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Glad someone had a direct comparison.
I feel Apple was clearly steering people to a new phone.
...
my battery was failing on my 6s+. The phone was become unusable. But the wait for a replacement battery was weeks if I recall correctly. So had the battery replaced via third party. Then Apple came out with $29 replacement program. I figured for $29 I’d get a Apple battery.
Not so lucky. Since Apple didn’t replace the battery , they wouldn’t touch it.
To put it very gently, not happy with mr cook.
 
Not too bright there in Az, that ship has sailed and the issue settled. Cheap batteries and $25 for not causing your phone with an old battery from shutting down. Ok they should have described it better. But watching all the false outage was seriously funny
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Glad someone had a direct comparison.
I feel Apple was clearly steering people to a new phone.
...
my battery was failing on my 6s+. The phone was become unusable. But the wait for a replacement battery was weeks if I recall correctly. So had the battery replaced via third party. Then Apple came out with $29 replacement program. I figured for $29 I’d get a Apple battery.
Not so lucky. Since Apple didn’t replace the battery , they wouldn’t touch it.
To put it very gently, not happy with mr cook.
Sounds like you are not happy with your own decisions. If Apple wouldn’t touch it you went to a non-certified shop. You get what you pay for
 
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I know life goes on and all, but man there are so many more important things to be focussing on in the United States right now.
 
Consumer: My old phone shuts off randomly when I’m using it.
Apple: here have a free software update that keeps your phone on.
Consumer: Apple slowed down my phone!

No matter what someone is always not happy.
Come on. How many people had a complaint that their phones were simply shutting down due to battery issues?
 
Anecdotally, that's not the only thing it did wrong. SUPPOSEDLY many people would go into an Apple Store complaining of a slowing phone and were directed by Apple staff that the way to fix that was to get a new phone. Anecdotal evidence is problematic. Is that what was really recommended? Did the sales staff perhaps mention a battery replacement but the buyer shrugged it off? We don't know. Just that anecdotally, Apple not only didn't mention the feature but used its invisibility to turn people to the more expensive(/profitable) fix.

For what it's worth.


ADDED: It's also quite possible that the Apple Store clerks were also not aware of the feature (it was hidden, after all), and so directing users to consider a new phone would be the appropriate thing to suggest...which doesn't remove the issue at all, just kicks it further up the chain of command.
My family had 2 batteries replaced, because they couldn’t figure out what was going wrong at the genius bar. When a third phone started having the same problem we bought a new phone.

About a week later it was all over tech sites and we knew what happened. At that point I had already mailed in one old phone as a trade in - so I couldn’t return and go back to my old phone.

They handled this very poorly.
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Come on. How many people had a complaint that their phones were simply shutting down due to battery issues?
I had 3 phones doing it in my family alone.
 
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The one major problem here for Apple is that iPhone 5s owners did not get that battery offer and had to pay full price even though they were in some cases forced the IOS upgrade like me. That's not whining. That's reality and a major mistake.
While there might have been some sort of issues there it doesn't appear that this particular power management functionality was involved when it comes to iPhone 5s and earlier devices.
 
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All this info was in the description of the iOS update.

Therein lies the problem. The info was not in the original release notes for the update. In fact, it wasn't until several weeks later that the release notes were revised to include the information. Per this MacRumors article:

Apple introduced this battery/performance management system in iOS 10.2.1, but it did not initially mention the change in the update's release notes.

Emphasis mine.

Here's MacRumors original report of the 10.2.1 release:

According to Apple's own release notes for iOS 10.2.1, the update brings unspecified bug fixes and security improvements.

And here are the release notes as of now from Apple's web site:

It also improves power management during peak workloads to avoid unexpected shutdowns on iPhone.
 
This is ridiculous. I had an iPhone 6S that suffered from the random shutdowns caused by an ageing battery. I would definitely prefer that the maximum clock speed is capped rather than having my phone randomly shut down while I'm using it. Apple could've been more transparanet with consumers at the time but theres no denying that they are 100% transparent with battery health now. I contacted Apple about the problem and they replaced my phone with a refurbished device which looked and felt like a brand new device and it did'nt cost me a cent. Apple are looking after customers. Is it their fault that Lithium batteries perform worse with age? Hell no, its science.

"Think about how dumb the average person is. Now realise that half of them are even dumber than that" - George Carlin
 
Apple could've been more transparanet with consumers at the time
Seems like that's basically at the center of all of this, and that Apple often enough didn't even offer to change the battery for those who came in with issues of this nature and basically simply invited people to buy a new device. That doesn't say something about it all being done intentionally and maliciously, but it still wasn't done properly for some time which had more of an effect on some.
 
Yea.. so I reside in Arizona and i think we have bigger issues than this with our state... can he focus on something actually important... 😐
Brnovich is just out to score political revenge points wherever he can... he doesn't look out for residents, he looks out for political interests of his buddies.
 
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Anecdotally, that's not the only thing it did wrong. SUPPOSEDLY many people would go into an Apple Store complaining of a slowing phone and were directed by Apple staff that the way to fix that was to get a new phone. Anecdotal evidence is problematic. Is that what was really recommended? Did the sales staff perhaps mention a battery replacement but the buyer shrugged it off? We don't know. Just that anecdotally, Apple not only didn't mention the feature but used its invisibility to turn people to the more expensive(/profitable) fix.

For what it's worth.


ADDED: It's also quite possible that the Apple Store clerks were also not aware of the feature (it was hidden, after all), and so directing users to consider a new phone would be the appropriate thing to suggest...which doesn't remove the issue at all, just kicks it further up the chain of command.
I’d bet they actually had the audacity to refer to buying a new iPhone as a “fix” too. I remember when an iOS update bricked my iPhone (yes, truly bricked, ie. unusable and unrepairable), I took it into an Apple store and the worker said it was unrepairable but “what I can do for you is get you a new iPhone”, which turned out to mean not for free but full price, since it was (barely) out of warranty. I’m sure he was trained to say this, but it just made me think he thought I was a fool who didn’t already know I could buy a new iPhone.
 
While there might have been some sort of issues there it doesn't appear that this particular power management functionality was involved when it comes to iPhone 5s and earlier devices.

And you know that from what? The age or value of the phone or some technical document? I was using the same IOS as everyone else, so the same things were happening to me. In other words, thank you for your prize opinion from the Cracker Jack box. It's not much of a prize. :D
 
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Don’t know why Apple bother looking after some people! If you have an old phone thats not capable of dealing with updates or the battery deteriorates then that’s tough. It’s like my old laptop (the battery is done), it’s like my old DAB radio (won’t pick up a lot of the new stations), it’s even like my old mechanical corkscrew (it won’t remove some of the new corks that are synthetic). Technology advances and products become obsolete or reduce in performance to protect them! Next we will be suing a company because a can opener no longer work on certain types of cans!!
 
And you know that from what? The age or value of the phone or some technical document? I was using the same IOS as everyone else, so the same things were happening to me. In other words, thank you for your prize opinion from the Cracker Jack box. It's not much of a prize. :D
From various discussions about it all where the details about the implementation surfaced where it was applied to certain models as of particular updates where it would be enabled for them.
 
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Consumer: My old phone shuts off randomly when I’m using it.
Apple: here have a free software update that keeps your phone on.
Consumer: Apple slowed down my phone!

No matter what someone is always not happy.

Uh, no. You have it completely wrong. Let me fix that for you:

Consumer: My current generation iPhone 6 shuts off randomly.
Apple: *crickets*
Consumer, later: My iPhone is super slow now, guess I need to buy a new one.
Tech person: We discovered Apple's recent update slowed everyone's iPhone down for some reason.
Apple: No we didn't.
Consumer: Hey Apple, what's going on?
Apple: La la la, nothing to see here. You're using it wrong.

All they ever had to do was openly admit to the manufacturing defect of the CPU pulling too much voltage from the specced battery after it aged a few months (it was absolutely a voltage design defect, as evidenced by this problem not occurring or recurring on other generations of iPhone), and acknowledge that they implemented a solution that (sometimes quite severely) throttles the CPU to keep the iPhone from randomly powering off. Everybody would have been very happy with them. Good job, Apple, they would have said.

But instead, they kept it all a secret, and people were fooled into buying new iPhones when many of them only needed a new battery to get their performance back. Now Apple are reaping the reward of, as always, trying to pretend their products are always perfect and never have issues. If they had been open and honest they wouldn't be having these penalties and investigations. There would be nothing to investigate.

If Apple had been open about the issue, most of the people who bought new iPhones at the time probably still would have bought a new iPhone, but at least they would have had a choice and would know why they were doing it. Literally the only issue here is that Apple hid the problem, implemented a secret solution that had a significant negative impact on the iPhone user experience, and then tried to pretend they hadn't done anything until they were outed by technical investigators showing evidence of the post-update throttling.

Seriously, how many times do we have to go over these well-established facts? No one cares that they throttled the iPhone. We care that they kept it a secret and tried to act like they didn't do it, and that the negative iPhone experience after the update wasn't their doing. That fits my definition of "deceptive business practice" as an owner of iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6s, and 6s Plus. And for the record, I did not experience the random shutdowns, but I was definitely impacted by the throttling. So from my perspective, Apple did not do me a "favor" by secretly "fixing" my iPhones. What they did was make my iPhone almost unusable at times.
 
Wait are you being serious? I'm one that didn't care about the throttling issue as I supported the idea of throttling to save power but was it really in the description?



Yeah and wasn't part of it that iphone users didn't know if they were being throttled due to battery life being less than ideal?

It was ADDED to the release notes after it was known to actually be working. The inital release that included the patch did not have any mention of throttling until at least weeks later.

I 100% support the fix and the reasoning, but Apple also 100% botched how this was handled. Should they pay more? no.

You had a choice:your iPhone temporarily slows down under load but keeps running, or spontaneously powers off just when you really wanted to do something.
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Uh, no. You have it completely wrong. Let me fix that for you:

...
All they ever had to do was openly admit to the manufacturing defect of the CPU pulling too much voltage from the specced battery after it aged a few months (it was absolutely a voltage design defect, as evidenced by this problem not occurring or recurring on other generations of iPhone), ...

There was no defect. No-one had ever put such a powerful CPU on a battery like that before is my take on it. This didn't happen in any later models because the software fix was applied and the hardware could detect the voltage drop and cope with it since it was then known. Apple, designing the entire stack, could also work with the battery manufacturer to build a more capable battery.

Never attribute to malice what can easily be explained by ignorance.
 
I really don’t get the issue here. If you have a car and the engine has a problem the car can go into limp mode with reduced performance to protect the engine. No one is mad about this?!?
The exact same thing happens in phones and some people are going mad about it.
Pretty much every CPU on the planet throttles when it gets hot.
Apple could've been more transparanet with consumers at the time
I dunno. I think that’s easy for people to say, but when you look at how many changes there are from version to version, it would all quickly become noise. They did mention it in the release notes, but the complaint is often that they didn’t give enough detail.

If you buy an iPhone, you expect that Apple is going to make decisions for you.
Come on. How many people had a complaint that their phones were simply shutting down due to battery issues?


iPhone 5. Would report 80% battery and then suddenly power off apparently randomly. I’m curious enough to have spent a few months in that state figuring out what triggered it and realized it wasn’t how I squeezed it or twisted it. It wasn’t tied to a specific application crashing. It happened more when it got hot. It most often happened when the camera or GPS kicked on. Guessed battery problem and won.
 
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for fixing a problem of iPhones shutting down during use? The only thing they did wrong was not shout it from the hills. All this info was in the description of the iOS update.
You literally have no idea what you are talking about.

I owned two iPhone 6S. Both were heavily throttled. Apples “fix” prevented me from noticing that there was a hardware fault with the battery.
Otherwise, I would have gotten the batteries replaced. I’m pretty sure they were still under warranty.

Please explain how this is acceptable.

Funny enough, my older iPhone 6 never had this problem. The 6S was notorious for battery issues. In my opinion, Apple noticed, that it had sold millions of iPhone 6S with faulty batteries and this was the solution.
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I think a lot of journalists and people just didn't understand the engineering challenge of ageing batteries and thought that Apple purposefully slowed down the phone, so they would buy a new one. Instead they were allowing the CPU to adopt to weaker ageing batteries and people got angry, like they would rather have an unusable phone, because it would turn off if the CPU required too much power. And it's also Apples fault to settle many of these cases and thus everyone follows the money and sues them.

you are the one who still does not understand.
 
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isn't this a dead. Issue. Apple paid the fine, and settled the lawsuit. What more is there?
 
Isn't this double jeopardy?
Yeah didn't I see this movie already, is this just a remake? Everyone knows what Apple did, why they did it and got there piece of meat. I guess lawyers have to eat too. :/
 
Ugh, this drives me nuts...this is a GOOD THING, that extends the life of the phone.

if they want to investing something, investigate the defective Lightning port, which should have had a mass recall back in 2012. Or force companies to quit designing defective products with sealed batteries.
Why is the only thing they’re concerned about one of the GOOD things about the product?!?
 
Ugh, this drives me nuts...this is a GOOD THING, that extends the life of the phone.

if they want to investing something, investigate the defective Lightning port, which should have had a mass recall back in 2012. Or force companies to quit designing defective products with sealed batteries.
Why is the only thing they’re concerned about one of the GOOD things about the product?!?
It's not really about that as much as it is how Apple approached it and those who turned to Apple with devices that had issues earlier on before others were able to surface what was happening.
 
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As someone who had a phone that would randomly shut down because of poor battery health (and eventually wore it down to the point where the battery went kaput), I actually prefer the throttling. My next phone, I eventually used it into the throttling phase. The phone was still fast enough for most of what I did, and it was a better user experience than my phone randomly dying on me with 50% left. It kept my next phone usable for longer (I only replaced it because the phone took a swim when I fell out of a boat last summer).
 
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