Apple Makes $29 Battery Replacements Available Immediately for iPhone 6 and Newer

[blackcrayon]

Apple got caught looking like an ******* crippling year old products... Hmm, I don't want to hear any more BS from Apple about the environment, world peace, social justice, etc... They are just another predatory corporation. That's fine but drop the politics. Instead of dating landfills by drilling for phone books, we can do it with iPhones now. FU Apple!

I totally agree. Any company that keeps phones from shutting down by throttling performance should definitely pollute the environment as much as possible. It's the only logical way to do business.

 

[MH01]

I actually stated my thoughts a few posts back as well.

https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...one-6-and-newer.2098263/page-14#post-25655257

To be precise, it's not entirely a battery issue, but replacing the battery can stave off the issue until whatever is causing the problem degrades the battery past that critical threshold again. Specifically, I suspect it's the bursty nature of the Apple processor stressing the battery out. Features such as rush to sleep / wake can be great for battery life, while also being bad for the longevity of your battery in the long run.

In summary, yes, Apple is treating the symptom, and that will have to suffice until they can find a more permanent solution.

You are spot on. Have a good new year mate !

 

[Abazigal]

You are spot on. Have a good new year mate !

A happy new year to you too.

 

[gwaizai]

Wrong. Many cases have been posted about Apple refusing to replace a battery, even when offering to pay the $79.

Exactly. So the question becomes "Why is Apple refusing to replace batteries, when they know this will restore original performance?"

Because they're manipulating us to upgrade to new phones. Ka Ching Ka Ching.
It's a total scam.

And everything we're hearing from Apple now is a bunch of double-talk on account of them getting CAUGHT.

$50 discount on a couple dollar battery? Free iphone 8's to all who upgraded since the throttling began is more like it.

 

[reddevil0728]

Read post #410. Apple prefer that you buy a new phone so if you send in a phone to them that was previously serviced by a 3rd party they may return it in worse condition.

Read this...

https://9to5mac.com/2017/02/25/iphone-warranty-third-party-screen/

Not sure if this policy is actually being practised.

But I would have thought by implication, i.e. if you have something repaired by 3rd party that’s not battery related, in this case maybe a screen.

Now you want to bring it to Apple to repair the battery. As long as it is unrelated to the screen, it shouldn’t be an issue isn’t it?

 

[MH01]

I totally agree. Any company that keeps phones from shutting down by throttling performance should definitely pollute the environment as much as possible. It's the only logical way to do business.

Upgrading annually, say through the upgrade program , is what is best for the environment.....

 

[Piggie]

I have a Nexus 6, which is two to three years old, and was, for the 1st time running a couple of benchmarks on my phone to see how it performed against Nexus 6 phones when they were brand new as you can look up review tests from back then.

Guess, what, my 2 - 3 year old phone is giving results just the same as those brand new ones.

A review article said this:

"Nexus 6 battery life is excellent, judging from our tests. Behind its 6-inch AMOLED is a mighty 3220mAh capacity battery, the same as the Samsung Galaxy Note 4



Then.....

iPhone 6 Plus has a 2,915 mAH battery

iPhone 6s Plus has a 2,915 mAh battery

iPhone 7 Plus has a 2,900mAh battery

iPhone 8 Plus has a 2,675mAh battery

Notice a trend here?

And Apple are saying, ahhhh, well, you can't expect batteries to last forever?

Hey Apple, how about not making your battery smaller every year as you know dam well they won't last as long and be able to perform as well for as long.

You think Apple management and Apple engineers are stupid and don't know what they are doing and how long a battery will last and be able to supply top power as they are idiot and don't know or test anything?

No. Apple are VERY clever and know exactly what they are doing.

Which should worry you more, as you can forgive someone stupid as they may not realise things. But this is all deliberate.

 

[MH01]

Exactly. So the question becomes "Why is Apple refusing to replace batteries, when they know this will restore original performance?"

Because they're manipulating us to upgrade to a new phone. Ka Ching Ka Ching.
It's a total scam.

And everything we're hearing from Apple now is a bunch of double-talk on account of them getting CAUGHT.

To be fair Apple has not changed their policy on battery replacements , 80% within 500 cycles , and replacing batteries would not solve the fundamental design flaw in the 6/6s, cause as batteries age, shutdowns come back, so this software is the only way to deal with the symptom and not the causes.

It's a much better solution ......if they only made it clear what the solution was doing .

By hiding how the solution for the symptom works, people are questioning if this did not push users to upgrade...... a valid question .

Fact is, yes Apple did get upgrades out of this , was it intentional or a by product ? That we will not know , though we can debate all we like .

 

[justperry]

Either:
backup, erase, restore backup
or
restore iOS and set up as new

will resolve almost all "slowness" issues other than the particular one Apple is talking about in the statement.

As if the first option helps, iOS is very similar to OS X/macOS, it doesn't normally slow down as with
some other OS'es.
If you restore it as before it imports all apps and settings from the old backup so it doesn't really make sense.

 

[Phonephreak]

You don’t know what’s necessary. Everyone thinks their solution is great, but Apple has to think about a billion people.

A year of $29 battery replacements from Apple is more than fair in my estimation. If you’re still upset, switch to Android.

How many phones Apple has out there is not my concern. This should bite Apple in the ass they messed up. They are fixing the problem at apples rate, slooooww. This isn’t going away. It’s all PR on apples end for now.
[doublepost=1514718629][/doublepost]

I suspect it's more an issue of the battery degrading over time and not being able to supply the power that their processors require. If you want to be pedantic about it, it's not really the fault of the battery, but basically everything in the phone that requires that much power.

Think of it as a sprinter who starts out blazing fast but quickly tires and then has to slow down afterwards. The bursty nature of the A-series processors apparently comes at a price. Everything works when the battery is new and in tip-top condition, but it becomes unsustainable after a short while (~1 year, it seems).

To be more precise, it appears to be a power-draw issue which can be solved either by replacing the battery (which allows the phone to run as if it were brand new) or reducing how much power the processor needs to run to avoid shutdowns (and a reduction in power basically means an accompanying reduction in performance). That's the way electronics work. There's no conspiracy here to trick users to buying more iPhones (even if it did have that inadvertent impact).

I hate to say it, as I love my Apple toys, this is a hardware flaw. They have been hiding it with software fixes. Balls in apples court.

 

[simonmet]

Nothing . They were told the battery was fine, the phone was fine, all diagnostics passed, so if you were annoyed by any performance issues, you had to accept them or think about a faster phone.

One think people learned over time , if a computer gets slow, it's upgrade time. What is slow, depends on the individual.

I think Apple’s battery health test is inadequate. I was getting terrible battery life (a couple of hours at most in Safari) and random shutdowns on my iPhone 5s, yet it somehow managed to pass Apple’s test. They quoted the 80% figure which surprised me given how relatively short it lasted - way less than half what it should have. This figure seems misleading because it implies you should be getting around 4/5 of its original battery life, yet that was very clearly not the case. So why did it pass? Is it a weakness in the battery’s own reporting?

Apple wouldn’t let me have a new battery so it encouraged me to upgrade to the 7. Not the only reason but battery life was probably the single biggest factor in my decision to upgrade. I’ve been following Apple’s battery life claims with intent ever since. They definitely exaggerate what is possible under any kind of normal usage pattern and I struggle to reach their Wi-Fi browsing in Safari benchmark even with a new phone. I think it’s safe to say they round up! Lol

So I don’t really trust that figure as a reliable indicator of battery life or of overall battery health. The real figure was what I was observing and experiencing in my daily use, and to me that put it at less than 50%, especially with confidence that it won’t turn off at any moment.

I still really like the 7 and fortunately battery life hasn’t really been an issue in the Plus model - yet! I’m definitely concerned about Apple remotely crippling my device in future though. I certainly won’t be upgrading it to iOS 12.

This is a pretty bad way for Apple to end the year.

 

[Grinulf]

Loyalty goes both ways. I have been a loyal customer since 1982. It is time for Apple´s TOP management to take this ********* for real. There is definitely place for firing some people and take some of the great revenues of the Apple business and support a trade in exhangeprogramme. It is NOT good enough to "offer" a 29 dollar battery replacement.
Apple has not been telling the truth and done things to our products that has made me quite upset. Time for Apple to pay its customers for its wrong-doing.

 

[Rogifan]

Exactly. So the question becomes "Why is Apple refusing to replace batteries, when they know this will restore original performance?"

Because they're manipulating us to upgrade to new phones. Ka Ching Ka Ching.
It's a total scam.

And everything we're hearing from Apple now is a bunch of double-talk on account of them getting CAUGHT.

$50 discount on a couple dollar battery? Free iphone 8's to all who upgraded since the throttling began is more like it.

Right that’s how Apple gets people to keep buying their products and loyal customers by manipulating them. Do you realize how ridiculous you sound? Unless you think Apple customers are idiots?
[doublepost=1514719368][/doublepost]

Holy crap, that is scandalous! WTF Apple!

You believe that story?
[doublepost=1514719425][/doublepost]

If I could return the two iPhone 8's I purchased for my husband and myself I know I would. They need to fix the root of this problem and stop the throttling before I lay out any more money that's for sure.

Since when are iPhone 8’s being throttled?
[doublepost=1514719589][/doublepost]

Perfect opportunity for Samsung to jump in with some sort of iPhone trade-in coupon for an S8 or Note 8. Excellent marketing opportunity.

Why so you can have more battery issues?

https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-galaxy-note-8-battery-problem-dead-charge-825899/

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-s...s-wireless-charging-not-working-a8131471.html

https://www.tomsguide.com/us/galaxy-note-8-battery-problem,news-26303.html

 

[WatchFromAfar]

I have explained a few pages back in some detail why I feel Apple did things the way they did and why I feel it was not entirely unjustifiable.

https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...one-6-and-newer.2098263/page-13#post-25655092

In summary, the long-term solutions proposed by some of you like improved batteries, I believe Apple is actively working on them, but it's not something that can or should be rushed, and it's not something that Apple can make happen overnight however huge an uproar there is. It will happen, people just need to give Apple time.

In the meantime, throttling the processor and replacing the batteries for a nominal fee remain reasonable interim measures until a more permanent solution can be found. I am not saying the solution doesn't suck, but again, if you give my linked response above a glance, you will hopefully have a better understanding of why I seem to be "giving Apple a free pass".

If I wanted improved batteries I would wait for them, I don't think Apple is working on them, why should I, or you, or anyone believe that? They've said nothing or showed nothing in that regard. Is it wishful thinking fueling your beliefs? But in the meantime they put out products that have been found to be below-par. Hey if it's poor wait until it's better or admit it's sub-par from the outset "sorry it's the best we could do"

 

[Rogifan]

Apple flat-out admitted to it.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/20/a...ones-with-older-batteries-are-running-slower/

"Last year we released a feature for iPhone 6, iPhone 6s and iPhone SE to smooth out the instantaneous peaks only when needed to prevent the device from unexpectedly shutting down during these conditions. We’ve now extended that feature to iPhone 7 with iOS 11.2, and plan to add support for other products in the future."

Yes they added the feature but do we have confirmation that any 7’s are actually being throttled right now? I don’t trust benchmarking software.
[doublepost=1514719961][/doublepost]

https://www.geekbench.com/blog/2017/12/iphone-performance-and-battery-age/

"The distribution of iPhone 7 scores under iOS 10.2.0, iOS 10.2.1, and iOS 11.1.2 appears identical. However, the distribution changes with iOS 11.2.0 and starts to look like the iPhone 6s distribution from 10.2.1."

Again I don’t trust Geekbench scores. And someone posted that Apple said running software like this will kick in the throttling. I guess my question is does adding that code to the OS (or whatever they’re actually doing) automatically mean any phone running that software will be throttled? Or is it all dependent on the battery health?

 

[WatchFromAfar]

Yes they added the feature but do we have confirmation that any 7’s are actually being throttled right now? I don’t trust benchmarking software.
You've missed the point entirely; Apple are doing it to old iPhones (6s), yes you can be correct by saying "it doesn't happen to iPhone 7's or iPhone 8's or iPhone X's" but Apple are doing it to perfectly working iPhones that are still sold by, ermm guess who, Apple.

 

[Abazigal]

If I wanted improved batteries I would wait for them, I don't think Apple is working on them, why should I, or you, or anyone believe that? They've said nothing or showed nothing in that regard. Is it wishful thinking fueling your beliefs? But in the meantime they put out products that have been found to be below-par. Hey if it's poor wait until it's better or admit it's sub-par from the outset "sorry it's the best we could do"

Apple is not a company who comments on products before they are released. The iMac Pro was only released this year, but do you think they started work on it only recently? It will likely have been in the works for years, with Apple announcing it only when they felt the product was ready for primetime.

There is that rumour about Apple wanting to design its own power management chips, which in the light of this incident, is starting to make sense. Perhaps their current supplier simply cannot supply the components in the exact specs that Apple's processors demand.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/30/16719724/apple-power-management-chips-dialog-semiconductor

Then we also have the stacked battery design in the iPhone X.

Likewise, a product can never be complete or perfect. There is always a better component around the corner, and at some point, any company (not just Apple) has to say "these is the final spec", freeze the design and send it for manufacturing.

Apple isn't perfect, but they aren't run by idiots either.

 

[WatchFromAfar]

Apple is not a company who comments on products before they are released. The iMac Pro was only released this year, but do you think they started work on it only recently?

Likewise, a product can never be complete or perfect. There is always a better component around the corner, and at some point, any company (not just Apple) has to say "these is the final spec", freeze the design and send it for manufacturing.

Apple isn't perfect, but they aren't run by idiots either.

If an iPhone is in the work for "years" how do they push them out every Autumn?

 

[TailsToo]

Loyalty goes both ways. I have been a loyal customer since 1982. It is time for Apple´s TOP management to take this ********* for real. There is definitely place for firing some people and take some of the great revenues of the Apple business and support a trade in exhangeprogramme. It is NOT good enough to "offer" a 29 dollar battery replacement.
Apple has not been telling the truth and done things to our products that has made me quite upset. Time for Apple to pay its customers for its wrong-doing.

I’ve been an Apple user since I was a kid in the 1980s. Still love their products.

They need to be sued, and the documents that lead to the throttling decision need to be unearthed. If it’s because of a design defect, then Apple needs to either fix these phones, or give refunds and clean house of those who knew of the coverup.

If it is really an inevitable result of using lithium ion batteries, then their solution is acceptable.

 

[Ladybug]

It sounds as if you're giving up. You're using up your outrage now, and when your new phone's battery degrades in a couple of years, you won't do anything about it.

This is a PR nightmare for Apple. I expect they'll do what it takes to make it right, beyond 2018. Because even though you seem resigned to do nothing if it happens to your phone in the future, other people will not be so complacent.

I expect they're working on better software fixes, better batteries, and better PR spin in equal measure. Perhaps they'll do a battery recall (as they did with some iPhone 5 units), when and if these problems start showing up in 2017 model iPhones.

You are correct, I don't have any confidence in this working out for Apples customers.

 

[simonmet]

You believe that story?

Guess I was gullible. I don’t see the point in lying about it, so that threw me off.

 

[Ladybug]

Right that’s how Apple gets people to keep buying their products and loyal customers by manipulating them. Do you realize how ridiculous you sound? Unless you think Apple customers are idiots?
[doublepost=1514719368][/doublepost]
You believe that story?
[doublepost=1514719425][/doublepost]
Since when are iPhone 8’s being throttled?
[doublepost=1514719589][/doublepost]
Why so you can have more battery issues?

https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-galaxy-note-8-battery-problem-dead-charge-825899/

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-s...s-wireless-charging-not-working-a8131471.html

https://www.tomsguide.com/us/galaxy-note-8-battery-problem,news-26303.html

They aren't just yet. Apple says their throttling code will be used for other devices in the near future. I assume the 8/X.

 

[Abazigal]

If an iPhone is in the work for "years" how do they push them out every Autumn?

There are likely different teams working on different iPhone models and the related technology concurrently. It takes years to make the first model of any particular iPhone, due to the designing, prototyping, and testing. The iPhone X reportedly took 5 years to go from concept to final product.

So even as we speak, the design of the 2018 iPhone would already have been locked in, Apple is busy sourcing for components so that production can be ramped up, and the 2019 iPhone is currently in prototyping.

That’s why it helps for the form factor of the iPhone to stay constant. When you know the dimensions way in advance, you have more time to design the internals with them in mind.

 

[fhall1]

My 9.7" iPad Pro has done the same thing pretty much from day one. I couldn't figure it out, often times I'll pick it up and it says to enter the passcode to enable touch ID, which I realize now means that the device had rebooted itself when I wasn't using it.

No - that’s not what it means. https://www.macworld.com/article/30...-to-enter-your-passcode-when-you-wake-up.html

 

[r.harris1]

If an iPhone is in the work for "years" how do they push them out every Autumn?

By having a product roadmap that goes out several years. While I have no insight into Apple's internal roadmap, it's a good guess that they're at least thinking about 2019 (in addition to 2018) if not actively working on it (I'd guess they are working on it). Maybe even further out.

It's probably more critical for Apple to do this, at least in some ways, than other manufacturers since they design many of their own chips and don't pull those off-the-shelf.