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The phone doesn't need to be in low power mode. Period.

A simple warning is good enough. Let the consumer decide what to do. Tesla doesn't lower the performance of the car once the batteries are old.

Such an idiotic decision could have only been invented at Apple.
Tesla actually has designed a battery that has minimal degradation of about 10% over 200,000 miles or about 10 years worth of driving for most people. So, Apple can surely make a battery that can stay at 90% of capacity for 10+ years as well.

See this article for more details:
https://electrek.co/2016/11/01/tesla-battery-degradation/
 
Users: “why you slow our phones down?!”

Apple: “your battery can’t hold the charge necessary for some tasks. We want you to use your phone for longer.”

Users: “can you believe Apple just wants us to buy more phones?! Let’s sue!!”

So you're saying that Apple is checking my battery, and then developing an update solely for the amount of charging cycles I have carried out?
I don't use my iPhone for apps, just calls. It only requires charging every 2 to 3 days, depending on the amount of calls made, so my iPhone 6 has only been charged 250 times.
 
15 seconds to open the camera. Utter crap. SLOWER than a 10 year old NOKIA

Can you show me one iPhone that takes 15seconds to open the camera app? And If you can, have the restored the device to rule out the fact that its not just a bug? Because I have never seen and iPhone take more than a few seconds. Including my iPhone 5 on it original battery.
 
If it’s a bad analogy then no point was made. No one is saying batteries will not wear out over time.

And Apple is doing what they can to help extend the battery life on existing iPhones and preserve the user experience the best they can.

You may not like how they went about doing it, but that doesn’t mean that Apple did not start out with the best of intentions. For all we know, had Apple done nothing, people would be complaining of how their phones shut down randomly and had very short battery life and this was part of Apple’s ploy to get them to upgrade their devices.

Apple can’t win here. They were faced with an impossible decision, and that still didn’t stop them from doing their best make older iPhones usable - which is by definition the very opposite of planned obsolescence.
 
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Yes, because android smartphones are the epitome of stability and smoothness. And it’s not like they don’t have their share of shutdowns and reboots.

Today’s iPhones are also packed with way more tech compared to the iPhones of old, and so there are more processes to manage in the background.

It’s likely to do with the 64-bit processors and the new race to sleep / wake functions that result in sudden spikes of power draw. The batteries today are larger than those found in older iPhones; thickness has nothing to do with the problem.

That doesn't sound right, the 5s also had a 64-bit cpu, in fact it was the first gen, so architecturally it's similar to 6, and about battery size, the iPhone SE has about the same battery size as the 5s, yet Apple excludes 5s from list of affected devices.

There is something off about the newer iPhones where Apple messed up on hardware design/quality and are now trying to amend it via cheap software fix, but the hardware issue is there.
 
Cue the people who will defend Apple, call this frivolous but if it were Samsung would be excited Samsung was getting sued.

or the people who claim since their device isn't affected than it's a nothingburger and people are just looking for a handout :p

the excuses throughout these threads by the expected few (and it's really the same people as always) is ridiculous
 
And Apple is doing what they can to help extend the battery life on existing iPhones and preserve the user experience the best they can.

You may not like how they went about doing it, but that doesn’t mean that Apple did not start out with the best of intentions. For all we know, had Apple done nothing, people would be complaining of how their phones shut down randomly and had very short battery life and this was part of Apple’s ploy to get them to upgrade their devices.

Apple can’t win here. They were faced with an impossible decision, and that still didn’t stop them from doing their best make older iPhones usable - which is by definition the very opposite of planned obsolescence.


Preserving the user experience by making the device slower huh. Right.

It’s not impossible to make the right decision once you take off the blinders and actually look at the other options.

Why doesn’t Apple replace batteries that are supposedly so degraded in a year that they need this heavy throttling? It’s a cop out.
 
Defrauding? Batteries degrade over time, and old items of all types show wear and tear in many ways. Next shall we sue Nike because the soles of my shoes wore down with usage and time?
No one is questioning whether or not batteries degrade over time. That is a known fact. Batteries degrade. Degrading batteries don't throttle CPU's. Software designed to throttle CPU's on phones with degraded batteries... that's how CPU's get throttled. That's a problem. That software loaded on users phones without their knowledge... that's also a problem.
 
Have any MR forum dudes made a car analogy yet?

"Well, when you buy a BMW you expect that blah blah blah and what if BMW did blah blah blah you wouldn't be very happy, would you?"
 
I love how flippantly people say “Apple should use better batteries”. Wow, you design one. The tech for lithium ion is stretched to the max. We need a whole new battery tech, but it’s not their fault new battery tech isn’t ready yet. So, they faced a dilemma. Reduce peak current draw or allow a battery to possibly become hazardous. Yes, they should have sent a push notification (I disagree about giving a choice, that wouldn’t be smart), but that doesn’t change the fact they did the right thing for the right reasons.
 
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Why do people on here with iPhone 4S and a battery that’s 50% degraded still have full speed?

Looks like this wasn’t an issue before the iPhone 6, and all previous iPhones also used batteries.
Not making excuse for Apple, but maybe because of the clock speed which is 1.4GHz on the 6 and 800MHz in the 4 IIRC.

Again, not making excuse for Apple, but at least the performance is restored with a new battery. Imagine if an update really permanently degraded performance.

Assuming the engineering team consulted with their legal team when implementing this, I’m surprised it made it past their legal dept. In apples own words, only “a small number” of users are affected by this. Surely replacing a small number of batteries is much less costly than this PR and now legal nightmare.
 
No one is questioning whether or not batteries degrade over time. That is a known fact. Batteries degrade. Degrading batteries don't throttle CPU's. Software designed to throttle CPU's on phones with degraded batteries... that's how CPU's get throttled. That's a problem. That software loaded on users phones without their knowledge... that's also a problem.
That’s a good thing. It prevents shutdowns and potential hazards to safety
 
Cue the people who will defend Apple, call this frivolous but if it were Samsung would be excited Samsung was getting sued.
For those defending Apple, I can’t see much of a problem with that. A lot of members here have higher education and understand how software and hardware can work together to eliminate failures in either, for the price of speed on an aging device. It’s not the algorithms existence that bothers members here, but the lack of transparency and omission of its existence on Apple’s part.
 
Well Nike doesnt come to my house and paint my white shoes black after a year without my consent just because they MIGHT show wear on a white surface after a while

Apple doesn't come to your house and force you to enable automatic OS updates, or hit the Update Now button. Lot of people don't update immediately, but wait for the reports and the x.1 or x.2 fixes.
 
Unethical? Well, perhaps -- but a stretch to claim illegal, IMO. We'll see how this progresses, of course. I'm not a lawyer and even if I was, I wouldn't pretend to know the outcome of a court case before it's even gotten started.

BUT -- here's the thing. If Apple was truly, as it claimed, just trying to avoid so many phones suddenly rebooting when under high battery load/usage, then what they did makes sense. That's not malicious. That's just the company making the internal decision than spontaneously rebooting phones are a bigger problem than slowing them down when their batteries are aging.

When you buy computers and electronic devices, the company selling them DOES often stay involved for long after the initial purchase. This stuff isn't just wood furniture or flooring.... Even the Tesla car is really just an electronic rolling computer, and owners find the company occasionally pushes out firmware that changes the car's behavior.

This lawsuit centers around the theory that the speed throttling was done by Apple maliciously, to trick owners into thinking they needed to buy new phones when all they needed was a battery. That's going to be difficult to prove unless they have some kind of smoking gun like internal Apple letters stating that's what they were trying to do.

IMO, if an owner started running into a phone spontaneously rebooting, they'd be JUST as likely to decide that meant they need a new phone as it slowing down would.... So I don't quite follow the "logic" behind the complaint?


About time. What they are doing is highly unethical. Their involvement with my property stops after payment.
 
That doesn't sound right, the 5s also had a 64-bit cpu, in fact it was the first gen, so architecturally it's similar to 6, and about battery size, the iPhone SE has about the same battery size as the 5s, yet Apple excludes 5s from list of affected devices.

There is something off about the newer iPhones where Apple messed up on hardware design/quality and are now trying to amend it via cheap software fix, but the hardware issue is there.
Well, anandtech has this to say.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12184/apple-confirms-cpu-limitation-in-ageing-devices

SoC blocks such as CPUs and GPUs can have very short transitions from idle to load causing steep transients and load spikes going above the +10W ranges. As batteries degrade over time and the cell impedance also rises also in function of the state of charge and temperature, the current flow becomes restricted and the cell is no longer able to satisfy the power requirement at a high enough operating voltage.

One possibility is that from the A8 chip onwards, aggressive power management algorithms result in sudden power spikes which can degrade the life of your battery. Especially on a phone where you are constantly putting your phone to sleep and unlocking it hundreds of times a day.
 
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Tesla actually has designed a battery that has minimal degradation of about 10% over 200,000 miles or about 10 years worth of driving for most people. So, Apple can surely make a battery that can stay at 90% of capacity for 10+ years as well.

See this article for more details:
https://electrek.co/2016/11/01/tesla-battery-degradation/
Apple doesn’t make batteries, they buy them from the same people everyone else does.
 
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About time. What they are doing is highly unethical. Their involvement with my property stops after payment.
You realize this is gonna be thrown out in court right? It's an absurd claim. Yes, Apple does power management. They are a computer company. It's the nature of the beast. Should they have notified users? Perhaps. It's not a class-action offense.

You also don't own the software on your device. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. Yes you paid for the phone. But if you want "their involvement with you property" to stop, you may as well go buy a brick because Apples' infrastructure enables almost everything you do on that phone.

You should also read that contract you signed when you bought your shiny phone. You'd be surprised about what you really 'bought'. The world doesn't work like you think it does.
 
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MR hasn't been defending Apple.
Really? When you report that the one year old iPhone 7 is already on the black list and you have nothing against this, you're a blind apologetic.

"As many people have suggested, Apple has done a poor job of explaining why it has implemented these power feature management and how the state of the battery ultimately affects iPhone performance. More transparent information about battery health should be provided, and customers should be better informed when their batteries start to degrade so they can choose whether or not to pay for a replacement. Apple may also need to relax its policies on when customers can pay for a battery replacement, as currently, a battery can't be replaced unless in-store equipment registers it as near failing."​

Are these really the problems users have with this? Or are macrumors readers mad because their phones are supposed to last only one year. Macrumors is totally off.

"Lithium-ion batteries degrade over time by nature, and this eventual wearing out addressed by the power management features is unrelated to the release of new iPhone models."​

Of course it isn't.

"The lawsuit seemingly misrepresents Apple's original statement and suggests the plaintiffs and their lawyers do not understand Apple's explanation for how iPhone power management features work and why they were implemented, given the lawsuit's suggestion that it's tied to the release of new devices. As explained by Apple, when certain iPhone models hit a peak of processor power, a degraded battery is sometimes unable to provide enough juice, leading to a shutdown. Apple says it "smooths out" these peaks by limiting the power draw from the battery or by spreading power requests over several cycles."
It's a fact because Apple said it. Funny how after one year, the new iOS is buggy and the battery life is cut in half and after 1,5 years your battery is degraded. Why isn't this happening on Android phones?

Yep macrumors is really siding with their readers here. If it wasn't for Geekbench we wouldn't even know about this, because Apple is so honest and transparent. And yet, we should believe EVERYTHING Apple says because you know, they never lied.
 
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