Apple's $29 Battery Replacement Program Could Lead to 16M Fewer iPhones Sold in 2018

[sracer]

I have a few different SE’s. I consistently get 2 days of usage in the 10.3.3 devices. On iOS 11, I just a normal day of use and it’s almost at zero. The difference is crazy noticeable...night and day.

Yes, I saw many reports early on of how iOS 11 tanked battery life on the SE. All of the SE's in our household are remaining on 10.3.3 until they are replaced. (or some critical app requires an update to 11+) Battery life is still great on them.

I think that the analyst estimates are way overblown. As as been previously stated, not everyone affected will hear about the battery replacement program. Of those that do, a fraction of them will take the time to get it done (if they live within a reasonable distance of an Apple store), and still others are on some kind of regular replacement schedule that they're paying for so they'll simply "upgrade" to the next phone.

If there is any financial impact to Apple as a result of this battery issue, it will be negligible... if the comments on this forum are any indication. Nearly all of those who are upset about this issue are still planning to continue buying iPhones.

 

[mlody]

We upgraded two of the three phones late last year not because they were slow, but we needed better cameras and got tired of the 4.7" size. Wife ended up with 8+ while I got X. Neither upgrade was driven by the performance. As a result of the upgrade our daughter ended up with hand me down 6S. We were planning to do aftermarket battery swap for it mid 2018, but given the circumstances, we will go OEM route and swap the battery in the next few weeks and then again at the end of the year.

We are also thinking about replacing the batteries for our current phones towards end of the 2018. With that said, Apple wouldn't be getting a sale from us in 2018 anyway, but once we upgrade batteries in all three phones in December 2018, for sure this will impact when we will upgrade next.

 

[gnipgnop]

Yes, I saw many reports early on of how iOS 11 tanked battery life on the SE.

Anyone who experiences that should follow the troubleshooting steps. Power settings don't always remain the same after a major OS update, for example.

 

[SaucyWeeTart]

1. Apple banned or disabled apps from telling users battery health status. Only after scandal do they promise to bring it back.
2. Apple nags you constantly to upgrade until you can't take it anymore psychologically and give in. You can't turn off the nagging. Then Apple bans users from downgrading, hence going back to non-throttling iOS version is impossible.
3. Apple kept it secret that the new update slows down CPU and only reveal the excuse that it's to "smooth" out your battery issue a year later.
4. Apple's tool in the genius bar is designed to give a green light that battery is good even though there is throttling present.
5. Apple denied battery replacements unless genius bar tool didn't give the green light.
6. There is a direct correlation of loss of sales if users replace battery and Tim Cook's Apple is the most profit-driven Apple there has ever been, doing unethical things like engaging in anti-competitive monopolistic practices with services like Spotify

There is not a single incident, it's a consistent number of unethical questionable things Apple did.

My problem is not with you necessarily, it's with the original poster who I replied to.

You make some valid points.

 

[apolloa]

Though Apple may not have been aiming to get customers to upgrade their devices by implementing power management features, it's an inevitable side effect

Yes, even though Genius Bar staff in Apples very own stores told customers affected by apples throttling software they needed to buy brand new iPhones, Apple never intended to force people to upgrade!!!!....​

 

[iShater]

Glad this information came out. My iPhone 6 is still running on 9.x (I know crazy eh?), now I finally have to upgrade because some apps are no longer running. Now at least i know that if I upgrade and performance goes down I can possibly restore it instead of spending a ton of money on a new phone that otherwise is not needed.

 

[sracer]

Though Apple may not have been aiming to get customers to upgrade their devices by implementing power management features, it's an inevitable side effect

Yes, even though Genius Bar staff in Apples very own stores told customers affected by apples throttling software they needed to buy brand new iPhones, Apple never intended to force people to upgrade!!!!....​

That's been my contention from the beginning. The lack of transparency of the Genius Bar staff does raise reasonable doubt as to Apple's motives. If that is an unfair conclusion to draw, some Genius Bar statistics could help clarify things.

• How many customers came in complaining of poor performance?
• How many of those were the result of the affects of throttling?
• How many of those (throttling cases) were the customer informed that the issue could be resolved by replacing the battery?
• How many of those (throttling cases) were the customer informed that a newer phone was the solution?

And if the Genius Bars didn't know about the throttling, then one reasonable conclusion to draw is that Apple set up a case where they can establish plausible deniability.

 

[michaelsviews]

Maybe put an update in IOS to where it does NOT throttle instead of spending time replacing batteries?

 

[PG(Austin)]

...and that is why the battery-caused cpu slowdown was never previously documented.

I love Apple products and love their design philosophy but this is 100% spot on. This was something that COULD have easily been noted was gonna happen and COULD have been engineered to have an off switch should a customer choose to ignore battery degradation. They didn't and kept it quiet for a reason.

Apple is a company and a company needs to make money, even if that company has more money than any company in the history of the world. But having that much money, and demand from a board and share holders to increase sales will make companies do things. Like hiding something that will affect those sales, no matter how altruistic they appear. Money clouds judgement period and with the recent release of yearly salaries of top Apple execs, they have a lot of reasons to protect those sales. Top management(much like most top management in companies today) is no question, 100% out of touch with the real world. Top CEOs today make 217x the average company worker. And Tim Cook saying of the iPhone X "It's less than a coffee a day at one of these nice coffee places." is proof. A very small group of the population pays $6 for a coffee EVERY DAY. They have, along with Samsung, broken the $1000 mark with huge success(mainly because we can buy on time with no interest), the devices will only go up from here.

To circle back around, they could have avoided this bad press buy just giving people the option.

 

[gnipgnop]

• How many customers came in complaining of poor performance?
• How many of those were the result of the affects of throttling?
• How many of those (throttling cases) were the customer informed that the issue could be resolved by replacing the battery?
• How many of those (throttling cases) were the customer informed that a newer phone was the solution?

Are general performance issues more likely to be related to the battery than something else? No. Can throttling occur in a healthy battery due to low charge or cold? Yes. Does replacing a healthy battery improve performance? No.

So in terms of percentages, the Genius Bar not focusing on battery replacements is what you would expect. It would be misleading for them to do otherwise.

 

[PG(Austin)]

Glad this information came out. My iPhone 6 is still running on 9.x (I know crazy eh?), now I finally have to upgrade because some apps are no longer running. Now at least i know that if I upgrade and performance goes down I can possibly restore it instead of spending a ton of money on a new phone that otherwise is not needed.

Apple no longer signs old iOS installs. Once you go to 11, there is no going back.

 

[DevNull0]

B.S! People will continue to buy new phones. Realistically, how many people actually buy new phones because of their slower performance?

Why do you think people will buy new phones without Apple crippling the old models?

When the difference from the 6s to the 8 is...better camera, faster CPU, wireless charging, and missing headphone jack....and that's it -- there are very few 6s owners who will spend the money to upgrade. Even the X -- gain an OLED screen, gain an ugly notch, pay a crazy high price. There's little reaosn to buy that if you already have a 6s.

 

[gnipgnop]

This was something that COULD have easily been noted was gonna happen and COULD have been engineered to have an off switch should a customer choose to ignore battery degradation.

If the choices are:

A. The phone shuts down
B. The phone slows down as necessary to remain functional

...then I can see why Apple wouldn't have thought the "off switch" was useful to customers. After all, this is a feature that was added due to a high enough volume of complaints about choice A. That's the choice that they already knew customers didn't like.

 

[tridley68]

Bring on the 6.5 OLED I phone X plus .

 

[Eagle1337]

Her three year old phone is slow?

Wow.

Funny thing is that it actually would not have been slow if Apple didn't turn down the performance on purpose..

 

[psac]

B.S! People will continue to buy new phones. Realistically, how many people actually buy new phones because of their slower performance?

Me. In my case, you could say it backfired on them. My 6 was so unusable (and I was told I couldn't pay to replace my battery), I had to buy a launch-day 8 (two of them in fact, one for my wife as well), instead of waiting for the X. I couldn't wait the two months because the phone was so bad. There was no way I could consider waiting another year.

 

[MistrSynistr]

The red pill is once you know Cook operates by virtue signaling and has no real virtue, you know he applies that to the way he conducts business.

You will always be schemed on with this man in charge, and this company will always be putting one over on it's consumer base under the guise of it being a harmless mistake.

 

[psac]

Healthy lithium ion batteries can run into voltage issues with low charge or cold conditions, so it's not surprising that throttling could potentially take place without the battery being EOL. Plus, the phone running into performance issues is not guaranteed to be related to voltage. That's why the standard troubleshooting steps exist: percentages are in favor of them working the vast majority of the time.

It didn't work for my 6. I was getting the double-whammy of barely usable battery (I needed to charge it at least three times per day to get through a full day), plus a dreadfully slow device, and I was told the battery was fine and they wouldn't let me pay for the replacement no matter how much I insisted. Yeah, sure, perfect battery.

 

[mytdave]

Hogwash. The battery situation has zero impact for us in deciding to buy a new iPhone. We are upgrading to new iPhones in 2018, AND we are going to replace the batteries in our 6s models too. We hand down our old phones to the kids when we upgrade. We do this regardless of battery status.

 

[jamezr]

That's been my contention from the beginning. The lack of transparency of the Genius Bar staff does raise reasonable doubt as to Apple's motives. If that is an unfair conclusion to draw, some Genius Bar statistics could help clarify things.

• How many customers came in complaining of poor performance?
• How many of those were the result of the affects of throttling?
• How many of those (throttling cases) were the customer informed that the issue could be resolved by replacing the battery?
• How many of those (throttling cases) were the customer informed that a newer phone was the solution?

And if the Genius Bars didn't know about the throttling, then one reasonable conclusion to draw is that Apple set up a case where they can establish plausible deniability.

Agree with all of the above......People can't say Apple has this enormous brain trust working for them....then in the next breath say throttling of older iPhones was not part of the plan to get people to buy new phones.
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If the choices are:

A. The phone shuts down
B. The phone slows down as necessary to remain functional

...then I can see why Apple wouldn't have thought the "off switch" was useful to customers. After all, this is a feature that was added due to a high enough volume of complaints about choice A. That's the choice that they already knew customers didn't like.

Then why not add a choice C?
C. Replace batteries or phones affected by a known defect in their battery/chipset technology?

 

[Jimmy James]

B.S! People will continue to buy new phones. Realistically, how many people actually buy new phones because of their slower performance?

Me. I keep my phones as long as they have good performance. Conversely, I don't if they don't. If Apple is, in fact, going to lose sales this whole situation points back to intent.

I upgraded my 6 to a 6s six months ago because the former became a pig. I don't need the newest phone and I got a great deal.

Lots of people may think like you, but I'm not alone here either.

 

[skinned66]

Well this is just supposition right now, but I'll be interested to see how sales are affected if at all.

 

[lazard]

Hogwash. The battery situation has zero impact for us in deciding to buy a new iPhone. We are upgrading to new iPhones in 2018, AND we are going to replace the batteries in our 6s models too. We hand down our old phones to the kids when we upgrade. We do this regardless of battery status.

It only has zero impact to the hardcore enthusiasts that upgrade every year. For everyone else, yeah it's a big deal.

 

[mytdave]

There are also other issues to performance besides battery condition. Software upgrades exact a toll on hardware, regardless of how carefully the new app or OS is coded. More capabilities demand more compute cycles. It is impossible for Apple or anyone else to release a new OS and new apps without some kind of performance hit.

Case in point: My work updated to the newest MS Office - it required upgrading all the PCs in the company. We had to double the RAM, and update older PCs to at least an Intel Core i5 CPU or better. The new Office was completely unusable otherwise. Don't complain about Apple too much. Performance impacts from Apple updates are relatively mild.

 

[skinned66]

And if the Genius Bars didn't know about the throttling, then one reasonable conclusion to draw is that Apple set up a case where they can establish plausible deniability.

I think this is very plausible scenario. The support training, materials and the tools are all provided by Apple. If they didn't go this deep then we can't really blame the staff. It would be nice to have an actual genius pop in "anonymously." That said I'm not sold on Apple doing it nefariously, just blindly.