Which would have been admirable if Apple had offered it as an alternative to throttling rather than as damage control after the fact.
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Apple Fined 25 Million Euros in France for Slowing Down Older iPhones With iOS Update
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“Throttling” isn’t going away and is here to stay. Apple should have offered the toggle for full performance and phone go dead or reduced performance and phone stays awake, at the outset.
Although I believe the performance management introduced in iOS 10.2.1 was a beta and Apple wanted to see how it went before providing a toggle.
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What an absolutely idiotic fine by France. The batteries were not capable of providing enough current to run the chip at the intended frequency, should Apple have let the phones crash? Explaining that to these French numbskulls is like teaching computer programming to cavemen.
Apple needs to pull out of France. Let them use typewriters. I have never seen a more ignorant, backward, nonsensical fine.
Apple needs to pull out of France. Let them use typewriters. I have never seen a more ignorant, backward, nonsensical fine.
I like this comment form the Reddit discussion:
"This whole situation is ridiculous. Do we really except companies to have to explain low level hardware and software systems to layman consumers?
This is children screaming that the cigarette lighter in the car pops out after a while because they rather it keeps being hot even if the car starts running a higher and higher risk of catching fire…
It’s not like they tried to claim batteries don’t degrade, something a child should know. They just made a smart engineering decision.
This whole thing could have been 'Apple can you add an indicator to tell us when to get a new battery?' and it would have been over."
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No, I’m just making a fine difference between actively setting policies after the problem became widespread (the policy was set much earlier) and dragging their feet in reacting to the problem.
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They simply should have informed customers that a new battery could speed up their phone. Nothing more, nothing less.
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I was lucky that my 6S was affected by this issue before Apple got caught by the benchmark data and my device still had warranty and I eventually got it replaced after some rebust conversations with a Genius:
My battery still had 93 % of its design capacity (150 cycles) and Apple's diagnostic tools showed "nothing wrong". I wasn't quite happy with that and then I made numerous logged battery endurance tests that showed how the device suddenly shut down at around 20 % remaining charge in a room with 21°C.
I cannot understand people defending Apple on this issue.
- It is known that Li-Po batteries lose performance as they age.
- A properly designed device should have a larger than "needed" battery so that it's also capable of powering the device without any issues in a slightly degraded state.
- Anything else is a manufacturing defect due to poor design choices.
My battery still had 93 % of its design capacity (150 cycles) and Apple's diagnostic tools showed "nothing wrong". I wasn't quite happy with that and then I made numerous logged battery endurance tests that showed how the device suddenly shut down at around 20 % remaining charge in a room with 21°C.
I cannot understand people defending Apple on this issue.
- It is known that Li-Po batteries lose performance as they age.
- A properly designed device should have a larger than "needed" battery so that it's also capable of powering the device without any issues in a slightly degraded state.
- Anything else is a manufacturing defect due to poor design choices.
Except in your analogy, the car manufacturer didn’t suggest that you buy a new car, instead of replacing the lighter.
Even when someone suspected the battery, Apple refused to sell battery replacements for out-of-warranty devices—the very devices whose batteries were older. Worst, their diagnostic test declared those batteries were good in their opinion.
Yes, it could have! That’s the obvious solution! But it’s also obvious that Apple wanted to avoid replacing batteries in older devices. Yet they will gladly give you a credit for your old device, then change its battery and sell it to aftermarket resellers.
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More like explaining ethics and consumer rights to computer programmers...
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I don't think you understand how larger companies work. What likely happened is a Defect was logged that indicated people's phones were shutting down unexpectedly. After testing it was determined that an older battery could not sustain the load that a newer battery could. Engineer fixed it by throttling phones that have experienced said shutdown to ensure that the phone at least kept working. Issue is pushed to an update. Probably no additional thought went into it until someone discovered it and got pissed off. Many many many bugs are addressed this way. This one just had the side effect of pissing off customers despite it actually benefitting the user of the phone to throttle it in this case. So I wouldn't say they went cloak and dagger, just that it wasn't thought about until people got upset. I do agree that it should have been disclosed and at a minimum gave you a notification that your battery is nearing the end of its life and needs to be changed as well as mentioning that the phone has been throttled to avoid future unexpected shutdowns.
I’m sure Apple did oversize the battery. However, things happen as in the Samsung note 7 incident. Was that a poor design choice?
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The way this is written it’s as if a lone engineer made a unilateral decision.
I don’t believe that is how large companies work in general, there are exceptions.
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...yes?!
(Samsung took a battery that was too large for the phone chassis so there wasn't any room inside for it to expand (and contract) so the battery damaged itself and sometimes that was really bad)
But just because the 6Ses didn't explode doesn't mean that this wasn't also a poor design choice that should have resulted in a free recall of the affected models. But Apple didn't issue such a recall and only admitted to it after a consumer found out about it with benchmarks.
Not true at all. Apple were advising people to buy new phones when only the battery needed replacing.
How do people, (especially regular forum users like you), not know this with the coverage it received?
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Yes. That’s what they need. A $25M cash injection to get the country back into profit.
They now have the biggest cash reserves of any country in the cosmos.
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No. They used it as a money grab and encouraged their customers to buy new phones.
Makes for good internet hyperbole but one can’t prove that was the ultimate motive.
The underlying issue was that these batteries dropped below maybe 60% (*) effective capacity after two years for typical users. Whereas in almost all other phones the 60% level might only be reached after maybe 3.5 years. Now, should batteries come with a sort of warranty that guarantees 80% capacity for up to 500 cycles? Maybe, but I'm not sure other consumer devices come with such a warranty.
But Apple as a premium brand carries a somewhat implicit warranty. Meaning their products generally use quality components and generally are let's say in the upper third when it comes to reliability. Thus, eventually, public pressure and Apple decided that those batteries were subpar in their performance and therefore Apple would replace them for a much-reduced fee.
But there is a difference between a recall and an extended warranty. The iPhone 6 has a perfectly working battery for the first one to two years. That doesn't require a recall, it required a warranty extension for the battery (which Apple mostly did by cutting the price for the battery replacement by about two-thirds).
(*) It varied, but let's say the battery had 90% nominal capacity but because it shut down at around 30%, the defacto battery life was down to 60%).
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Can you name me any retail brand that wouldn't try to steer people into buying new products instead of repairing/patching up the things the customer already has?
Apple didn't design this flaw so it could sell more new phones. They didn't design the patch (that slowed down phones) to sell more new phones. They were slow to admit the flaw, as most companies are because they didn't want to have to exchange a whole lot of batteries for free.
There is an advantage in Apple owning the whole stack from product to retail to repair. But it creates conflicts of interest when retail has the incentive to sell new product while the brand owner has an interest in maintaining a brand image (that sometimes might mean extending warranties, like they now did with the laptop keyboards as well).
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It's not what they did that was the problem, it was how they did it. All they really needed to do was put a warning in about what was happening and that they may need to replace the battery... but then that wouldn't have generated a sale of a new iphone from people who simply thought their phone was getting too old for the new OS's being released rather than it just needing a new battery.
If an individual can plan something 1-2 or 50 years in the future (retirement) it is not at all unreasonable or biased to believe that the most successful corporation on planet Earth can plan something as trivial as this. And by "plan" I don't mean to the minute details, but simple scenarios and possible outcomes can be drawn quite early.
The 6 series was no accident in any way. What I mean:
- it was the first real design change in years. Actually philosophy change not even simple design (think the sizing and where Samsung was pushing the market);
- a huge upgrade cycle was a sure thing;
- aluminium alloy used and then "solved" in 6S was another "unfortunate" accident. I like to call it planned obsolescence;
- 1 GB of RAM was an obvious hindrance for future updates (have you run iOS 11-12 on a 6 Plus even with battery exchanged?)
Especially the RAM thing I knew perfectly well what it would mean for my user experience in the future, and yet I still bought in. Not because Apple does exquisite products, but simply because the rest is huge pile of complacent crap.
With regards to the psychology observation, what you call as me being biased, I can just as easily call as you being in denial, refusing to acknowledge the cold reality. We still need both approaches though, to make progress.