs which is considered "ancient." Removable battery is always a better option than a sealed one degraded over time and now slowed by Apple.

 

[MY_USERNAME]

Sure Apple told you about this. You did read TOA & TOS to which you agreed?