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U.S. Government Official Questions Apple Over iPhone Battery Slowdowns
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You do know there are various departments in Local and National Government. One department is consumer protection.
Wishful thinking. Even if Apple wins most cases in the end, they have to explain in detail what they have done and why. There will be public records. Especially the french lawsuit could hit them hard.
This is the classic shakedown letter. What it really is saying is "pay up now, our PACs need money and you have lots of it. Pay or we'll investigate"
Stop touting your personal phone as if it's the absolute benchmark.
Stop touting personal anecdotes of people with issues and projecting them onto the entire user base.
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And, of course, these agencies (run by politicians with aspirations) never do an investigation for personal gain or to make it look like they’re “doing something”.
Franken asking Apple about the security of Touch ID (and FaceID) comes to mind.
And I am stating in plain and simple language that Im from Mars. And have nothing to do with Earth. In fact I am making an effort to colonize Earth!
How does that statement sound? Im sure its equally truthful as Apple
It stops being a "personal anecdote" when the throttling "feature" itself has been introduced for devices up until the iPhone 7. Apple doesn't really do preemptive measures just for the sake of it, they knew specific devices are being affected.
Does it matter? Why bring snapdragon into it. We're talking about apple on an apple centric website, no?
Planned obsolescence is a crime. But Apple is doing the exact opposite.
Let's take a step back and take a second look at this. Hindsight is 20/20, they say.
Apple puts out a phone with a new CPU.
Do they know the battery must give it almost maximum juice to sustain that? Do they know it will fail within a year or two? Did they know they could under-clock the CPU at this point and not have a problem. Would people buy a new phone with a so-so increase in performance.
The phone is out in the wild and at one year they start shutting down due to battery degradation. Do they recall the phone or come up with a work-around? We all know what they did here.
Is this pretty much it in a nutshell?
Apple puts out a phone with a new CPU.
Do they know the battery must give it almost maximum juice to sustain that? Do they know it will fail within a year or two? Did they know they could under-clock the CPU at this point and not have a problem. Would people buy a new phone with a so-so increase in performance.
The phone is out in the wild and at one year they start shutting down due to battery degradation. Do they recall the phone or come up with a work-around? We all know what they did here.
Is this pretty much it in a nutshell?
Sorry, your original post was:
“Apple's $800+ flagship iPhone 7 includes a battery that is unable to correctly power the device after a year or so.”
That statement is an outright lie. The bottom line is you have absolutely NO IDEA what percentage of devices are affected, yet are happy to state they are all affected (or most).
If that was the case, nothing would be happening right now. My wife's 6s+, within months into ownership, started restarting under heavy CPU load (doing Ingress in the park) - also seemed to correlate with colder weather - while my 6s+ had no problems. In under a YEAR of ownership, her phone got to the point where it would shut off and reboot 5-6 times in a 2 mile walk under 60% of charge. coconutBattery showed her phone's design capacity fluctuating from 40% to 60% to 90%. Meanwhile, my 6s+ was fine.
My wife's 6s+ had easily 1/3rd the capacity of my 6s+ (by 12:00pm my wife's battery would be at 20% while mine was at 90%). Yet when we took our phones into the Apple Store, they said my wife's battery was "green" and refused to do anything about it - even though we showed them a shut off. This was under a YEAR of ownership and under 250 cycles.
Apple guarantees their batteries 500 cycles and 80% design capacity.
If my wife's 6s+ didn't have this problem, we'd still have our 6s+ phones and not our 8+ phones right now.
My 6s+ was fine, my wife's 6s+ was not fine - just cuz yours is fine doesn't mean others are fine.
From my perspective it was planned ignorance. Apple new they had a batch of bad batteries and instead of fix them or offer cheaper replacements, they initially tried to help/hide it by slowing down the CPU frequency.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/20/a...ones-with-older-batteries-are-running-slower/
Apple said:
Has to be a large enough percentage to be included in the iOS code.
Taken from the Labor Department's own website, unemployment is at the lowest it's been in a decade. Try again....
Not going to be mad at all. What I do expect to happen is for Apple to realize they can't clandestinely implement performance reductions of up to 60% and expect their consumer base to be happy about it. Something is wrong with the hardware in the 6, 6S, and 7 where a substantial number of devices need more power than the batteries can provide. It may extend to the 8 and the X but at this point we don't know.
All battery powered devices can experience unexpected shutdowns, but is much more prevalent with the iPhone 6 and up with batteries less than two years old that are only marginally degraded and still pass Apple's capacity testing. Shutting down unexpectedly basically makes the device useless and Apple did the best it could to fix it by implementing throttling. However, consumers generally expect reduced runtime as batteries degrade, not crashing or throttling.
iOS 10.2.1 has the code that implements throttling. What Apple should have done at that time was institute a policy that any device that had throttling triggered would notify the consumer the battery was bad and extend the warranty replacement to two years with a $30 fee for older devices. That would have been transparent and would show they accepted responsibility for the poor design as soon as they identified there was a hardware problem.
For the future I hope Apple realizes this was a design issue and fixes it to reflect consumer expectations. A two or three year old device shouldn't be crashing or throttled by half under normal usage unless there is a genuine hardware failure.
but but but, so many people here said that there is nothing to this, and that my iphone will crash when I go to facebook without this courageous feature.
Looks like all those fan boys might be wrong...
Looks like all those fan boys might be wrong...
What other troubleshooting steps did you follow for the phone? If the battery passes the test, then it's less likely to be the cause of the problems.
Also, in regards to AR games like Ingress...
"Augmented reality games like the newly-released Pokémon Go and old-favorite Ingress, aren’t your typical mobile games. They chew through your battery—and data plan—partially because they constantly track your location via GPS. These tips will help you slow the drain, stay charged, and keep comfortable while you play."
https://lifehacker.com/how-to-save-your-phone-s-battery-while-playing-pokemon-1783445442
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We had contacted apple support about it before. Full phone restore as new, the home+power to reboot, etc... we did everything they asked. Nothing changed her phone shutting off randomly after it dropped below 60%. That's when we started going in demanding replacement of the battery because it was obviously bad. We did the restore 3 times (twice without restoring from backup, just setting phone up as new).
I watched their own iPad test fail 3 times in a row - but each time it failed the Apple Genius refused to show me why just saying: "The battery is green, there is nothing wrong with the battery."
And yeah - we used Anker external battery packs when doing Ingress. - Kinda have to
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