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Apple Being Sued for 'Purposefully Slowing Down Older iPhone Models' [Updated]
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Is it just me or is this issue more prevalent with the smaller iPhones (which consequently had smaller batteries?) than the larger phones?
That seems to me like something the iPhone X was trying to address with its dual-battery design.
In the meantime, I guess the options are to either have your battery replaced and / or stay away from the smaller iPhone models.
That seems to me like something the iPhone X was trying to address with its dual-battery design.
In the meantime, I guess the options are to either have your battery replaced and / or stay away from the smaller iPhone models.
I have a question... why wouldn’t it simply be that when the CPU clocks up during an intense task, it simply runs down the battery quicker? Isn’t that what happened with all older phones? I’ve never had an older phone turn off because the CPU was drawing too much power, that I know of. The battery simply drains faster as it gets older. Is my reasoning wrong here? At the very least, this is what I expect a lot of consumers to think and then draw the conclusion that Apple was throttling speeds in a nefarious way. Could someone explain this to me? (Btw, not a joke, I seriously don’t know the answer to this).
There are plenty of smart people agreeing with what Apple is doing, and saying it makes sense. The lack of communicating to people is the bigger problem potentially, but Apple always likes to shield users from unnecessary complexity. So I think their intentions were good, but perhaps they should have erred more on the side of giving feedback and information to avoid this mess.
Replacing the battery brings you back to "full speed" regardless. I'm pretty sure this isn't "detecting batteries", it's almost certainly monitoring some system state.
God. I love Apple products even Steve Jobs, Ives, Forstall, Cook but I fully support this stance against them. This is the first time I really despise Apple apologist.
You haven't posted anything showing MR is being intentionally Apple biased. What you have shown is your dislike for MR not blindly siding with the MR regulars. MR (Joe) stating an opinion in the article as to what he thinks may or may not happen with Apple, is not the same thing as MR refusing to state fact in place of site bias to the contrary.
Controlling the feature or doing it only at 20% shows a lack of understanding of the actual issue here. The lithium batteries that Apple and other manufacturers use are Lithium Polymer. These batteries absolutely can NOT drop below a certain safe voltage or else chemical instability and/or permanent failure occurs. In a wearing battery nearing its cycle rating, a sudden spike in CPU/GPU usage can stress the battery - at any percentage - below the minimum safe voltage. It's not a problem that's optional to care about nor does it only happen below 20%.
Apple needs to be upfront about what's going on within the OS when a battery is degrading enough to trigger this, be upfront about battery health in Settings/Battery, and allow battery replacements the very minute the first downclock takes place. As it stands right now the user is denied a replacement, even if they want to pay for it, if the battery has not failed outright. The only solution is to go with a third party warranty voiding replacement or buy a new phone, which is insane.
It does seem like they've out-specced themselves by fitting hardware that's class-leading but unsustainable beyond 1.5 years without a battery replacement. I for one don't mind this and encourage it for the sake of advancement (I replace my phone every year with iUP) - but at the huge, huge caveat that battery replacements must be provided to long-term owners. Disallowing a swap altogether even if the customer pays is absolutely nuts. I'll take a more powerful phone that requires yearly battery swaps anyday over a weaker phone that can endure double that, but I understand that an absolutely gargantuan part of the market does not use their phones like I do.
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Samsung did do something like this with the note 7, but only after they started spontaneously combusting.
Apple was asked if they were slowing down older models. They answered no.
It was not an outright lie. They aren’t slowing them down based on model. But it wasn’t admission of the truth that they were throttling older phones.
It’s sneaky half truth. A mere technicality. They could have taken that time to admit that they were throttling some older devices based on battery issues. But they did not. They played the lawyer game by speaking carefully.
You might not think that’s lying, but imho it’s a lie by omission.
Internal resistance on the battery. A current spike means a voltage drop which forces a panic shutdown.
I had this problem on my iPhone 5 a few years back. Works fine, you have 50-60% battery life in the status bar but if you turn on the camera or GPS or something that pulls extra current, it shuts down. I new the battery was failing, but it make the phone a pain in the rear to use until I could get it to a store for a battery replacement.
This definitely is an issue they need to fix. It can't be right that iOS determines the battery has an issue but Apple geniuses diagnostic software says everything is peachy. I'm confident Apple will correct these inconsistencies, but it should never have taken this long.
Some apps will not work without updated iOS. Hulu for instance, was one my wife was not able download on her iPad mini without upgrading to iOS 10 or something.
100% charged battery, all apps closed. CPU speed was 911 Mhz. Yes it is a bad thing when my phone is running slower than a 5s when I paid for a 6s
From a pr standpoint, the press fallout could get ugly. It all depends on how much average joe and susie want to educate themselves on the facts, versus reading yahoo typed headline writer biased junk mail.
I think the battery replacement price is fair. The problem is being denied battery service when the diagnostics say your phone is fine, all while iOS says your battery needs nursing with the CPU throttled down. This is the part Apple needs to fix, to align their diagnostics with whatever iOS is doing to determine battery health.
Mine is at 600ghz right now, and my battery is about 300 cycles. What a fiasco.
It's not that simple. "Clocking-up" the CMOS transistor circuits in the CPU requires higher voltage and current, whereas the more current you pull out of the battery, the lower the voltage it supplies (due to internal battery resistance, which increases with age). At some point the voltage that the CPU chip requires and the voltage that the battery is supplying cross over, and the power manager shuts down the system to prevent random data corruption.
Of course, this is only a problem with a high-power CPU, teamed up with a thin battery. Older iPhones and most mobile phone competitors to Apple use lower performance processor cores that just can't draw as much peak power (because they are slower).
It seems Apple wants to run their high performance/power processors just below the shutdown point, which of course will change as the battery ages. The 6s battery recall may have been because they overshot, and overclocked their processors a bit too much for some of the batteries they were being shipped by their suppliers.