this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2024
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It's not even almost, in 2019 there was a settlement where they were found to literally be making older devices artificially slower once a newer model or two was out. Settlement sign ups ended in 2020, search Apple slowdown lawsuit.
Yeah you’re talking about batterygate. That was blown way out of proportion by the media. I know this because I worked for Apple from as far back as 2012 and most iPhone repairs were from old batteries shutting off around 30% charge remaining because the battery was so consumed, it couldn’t keep up with the voltage the hardware was pulling. This led to frequent shutoffs, data corruption and a whole lot of angry customers.
In an iOS 10 update they tweaked iOS to throttle to a speed the battery could handle. So yeah, your old phone might run a little slower, but it wouldn’t shut off in the middle of use and corrupt your shit.
The problem was they didn’t elaborate in the release notes and didn’t give customers heads up as to why they did that. Then their press release was written by engineers. Tech blogs spun the story as “OMG APPLE IS SLOWING YOUR PHONE SO YOU BUY A NEW ONE”.
No.
Apple is telling your phone to dumb itself down to what your old-ass battery can handle. As a result, they also dramatically lowered the price of battery swaps for several years after this whole experience to like $29, and just this last week they officially affirmed their unwritten commitment of supporting devices with software updates for at least 5 years.
Be mad at Apple for shit they deserve please. They’re not a great company and do a lot of shitty things that deserve this kind of hatred. But I lived this. You just have a surface level understanding of what happened.
The only way to circumvent this problem is to invent a battery that doesn’t age. The person who does that is going to be a _very _ rich dude.
I appreciate the look behind the curtain but since apple was found in a court to have deceived customers and was proven of wrong doing it certainly is a bit more than just the media blowing it out of proportion or Apple actually doing people a favor that was misinterpreted. For example 3 days a week I use a phone from 2018 that was my daily driver for 3 years and needed to use it as a backup MFA device that I also sometimes stream and watch media on for a few hours a day. Updated it to the latest LineageOS and haven't had to worry about freezing or being slow or shutting off and corrupting my shit.
I already stated as much my guy, they screwed up letting users know what was going on. First in the release notes, second in the press release they put out about it. That’s why Apple was found to have deceived customers and rightfully so.
I’m not arguing that. I’m just stating the intentions behind it have been completely dominated by the media and reader’s reactionary responses to hearing “Apple slowed down your phone”. All I ever said here was that there was a very good reason for doing so, and it wasn’t planned obsolescence.
As for lineageos, it also slows down the CPU as needed when a consumed battery cannot output the necessary power or when the operating temperature exceeds safe limits. Most OSes do that. The ones that don’t cause data corruption.
You seem to misunderstand the issue still. It’s not an OS issue. It’s an issue with a consumable part becoming consumed. Until the update, iPhones just shut off when the OS tried to pull too much power. All Apple did was trade shutoffs (compromising user data) for dynamic CPU throttling (sometimes slower performance but your data is fine). Where they screwed up was in telling the users what they were doing and why.
It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about iOS, Android, a fork, or something else. An OS has battery management capabilities or it doesn’t.
That doesn’t change the fact that Apple should’ve been more transparent, but you’re not avoiding this very common method of resource management because of the type of device you have, unless lineageos can defy the laws of physics and consumable batteries.
or how about easily replacable batteries. yes, they can be designed in a sleek, apple-y ergonomic way. but its much easier and more profitable to make battery replacements a phone killing endeavour. this applies to other manufacturers as well.
That’s a valid criticism too. But that’s also not exclusively an apple criticism, as you pointed out.
I’m not trying to defend Apple from people who hate them, I just want to make sure we’re not being solely reactionary here.
Again, they dropped the price of out of warranty battery replacements from $99+ to $29 for (don’t quote me on this) something like 2 years as a result of the bad PR they got from this change, which was inherently done to prolong the life of a phone with a consumed battery. That’s anything but a planned obsolescence move. They fucked up the messaging to users sure, but it wasn’t just done to slow your iPhone.
agreed on the batterygate thing. ars did a pretty decent writeup on the reasons behind the CPU throttling.
my issue with Apple has always been their... "its magic!" bullshit. that marketing leads to more and more e-waste as other manufacturers follow the sucessful Apple marketing trend, because, you know... its NOT actually magic and batteries are consumable items.
"Ford, how am I supposed to operate my [insanely expensive] digital watch now [that the battery is broken]?" guess i'll just get another one!
I mean, people don’t have to buy new phones every year. Especially recently YoY improvements have stagnated enough and prices have jumped enough that there’s never been less reason to.
I don’t really fault Apple for iterating their devices every year and advertising them any more than I fault literally every other manufacturer for doing the exact same thing. I just don’t understand why people like to pick out Apple specifically? It’s an industry problem, not just an Apple problem.