Apple Being Sued for 'Purposefully Slowing Down Older iPhone Models' [Updated]

[0990848]

Apple found to be throttling performance of iPhone's above 80% battery: https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/7lkdur/i_went_to_the_apple_store_after_seeing_my/

I'd recommend everyone to run Geekbench and compare against expected results to see if your phones being throttled, regardless if your battery is healthy.

 

[Applejuiced]

Apple found to be throttling performance of iPhone's above 80% battery: https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/7lkdur/i_went_to_the_apple_store_after_seeing_my/

I'd recommend everyone to run Geekbench and compare against expected results to see if your phones being throttled, regardless if your battery is healthy.

That particular user got really lucky they let him replace the battery at 83%.
To put in simple terms Apple is throttling the performance of the phone when they themselves do not consider the battery degraded.
If the battery is "healthy" by their own diagnostic test, why are we being throttled?
They're doing the same with the iPhone 7 on the latest iOS 11 version.
Battery is well over 80% capacity but the device is throttled.

 

[firewood]

Or buy an iPhone without Apple slowing it down at all.
How about that option?

Android vendors do that. They seem to underclock their processors to the lowest common denominator at the end of life of a normally aged 2 year old battery. So no slow down over time is needed, since they screwed customers by slowing down their processor out of the box brand new.

Apple instead overclocks their processors when the battery is brand new, and has more juice than typical. That may be one of the ways they get those huge single core processor performance scores (almost 2X the competition).

 

[Abs_p]

Android vendors do that. They seem to underclock their processors to the lowest common denominator at the end of life of a normally aged 2 year old battery. So no slow down over time is needed, since they screwed customers by slowing down their processor out of the box brand new.

Apple instead overclocks their processors when the battery is brand new, and has more juice than typical. That may be one of the ways they get those huge single core processor performance scores (almost 2X the competition).

Apple's clock speed has always been lower than competition. They get high single core processor performance because of how good their Processors are.

 

[pran76]

That particular user got really lucky they let him replace the battery at 83%.
To put in simple terms Apple is throttling the performance of the phone when they themselves do not consider the battery degraded.
If the battery is "healthy" by their own diagnostic test, why are we being throttled?
They're doing the same with the iPhone 7 on the latest iOS 11 version.
Battery is well over 80% capacity but the device is throttled.

This this this! Where does the throttling start? Why is it that the battery cannot support the phone even with acceptable battery wear?

 

[firewood]

I would run the same app that the 5s was running and I couldn’t run it smoothly on the 6s. Does that sound okay to you? Fresh 100% charge on both, both phones restarted etc. level playing field during the tests

Very interesting. I just updated a 5s and a 6s to iOS 11.2.1, and neither of them show any signs of slowing down when running various apps. The 6s was still much faster than the 5s.

Are you testing in Airplane mode after the reboot? (LTE can draw a ton of battery power.) What percentage of storage was free?

 

[Applejuiced]

Android vendors do that. They seem to underclock their processors to the lowest common denominator at the end of life of a normally aged 2 year old battery. So no slow down over time is needed, since they screwed customers by slowing down their processor out of the box brand new.

Apple instead overclocks their processors when the battery is brand new, and has more juice than typical. That may be one of the ways they get those huge single core processor performance scores (almost 2X the competition).

I never heard of that before about android phones being underclocked right out of the box.
Are you sure and do you have some links with more details?
[doublepost=1514003048][/doublepost]

Very interesting. I just updated a 5s and a 6s to iOS 11.2.1, and neither of them show any signs of slowing down when running various apps. The 6s was still much faster than the 5s.

Are you testing in Airplane mode after the reboot? (LTE can draw a ton of battery power.) What percentage of storage was free?

Can you check those 5s and 6s iPhones on the latest iOS 11 with geekbench?
I'm interested to see the results if their batteries haven't got replaced.

 

[Ds6778]

Really hope Apple just stops supporting devices as long as they have. There’s your obsolescence.

 

[akbarali.ch]

... and if your phone shut down periodically you would be complaning about that. What Apple is doing is smart. Where they failed is being transparaent.

I'll and probably most other if not all would prefer longer phone's life even if its bit slower, rather than shutting down in middle of booking a cab while using 4G data and GPS. or when you line up your team mates for panorama and in middle the phones shuts

 

[Applejuiced]

Really hope Apple just stops supporting devices as long as they have. There’s your obsolescence.

Really?
So in other words it's the customers fault and Apple should just punish us?
The responses keep getting better
[doublepost=1514003463][/doublepost]

I'll and probably most other if not all would prefer longer phone's life even if its bit slower, rather than shutting down in middle of booking a cab while using 4G data and GPS. or when you line up your team mates for panorama and in middle the phones shuts

No, I would NOT want Apple to ever slow down my device without telling me or giving me the option of slow down or shorter battery life.
A phone that shuts off at 30-40% shouldn't need throttling to not turn off.
It just needs the defective batteries replaced.
That never happened with any other iPhones prior to the i6 and 6S for the phone to turn off before the full battery is depleted near 1%.

 

[Ds6778]

Really?
So in other words it's the customers fault and Apple should just punish us?
The responses keep getting better
[doublepost=1514003463][/doublepost]

No, I would NOT want Apple to ever slow down my device without telling me or giving me the option of slow down or shorter battery life.
A phone that shuts off at 30-40% shouldn't need throttling to not turn off.
It just needs the defective batteries replaced.
That never happened with any other iPhones prior to that for the phone to turn off before the full battery is depleted near 1%.

No, but people buy a $600-700 phone and expect the world.

 

[organic bond]

Android vendors do that. They seem to underclock their processors to the lowest common denominator at the end of life of a normally aged 2 year old battery. So no slow down over time is needed, since they screwed customers by slowing down their processor out of the box brand new.

Apple instead overclocks their processors when the battery is brand new, and has more juice than typical. That may be one of the ways they get those huge single core processor performance scores (almost 2X the competition).

Which Android vendors? Source?

 

[Tubamajuba]

Really hope Apple just stops supporting devices as long as they have. There’s your obsolescence.

Before this battery/throttling mess, I could never understand why most Android manufacturers were so stingy with post-purchase support. Now I understand. People don't care about updates- they just want their phone to run like new forever. If you never update, the phone never gets slower. Definitely a good argument for Apple to limit iOS updates to about a year or so. People don't seem to mind being forced to get new phones if they want new features, after all.

 

[Applejuiced]

No, but people buy a $600-700 phone and expect the world.

Asking for honesty from the manufacturer is expecting the world?
After spending $700-1200 for a smartphone we should just allow Apple to continue to pull shady and deceptive practices like this?

 

[ach]

***IF*** there truly is a design defect, that would also partly explain Apple's reluctance to let users replace the battery even if they are willing to pay. Imagining having to replace a battery a second, or third time in 2 years because the circuitry is just too demanding on the battery. What use is having that massive day 1 performance if the device will become significantly hobbled sometime later? That feels misleading.

I have an iPhone 4 which has never spontaneously shut off. I also have an iPhone 6 on iOS 10.3.3 (28% battery wear) which has shut off twice at 30% in the last 3 months. It doesn't look good.

My family all had iPhone 6 a couple of years ago, one of which had this "battery" / crashing issue. That is why we took up on the trade in last year for the iPhone 7 for free, we traded in for 7 phones. The 6's were the worst iPhones, with "battery" and wifi issues.

 

[pran76]

Really hope Apple just stops supporting devices as long as they have. There’s your obsolescence.

So as long as they can still make calls, receive messages etc, i’m Okay with that. I was constantly dialing the wrong number from my redial list cause the scrolling was delayed by 1-2 seconds

 

[Steveno]

I=E/R

It is from using too low a resistance on the vape coil therefore drawing too high of amps is what causes those explosions, not so much a degraded battery.

You missed my point. Over taxing a battery is bad. And a degraded battery can handle less amps. Then it becomes a safety hazard.

 

[pran76]

Very interesting. I just updated a 5s and a 6s to iOS 11.2.1, and neither of them show any signs of slowing down when running various apps. The 6s was still much faster than the 5s.

Are you testing in Airplane mode after the reboot? (LTE can draw a ton of battery power.) What percentage of storage was free?

Tested it several times with many scenarios before I took it to get my battery replaced. Back to 1858MHz from 700~ish.

What you are stating is part of the issue - when, how and by how much is the throttling?
[doublepost=1514004557][/doublepost]

No, but people buy a $600-700 phone and expect the world.

Expect the world? Expecting your phone to work NORMALLY is expecting the world? What crazy world do you live in?

 

[BGordon45]

How do we fix it?

I felt like my iphone6 has been running real slow since the latest iOS update to 11.

I did not like ios 10 and stayed with iOS 9 for over a year (dealing with daily update messages).

My benchmarks:
Single Core: 823
Multi-Core 1383

iPhone 6 avg:
single core: 1400
multi-core: 2365

This looks like about a 40% reduction in speed

I already replaced my battery last year (when I was on iOS9). It had dismal performance. The new battery is just over a year old (outside of warranty now) and is at just under 80% design capacity with 348 cycles

 

[Ds6778]

Asking for honesty from the manufacturer is expecting the world?
After spending $700-1200 for a smartphone we should just allow Apple to continue to pull shady and deceptive practices like this?

Lol it was in the release notes of 10.2.1, not their fault you didn’t read.

 

[kwikdeth]

That is really time consuming and complicated and pretty much unwieldy to do (especially for security patches).

All they need to do is add a setting in the power management that gives people the option to preserve battery life on older device or use it in normal power mode. It can warn you that your battery should be in “preservation mode” based on its charge performance, rather than device age. If I have an old phone and replace the battery with a new one, I should be able to use it in “normal” mode.

If they don’t implement that, you will know for sure what their real motives are.

that's actually far more simple and elegant and that would be preferable IMO
[doublepost=1514005270][/doublepost]

With iPhone, people usually don't think big enough.
This is hundreds of millions of devices in almost as many hands.

sadly you're right

 

[Ds6778]

Tested it several times with many scenarios before I took it to get my battery replaced. Back to 1858MHz from 700~ish.

What you are stating is part of the issue - when, how and by how much is the throttling?
[doublepost=1514004557][/doublepost]
Expect the world? Expecting your phone to work NORMALLY is expecting the world? What crazy world do you live in?

Expecting a battery that’s three years old to function like new is crazy to me.

 

[Applejuiced]

Lol it was in the release notes of 10.2.1, not their fault you didn’t read.

What they just got caught doing and finally admitted to it wasn't anywere.
Good try though

 

[Ds6778]

What they just got caught doing and finally admitted to it wasn't anywere.
Good try though

It was in the release notes lol this was implemented less then a year ago and you guys act like you’ve been right “all these years.”

 

[BGordon45]

By the way - I already replaced my battery last year. It had dismal performance. The new battery is just over a year old (outside of warranty now) and is at just under 80% design capacity with 348 cycles