Apple admits to intentionally slow down your iphone

[AnMig]

https://www.theverge.com/circuitbre.../iphone-slowdown-is-needed-but-also-a-problem

Something does not feel right about this, intentionally slowing down/ by throttling your year old Iphone due to expected degradation in the battery, with no option to opt out. Most people will want performance than a longer battery life. Then again most people wont notice the slow down.

My son wants to upgrade his iphone 6s plus to an Iphone 8 for christmas, I asked him why since I did not expect a fairly recent iphone to slow down (that was androids deal). He mentioned some slow downs and crashing on some youtube videos. This article may explain this.

I understand the rational but informing their customers with an option to opt out sounds like a no brainer.
Why dont they just tell customers with more the 1 year old iphones to use battery saver mode instead?

Just think if Tesla did this to there 1 year old cars, you can now only go 55mph so that you can travel the same distance.

mini rant
Iphone 8plus is still 699$!!!!!! they really hold on to their value.

 

[darkswordsman17]

Actually I think most people would rather have the battery life. At least in my experience. The real question is how long does it take for this to kick in. Really doesn't even matter as I bet Apple is going to be facing a lawsuit over this. Which will probably just lead them to adding a big notification and putting a setting in with a disclaimer that it'll affect battery life. People will probably get a free or cheap battery replacement if they bring in their old phones.

I'm not sure the crashing Youtube has to do with this though. Has he tried doing a backup, then factory reset? That helps some people. Heck, just uninstalling and reinstalling the app might help too (that's happened to me, where I'll get an update, and for whatever reason it just crashes, but then is fine after uninstalling and reinstalling the app, some occasions I had to wait for an update to the app before it actually resolved).

Funny you mention Tesla as I bet they do have a limp mode, although I think it something open to the consumer at any point. They also artificially limit the range, so that as the battery ages it will keep a consistent charge. Meaning that they leave some amount of extra capacity that never gets charged to (or rather they alternate parts of the battery to charge, so that it saves some charge cycles), so that there will be some extra in the battery as it loses capacity over time. Apple I believe does the same thing with their batteries. Its so that they seem to hold a fairly consistent battery amount for a longer amount of time.

Also for people that had the lowest battery rating, their cars actually come with a bigger battery that they can pay to unlock the higher capacity of. They temporarily unlocked the extra for people that were going to be impacted by the hurricanes recently.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_t...60kwh_batteries_before_irma_not_everyone.html

I think they might've done away with the 60kWh batteries though so this was for older cars. The question then would be, did that let them age better (meaning did Tesla let the full battery distribute the capacity, so that it effectively had a bigger buffer?).

 

[ZGR]

Let's see some actual testing done on the performance degradation.

 

[luv2liv]

I TOLD YOU SO!!!!!
muahahaha.
i had apple devices before and when i started to realize this sneaky tactic, i quit apple products already. i mentioned this in the forum but some people got the nerve to defend apple. just like that time they defended 3.5 inches is the perfect phone size. brilliant.

 

[PricklyPete]

Probably why I have never noticed this slow down and hat people claim. I change my batteries pretty regularly.

 

[Yakk]

I almost feel bad for those people... almost.

I rather like having the choice of battery life or performance. Samsung got that right, I go back & fourth between power saver & full throttle performance all the time depending on what I need to do.

 

[WelshBloke]

Let's see some actual testing done on the performance degradation.

https://www.geekbench.com/blog/2017/12/iphone-performance-and-battery-age/

 

[Stuka87]

I can say that my old iPhone 6 used to do the shutdown thing. At first i thought it was random or that the battery meter was wrong, but then came to learn it was certain tasks that could cause it. After replacing the battery, the issue went away entirely. I am pretty sure this change would have stopped the issue.

So for me, I would have been fine with the phone being a bit slower if it meant I did not experience random shutdowns.

 

[Stuka87]

I TOLD YOU SO!!!!!
muahahaha.
i had apple devices before and when i started to realize this sneaky tactic, i quit apple products already. i mentioned this in the forum but some people got the nerve to defend apple. just like that time they defended 3.5 inches is the perfect phone size. brilliant.

This didn't go into effect until iOS 10, previous iOS's didn't have this. So unless you JUST switched over, you never experienced this, ever.

Older devices do run newer OS's slower. This is the same for all computers, be it mobile devices or desktops.

 

[WelshBloke]

I can say that my old iPhone 6 used to do the shutdown thing. At first i thought it was random or that the battery meter was wrong, but then came to learn it was certain tasks that could cause it. After replacing the battery, the issue went away entirely. I am pretty sure this change would have stopped the issue.

So for me, I would have been fine with the phone being a bit slower if it meant I did not experience random shutdowns.

That seems peculiar behaviour. Now admittedly I dont use Apple phones but the behaviour I expect as batteries age is that the battery life of the device slowly degrades and eventually (after a long time, I have ten year old smartphones that still function with the original batteries) stop working all together.

 

[WelshBloke]

Older devices do run newer OS's slower. This is the same for all computers, be it mobile devices or desktops.

Not always true. I've had increased performance from some Android updates.

 

[Stuka87]

That seems peculiar behaviour. Now admittedly I dont use Apple phones but the behaviour I expect as batteries age is that the battery life of the device slowly degrades and eventually (after a long time, I have ten year old smartphones that still function with the original batteries) stop working all together.

As a battery ages, it does have less capacity. However, it also is unable to put out as much current. So when a high current situation shows up, and the battery can't keep up, the voltage drops. This voltage drops causes the hardware to shut off to protect itself.

 

[mikeymikec]

Not always true. I've had increased performance from some Android updates.

And many people claim that newer versions of Windows run faster than older versions on the same hardware.

 

[Stuka87]

Not always true. I've had increased performance from some Android updates.

True, earlier versions of Android were horribly optimized. And there was some huge performance gains when certain versions (such as 4) came out. iOS has always been pretty well optimized, so there is less to gain over new versions to offset the more advanced features. There is also the fact that older hardware may be missing certain hardware feature sets that the newer OS utilizes. Such was the came when iOS 4 (I think it was 4) came out and is was almost unusable on an iPhone 3g.

 

[ibex333]

https://www.theverge.com/circuitbre.../iphone-slowdown-is-needed-but-also-a-problem

Something does not feel right about this, intentionally slowing down/ by throttling your year old Iphone due to expected degradation in the battery, with no option to opt out. Most people will want performance than a longer battery life. Then again most people wont notice the slow down.

My son wants to upgrade his iphone 6s plus to an Iphone 8 for christmas, I asked him why since I did not expect a fairly recent iphone to slow down (that was androids deal). He mentioned some slow downs and crashing on some youtube videos. This article may explain this.

I understand the rational but informing their customers with an option to opt out sounds like a no brainer.
Why dont they just tell customers with more the 1 year old iphones to use battery saver mode instead?

Just think if Tesla did this to there 1 year old cars, you can now only go 55mph so that you can travel the same distance.

mini rant
Iphone 8plus is still 699$!!!!!! they really hold on to their value.

In actual, real life testing, this is complete BS. I own the iPhone 6S Plus, and there is NO SLOWDOWN. It still works same as it was new, and there is very little reason to upgrade. All this talk is made up stuff. Nonesense. Fluff.

You'll surely notice a slowdown when you compare an iPhone 5 to say... an iPhone 8... But anything 2-3 years old is still very competitive. Anyone who says different, is just a whiner making up an excuse to upgrade because he "thinks" performance will skyrocket. (when it actually doesn't)

See, this is something iPhones have, that android phones do not. Older android phones actually really do show their age and suffer from noticeable slowdown as years pass. iPhones are less susceptible to this. And generally remain "usable" longer because of the OS echo-system and timely updates.

 

[WelshBloke]

In actual, real life testing, this is complete BS. I own the iPhone 6S Plus, and there is NO SLOWDOWN. It still works same as it was new, and there is very little reason to upgrade. All this talk is made up stuff. Nonesense. Fluff.

Ummmm.

Apple have said that they do this.

 

[WelshBloke]

As a battery ages, it does have less capacity. However, it also is unable to put out as much current. So when a high current situation shows up, and the battery can't keep up, the voltage drops. This voltage drops causes the hardware to shut off to protect itself.

I'm not aware that other (non apple) phones handle this the same way. It would be interesting to see a comparison of older phones with degraded batteries.

 

[Zaap]

Another reason the drumbeat to ditch removable batteries was a fool's errand.

I doesn't surprise me Apple does this, and wouldn't surprise me if Android makes get caught doing it too.

 

[Red Storm]

I think it's an interesting tactic to combat degrading batteries... but Apple absolutely needs to be telling people it's doing this. And it needs to be an option the user elects to make, not one forced on them in secret.

 

[WelshBloke]

I think it's an interesting tactic to combat degrading batteries... but Apple absolutely needs to be telling people it's doing this. And it needs to be an option the user elects to make, not one forced on them in secret.

It kinda shows up the pointlessness of benchmarks like Geekbench as well. This behaviour looks like its designed to squeeze as much bursty performance as possible when the phone is new, but performance that cant be sustained over the life of the device.
That leads to lovely scores in reviews but not to such a great user experience (unless you buy a new phone every year).

I doesn't surprise me Apple does this, and wouldn't surprise me if Android makes get caught doing it too.

If they dont do it already it wouldnt surprise me if they start if Apple doesnt get too much flack for this.

 

[Oyeve]

Wow.Just.Wow.

 

[Rifter]

I TOLD YOU SO. To all the apple fanboi's who claimed this was BS.

 

[gar655]

I'll take that over not getting security patches or software updates once your Android phone is more than a year old. 18 months max. Unless you pay the ridiculous amount that google wants for their pixel 2 phones.

My S7 is just over a year old, rarely get any security updates, will likely never get the Oreo update. And Samsung/android just throttles the CPU whenever it feels like it.

Say what you will about Apple but at least their hardware still gets all the software support for as long as 5 years or more.

 

[Rifter]

I'll take that over not getting security patches or software updates once your Android phone is more than a year old. 18 months max. Unless you pay the ridiculous amount that google wants for their pixel 2 phones.

My S7 is just over a year old, rarely get any security updates, will likely never get the Oreo update. And Samsung/android just throttles the CPU whenever it feels like it.

Say what you will about Apple but at least their hardware still gets all the software support for as long as 5 years or more.

Except that with a Android phone you are actually in control, and can root and install any version you wish, there are alot of roms out there that get regular updates. Some even get nightly updates.

 

[Oyeve]

I'll take that over not getting security patches or software updates once your Android phone is more than a year old. 18 months max. Unless you pay the ridiculous amount that google wants for their pixel 2 phones.

My S7 is just over a year old, rarely get any security updates, will likely never get the Oreo update. And Samsung/android just throttles the CPU whenever it feels like it.

Say what you will about Apple but at least their hardware still gets all the software support for as long as 5 years or more.

Well effing duh! They only make ONE phone product. And they barely get that right.