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

[jamezr]

It won't be. Apple doesn't bluff when making public statements like this about technology. They know they can prove what they've said about how the throttling actually works.

But you are missing the point......no one is disputing how throttling works.
What is at question is WHY did they NEED to throttle the iPhone in the first place? Because there was a defect in the way the battery and CPU voltage is managed at the hardware level. So to prevent phones from shutting down....they throttled them. This was done to prevent the defect from becoming public and forcing a recall to replace the batteries.
So instead they are offering to have the defective battery replaced at $29 for the consumer.

Batteries normally degrade...that is not the issue. But they should not force a phone to shutdown through normal use when there is plenty of battery life left. That is what was happening on the iPhone 6 and 6s and Plus models. So to get around the recall or mass replacement of the batteries......they throttled them.

 

[sinsin07]

Samsung and LG say they don’t slow phones with older batteries like Apple
https://www.theverge.com/circuitbre...ung-lg-dont-slow-phones-older-batteries-apple

HTC and Motorola say they don’t slow old phones like Apple does
https://www.theverge.com/circuitbre...ont-slow-processor-speeds-old-batteries-apple

How exactly would the above do that? Don't they run and OS by Google? Or is their OS Forked?
Do the have the ability to push out an update over the air like Apple independent of the the carrier?
Do any of the above vendors provide any data on how their older phones perform as battery wears?

Just asking.

Also there's this from the first link:
''Samsung and LG’s responses come a day after The Verge reported statements from HTC and Motorola, with both companies saying they did not throttle their phones’ performance as batteries age. Taken together, the statements make it clear that Apple’s battery management practices aren’t standard industry behavior. Whether that’s because other phones don’t need this kind of performance adjustment or that’s because other companies didn’t think to do this is something we can’t say..."

 

[mackinmike]

Not exactly an apples to apples comparison considering you can swap out the battery and “issue” is resolved. You couldn't swap out the case of the iPhone to fix the antennae issue. The only way to fix that antennae issue really was to buy a new iPhone lol.

Only to degrade again. Performance degradation is lock-step with battery health. Seems like a design flaw to me.

 

[Andres Cantu]

at least our batteries don't explode #AppleFanBoy

That’s one way to look at it, I agree!

 

[dialogos]

How exactly would the above do that? Don't they run and OS by Google? Or is their OS Forked?
Do the have the ability to push out an update over the air like Apple independent of the the carrier?
Do any of the above vendors provide any data on how their older phones perform as battery wears?

Just asking.

I don't know how they do it but the fact is my 5 years old Samsung S3 was way faster than my 2 years old iphone 6 before I replaced its battery ( I bought my iphone 6 brand new 2 years ago so the years are correct )

 

[Crzyrio]

Apple: "we're sorry we got caught"

But you are missing the point......no one is disputing how throttling works.
What is at question is WHY did they NEED to throttle the iPhone in the first place? Because there was a defect in the way the battery and CPU voltage is managed at the hardware level. So to prevent phones from shutting down....they throttled them. This was done to prevent the defect from becoming public and forcing a recall to replace the batteries.
So instead they are offering to have the defective battery replaced at $29 for the consumer.

Batteries normally degrade...that is not the issue. But they should not force a phone to shutdown through normal use when there is plenty of battery life left. That is what was happening on the iPhone 6 and 6s and Plus models. So to get around the recall or mass replacement of the batteries......they throttled them.

It’s not as simple as that unfortunately.

When a battery is at 100% state of health, a large current draw will cause the voltage to drop say 0.1Volts

As the battery gets older and the state of health drops to 80%. A large current draw causes the voltage to drop 0.6
Now.

While it may say you have 50% battery left, when the current draw peaks, the voltage drops below the minimum required and causes everything to shut downZ

This happens to all Ali-Ion even the ones in MacBooks. Although( those last much longer

 

[DeepIn2U]

Dayum! Almost 2000 posts ... is this the largest thread in macrumors history?

BTW although a lot of people are pissed off (directly affected), upset of the b-slap tactics (everyone eventually except only supported in 2018 by such tactics) or those now considering a lateral move elsewhere or NOT to upgrade in 2018 .... seems like Samsung is having issues on the Note 8!


Samsung Galaxy Note 8 Not Charging , Dead Battery, problems, Sprint Mobile *UPDATE

Quick summary on what happened: -sprint sold me a note 8 for full price. -did not buy insurance (didnt buy insurance since the s5 came out, i would purchase insurance if i was a clumsy fool. Never cracked or dropped my phone in water since i owned a cell phone) -3 weeks later phone completely drains *slept with a few percent left in battery. -plugged charger to phone. -phone wont charge -called samsung , transferred to tech support, trouble shoot, then repair ticket started (3-4 week wait according to rep) -needing a phone was an issue so i called sprint to see if they could help me with my problem. Tech support, troubleshoot, cant help me because i didnt buy insurance, said i still would have to pay $75 for a replacement even with insurance(even if they sold me a lemon phone that was less than a month old) told me to go to a sprint store to see if they could help. -went to sprint store , waited 45 min , repair tech troubleshoot phone ,phone still not responding. -tech checks my account status to see what they could do, said i didnt have insurance so they couldnt do an exchange. Mentioned again i would have to pay $75 even if i had insurance and i still would have to wait for a replacement to come in which is most likely a refurbished device. - screw it so i sent it to samsung. - 3 weeks later got a refurbished phone with light scratches. -phone battery drains faster than usual, apps freezing and crashing. -outcome of the situation... i paid full price for a used phone. THE END

 

[nofear1az]

Seems like they realize they bungled this, and want to go extra-far to make up for it. $29 for the battery replacement is an EXCEPTIONALLY good deal, even if it is only good for the next year. EVERYONE should do it for eligible phones!

Sure, and here we just bought an iPhone 7 and next year or year and a half when the phone's software starts to throttle it down the price will be back to $79. Not a deal. Never was a deal. Not even a deal for those people that have already replaced their phones or batteries.

Apple should be offering this as a choice in the Settings menu. But they don't. The throttling only started after the last fiasco of the iPhones shutting down and this was the <cover-up> fix for it.

Why are they throttling the phone when the battery degrades under 80% health instead of [say] at 60% health?
Why is this threshold set so high?

Why did they remove the battery health report app?

Is it being throttled ALL the time or just at peak processing times?

Why not allow the phone to run full speed until the battery drain is at 20% left and then start throttling?

Why not let the owner's make some of these decisions from the Settings menu? Apple could set the bare standard and if the owner wants to change it they could.

It's the throttling that gets to me more than the cost of the battery change. It's the fact that Apple never told anyone and allowed us to believe we needed an upgrade instead of a battery replacement to fix the slowness. It's the fact that you need to replace the battery so darn quickly [1yr to 1.5yrs]. And it's also the fact that the iPhone software was throttling you down and you take it to Apple for a diag and they turn you down for a battery replacement even when you are willing to pay out-of-pocket.

I still call BS on Apple but i'm so glad you all think that the $29 is a GREAT deal.

 

[Crzyrio]

I don't know how they do it but the fact is my 5 years old samsung S3 is way way faster than my iphone 6 before I replaced its battery

Older phones, peak current draw was a fraction of what the new phones use.

 

[sinsin07]

I don't know how they do it but the fact is my 5 years old samsung S3 is way way faster than my iphone 6 before I replaced its battery

I respect your anecdotal experience however there is this:
android slows down over time
To be clear, I don't approve of the Apple scenario.

 

[gnipgnop]

You remember , "you are holding it wrong" ? Geez they tried to prove it was all fine , some accepted the excuses etc etc .... and come the 4S the antennae was redesigned to fix the issues.

No, the fix for the iPhone 4 was to change the way the phone displayed signal strength through the on-screen bars. After the change, it was no longer possible to attenuate the phone and lose "all the bars" and drop a call. It was only possible for that to happen with a weak signal. In other words, Apple's error was not actually the antenna performance or attenuation at all. If you remember, that was a period of time where all cell phone manufacturers and carriers used "full bars" as a marketing gimmick, so Apple chose a bar formula that showed full bars more often.

Apple has also continued to change and improve the antenna design through the years. The 4s wasn't the last phone to have a design change in that regard, so that's not really evidence of bad design. Apple continued to sell the iPhone 4 with the same antenna design for years afterwards.

 

[qawes]

What app do y'all recommend to getting the specs on battery status? My wife's 6S Plus is pretty bad, but I'm not sure how to quantify "pretty bad"...

coconutBattery which runs on macOS.

 

[clauzzz203]

Older phones, peak current draw was a fraction of what the new phones use.

Newer phones always have processors produced on smaller nanometer scales so they consume less power. Therefore your argument is null and reversed.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/inside-apples-new-a11-bionic-processor/
The A11 Bionic also features the first Apple-designed GPU that is 30 percent faster than the A10 and can offer the same performance as the A10's GPU at half the power consumption.

 

[sinsin07]

Dayum! Almost 2000 posts ... is this the largest thread in macrumors history?

BTW although a lot of people are pissed off (directly affected), upset of the b-slap tactics (everyone eventually except only supported in 2018 by such tactics) or those now considering a lateral move elsewhere or NOT to upgrade in 2018 .... seems like Samsung is having issues on the Note 8! ...snip

Samsung Note 8 battery issues?

 

[Joesmith13245]

It won't be. Apple doesn't bluff when making public statements like this about technology. They know they can prove what they've said about how the throttling actually works.

They made this public to create a demarcation line to islotate the time frame for which the lawsuit will cover. As much as everyone wants to believe this was done because they care about their customers, it was done for legal purposes.

 

[dialogos]

I respect your anecdotal experience however there is this:
android slows down over time
To be clear, I don't approve of the Apple scenario.

I don't care what the article says. I'm sharing my personal experience here and it's a fact that my S3 was faster than my iphone 6 before I replaced the battery. Showing me an article doesn't change MY experience with my iphone. For instance the camera would take more seconds to launch on iphone than on S3.

and to be clear I also have the S7 and I haven't noticed and significant difference since the day I bought it. Compare that to my iphone 6 which after 9-14 months was unusable !

 

[Crzyrio]

Sure, and here we just bought an iPhone 7 and next year or year and a half when the phone's software starts to throttle it down the price will be back to $79. Not a deal. Never was a deal. Not even a deal for those people that have already replaced their phones or batteries.

Apple should be offering this as a choice in the Settings menu. But they don't. The throttling only started after the last fiasco of the iPhones shutting down and this was the <cover-up> fix for it.

Why are they throttling the phone when the battery degrades under 80% health instead of [say] at 60% health?
Why is this threshold set so high?

Why did they remove the battery health report app?

Is it being throttled ALL the time or just at peak processing times?

Why not allow the phone to run full speed until the battery drain is at 20% left and then start throttling?

Why not let the owner's make some of these decisions from the Settings menu? Apple could set the bare standard and if the owner wants to change it they could.

It's the throttling that gets to me more than the cost of the battery change. It's the fact that Apple never told anyone and allowed us to believe we needed an upgrade instead of a battery replacement to fix the slowness. It's the fact that you need to replace the battery so darn quickly [1yr to 1.5yrs]. And it's also the fact that the iPhone software was throttling you down and you take it to Apple for a diag and they turn you down for a battery replacement even when you are willing to pay out-of-pocket.

I still call BS on Apple but i'm so glad you all think that the $29 is a GREAT deal.

Batteries are much more complex than they appear.

80% is the standard across many industries for Ali-Ion batteries l. Even in vehicles, 80% is considered EOL because of how unstable it is after that.


The 2nd point :” why not throttle only below 20%”

Because when a battery is at 80% state of health, the voltage drop during peak current draw can drop to below 0% levels in a matter of mili seconds. Look at my previous answer.


https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...lth-info-in-ios.2097894/page-74#post-25651150

 

[MH01]

But you are missing the point......no one is disputing how throttling works.
What is at question is WHY did they NEED to throttle the iPhone in the first place? Because there was a defect in the way the battery and CPU voltage is managed at the hardware level. So to prevent phones from shutting down....they throttled them. This was done to prevent the defect from becoming public and forcing a recall to replace the batteries.
So instead they are offering to have the defective battery replaced at $29 for the consumer.

Batteries normally degrade...that is not the issue. But they should not force a phone to shutdown through normal use when there is plenty of battery life left. That is what was happening on the iPhone 6 and 6s and Plus models. So to get around the recall or mass replacement of the batteries......they throttled them.

Spot on . Best interest for the customer would be to inform them that their battery needs replacing , and can be down for $79.

Though it sounds like this might have been a very wide spread issue , so to avoid a recall or raise awareness, some bright spark came up with an idea how to prevent the issue from surfacing by reducing power draw depending on how bad the battery way .

Win for Apple.

1. Avoid a mass recall
2. No one would ever find out
3. Users would assume devices were slow due to old age and it was time to upgrade .

And now it gets cloudy, you are training your users to the fact that iPhones get slow over time, and they are willing to upgrade, so you use this only for the troubled 6S .... or do you make it widespread and let the phone drop in performance based on a battery you know will die. Apple went wide spread .

My thoughts are that it was a patch to avoid a mass recall, and ended with greed making it a mechanism for iPhones to slow down moving to upgrades, cause the users had no issues with it when it happened on mass with the 6S...... yup....us the users.... accepted it, and Apple thought , what the heck, let's milk this.... my theory and sticking to it

 

[sinsin07]

I don't care what the article says. I'm sharing my personal experience here and it's a fact that my S3 was faster than my iphone 6. Showing me an article doesn't change MY experience with my iphone.

and to be clear I also have the S7 and I haven't noticed and significant difference since the day I bought it. Compare that to my iphone 6 which after 9-14 months was unusable !

Not saying it does.
Just showing that their is a wider audience concerning Android slowdowns than is what in your tiny bubble.
If you can't handle additional information than don't post personal anecdotal information like it means something.

 

[MH01]

No, the fix for the iPhone 4 was to change the way the phone displayed signal strength through the on-screen bars. After the change, it was no longer possible to attenuate the phone and lose "all the bars" and drop a call. It was only possible for that to happen with a weak signal. In other words, Apple's error was not actually the antenna performance or attenuation at all. If you remember, that was a period of time where all cell phone manufacturers and carriers used "full bars" as a marketing gimmick, so Apple chose a bar formula that showed full bars more often.

Apple has also continued to change and improve the antenna design through the years. The 4s wasn't the last phone to have a design change in that regard, so that's not really evidence of bad design. Apple continued to sell the iPhone 4 with the same antenna design for years afterwards.

The antenna design was the issue , please have a read and how it was corrected in 4S

http://iphone.appleinsider.com/arti...e_4s_and_its_improved_antenna_s_is_for_signal

 

[justperry]

Oops, (80.3%) just had a look at coconut battery, it's charging now so it might be skewed.

Update
Seems like you can't trust Coconut battery either.
It's up by about 6% after I took it of the charger.
Just after I took this screenshot it dropped by 0.5%
Can't really rely on it.

 

[Mescagnus]

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.

Interesting to see how much of this timeline turns out to be true. This issue will haunt Apple throughout 2018, and what's more, customers losing trust in Apple's practices will haunt them well beyond that.

A shadow of doubt is cast over Apple's products & practices – "if they did this, what else have they done or will do in secrecy?" – SECRECY being the key word.

Losing customers' trust is the biggest hit any brand can suffer. As a very loyal Apple customer, I will keep my eye on how this develops. Personally, I've never had the said battery/performance issue – perhaps due to my habit of upgrading to the newest iPhone every year.

 

[Act3]

Newer phones always have processors produced on smaller nanometer scales so they consume less power. Therefore your argument is null and reversed.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/inside-apples-new-a11-bionic-processor/
The A11 Bionic also features the first Apple-designed GPU that is 30 percent faster than the A10 and can offer the same performance as the A10's GPU at half the power consumption.

So maybe Apple will not have to throttle the iPhone 8 and above to compensate for battery nearly as soon

I’ll keep my 6s and see how the newer models fair before I upgrade anytime soon.

 

[dialogos]

Not saying it does.
Just showing that their is a wider audience concerning Android slowdowns than is what in your tiny bubble.
If you can't handle additional information than don't post personal anecdotal information like it means something.

So we can't post personal experiences now? Why? Not convenient enough to you?

Last years Android do not lag as much as a throttled iphone. Probably it's too hard to understand. Out of curiosity have you ever owned a recent android device?

 

[BigMcGuire]

Update
Seems like you can't trust Coconut battery either.
It's up by about 6% after I took it of the charger.
Just after I took this screenshot it dropped by 0.5%
Can't really rely on it.


View attachment 744291

As a user of coconutBattery for years and years --- it's normal for there to be a small variance. I've seen a max of 5% but it averages 1-3% variance. That's why you want to do it over time. I have spreadsheets where I check my phones on a weekly basis if not more. (Now I'm lazy and only do it 2-3 times a month). This is how it has always worked - even Apple's own apps if you talk to the tech, will have a variance too.