Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
I have not seen them confirm that this offer will be available everywhere they sell iPhones. I hope so since I have a bad battery on an 18 month old iPhone 6S and I am not in the US.
 
  • Like
Reactions: apolloa
So we went from throttled to not working? This is getting comical at this point. To all the ones who seem to be soooo salty, go to android if you feel so strongly.
Oh boy, you must be a blast at parties.

You said highest performance. When it isn’t the performing at half speed, it’s not working at the highest performance. Since you are chasing specs, apparently, that’s ‘not working as expected.’

See?
 
  • Like
Reactions: clauzzz203
It's only "planned obsolescence" when apple admits it. I'm waiting for them to admit it. But you actually think most consumers are that ignorant to believe this old tired meme?
They have already been caught at it. You can deny it all you want. Won’t change the facts if the case. If that notification pops up on all phones in just a year of use good luck convincing customers otherwise.
 
Throttle scenario A: demanding application generates excess heat that could damage the phone. The solution is to throttle the processor in a way that prevents heat levels from reaching a damaging level.

Throttle scenario B: demanding application generates peak power draw that could damage the phone when battery is too low. The solution is to throttle the processor in a way that prevents the power draw from reaching a damaging level.

People seem to be trying to claim that A is understandable, but B is not.


The problem was Apple was trying to hide it. Why would they offer a battery replacement so cheap if they did nothing wrong.. Remember Apple isn't the company it used to be and I highly doubt they give stuff away. Looking at their numbers they def don't give stuff away.. So the other possibility is they F%^&%$# up...


James
 



Apple this afternoon addressed customer concerns about an ongoing controversy over power management features in older iPhones, pledging to introduce more detailed information about battery health and reducing the price of battery replacements for all of 2018.

In a letter explaining its policies, Apple apologizes for the misinformation that's been spread and says that it would never "intentionally shorten the life of any Apple product, or degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades."

iphone-6s-colors-800x586.jpg

At issue is a power management feature that was initially introduced in iOS 10.2.1 in the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6s, which was implemented to prevent unexpected shutdowns due to high power draw peaks. Apple's lack of clarity about the feature has led to a number of lawsuits being filed in recent days claiming that Apple is purposefully slowing down older iPhones.

Apple explains the situation and the aging of batteries both in the letter and in a new support document.These power management features are implemented in the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus, iPhone 7, and iPhone 7 Plus, and will be added to future iPhones as required. They kick in when the battery begins to degrade and can be fixed with a new battery.

Apple says it began to receive feedback this fall from customers who were seeing slower speeds, which it initially thought might be due to software updates and minor bugs in iOS 11, but it now believes the continued chemical aging of the batteries in older devices is at fault.

To allay customer concerns and address recent customer feedback, Apple says it will implement several changes.

- The price for out-of-warranty iPhone battery replacements is being dropped from $79 to $29, starting in late January and lasting through December 2018. Apple plans to provide more information on the price drop in the near future, but it will apply to anyone with an iPhone 6 or later whose battery needs to be replaced.

- In early 2018, an iOS update will introduce new features to give users more visibility into the health of their iPhone's battery, so they can clearly see whether the state of the battery is affecting performance.

Apple says its team is also always working on ways to make the user experience better, including how performance is managed to avoid unexpected shutdowns as batteries age.

Article Link: Apple to Offer $29 iPhone Battery Replacements, More Battery Health Info in iOS
 
If you are expecting blood, you will be sorely disappointed.

I am not sure how anyone can even conflate these two issues. By Apple’s own admission, they only started slowing down their phones from iOS 10.2.1 onwards, and only from the iPhone 6, and only to avoid unwanted shutdowns.

But people have been claiming that Apple slows down their devices for many years running, which is an entirely separate matter. An iPhone 4 barely runs iOS 7 because it doesn’t have the specs for it, plain and simple. There’s no conspiracy by Apple to cripple your phone to make you run out and get another iPhone.

I don’t expect any fallout from this matter.

That’s because you live in the US which has no consumer laws and government regulation.
And I have read many stories now including in mainstream media, the ones that Jo Public listens to and reads, claim about the conspiracy theories being proven now.

If you don’t think their will be fallout from this then you’ll be sorely disappointed as I said, you wait till the regulators start to investigate this one. Because Apple did not tell a SOUL about slowing iOS devices, not one outside Apple.
And then they refused to replace batteries despite their software deciding that the battery be of such low capacity it slowed your device down.

And the fact they have admitted to doing this for at least a year. I think they will be found if breach of consumer rights and false advertising in Europe but we will see.

I think here in the U.K. you can use your right to the ‘fit for purpose’ law.

We will see over the next year what happens but I wouldn’t hold my hopes up for no action being taken, and that’s not including the class action lawsuites in the US which Apple will find it very tough to defend against.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: clauzzz203



Apple this afternoon addressed customer concerns about an ongoing controversy over power management features in older iPhones, pledging to introduce more detailed information about battery health and reducing the price of battery replacements for all of 2018.

In a letter explaining its policies, Apple apologizes for the misinformation that's been spread and says that it would never "intentionally shorten the life of any Apple product, or degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades."

iphone-6s-colors-800x586.jpg

At issue is a power management feature that was initially introduced in iOS 10.2.1 in the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6s, which was implemented to prevent unexpected shutdowns due to high power draw peaks. Apple's lack of clarity about the feature has led to a number of lawsuits being filed in recent days claiming that Apple is purposefully slowing down older iPhones.

Apple explains the situation and the aging of batteries both in the letter and in a new support document.These power management features are implemented in the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus, iPhone 7, and iPhone 7 Plus, and will be added to future iPhones as required. They kick in when the battery begins to degrade and can be fixed with a new battery.

Apple says it began to receive feedback this fall from customers who were seeing slower speeds, which it initially thought might be due to software updates and minor bugs in iOS 11, but it now believes the continued chemical aging of the batteries in older devices is at fault.

To allay customer concerns and address recent customer feedback, Apple says it will implement several changes.

- The price for out-of-warranty iPhone battery replacements is being dropped from $79 to $29, starting in late January and lasting through December 2018. Apple plans to provide more information on the price drop in the near future, but it will apply to anyone with an iPhone 6 or later whose battery needs to be replaced.

- In early 2018, an iOS update will introduce new features to give users more visibility into the health of their iPhone's battery, so they can clearly see whether the state of the battery is affecting performance.

Apple says its team is also always working on ways to make the user experience better, including how performance is managed to avoid unexpected shutdowns as batteries age.

Article Link: Apple to Offer $29 iPhone Battery Replacements, More Battery Health Info in iOS

What about iPad's? they're failing to include those. I'm not paying $299 for a battery.
 
Here's the timeline of what happened:


  • AppleCare's escalation team approaches Engineering and says, "We're seeing a ton of in and out of warranty returns and repairs due to degraded batteries. This is costing us millions of dollars. Can you figure out why the iPhone 6/s failure rate is so much higher than normal?
  • Engineering gets ahold of some Failure Analysis captures from the field to reproduce the issue. They find that when the battery voltage drops due to age or cold weather, the sudden shutdowns occur.
  • They look at the peak voltage demands from the iPhone 6/s relative to the battery output curve.
  • They realize the fundamental design defect in the iPhone 6/s: the device's peak voltage demand was way, way too high relative to the battery's capabilities. This defect was not present in previous devices, and was fixed in the iPhone 7.
  • Engineering, AppleCare, Marketing and sundry Management discuss next steps. They're not going to do a recall, admitting the design defect, because the PR and financial hit would be in the tens of billions. They don't want to keep replacing phones or batteries, because that's costing millions. They're not going to put in UI letting users know their battery needs serviced, because Marketing forbids any public discussion of anything being wrong with Apple products.
  • Engineering says, "This is just a voltage problem. If we drop the clocks, we can ensure the devices never go over the peak battery voltage." Thanks to the power management hw & sw, they have good data on the battery voltage potential. The CPU already runs at lots of different clock speeds, depending on load. So it was a very simple change to detect the battery voltage max, and set the max clock speed below that threshold. Problem solved.
  • Engineering Management tells senior Execs "Okay, we have a fix for the sudden shutdown failures, but devices are going to be slower as a result. We really need to surface this to users, to mitigate the bad experience." Marketing says absolutely not we never say anything is wrong with Apple products. AppleCare says please just ship it, we have a huge pile of defective phones building up.
  • Apple rolls the dice and ships the silent software change, hoping the expensive returns will go down, customers will at least be able to use their devices, if in a degraded state, and prays no one will ever figure out the hack.
  • People slowly start figuring out their devices are slower. Finally the GeekBench guys query their database, and the CPU clock/voltage throttling sticks out like a sore thumb.
  • All hell breaks loose, and here we are.
It's critical to keep in mind this is not just about "worn out" batteries. Battery voltage drops with cold weather. My iPhone 6 was exhibiting this design defect when it was only a year old, as soon as I exposed it for the first time to cold weather. It would shut off instantly when I stepped outside. After a few months, the shutdowns became frequent as the battery did begin to "wear out" but in my case, this battery was marginal from the factory. Apple Engineering completly screwed up by allowing so little margin between max voltage requirement and worst case battery performance. No other models have had this problem before or since.

This is a coverup for what should be the biggest product recall in history. As long as Apple has people yelling at each other over battery chemistry, they win.

Probably pretty close to accurate except the issue was not fixed with the iPhone 7. Apple added that device to the throttling routine with the 11.2 update and Geekbench has data showing there are a number of them affected by throttling even though they are no more than 15 months old.

Throttling because of battery voltage clipping issues is a stop-gap measure to compensate for an obvious design flaw. I can't imagine Apple thinks cutting performance by half in phones that are less than two years old would be acceptable. By the time Apple figured out they had a much more prevalent problem than initially suspected the iPhone 7 was already being sold and consequently suffers from the same lack of a proper battery.

However, it is likely they fixed it with the A11 chipset and/or battery specifications in the iPhone 8 and the X. We'll eventually know once the battery health function is released. If the iPhone 8 and X users have very few reported instances of throttling after one to two years we'll know Apple did something different in those devices.
 
They would not have recommended it but Apple will not refuse you to sell a new battery if you really insist on it.

Hello manu chao and thanks for your reply. My personal experience was at an Apple store a few months ago. I went there because my iphone was very slow and I thought there was a problem with it. I had restored it to factory settings. They told me the iphone was slow because it was old (iphone 6) They recommended to replace my phone soon!

At the same time without knowing my phone was slow because of the battery, I asked them to replace my battery because it wouldn't last more than an hour! They run their diagnostics and told me my battery passed every test and it was fine. I precisely told them I understand my iPhone is not under warranty so I don't expect them to replace my battery for free but they still refused to change it. I didn't insist more than that as you put it because my alternative was to take it to a non apple store to replace it there as I did.

After that my iphone suddenly got fast again. Back then I had no idea why...but now with all this battery throttling issue that's on the news now I can definitely connect the dots..
 
Throttle scenario A: demanding application generates excess heat that could damage the phone. The solution is to throttle the processor in a way that prevents heat levels from reaching a damaging level.

Throttle scenario B: demanding application generates peak power draw that could damage the phone when battery is too low. The solution is to throttle the processor in a way that prevents the power draw from reaching a damaging level.

People seem to be trying to claim that A is understandable, but B is not.



You missed the point though.

Thermal : A CPU will cook itself , the throttling is a safely feature preventing death, BY design.

Mitigation : put in place adequate cooling.

IF and this is a huge IF...... apple messed up the cooling solution by design, this Throttling is not plan B!!!! It's a safe guard.... when you are thermal throttling, you got you cooling all wrong....



An application draws peak power draw that could ......where did you copy that from ...

What is happening. ....The Battery is no longer capable of supplying peak current demands and apple built a workaround where the CPU draws less power on the battery ..... which now has lower peak current supply....so you need a CPU to draw less.....so to avoid shutdowns ... random shutdowns are not good for computers....(not going to bother explaining why)

The only relevance to what apple is "throttling" and thermal "throttling" is that one is working as intended and the other is making the system run At reduced capacity to hide a damaged battery....it's a bandaid....

Using your logic a system with damaged heatsink is fine.....cause it will throttle..... no it's not okay, fix the heatsink!!

Thermal throttling is not okay!! Means your cooling solution is wrong......this is why you don't understand the issue..... neither one of these should be Happening...... if your system is throttling!! Fix the cause !!!
 
Last edited:
1. Starting with the iPhone 6, Apple has designed in batteries that, although of adequate capacity, are inadequate for the phone's peak power draw, trying to get the phone as thin as possible. (Of course they will never admit to it; that makes it no less true.)
I think there is also another side to this story in that Apple has gotten ever better at scaling CPU performance up and down depending on load (to both achieve very low average consumption with very high peak performance) and this has shifted the ratio between peak consumption and average consumption in a way battery design hasn't been able to fully address (you can always make the battery larger but that comes with a longer battery life that Apple didn't "want").
 
What I’m not understanding from the Apple apologists on here is one simple question: How is not disclosing a feature that purposefully slows down a phone to hide a defective or older battery so the the end consumer never thinks to check for bad battery so they go ahead and upgrade to a new device NOT considered manipulative and misleading? Apple should be a shamed. They’ve lost the trust of millions of users who may now think twice about purchasing a new iPhone. How many billions will this ultimately cost them? And please don’t give me the ‘Apple is too big to fail’ or ‘this won’t affect Apple at all’ mantra. There is no excuse for Apple having not disclosed this and given users the ability to run full power and charge more often, pay for a new replacement, or run a slower phone and save the $80 for the battery replacement. Instead, they decided to not say a word about this, therefore many users likely upgraded phones for really no reason. This is incredibly shady.
 
At the same time without knowing my phone was slow because of the battery, I asked them to replace my battery because it wouldn't last more than an hour! They run their diagnostics and told me my battery passed every test and it was fine. I precisely told them I understand my iPhone is not under warranty so I don't expect them to replace my battery for free but they still refused to change it.
Not wanting to replace a battery that lasts only one hour is just pure stupidity, no malice needed.
 
Does anyone know if this translated to the ipad Air or mini of the same gen as ip6? because I noticed that my Air (1st) gen and ipad mini (retina 2013) are incredibly slow running ios 10. This feels a little like Diesel Gate.
 
  • Like
Reactions: clauzzz203
Right, than how are phone shutdowns explained on android. Substandard battery? Substandard software? Substandard hardware? All of the above?

Crippling the phone and having it working is a heck of a lot better than having the phone die.
[doublepost=1514568414][/doublepost]
Prove the bolded. What is many?

I can chime in but not with proof but how about some anecdotals? 3 people in my circle upgraded, two to the 8 and 1 family member to 7+ when I asked what they did with their old iPhones 2 said they sold them cheap because they were slow & struggling. The other still has his but admitted his 6s+ just wasn’t up to it any more, says he’s gonna sell it on eBay as it’s now living in a drawer in the kitchen.
 
They withheld this info on purpose so people would just buy a new phone. If it wasn't the case, why didn't workers offer battery replacements to people that come into the store complaining about slowness? It's because this solution/information was withheld. It's really that simple. No matter how they spin it, deep down, you know that's what did they to generate more revenue on new phone purchaes. Plain Greed and shady as hell.
 
It's only "planned obsolescence" when apple admits it. I'm waiting for them to admit it. But you actually think most consumers are that ignorant to believe this old tired meme?

I'm delighted to see you agree that is is obsolescence regardless of planning (or not)

Makes the fact they hid it even more heious
 
Google did we ? You missed the point though.

I didn't miss the point or Google. The auto shutdown in iOS only exists to prevent damage to the phone in certain processor load/remaining charge scenarios. Apple added to that safeguard by introducing CPU throttling that prevents the auto shutdown so users still had some level of functionality instead of a shut down phone. You still haven't explained why you think this type of safeguard is suspicious when you completely accept the idea of throttling the CPU to prevent heat damage to the phone.

Or are you trying to claim that the power draw relative to the battery charge couldn't potentially cause damage in certain situations?
 
Hello manu chao and thanks for your reply. My personal experience was at an Apple store a few months ago. I went there because my iphone was very slow and I thought there was a problem with it. I had restored it to factory settings. They told me the iphone was slow because it was old (iphone 6) They recommended to replace my phone soon!

At the same time without knowing my phone was slow because of the battery, I asked them to replace my battery because it wouldn't last more than an hour! They run their diagnostics and told me my battery passed every test and it was fine. I precisely told them I understand my iPhone is not under warranty so I don't expect them to replace my battery for free but they still refused to change it. I didn't insist more than that as you put it because my alternative was to take it to a non apple store to replace it there as I did.

After that my iphone suddenly got fast again. Back then I had no idea why...but now with all this battery throttling issue that's on the news now I can definitely connect the dots..

Shady as hell. If people can't see thru this and then nothing will convince them Apple and their staff deceived peopled into buying a new phone.
 
Lithium ion batteries can't stand heat, thus it might be better to charge your iPhone overnight with the slower 5 Watt charger which comes with the iPhone.
Most of the time I charged mine with the 12 Watt iPad charger, but from now on I will use the slower one just in case.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: dazzlingirl
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.