Apple Testifies on iPhone Throttling Before Canadian Parliamentary Committee

[Bacillus]

The facts that iPhone 7 is affected and throttling thresholds were (randomly?) beyond 20% charge level are just inexcusable.
All PR being targeted to overshadow this !!

 

[baanpro]

Charging to temporarily fix a defective component and making it seem like they're the good ones trying to help you. God, Apple marketing is truly brilliant.

Old batteries are not a "defective component", maybe you have some Duracell batteries around the house that last forever? I'm not an apple fanboy, but that comment is just plain wrong.
[doublepost=1519955045][/doublepost]

What the hell has this got to do with any level of government in any country? It has nothing to do with anti-competiveness, nothing to do with a monopoly, nothing to do with foreign ownership laws or any other matter related legislation that a government as a norm falls under their power.

It has to do with protecting the consumer from BS decisions that companies make to pad their bank accounts. The Government is always looking for outliers when it comes to scamming the public. I know the small guys get away with it, but as one guy said earlier, their size puts a bullseye on their back.

 

[firewood]

The facts that iPhone 7 is affected and throttling thresholds were (randomly?) beyond 20% charge level are just inexcusable.

Perfectly excusable if you know about safety margins. Apple may have been overcautious with their margins, but best safety requires a phone to try to not shutdown if the battery measured to be slightly suspect.

 

[Naraxus]

Apple deserves to be reamed over this. Completely deceitful.

 

[firewood]

If your computer slowed down to keep an old batteries performance, ...

They do. Measure how many hours+minutes a laptop can run benchmarks in full turbo mode (fans full speed) when new, and when near end-of-life when running off the original battery.

 

[DeepIn2U]

"Apple would never intentionally do anything ... to drive customer upgrades."

What about the missing capacity option in iPhones???

Precisely the option that's best for most users is missing, driving people into upgrades either at purchase, or some time later.

For example now it's 64GB (too little) or 256GB (too much and very expensive), for many years.

I hate this, because I want to love and believe Apple.

You have the first post and I find it odd you didn't catch that the first paragraph by Apple Canada's head of Legal in NO way actually answered the first question, lol.

Famulak went on to explain that Apple is offering $35 battery replacements in Canada, down from $99 ($29 in the U.S., down from $79) ... this while the Canadian dollar has been more the US dollar for 3 days. Don't worry it'll take Apple 3mths (judging from the past 4x the Canadian dollar was worth more in exchange to the US dollar consecutively in the past 10yrs).

Looks like somehow Apple will end up paying one fiddler or another. Cases like this is why Apple's Mail will never evolve 😉 harder to search = less negatively impacting evidence in emails 😉

all joking aside something doesn't smell right at Apple with the throttling. "limited" (for less than the length of time the throttling has been doing on before official iOS release to resolve the issue with options for users to disable) is an insult. Make the battery replacements at the cheap price equal to the length of time before the fix is issued.
[doublepost=1519963232][/doublepost]

Kind of odd how quickly this happened up here in Canada.

Less bureaucracy to go through in Canada vs the USA.

 

[omihek]

Charging to temporarily fix a defective component and making it seem like they're the good ones trying to help you. God, Apple marketing is truly brilliant.

If you really believe an aging battery is a "defective component," then you probably have a fit every time you have to gas up your vehicle, am I right?

 

[Stella]

Such as ensuring no Consumer related laws have been broken, Consumer Protection for instance.

This is very worthy of government questioning.

What the hell has this got to do with any level of government in any country? It has nothing to do with anti-competiveness, nothing to do with a monopoly, nothing to do with foreign ownership laws or any other matter related legislation that a government as a norm falls under their power.

 

[Deasnutz]

Apple is very elaborately full of crap.

 

[Burger Thing]

Perfectly excusable if you know about safety margins. Apple may have been overcautious with their margins, but best safety requires a phone to try to not shutdown if the battery measured to be slightly suspect.

It is totally unacceptable, that a device just over a year old needs to have any special treatment regarding batteries at all.

 

[Jesse Waugh]

The sole purpose of the software update in this case was to help customers to continue to use older iPhones with aging batteries without shutdowns - not to drive them to buy newer devices.

Apple is still tiptoeing around the fact this problem is likely a design defect specific to iPhone 6/6+ and should have necessitated a recall of those models, and that the software change was their attempt to avoid that costly outcome. They keep using the "older phones" euphemism to conceal that fact.

Apple just gave me a new iPhone 6S Plus as a replacement for my 6 Plus, which the Geniuses supposedly broke when attempting to change the battery. I’d made two government-registered official complaints to the Barcelona Apple Store over a period of two months because they stated they didn’t have replacement batteries in stock.

This might lend support to your theory about iPhone 6/6+ being design defective.
[doublepost=1519971434][/doublepost]

Charging to temporarily fix a defective component and making it seem like they're the good ones trying to help you. God, Apple marketing is truly brilliant.

Marketing or lies?

 

[firewood]

It is totally unacceptable, that a device just over a year old needs to have any special treatment regarding batteries at all.

Then don't buy any device with an Li-Ion battery, as they all require special treatment. Why else are smart battery controllers required to keep them from catching fire?

 

[tex210]

Apple just gave me a new iPhone 6S Plus as a replacement for my 6 Plus, which the Geniuses supposedly broke when attempting to change the battery. I’d made two government-registered official complaints to the Barcelona Apple Store over a period of two months because they stated they didn’t have replacement batteries in stock.

This might lend support to your theory about iPhone 6/6+ being design defective.
[doublepost=1519971434][/doublepost]

Marketing or lies?

Wow. They gave you a better model and you’re mad? They are behind in battery replacements everywhere and you think that’s evidence of a defect? Perhaps they wanted to make the squeaky wheel happy. I’m sure you were a customer they really wanted making a scene in a store. My iPad mini4 had a third party keyboard damage the screen. No AppleCare. I didn’t even buy the iPad from Apple. They swapped it out for free, without hesitation. I also didn’t expect that. I thought I’d be paying. I was thankful. Little did I know it was a conspiracy.

 

[alexhardaker]

I have lived with a <80% iPhone 6 for about half a year now until i replaced the battery yesterday, i never realized how slow my phone was thanks to the safeguard implemented by Apple.

But seriously, my phone is 4 years old now and lithium batteries wear out, cant expect them to last forever, no-one should, my old battery had almost 1500 cycles during these 4 years and yesterday i extended my phones life for 2 years atleast (although i will upgrade to the next X in the fall) for 29 dollar, the cost of 3-4 pizzas so i really dont get what all the fuzz is about, battery replacement was cheap before too and Apple gave the phones extended lives through software to safeguard the phones from crashing/turning off thanks to low voltage with the old and crappy batteries.

Dont know why some people are upset by all this

People think that Apple didn’t make this clear enough in the update and therefore think Apple were hoping that people would get pissed off with having a slower phone thinking they need a new one, so would buy one instead of going to Apple and asking what’s going on. The face that Genius Bar employees refused to replace batteries when the iPhone had slowed down even with it being slow with the battery not going under the 80% health rate kinda says something, doesn’t it?

 

[CarpalMac]

Dear Apple, your motivation isn't the user anymore, but the pile of cash you have. If you were motivated by the user, you wouldn't ask $\€\£1000 for your product. I have a feeling their profit margin is very high.

Anyway, it's not just Apple but every big company/corporation out there. They are all the same GREEDY!

Money is absolutely their one and ONLY motivation. As it is any publicly traded company.

To pretend it is anything else is nauseatingly disingenuous. It's like Disney pretending that their only reason to be in existence is so they can create "magical dreams" for children. Yes, sure. That's why their park tickets have gone up in price by ~50% in 4 years. It's all about them dreams.

That people fall for this crap is deeply worrying.

 

[Jdoll0060]

Apple just gave me a new iPhone 6S Plus as a replacement for my 6 Plus, which the Geniuses supposedly broke when attempting to change the battery. I’d made two government-registered official complaints to the Barcelona Apple Store over a period of two months because they stated they didn’t have replacement batteries in stock.

This might lend support to your theory

Let me break this down for you. This is the current journey at any given Apple store.

Once you get the part for your phone (iPhone 6/6+ being the longest wait because of a global shortages of phones and batteries) and drop it off for repair, your phone is taken into a repair room that has ~1-8 repair technicians working on phones, and that gets put into a line of 0-60+ phones in need of a modular repair (depending on location and traffic, keeping in mind we have anywhere from 4K-6k open orders) Your phone is then taken by a random tech in a F.I.F.O repair line and worked on.
Now your 6+ battery is held in place by 3 adhesive tabs (2 tabs on the 6), if one of the aging tabs snaps (depending on how deep it breaks) the only option would be to bend/dig the combustible (Samsung exploding phones) lithium ion battery out of your device. Apple doesn’t want to endanger the health and safety of its employees, so the S.O.P is to replace the device with the same model. If we don’t have your globaly unavailability phone in stock we can (in some situations with predetermined units, 6+) replace the device with one generation newer phone for the original quoted price ($29)
The technician that repairs your phone has no idea who you are and will not care due to trying to keep up with the sheer number of repairs and the expected turn around time for that day. We don’t know or care how many complaints you’ve filed we are just trying to make it through the day without a battery having a thermal event that forces us to evacuate the repair room for a minimum of 30 minutes.

The fact that you can’t seem to grasp is that you are not the only person in the world, plenty of other people have waited patiently for a battery to come in without wasting other people’s time.

 

[Burger Thing]

Then don't buy any device with an Li-Ion battery, as they all require special treatment. Why else are smart battery controllers required to keep them from catching fire?

I didn’t know that all Li-Ion devices need to be slowed down just after a years of usage because of battery degradation. Otherwise they might catch fire. Thanks firewood. One can learn every day something new here on MRs.

 

[Jdoll0060]

I didn’t know that all Li-Ion devices need to be slowed down just after a years of usage because of battery degradation. Otherwise they might catch fire. Thanks firewood. One can learn every day something new here on MRs.

Did you know that different devices have different power systems? That batteries in cars, laptops, and phones are all different, and even behave different in the same device based on individual usage? You know like car tires or something, just with chemicals and electricity. And did you know dynamic power management only kicks in under peak conditions, so not all experiences are the same?

We have so much to learn from one another.

 

[Ries]

If you really believe an aging battery is a "defective component," then you probably have a fit every time you have to gas up your vehicle, am I right?

There is a difference between being a aging battery and being a defective battery. My Macbook 2011's battery is a aging battery, doesn't hold charge that well anymore, but it works and doesn't cause slowdowns or crashes. The iPhone 6/7 battery is a defective battery, it causes slowdowns or crashes way before it should be considered used up.

Just because it is a wear component doesn't mean it is acceptable that it is wearinging down faster that comparable products or stop working before it's end of life.

But you would just be fine buying a new tank for your car because it starts leaking and crashing the car at random times or slows down on the highway to a crawl cause you hit the gas too hard after a year or two, am I right?
[doublepost=1519977852][/doublepost]

Did you know that different devices have different power systems? That batteries in cars, laptops, and phones are all different, and even behave different in the same device based on individual usage? You know like car tires or something, just with chemicals and electricity. And did you know dynamic power management only kicks in under peak conditions, so not all experiences are the same?

We have so much to learn from one another.

Did you know that you can design a product not to exibit those flaws before EOL? We have so much to learn from one another.

Just don't cheap out of buying lower quality batteries, but I guess Apple need that greed margin.

 

[Easttime]

I have lived with a <80% iPhone 6 for about half a year now until i replaced the battery yesterday, i never realized how slow my phone was thanks to the safeguard implemented by Apple ... Dont know why some people are upset by all this

Because my 6 was getting slower and slower in a way that an aging battery alone would not explain it, I began to assume that it was because the hardware was being outpaced by the software, it was suggested to me at an Apple store that I could upgrade, I held off and tried a nuke and pave which helped a little, I had no idea their software was throttling my phone, then the story broke, then Apple dropped the price of a battery replacement and made it easier to get one after the story broke, I did that and now my 6 is perfectly functional without having to spend a pile on a new phone. Transparency issue. That’s probably why.

 

[Altis]

Because the random shutdowns were happening to phones less than two years old with less than 500 cycles on them and the batteries were testing fine at Apple's Genius bar. This became a public issue recently after Apple was forced to acknowledge the voltage clipping issue, but they had known they had a problem for quite a while now. They even had time to program specific test routines into the 10.2 iOS release trying to figure out what was going on.

Also, Apple acknowledged they implemented the throttling algorithm on the iPhone 7 with the release of iOS 11. The iPhone 7 wasn't even a year old at that point yet Apple is concerned about it randomly shutting down too.

The issue isn't four-year-old phones; it is the phones still under warranty or Apple Care that are well within the device's stated useful life and should be expected to function at 100%.

This is exactly the crux of the issue. Apple doesn't address this at all in their whole "we're doing you a favour!" spiel.

The fact that the throttling starts well above the 80% threshold, during which Apple's diagnostics report the battery as "Healthy" and Apple would refuse to replace it (whether under warranty or paid for).

Combine it with the fact that Apple didn't tell anyone, not even their own techs. Users would never suspect the seemingly fine battery, that would report as "Healthy" even if it were tested, as the culprit for poor performance. That the 7 was included before the 8 was out, and phones under a year old and still under full warranty were being throttled... even when fully charged and plugged in... and Apple recently removed access to battery health info for iOS devices... and Apple makes the batteries a royal pain to replace...

The whole thing is shady. The only reason Apple would win these cases is if the prosecutors don't know to bring up all these technical details, or nobody in the room understands it. It's clear Apple is very good at playing down what they did and won't get into the specifics at all.

 

[Bacillus]

Perfectly excusable if you know about safety margins. Apple may have been overcautious with their margins, but best safety requires a phone to try to not shutdown if the battery measured to be slightly suspect.

Buff. 20% is a 10% safety margin over 10% (which has safety by itself, I throttle at 5%)

 

[Burger Thing]

Did you know that different devices have different power systems? That batteries in cars, laptops, and phones are all different, and even behave different in the same device based on individual usage? You know like car tires or something, just with chemicals and electricity. And did you know dynamic power management only kicks in under peak conditions, so not all experiences are the same?

We have so much to learn from one another.

Exactly. Start probably with sarcasm

 

[jonblatho]

... and Apple recently removed access to battery health info for iOS devices...

In your massive spiel on “technical details,” you neglected to verify that this was actually true before repeating it.

Battery health information was never available as part of iOS, but it has for a long time been (and still is) exposed to third-party apps which you can download on the App Store right now if you want, even for free. For the more technical folks, it even shows up if your iPhone is plugged into your Mac with Console open.

 

[Jesse Waugh]

Wow. They gave you a better model and you’re mad? They are behind in battery replacements everywhere and you think that’s evidence of a defect? Perhaps they wanted to make the squeaky wheel happy. I’m sure you were a customer they really wanted making a scene in a store. My iPad mini4 had a third party keyboard damage the screen. No AppleCare. I didn’t even buy the iPad from Apple. They swapped it out for free, without hesitation. I also didn’t expect that. I thought I’d be paying. I was thankful. Little did I know it was a conspiracy.

Wow. Work for Apple?