Slashdot Asks: How Should Apple Have Responded To the Battery Controversy? 177
Yesterday, Apple officially apologized for slowing down older phones in order to compensate for degrading batteries. In a letter to customers, Apple said, "We apologize," offering anyone with an iPhone 6 or later a battery replacement for $29 starting in late January through December 2018 -- a discount of $50 from the unusual replacement cost. They're also promising to add features to iOS that provide more information about the battery health in early 2018.
Apple's response has left many wondering whether or not it is enough. Even though they are discounting the cost of a battery replacement, for example, they are still profiting from each battery replacement. At the end of the day, "Apple only came clean after independent investigation, giving the whole situation an air of underhanded secrecy," writes Macworld. Should Apple have responded differently to the battery controversy? In the first place, should Apple even issue a software update to older devices to purposefully throttle the CPU and prevent the phones from randomly shutting down when experiencing rapid power draw?
Quinn Nelson via Snazzy Labs explains the controversy and how it is largely exaggerated.
Apple's response has left many wondering whether or not it is enough. Even though they are discounting the cost of a battery replacement, for example, they are still profiting from each battery replacement. At the end of the day, "Apple only came clean after independent investigation, giving the whole situation an air of underhanded secrecy," writes Macworld. Should Apple have responded differently to the battery controversy? In the first place, should Apple even issue a software update to older devices to purposefully throttle the CPU and prevent the phones from randomly shutting down when experiencing rapid power draw?
Quinn Nelson via Snazzy Labs explains the controversy and how it is largely exaggerated.
By giving away free phones to everyone (Score:1)
full communism now
Re:By giving away free phones to everyone (Score:5, Funny)
Almost free iPhones to everyone? (Score:2)
I think ichimunki was fishing for a "Funny" mod, but it's hard to say without looking for the invisible AC comment he's replying to. Moot in my case, since I never see a mod point to give.
Having said that, I'm seriously wondering if this fiasco is my opportunity to learn about the iPhone on the cheap. It would seem that I could now get a secondhand iPhone at the usual low cost, but then replace the battery and make it almost as good as new thanks to Apple's tiny dip into their humongous cash reserves.
Any ex
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At $29, they might not be making a huge profit. But I seriously doubt Apple is taking an loss on this. A few bucks for the new battery, and 20 minutes of labor can't cost that much.
Their biggest hit is that they can't force folks into an expensive and unnecessary replacement.
Re:Almost free iPhones to everyone? (Score:5, Informative)
The replacement battery for my oldest smartphone (not an iPhone, but a popular model from [never again] Samsung) costs around $30, and that's with me doing all the work. Even if Apple can keep the labor time to 20 minutes, I think that's at least another ten bucks, and on top of that you have the administrative costs of tracking the phones.
Not sure, but I think the original battery-replacement charge was pretty close to their real costs. Apple is NOT in the business of trying to make money from replacing batteries. If there was a significant premium in the original charge, then I strongly believe that was mostly to encourage people to upgrade their iPhones. That's where Apple's big profits are coming from, and lost sales of new iPhones are their biggest profit reduction from this new battery replacement program.
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Not sure, but I think the original battery-replacement charge was pretty close to their real costs. Apple is NOT in the business of trying to make money from replacing batteries.
It probably is close to their real costs, because of the way they designed their phone. But that was a choice, and they should provide reasonably-priced battery replacements. It's sad that they will only do it for a year, but that should be ample time for anyone who finds this offensive to jump ship, so a year is not bad.
It's a major gift. (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple was faced with the PR problem of convincing people their approach was right--which it totally is-- or accepting blame. If you are going to do the latter, accept fault for something you are wrongly faulted for then your best move is not to do it grudgingly. Do it so everyone feels they got more than they deserved but isn't too painful. Apple is buying some customer loyalty with a write down.
What astonishes me the most is the other companies saying they don't throttle power usage as a battery degrades. How happy are you going to be when you fire up Halo or whatever on your fully charged Moto and in 2 minuted the phone hard shuts down? Or you can't make it through half a day with the phone, used just to send texts and calls?
That's insane. Of course you want the phone to take measures to deal with a weak battery.
People say, well it should be my choice. it should be a setting. Well people without iphones probably don't realize it is (partly) a setting. When your charge gets below 20% IOS asks if you want to use low power mode. So it is a choice now. Apple went a step further and had a second layer of adaptive power management on top of that as well. But they still gave you a choice on that. The Choice was to buy a new battery or not.
Everyone would prefer the option of a battery that lasts forever and never degrades and costs the same and weighs the same. But no phone has that option. Every phone in existence needs a new battery after enough use. For most people, the upgrade cycle is fast enough they never need that new battery. But for some, they do. ANd for those folks they are much better off with a slow thottling of the battery than not. That can buy you a year or more before you need to choose: Buy a new battery or live with noticably slow phone. That year probably converts most of those people to be within their upgrade cycle.
SO this is a feature not a bug. You can if you like fault apple for not touting this up front as a positive benefit. But as you can see from the idiots commenting below me that it's very hard to explain this in a few words and not people think "oh gosh they slow my phone down?". They don't think that it's always preferably to having the battery life be unusably short.
For the crazy people who run super computing calculations on their iphones and demand no degraded speed and don't understand that battery operated devices have considerations, then by all means buy a moto. or buy anew battery. But stop whining.
But is it a major gift to me? (Score:2)
Interesting comment, perhaps even worth an "Insightful" mod if I ever saw a mod point to give. (In contrast to receiving so many of the trolls', eh?) Still a bit stretched to see how your comment fits as a reply to my questions. It does sound like you might be someone in a position to answer some of them, so let me recap:
I think Apple designs well, but limits my freedom through monopolistic practices. For that reason, I have only purchased one Apple device in my life, a MacBook Pro with Retina display. I do
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I'd not reccomend a second hand iphone. for a couple reasons. First, the whole point of buying apple is that you value having fewer problems and frustrations alsong with the idea that you have to pay more to get that. If you don't value that and prefer economy then other phones are a better proposition. Buying a used phone wont satisfy that requirement and since apple's phones also retain their resale value more than other's you still pay some premium as well. So it's a false economy.
If you have some o
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I think ichimunki was fishing for a "Funny" mod, but it's hard to say without looking for the invisible AC comment he's replying to. Moot in my case, since I never see a mod point to give.
Having said that, I'm seriously wondering if this fiasco is my opportunity to learn about the iPhone on the cheap. It would seem that I could now get a secondhand iPhone at the usual low cost, but then replace the battery and make it almost as good as new thanks to Apple's tiny dip into their humongous cash reserves.
Any experts willing to address possible problems and questions with this plan?
(1) What older models are worth considering?
(2) Are the secondhand prices already jumping up?
(3) How do older models compare with using newer iPhones?
(4) Can I just pop my SIM from my Android phone into the iPhone and go?
I can guess a bit on Question (4). I think it should be okay as long as the used iPhone is locked to the same network I am using now. However I'm not sure about the SIM form factors for iPhones...
Whoops, thought up three more questions:
(5) What are the time constraints?
(6) Does Apple profit from secondhand iPhones?
(7) How much backward compatibility is there from newer apps to older iPhones?
Re: By giving away free phones to everyone (Score:2)
Re: By giving away free phones to everyone (Score:3)
User-replaceable batteries wouold be sufficient.
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Option (Score:2, Insightful)
They could have made it an option. Speed or longer battery life.
Re:Option (Score:4, Insightful)
*crashing phones or no crashing phones, FTFY.
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I agree that a warning dialog might've prevented some drama here. OTOH, there are a ton of issues associated with any sort of warning dialog too, and such a thing may in fact create drama on a regular basis. Support costs would increase with more people walking in with phones showing "some weird error message". Or the error message would be ignored, as most error messages are, and nothing would change. At the scale of iPhones, such things matter. There is no easy silver bullet.
Apple tries to make its produc
Re: Option (Score:2, Funny)
Like those 'weird' battery low/critical messages on my laptop. What is battery? What could it mean? I took it to a tech shop so they could explain it to me.
Apologize and correct (Score:5, Interesting)
They should have issued a statement saying the code was written to extend the life of the battery and prevent reboots due to voltage drops.
Then they could have issued a patch that made the behaviour optional, perhaps with a pop up message suggesting enabling it when the battery started failing.
Finally, the battery replacement discount is not a bad PR move.
Go back in time.... (Score:3)
Obviously, they should have used their vaunted "Time Machine" to go into the past and make different choices, like user-replaceable parts and full disclosure on how they were fixing the battery power related crashing issue.
What good is a time machine if you can't use it to fix past mistakes?
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What good is a time machine if you can't use it to fix past mistakes?
If you accept multiverse theory, it's no good at all to you.
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They should have issued a statement saying the code was written to extend the life of the battery and prevent reboots due to voltage drops.
That would have been lying.
Because the voltage doesn't drop; it's the current that drops.
The only people who would ever see it are people with very, very high CPU utilization.
Mostly the people who jailbreak their iPhone run a CPU benchmarks.
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No, it's the voltage that drops. If you pull more current with a given internal resistance of the battery, the voltage available to the phone will drop accordingly. If the internal resistance grows with the age of the battery, the voltage will drop further. One day it will be too much and the phone will either manage a shutdown or simply crash. The latter being bad since it might damage the filesystem if it happens at the wrong time.
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No, you can't measure it that way.
Attempting to dray too much current, and watching the voltage is the only way to determine the amount of current available to draw. Not the other way around.
You ramp up current draw at a given voltage, and if your voltage starts to drop, you have to back off on current utilization. The only way to do that is to back off on current utilization.
It's the current draw that matters; you aren't drawing off 9 volts, and then suddenly you can only draw off 7 volts. That's not ho
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You're both right. A battery is (more or less) a perfect voltage source, in series with a resistor. From that perspective, the current you see, and the voltage you see, are just different ways of looking at the same thing.
You can't 'ramp up the current draw' at a given voltage, because the voltage across the battery will change precisely in sync with the current, according to ohms law and the nominal battery voltage. Inside an iPhone, of course, there is complex power management circuitry that will attempt
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It's not a lie, it's saying essentially the same thing, and is a completely uncontroversial statement except to electronics dabblers who barely know enough to be dangerous.
Battery voltage is lower when in-circuit under load than when open-circuit. And this effect is more pronounced especially with discharged or dying old batteries. And for a linear circuit, lower voltage means lower current. Yes a cellphone isn't a linear circuit but that's not important. Point is that current spikes will brown out the circ
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Because the voltage doesn't drop; it's the current that drops.
If resistance is the same, how do you change the current without changing the voltage?
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If resistance is the same, how do you change the current without changing the voltage?
Does the internal resistance remain the same over time? I would suspect that it does not, as the battery chemistry breaks down.
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It's the voltage drop that causes the reboot. Battery voltage is dependent on load, i.e. the amount of current being drawn. As more current is drawn, the voltage drops. Even in new, healthy batteries.
In older batteries the voltage drop is larger. Of it gets too low, the phone's system-on-chip automatically enters reset state to protect itself. Low voltage can result in things like failed flash memory writes. There is also a lower limit below which the voltage regulators don't work.
Exactly as they did (Score:5, Insightful)
I think what they did is about right - apologize for not making it clear, make it cheaper to get a new battery than any replaceable would have been, and then (most importantly) add information so people can tell if a battery is wearing out or not.
It's not like it's a manufacturing defect, where Apple would actually replace a part. The whole system is acting as designed, and in fact in the best interests of the users - lots of other companies would have just added an info panel and called it good. The batteries are still working just fine. The cheap battery replacement is beyond what they really had to do, but is good customer service.
I also question between parts and labor if Apple is really making money on the battery replacement at that price. That was just thrown out as a given but who claims that is still a profit?
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You think its in the best interest of users to intentionally mislead them into thinking that their phone's performance has degraded to the point that they need to replace it with a new phone, rather than making it clear right off the bat that the problem is due to an aging battery which can be easily replaced? I am astounded that there are *still* people who can spin this story into one that makes Apple sound benevolent and innovative. There is one reason and one reason alone that they weren't upfront about
Re:Exactly as they did (Score:4, Insightful)
Do *you* think ti's better for the users that the phone shuts off randomly, or over time does not last nearly as long? That would ACTUALLY force a user to buy a phone sooner than if it is just getting a bit slower.
Why are you advocating an approach that leads to users replacing phones more often than they do already? Cruel man.
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Actually, it is a manufacturing defect — and one that they admitted to, but only for a narrow range of serial n
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It's a design defect. In Europe they might be legally required to give free battery replacement because of that.
When designing a phone you need to calculate and then measure to confirm the maximum current draw. You then select a battery that can meet your requirement for its entire useful life (which the international standards bodies define at 80% remaining capacity).
Apple failed to do this. The undersized the battery and caused the phone to malfunction, even though the overall capacity of the battery was
100% refund, no questions asked+ contract buy out (Score:2)
100% refund, no questions asked + contract buy out if you reuped for 2 years to get a new phone.
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Even worse the battery replacement is $79 dollar normally
http://money.cnn.com/2017/12/2... [cnn.com]
In a lengthy message posted on its site Thursday, the company gave an in-depth explanation for the controversial update. To make amends, Apple will temporarily drop the price of replacement batteries for the iPhone 6 and later to $29 starting in late January. The price will go back up to the usual $79 in 2019.
And even worserer than that most people wouldn't know the problem was the battery and would have bought a new phone.
And there've been reports of throttling even when charging. What'd be interesting is to see if swapping batteries restores performance, and to check if the throttling stops when a charger is connected.
Re:Exactly as they did (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm going to suggest that a battery that cost $6 on eBay might not in fact be the same battery Apple uses, and likely has quality issues. If it works for you, great. If it catches fire, well, it's your decision to use that battery.
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The first "should" of this whole mess... (Score:5, Insightful)
The first "should" of this mess is: batteries should be user-replaceable.
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The first "should" of this mess is: batteries should be user-replaceable.
They are.
Unless you are not a very technically competent user.
Then there's the Eastern European guy in the Mall kiosk who will do it for you with parts from stolen iPhones bought off eBay for about $50.
Re:The first "should" of this whole mess... (Score:5, Insightful)
They are.
Unless you are not a very technically competent user.
There are a lot of decent defenses for getting rid of user-replaceable batteries (I disagree with them all, but they are reasonable arguments).
This, however, is just a stupid thing to say. The only reason I'm replying to it now is that I'm seeing it more and more often, and someone has to pipe up about it.
Everyone (including you) knows what people mean by "user replaceable battery": a battery than an ordinary user can replace. If you need spudgers, soldering irons, and skill to do it, then it's not user replaceable.
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The question is, how many people WANT a user-replaceable battery vs a thinner, lighter, more efficient and recyclable phone. How many people have ever actually bought a battery, even when they were user-replaceable, I've worked in a tech store, the ones on the shelves were the only ones in stock, it didn't move inventory and the occasional person that did buy it would buy the knock-off brand.
So why put the effort into logistics if virtually nobody buys them from you?
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You're an idiot. A smaller phone is more efficient, less traces, less PCB, less plastic, more battery, hence also more recyclable, the phones still come apart for recycling which has to be done anyways and there is less waste vs a replaceable battery that has to have built-in electronics and a plastic case just for itself.
People buying knock-off brands makes no money for the OEM, thus the manufacturer doesn't see the demand. Obviously your focus is on what you want to sell and knowing what your customers wa
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You're comparing a $80 feature-phone with a full-fledged smartphone. It's a poor comparison but the market hasn't been conquered by Nokia either.
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smart phone running Windows That's an oxymoron. I call Windows phones feature-phones because they have a handful of features but don't have any particular ecosystem associated with them for apps or app development.
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Everyone (including you) knows what people mean by "user replaceable battery": a battery than an ordinary user can replace. If you need spudgers, soldering irons, and skill to do it, then it's not user replaceable.
Yes, I understand.
You long for the days when you can charge more than one battery, and carry around more than one battery, and swap it out, so that you can go 15 days without a recharge, or you can watch 9 hours worth of movies on your flight to another country, without paying the extra $15 for them to turn on the plane's power jack at your seat.
Battery degradation in sealed battery devices is not an issue, unless you are frequently letting them run all the way down, or they are doing so because you are run
Re:The first "should" of this whole mess... (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, I understand.
Clearly, you don't understand, since you wrote a lot of words that didn't address my comment at all.
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1.) Unless your phone has been infected with cryptomining malware, the single biggest drain of battery power will always be the display.
2.) The 2 most important factors in battery life are recharge cycles and temperature conditions.
In short, to maximaize battery life, move to somewhere with temperate weather and turn on the screen as little as possible.
For yourself, and the tiny fractions of users like you
For most of us battery degradation is a very real concern and your post is just an idiotic rant
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Other manufacturers manage to make thin, waterproof phones with batteries that are not soldered or glued in, and where the back of the phone can be removed with only moderate effort in a way that doesn't damage anything.
Since all batteries are consumable, all phones will eventually need new ones.
Since most phones, including the iPhone, can barely go a day of typical use, and this only gets worse as the battery degrades, a daily 80% cycle is a reasonable requirement.
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At what point does it become user-replaceable? Some devices need a screwdriver to open the battery compartment; are their batteries user-replaceable? Apparently, for some of these phones, the screwdriver is all you need.
Re:The first "should" of this whole mess... (Score:4, Insightful)
I would say the threshold is that if any random person can do it without special training and/or special tools, it's user-replaceable. An ordinary screwdriver? Sure, pretty much everybody has one of those.
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If you need spudgers, soldering irons, and skill to do it, then it's not user replaceable.
You certainly don't need a soldering iron to replace an iPhone battery, and you don't need much skill beyond the ability to read and follow straightforward directions. And the idea that a battery isn't user replaceable because you have to use a tool that came with the replacement battery rather than one out of your red Craftsman toolbox is just plain silly.
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They are.
Not really.
In my Samsung Galaxy S5 you pop off the back, put in a new battery and replace the back. That's "user replaceable."
https://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfr... [cloudfront.net]
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I'm actually OK with the batteries not being easily replaceable. There are decent reasons why they're glued in. I'd rather have a bigger battery than a smaller battery and a door to make replacing it trivial.
However, that being said, as the batteries will need replacement, I think it's only fair that if you glue the batteries in to your phones, you should be required to replace the battery at cost of the battery, at any repair shop of the owner's choice.
None of this "mail it in" or "find the nearest Apple S
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Or, if being able to carry extra batteries with you and swap them in is important to you, then you should buy a phone that meets your needs and desires by including that feature. They're apparently very common. Every time the topic of the iPhone and its battery come up in any capacity on Slashdot, people stumble over themselves to point out that, on their Android phones, they can very easily pop the back cover off, swap in a fresh battery, and add a microSD card for more storage.
And, for those of us who a
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[...] With iMiser(TM) disabled, your iPhone may unexpectedly turn off when you receive important phone calls or are trying a take a video of your kids.
FTFY
Free batteries for a start (Score:1)
They responded well (Score:1)
If you buy any device, you put yourself into the manufacturer's hands, trusting it with technical decisions. The throttling was such a technical decision: Apple wanted to prevent unexpected shutdowns of their devices and therefore implemented throttling. Of course this makes experience for users worse, but the cause for this is bad batteries. As long as the slowdown is being communicated to the user, there is no issue. If Apple did not communicate it, throttling might motivate users to buy new phones entire
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With Apple more than almost any other company, and with phones more than almost any other product, "you put yourself into the manufacturer's hands." Apple has been clear from the start that they don't really care what customers want, so long as they can get more iPhone sales.
Customers wanted physical keyboards, to be able to add Apps from anywhere, free ring tones and the ability to record your own, standard chargers, and being able to plug in audio devices with a universal jack. Guess what? Apple does thei
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Customers wanted physical keyboards, to be able to add Apps from anywhere, free ring tones and the ability to record your own, standard chargers, and being able to plug in audio devices with a universal jack
I am a happy Apple customer. iPhone 6, iPad Pro, pencil, earbuds and watch series 3. And I want none of those things. What I do want is a phone with decent water resistance, secured with regular and immediate updates (when there is a problem) and some control of apps that minimises exploitative ones. Apple gives me this. No one else does.
Nowadays, you have to 'trust' someone. Trusting Apple is better than trusting a whole lot of randoms.
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> Customers wanted physical keyboards
No. *Blackberry* customers wanted physical keyboards. And they kept buying Blackberries until the company imploded. For the first several years of Android's existence, there were many available with physical keyboards. The first Android *EVER* had a physical keyboard. The models with touchscreens outsold the ones with keyboards by far; and Android manufacturers eventually quit making keyboard phones because they weren't selling. The iPhone just predicted the tre
Informing the users (Score:5, Insightful)
A simple notice telling users that their battery was tired and the phone is being slowed to prevent unexpected shutoffs would have avoided the entire issue.
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The annoying thing is that Apple already had a notification saying that "battery performance is degraded" in the settings screen when the battery goes bad. I know, I've seen it. They just needed to add something alongs the lines of "this may cause decreased application performance until the battery is replaced", and they would have been golden.
Oh, and now I'm pissed off because I just paid $79 for my replacement battery a few months ago. Bastards.
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What a load of FUD. The situation you're describing isn't what's happening.
A message warning users that their battery is dying has been in iOS for at least the last year or two, so I think it's safe to say that most users have had no problem with them, given that no one seems to have been bothered by them up to this point. That said, while dying batteries are certainly a directly related problem, they aren't the core issue at the root of this problem.
The root problem here is an unexpected drop in voltage, w
Heads will roll (Score:1)
I don't use iPhone but I want to see some executive responsible for this to step down.
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Do you request the same thing of executives at CPU manufactures who decided to throttle your CPU when it's about to overheat?
Re: Heads will roll (Score:1)
No, because that's well documented behaviour of the CPU, and is a temporary state - when the temperature goes down, the CPU speed will go back up.
These updates by Apple were permanent, and would get more aggressive over time, so your once snappy phone would become sluggish, eventually making you upgrade to a new phone, since you weren't informed that the true problem was the battery, that could be cheaply replaced.
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Blame someone? No problem. All they have to do is blame Steve Jobs. Jobs being beyond the reach of retribution and all. (And I won't be all that surprised if that's exactly what they do).
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how they should have responded (Score:1)
a) Not dunnit in the first place (device slowdown as battery degrades). That was a crappy thing to do and serves to highlight the "mandatory 18 month upgrade" that's so much a part of the Apple business model.
b) Build their business model around the battery as a consumable (which they finally admitted in their apology) and make it easier / less expensive to swap out. (Whether this is a user action or something that can be done with a minimum of pain at the apple store is left up to them.)
What the user ca
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a) Not dunnit in the first place (device slowdown as battery degrades). That was a crappy thing to do and serves to highlight the "mandatory 18 month upgrade" that's so much a part of the Apple business model.
You'd really prefer the random crashes instead of the degraded performance, ya?
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a) Not dunnit in the first place (device slowdown as battery degrades). That was a crappy thing to do and serves to highlight the "mandatory 18 month upgrade" that's so much a part of the Apple business model.
You'd really prefer the random crashes instead of the degraded performance, ya?
A degraded battery, that is, a battery that goes flat sooner than it did when new, causes random crashes? I don't see the connection. Do you have an example?
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Oh, you mean the ones with the Eternal Battery(TM)(R)(C) from Acme Corp. Well then, nobody's keeping you from buying one of those instead.
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Yes, they either suffer from the same problems, implemented the same solution, or already slowed the CPU down whether they shipped. This is a hardware limitation (so it could be done in software, firmware or hardware.) But batteries that can power a CPU at 100% when new cannot power that CPU at 100% when old. So, either you have to prevent apps from using 100% of the CPU, or the battery randomly cuts out when it's eventually using 100% of the CPU.
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Yes, they either suffer from the same problems, implemented the same solution, or already slowed the CPU down whether they shipped. This is a hardware limitation (so it could be done in software, firmware or hardware.) But batteries that can power a CPU at 100% when new cannot power that CPU at 100% when old. So, either you have to prevent apps from using 100% of the CPU, or the battery randomly cuts out when it's eventually using 100% of the CPU.
and/or they have a user replaceable battery.
But seriously, in all the years I've carried a cell phone, back to those huge military walkie-talkie-looking Motorola monsters, through multiple Motorola, LG and Samsung models, to my current rather elderly Note 3, I've not yet had the experience of random crashes due to a degraded battery. Are you sure they're not just making that part up? Earlier reports were that they slowed down the CPU to retain the illusion of useful battery life when the battery started t
If your cell phone CPU can't eventually cause this (Score:5, Insightful)
If your cell phone CPU can't eventually cause this problem, by drawing more current than it's possible for a worn out battery to provide, triggering a shutdown...
You probably own a Nokia "feature phone", and not a smart phone.
Other cell phone vendors have already stated that "Yes, we do the same thing".
Do you know one company with a sealed battery that's going to want a lawsuit against Apple about this to be successful?
That's an automatic precedent against them doing the same thing, as well.
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If your cell phone CPU can't eventually cause this problem, by drawing more current than it's possible for a worn out battery to provide, triggering a shutdown...
You probably own a Nokia "feature phone", and not a smart phone.
If your cell phone shuts down while attempting to draw even a fraction of the power that is still used to fast charge these old phones, you've stuffed up the design. It's also quite telling that it only effects a subset of Apple models too.
Other cell phone vendors have already stated that "Yes, we do the same thing".
Except where they haven't, where they have outright denied it (just scroll down the Slashdot front page a bit), and where the whole issue seems to be a uniquely Apple problem.
Do you know one company with a sealed battery that's going to want a lawsuit against Apple about this to be successful?
Yeah let's start with all the companies who don't have a problems with their batteries at end of
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Maybe you missed the story earlier, but every other manufacturer has denied doing it.
The only one that had this issue was Google, and they replaced every affected Nexus 6P for free.
If the battery is properly sized then by the time it becomes an issue the user will have replaced it because 1 hour of use per charge is inadequate. It's the size of the cathode that matters.
Open Source their code ! (Score:2)
Why do investigators need to to go to great lengths to "prove" Apple's wrongdoing.
We should be able to look it up in the source code history.
Apple uses the BSD kernel and LOTS of other open source code, so they pretend to share: http://opensource.apple.com/ [apple.com] [apple.com]
But, really, that is just a joke. A browser of a bunch of fragmented stuff that nobody actually uses on any actual machine that I am aware of.
FreeBSD and Linux are super secure and dependable, in large part BECAUSE they are open source.
Google'
Re: (Score:2)
To the best of my knowledge, the evil bit was only standardized for IPv4 packets, and there's no standard way to indicate evil in source code. Therefore, in order to conclude that source code constituted wrongdoing, you'd need to find out what it does, and, more importantly, if the behavior constituted wrongdoing.
The source code change was intended to stop random
This year's "gate" (Score:5, Insightful)
If the media wants to find a 'gate, they'll find a 'gate. There's nothing Apple coulda done to prevent it besides BEING PERFECT IN ALL REGARDS AND CREATE PERFECT EVERLASTING PRODUCTS.
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Re: (Score:1)
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Indeed, all other phones are always slow, not just after their second or so year. Brilliant tactic.
And all other batteries last forever too, obviously.
Shut it down (Score:1)
They should've shut the company down, open-sourced their codebase and donated their blood-money to the EFF.
Though I might be biased.
What Apple should have done (Score:1)
With the Truth? (Score:1)
Maybe they should have responded with... um... hmmm... the truth, perhaps?
Re: (Score:2)
With apologies to Jack Nicholson ("A Few Good Men")
The truth? We can't handle the Truth
user controlled (Score:1)
Apple should have released an app to allow the user to control battery life versus performance and explain the pros and cons and the alternative of installing a new battery.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, that's enabling top performance and random crashes, not reducing battery life. Unfortunately, there have been zero Slashdot posts that clarify exactly what the issue is, apparently.
iPhone 5s (Score:2)
My wife owns an iPhones 5s. The battery is pretty worn, and needs replacement.
I borrowed it the other day to use the GPS to get somewhere; half-way to my destination it shut down, even though it claimed to have 15% battery remaining. I would MUCH rather it had slowed down and stayed running; as I was driving at the time I didn't notice it had turned itself off (as I was driving, I relied on the audio cues), and missed my turn.
If Apple should have done anything different, it's that there should be a notifi
Re: (Score:2)
Are you sure that it doesn't already have one? The "degraded" battery warning shows up under the Settings screen. They should probably make it show up in the notifications page as well, though.
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The issue isn’t they didn’t provide this or that, the core issue is they were addressing an isolated issue with some phones shutting down unexpectedly due to current draw on older batteries. It wasn’t a fully-widespread issue. Only on a subset of phones out there. But the solution was to apply the throttling everywhere, under the radar. That is the issue.
If they were more forthcoming, they could have positioned it as “through additional research based on isolated customer reports
Design better phones (Score:2)
There Should Have Been None In The First Place (Score:2)
1) batteries should be user replaceable
2) phone (or any other product) should be reparable
3) OS should be open sourced to allow scrutiny and avoid misconduct by companies. A battery has a limited lifespan, driven by the laws of physics. An OS should not have a limited lifespan limited by the will of Apple, Google or any other.
They are? (Score:2)
> they are still profiting from each battery replacement
At $29 per replacement?
That sounds like break-even to me, at best.
Re: I prefer random crashing! (Score:1)
How is waiting on an uber or taking a phone call a high performance job?
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Haven't been following this closely. iPhone batteries are dying because users are holding the devices wrong? Have i got that right?
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He hits me cuz he love me [dailyhaha.com]