Apple Now Faces 26+ Lawsuits for 'Purposefully' or 'Secretly' Slowing Down Older iPhones

[firewood]

You should probably go on the stand as an expert witness in Apple’s defense.

I may know more about benchmarking than all the non-engineers here.

But Apple employs multiple phD's far more expert in benchmarking than all of us put together. If the lawsuits go anywhere at all, they'll be the ones being deposed on actual performance measurements, and whether the crazy stuff posted here has any validity.

 

[mwd25]

You are just playing on a confusion on words.

The slowdown due to battery degradation did happen. I don't even remember Apple denying it.

What didn't happen is the conspiracy theory behind it that all this time it was Apple intention to do "planned obsolescence" so you buy more new phones. In fact, the official and reasonable explanation is that on the contrary it extended the usable life of older phone (because intermittent shutdowns is worse than throttling.), which is the opposite of the theory.

When I say "It didn't happen", it's the conspiracy theory, not the battery throttling.

Here, here. When you see "news" reports, the impression is given that performance across the board has been significantly slowed. And its been done for the express reason of trying to get people to upgrade. And its been going on "for a long time" I keep hearing that phrase. Well, personally, I dont define a long time as 2 phone generations ago. Your also given the impression that we have all been scammed and that we would all be better off if this line of code was never written. People would still be running around with their Iphone 4 and would not have upgraded. So, heres the thing, before Apple did this......Prior to Iphone 6, my Iphone 5 battery was being asked to provide so much power to cpu that it expanded and popped the screen away from the frame!!!! Thats not the Iphone experience I want. We cant have it both ways. Pretty sure that issue, one that was very common to any iphone 5 over two years old has been solved and no phones post Iphone 5 have had that issue. An issue that is directly related to a degraded battery trying to supply too much power for intensive tasks.I really wish Apple would allow people to turn off the feature. Here you go, you dont want it, fine. Dont come crying to us when your battery heats up and warps your screen cause its expanding.

 

[firewood]

Shouldn’t software get more efficient over time anyway?

Nope. The opposite. The trend for the last several decades is for the software to get slower faster than the hardware gets faster. An Apple II boots faster and has lower keyboard latency than any Android or iOS device (except maybe the latest iPad Pro in some limited scenarios).

Todays code trades bling, features, and security for efficiency.

 

[Act3]

Great question.. and a hypothesis for an answer.

Is it possible that the iPhone 6 hardware reached a sufficient level of performance where the relationship between peak power available and peak power consumption became a problem? By that I mean was the iPhone 6 hardware sufficiently advanced to *require* the battery to provide power bursts that after a 20% degradation were simply not available.

I'm certainly no expert but this strikes me as at least a logical hypothesis.

Thoughts?

I think the batteries got too thin. Smaller batter has more internal resistance to start with, that internal resistance goes up over time as battery degrades. It gets to the point where the voltage drop caused by the internal battery resistance is high enough that the terminal voltage which the CPU gets is too low and phone shuts down. Throttling the CPU will lower the current drawn by the CPU, therefore less current in circuit and less voltage dropped by the internal resistance of the battery and therefore more voltage supplied to drive the processor.

V = emf – Ir

V is the voltage what the CPU sees, emf is the voltage made by the battery, and I (current) times r ( internal battery resistance)

 

[falainber]

I have, and no where did I find the word "throttle" or a mention of a lower processor clock frequency.



That does not provide reliable information on the actual processor speed. Just an upper bound. Hypothetically, the processor could actually be running faster, but mostly be busy with other OS processes or tasks, or blocked by such, and the benchmark would report a misleading lower score.

Sorry, but as an iOS app developer of high frame rate apps, I've likely written a lot more benchmarks than you have, and know more about the possible flaws. So I don't trust benchmarks on closed OS systems without a lot more physical engineering data.

That's just a lot of BS. Apple did not use a word "throttle". So? Are you surprised? They called it "optimization" and "power management". But it's the same. And as far as benchmarks are concerned... calculation intensive tasks will scale linearly with CPU frequency drop. It's not as complicated as you are trying to pretend it is. Whether you written any benchmarks or not does not change the fact that Apple throttled iPhone CPUs (along with other tweaks) after screwing up the design of the phones starting with iPhone 6.

 

[itguy06]

Bad example. As a car ages, the engine and transmission wear and there are major power losses. I hsven’t seen a auto manufacture stating this is the owner’s manual or on their websites. The same assumption should be made with batteries.

There are not major power losses in a vehicle as it ages if it is maintained properly. Maybe as you get to 150-200k but the cars of today do not slow down as time and miles pile on.

 

[ronno]

I may know more about benchmarking than all the non-engineers here.

But Apple employs multiple phD's far more expert in benchmarking than all of us put together. If the lawsuits go anywhere at all, they'll be the ones being deposed on actual performance measurements, and whether the crazy stuff posted here has any validity.

I think you are going down the rabbit hole of worrying too much about *how they slowed it down. The main thing is that they slowed it, and then let people get $800 replacements instead of informing them that a new battery would solve the slowness and crashing.
Honestly, the technical specifics about how they showed it don’t matter As much as the fact that they did slow it, and they’ve admitted it.

 

[firewood]

... calculation intensive tasks will scale linearly with CPU frequency drop.

Not only is this assumption not always true. But these kinds of simplistic assumptions could be part of what's behind the security vulnerabilities recently discovered in CPUs designed by Intel and many others. (See earlier MacRumors stories)

 

[mebehere]

Nope. The opposite. The trend for the last several decades is for the software to get slower faster than the hardware gets faster. An Apple II boots faster and has lower keyboard latency than any Android or iOS device (except maybe the latest iPad Pro in some limited scenarios).

Todays code trades bling, features, and security for efficiency.

Bummer. Except for the security part. I don’t get new features at this point. Not ones that I give a damn about anyway.

 

[firewood]

There are not major power losses in a vehicle as it ages if it is maintained properly.

I don't know about power loses. But I do know from experience that the minimum cold cranking temperature will go up as a lead-acid battery gets older, and wet traction in rain will be reduced before tires show their wear bars. All with proper by-the-book maintenance.

 

[falainber]

Not only is this assumption not always true. But these kinds of simplistic assumptions could be part of what's behind the security vulnerabilities recently discovered in CPUs designed by Intel and many others. (See earlier MacRumors stories)

Yes, this assumption is not always true. Nor did I say it was. But in this case it is true. That's all that matters.

Geekbench 4 uses (source) a number of different tests, or workloads, to measure CPU performance. The workloads are divided into four different subsections:

• Crypto Crypto workloads measure the crypto instruction performance of your computer by performing cryptography tasks that make heavy use of crypto instructions. While not all software uses crypto instructions, the software that does can benefit enormously from it.
  
  
• Integer Integer workloads measure the integer instruction performance of your computer by performing processor-intensive tasks that make heavy use of integer instructions. All software makes heavy use of integer instructions, meaning a high integer scores indicates good overall performance.
  
  
• Floating Point Floating point workloads measure floating point performance by performing a variety of processor-intensive tasks that make heavy use of floating-point operations. While almost all software makes use of floating point instructions, floating point performance is especially important in video games, digital content creation, and high-performance computing applications.
  
  
• Memory Memory workloads measure memory latency and bandwidth. Software working with large data structures (e.g., digital content creation) or with referential data structures (e.g., databases, web browsers) rely on good memory performance to keep the processor busy.
  

Out of these four groups only the memory tests may not scale linearly with CPU frequency (but they would be affected too)

 

[firewood]

Out of these four groups only the memory tests may not scale linearly with CPU frequency (but they would be affected too)

It would be interesting to get individual breakdowns in the reported performance of those four groups for devices that are claimed to be "slowed down" by Apple.

 

[JosephAW]

All because of this mad pursuit of thinness.

 

[KAZphoto]

This is because they got caught. They are finding out their secrecy is being challenged in this ever connected Information Age.

We had a similar but different issue as people here but I feel on a smaller scale. We upgraded my wife’s iPhone 4 to the 4S prematurely because she would be on a phone call, and I could hear her but she couldn’t hear the person she was connected to. Taken in once or twice and they would say hardware problem you should replace it. We did because her phone needs to work as a phone. The disappointing part is that later they released a software update with a note about fixing that exact software bug. I was not thrilled.

Not sure how many others this has happened to. Apple can’t sweep everything under the rug all the time...

 

[firewood]

All because of this mad pursuit of thinness.

And, at the same time, more processor and graphics performance, faster networking, plus bigger or higher resolution displays.

 

[Thanatoast]

This is why we can’t have nice things.

 

[sterlingindigo]

Let me be perfectly clear, it’s all the time way slower now and it’s not just the battery and it’s not just when it’s cold. It’s way slower all the time. Ridiculously slow opening Facebook or even typing a note. Even after a new battery replacement performed at Apple store. You type half a sentence and the words don’t show up for a minute or more sometimes. Then all of a sudden the type gets populated quickly. Super laggy, it sucks- and I won’t be a sucker again.

 

[bladerunner2000]

Monopoly?... The market is saturated with phone makers, and some good ones too.

Really? There's another company that makes phones that run iOS?

 

[Ladybug]

Sadly Apple deserved this. They should have used higher quality parts to ensure that the device works at least two years in a sufficient way.

Agreed..You would think right? But no, lets just continue using the same quality batteries and insert some code to throttle users instead. That is not good engineering, especially when they didn't learn from their mistake. I don't expect my phone to last forever but expecting 2 years out of a premium device should not be asking too much.

 

[rootee]

My phones fully charged, and running great, Thanks AAPL!

 

[Tiger8]

Why are no such lawsuits being filed against Microsoft, Dell and other companies who have been implementing same feature to prevent unexpected laptop shutdowns?

Says who? Sources? And please don't post a link about low power battery management, it's completely different

 

[rootee]

Really? There's another company that makes phones that run iOS?

Okay, I see your point — wait, what were we talking about?

 

[firewood]

Really? There's another company that makes phones that run iOS?

Nope. The majority of companies in the same market sells mobile devices running Android. Read any of the major reports on market share. Even the reports put on the front page of MacRumors.

 

[Abazigal]

Really? There's another company that makes phones that run iOS?

That's like saying Macdonalds has a monopoly on Big Macs. Obviously, if you like their burgers so much, then yeah, Macdonalds is the only place you can go, but if your aim is to simply get a burger to fill your tummy, there are tons of burger joints where you can get your fix.

 

[Regbial]

So those folks are all OK with their phones instantly shutting off when they open Facebook?

uhh... you shouldn't even be using the Facebook app.. Doesn't everyone know this? The app has (or had?) a constant memory leak and stayed on even when force quitting it from the app switcher.

If you *must* use Facebook, use it from Safari.

Also LOL, finally Apple is being kept in check. About time. >