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Italy Fining Apple 10M Euros for 'Dishonest Commercial Practices' Related to iPhone Throttling
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I hope you realise that they got fined for not disclosing and for denying customers battery replacements.
I once walked into an Apple Store and asked to pay for an iPad 3 battery replacement buy was denied because it wasn't below the 80% threshold. Meanwhile, years software upgrades made it so slow that it was unusable for even visiting a website despite having been wiped clean.
Oh wow and you actually believe all that, hilarious. Old hardware can't handle writing text on an input field (be imessage, whatsapp or safari) without lagging, ohh ok, must be extremely resource consuming, thank god you clarified.
Correct, slowing the battery down is actually valid to keep older batteries working. They just had to say that what they were doing and recommend a battery change.
It would certainly be possible for Apple to design the power management circuits to be able to handle the high power spikes that are causing issues, but I assume there would be trade-offs in battery life and possibly internal space that they found unacceptable.
They could also have designed the phone to work properly with batteries at 75% life but I assume they were caught by surprise by this issue, since their fix was released much later. I certainly hope newer phones are designed to take this into account.
an increasing number of countries and customers
This is journalism in a widely referenced tech blog.
#grammarcop
You apparently know little about electricity. There are plenty of laptops that can't charge and run full power at the same time, that is because they can't provide power quickly enough through the charging system and must draw on the battery.
The issue that was being alleviated by the update was for high power spikes when the CPU went to full utilization, and that is going to be much more power than a battery charger can provide quickly. No iPhone has a wall power system, nor provision for an external power supply. They have a wall battery charging system, and that is an entirely different thing.
I like how there are so many Apple defenders here LOL
Granted, these organizations just look for ways to get money from business, but what Apple did was not right at all. Whoever had an 6s Plus and 6S might remember what a pain in the neck it was: the phone would shut down at even 30-40% of the remaining battery. When it was just a little cooler outside, the phone was unusable! Apple equipped those phones with very questionable batteries quality wise. They had to throttle the processor speed in order to eliminate the issue. However, nothing was ever disclosed until it blew in their faces.
Now if only somebody could fine them for the Xs antenna design haha
Granted, these organizations just look for ways to get money from business, but what Apple did was not right at all. Whoever had an 6s Plus and 6S might remember what a pain in the neck it was: the phone would shut down at even 30-40% of the remaining battery. When it was just a little cooler outside, the phone was unusable! Apple equipped those phones with very questionable batteries quality wise. They had to throttle the processor speed in order to eliminate the issue. However, nothing was ever disclosed until it blew in their faces.
Now if only somebody could fine them for the Xs antenna design haha
Apple was willing to change batteries when they were at 80% capacity or lower, which is the industry standard when it comes to lithium ion batteries. That's because voltage supply becomes less consistent at 80% or lower capacity. However, voltage supply can also be less consistent when the battery is exposed to cold temperatures or when the battery is around 20% charge or less. What does that mean? It means Apple would have been lying if they always recommended a battery change as a solution to customers that had capacity above 80% and experienced slow downs.
Calm down Francis, you should know there is a difference between the government and its people. No government is above criticism, especially when it comes to garden variety corruption.
If the SoC requests a voltage that is too high for the battery to supply, the phone is at risk of being damaged. That's why any brand of phone would simply shut off when that happened. It's a safety feature already built into the phone. The only alternate solution available is exactly what Apple did, which is have the OS watch the voltage pattern and prevent the spikes with temporary throttling.
Now if Apple could just get similarly fined in all of the other countries where they sell the iPhone, we might actually see companies stop and think before they make what could easily be considered an anti-consumer move.
I'm as big an Apple fan as anyone, but even I don't know how the tech press buys the whole "it wasn't planned obsolesce, we were just (non transparently) ensuring "older" (in some cases under a year) iPhones continued to function (at significantly slower speeds) properly," argument. As if Apple didn't understand the fact that this would encourage people to buy a new phone (because they didn't tell them or even Genius Bar employees that a battery replacement would fix their problem).
It's ridiculous because it can, and IMHO most certainly IS both. Yes, on the one hand Apple was "just" addressing an engineering issue that is inherent to modern (ultra thin) smartphone design, in a way that would be invisible to the user. But to pretend like one of the world's most valuable companies lacked the insight to understand what this "fix" would mean for sales is just silly.
I'm as big an Apple fan as anyone, but even I don't know how the tech press buys the whole "it wasn't planned obsolesce, we were just (non transparently) ensuring "older" (in some cases under a year) iPhones continued to function (at significantly slower speeds) properly," argument. As if Apple didn't understand the fact that this would encourage people to buy a new phone (because they didn't tell them or even Genius Bar employees that a battery replacement would fix their problem).
It's ridiculous because it can, and IMHO most certainly IS both. Yes, on the one hand Apple was "just" addressing an engineering issue that is inherent to modern (ultra thin) smartphone design, in a way that would be invisible to the user. But to pretend like one of the world's most valuable companies lacked the insight to understand what this "fix" would mean for sales is just silly.
The solution is not to upgrade; you still have all the functionality you had when you bought the device.
They're probably operating closer to the processor's max performance envelope than the MBP did when they come out, thus having less ability to run more processor intensive tasks as the OS is updated.
I would just like to remind you of the cash grab from the USA on BP, VW and many European banks. What is good for Goose is also good for the Gander.
In a response, Apple said it was aiming to smooth out the high power draw peaks that can result in shutdowns and other problems in older devices so that its customers had "the best experience."
Article Link: Italy Fining Apple 10M Euros for 'Dishonest Commercial Practices' Related to iPhone Throttling
Bellissimo!
There's a simple solution to this dilemma: companies could stop innovating. Then the product you buy today would be the same as the product you would buy in a decade and everything would just work forever.I didn’t realize Samsung also engages in planned obsolescence.
But I don't think that's how the industry works....
1. I believe lot of people will disagree with your solution.
I remember this annoying popup to update my iPhone. I didn't want to update so I kept cancelling it. There was no option not to update at all. I had also deleted the downloaded file as I was instructed by a friend! Well the update came back to my iPhone and one day I accidentally clicked OK. There was no way back. My iPhone got slow and I had no way to roll back to an older iOS version. How is this not forced update?
I have an old iPad and an old iPhone which are unusable. Why shouldn't I be allowed to restore them to factory settings as I bought them?
2. I was denied a battery replacement at an Apple store before the "scandal" because my battery was fine according to their diagnostics. I had never asked for a free battery, on the contrary I knew the price and I was very much willing to pay it. I needed a healthy battery and not a new iPhone which they offered as a solution.
* I'm editing my post here. I was denied TWICE a battery replacement. Just remembered they wouldn't replace my wife's battery too.
It’s because Vista slows your pc down and runs significantly slower on older hardware. Therefore, a lot of people need to upgrade their PC in order for Vista to work. The analogy makes a lot of sense.
Software development require time, real talent and loads of money.
In iOS 7-8-9-10, Apple engineers have rushed to get new features out and the result is bloating codes. The engineers are not given enough time to make the iOS works as it should. The combination of incompetency and the pushing top management that drives iOS to become unoptimized. Now I’m glad we can see a change in iOS 12 and I hope this will continue.
Sorry but I don't think your analogy makes sense.
1. People could downgrade Vista at any time!
2. It was well known since day one that Vista slows down your computer
What you're stating that people bought new computer I don't think is valid. On the contrary it was well known that Vista was a terrible operating system , so people would either keep Vista or downgrade them to XP or something else. I don't remember people buying a new computer!
This entirely contradicts the fact that iOS was one of the top performing OS with 1GB RAM until recently, and most of the Apple diehards defended saying that iOS was an optimised OS tightly integrated with hardware in a sophisticated manner etc... Now we are hearing that previous editions were bloatwares! Only one of these two could be a fact.
jlc1978 said:
If you don't upgrade, support drops within the ecosystem so it's not really quite that simple. It's obvious and expected nothing stays supported forever. This is the real truth behind planned obsolescence, you'll have to upgrade one way or another and that upgrade is generally going to be a hardware one. iOS 12 is flashy with it's promises but hasn't really proved much difference to me. Coming from 11 yes, but coming from previous iOS versions it's not really any different and is just fluff to make people feel warm and fuzzy that Apple cares. Here's a video even showing performance boost between 10.3.3 and iOS 12 to be a moot improvement to performance.
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