this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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I know I’m going to get downvoted to oblivion here, and people love to hate on Apple. But this was in response to older phones with old batteries sometimes not being able to keep up with the demands of the latest iOS and features and unexpectedly shutting down. So they would “dampen” the demands to keep them running.
We want to keep our old phones forever but we also want them to do the stuff that the latest phones can do. Something has to give.
This is litigation culture run rampant.
At the same time, they could have been more obvious about it. Quietly doing that in the background seems like they're deliberately making what would be an otherwise mostly-usable device worse, so you buy a new one.
Something like popping a warning saying "Battery has degraded, would you like to reduce performance to extend battery life?" would have been better, letting the users choose to either replace the battery, and/or downrate the performance. Either way, doing it quietly was going to be a PR disaster when it came out.
If my mom saw that on her phone she would call me and say her phone was exploding. Or go and buy a new phone.
Doing stuff behind the scenes is fine because people are ignorant and easily panic. But it should have been visible in the battery power menu or something.
In the battery menu of my iPhone X, I saw a warning similar to "maximum performance might be affected". The menu showed battery life was low (%69), warned about performance and recommended me to bring the phone to customer service.
Which seem perfectly reasonable to me honestly. This all seem like a nothing issue when we have larger problems concerning things like planned obsolescence and no maintainability to deal with.
I honestly think they didn’t disclose it precisely because there was no malicious intent behind it. It was something they did to extend the useful life of the phone, and I don’t think it occurred to them that it would be seen negatively.
It also doesn’t make sense as a shady tactic to spur phone upgrades because you can always just get a battery replacement to restore the original performance. You don’t need a new phone, just a new battery.
Sadly, very few people seem to understand this. I'm all for seeing a big company have to take responsibility, but the way people just blindly follow this is very disheartening. You can't have true accountability without accuracy. They hear "throttling old phones" and assume the rest. The supreme irony is, throttling was the only way to keep older devices running longer. When I was doing kernel development on the Note2 and Note4, people constantly reported sudden reboots or otherwise rapidly depleting battery while using the camera. The old batteries just couldn't handle the sudden spike in demand for near 100% CPU/GPU utilization + full display brightness + camera hardware powered on + heavy RAM/IO use, all at once. So the voltage would drop, even for just a few milliseconds, then the CPU would starve, and the device would reboot. Just like pressing the reset button on a PC. Limiting the CPU was the easiest solution for everyone. Do I think they should have done it silently? No. Do I think they did it to avoid being thrust into the spotlight when more and more of their users were reporting reboots? Yes. I think modern devices handle this much better because they learned from the past. Manufacturers didn't realize back then what the degradation curve would be years into the future against acute spikes in battery demands.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I was affected by this way before they were sued, started offering cheap battery replacements, and added a setting to disable the throttling. Today you might turn on battery saving and not notice any slow down, but older iPhones were not like that. Depending on the throttling, everything would lag.
Mine was lagging left and right after 1 year. I managed to make it better by disabling animations, etc, but after a while even that wasn't enough to keep me happy. I went to my local official Apple store and the suggestion was to buy a new phone because mine (then owned for ~1 and a half years) was a 3 year old model.
I had no idea what the problem was and there was no way to disable this. Apple's fix was to buy a new phone. When I managed to get the money, I did buy a new phone... that was my first and last iPhone though. The phone I got next (from a then new brand called OnePlus) lasted 3 years on my hands without hidden throttling or random shutdowns.
I understand why they did it and why it's useful. The problem is that they did it behind people's back without providing any information or a way to disable it, and then had their stores suggesting a new phone as a fix. For me this is scummy behaviour and shouldn't be praised.
I agree, and did not mean to imply they had any good intentions. Just that it wasn't pure malicious, evil on their part. They should have been transparent, and offered better solutions to users. They certainly could afford to do so.
That is invaluable insight into random reboots. I have a question: Why does the device have to reboot instead of automatically lowering CPU frequencies? Why do you have to set up throttling instead of the hardware handling this by itself?
Thank you for appreciating my contribution. :) And to answer your question, because it happens too fast. Everything powers on, the voltage drops below a critical point, the CPU forgets who it is or where it is, and the reboot begins. I'm sure nowadays they make efforts to anticipate this. But back then, the industry was busy cramming increasingly powerful hardware into devices, and no one had really given any thought to how the batteries would react after years of use. Then environmental factors could make everything worse - coldness can suck dozens of percent off even a healthy battery.
Strongly disagree. Current draw is a well-known design consideration for a device like this. Unless otherwise stated, devices are generally assumed to function at full performance for the lifetime of the device. It’s expected that battery life will degrade over time, but not processing performance and responsiveness. Most manufacturers will account for degradation in peak current by limiting TDP to the peak demand for the device’s future current capacity. Throttling the SOC is not something customers expect, which is why the case has succeeded.
How exactly does one limit TDP without lowering CPU power needs? You could limit the screen brightness, but users are definitely going to notice that and be unhappy.
By designing the device properly? It’s why they don’t put a 170W Ryzen in your phone. TDP is not a dynamic property - it is a design aspect, usually one of the first ones decided upon when building a new device.
Your battery is going to age no matter what. At some point, it won't be able to keep up with the power draw of your OS when more and more features keep being added years into owning the device.
Replace the aging battery with a new one and the phone will run full speed again. This applies to Android as much as iOS.
Also, Apple is the current king of power and efficiency in their chips. Your Ryzen hyperbole isn't applicable to their designs.
Yes, and this happens immediately as soon as it comes off the line, which is why a 6W SOC will be designed with a battery capable of delivering 7-8W of power. Current capacity specifically is generally spec’d so that it’s sufficient for the lifetime of the device, even if total charge capacity (battery life) drops. When the 6S was designed, Apple either knew they would need to throttle the SOC starting at around 2 years after purchase, or they miscalculated the current capacity degradation curve for the battery they chose. The former is shady and misleading, and the latter is just embarrassing. In either case, I am in full agreement with the court that Apple should be held liable for selling a product that does not matched advertised functionality as understood by the typical consumer.
Well you clearly have an axe to grind if you think an average lithium ion battery is going to perform like new years after purchase. Your argument is that it should work perfectly forever, which isn't logical whatsoever.
I never said that. My point is that if a device requires 1200mA peak current draw to function at full performance, the battery needs to be selected so that it can deliver that demand for the lifetime of the device. The support lifecycle for iPhones is about 7 years, so if the minimum discharge of the battery drops to 80% after 7 years, the battery should be selected to have a nominal discharge current of about 1500mA.
That would increase cost and probably also the size of the phone, likely to unacceptable proportions.
I just don't think your position is reasonable. We don't expect car manufacturers to produce engines that never lose horsepower or never need oil changes. Why would we expect similar from electronics that cost a fraction of a car?
But you know, I still support your right to hold that position even if I disagree.
Probably, but that’s why you make trade-offs in the design process. With a BOM of $236 and a MSRP of $750, it’s not like we’re starting from a razor-thin margin here.
Doubtful - total charge capacity does depend on volume, but nominal discharge current is mostly orthogonal.
Of course not. But if a car manufacturer designed their transmission so that after 40,000 miles, gear 7 and 8 stopped working because the gear teeth were too worn down by that point, and the automatic selector would top out at gear 6 to avoid stalling the engine, you’d definitely have a lawsuit and recall on your hands.
This is all about norms of consumer expectations. People expect that battery life of their devices will degrade over time. They don’t expect that performance will do the same.
I don’t disagree entirely. And this article is a little light on the details… But I think the main reason behind the legal liability is the lack of transparency - which could be interpreted as having a malicious intent to push people to upgrade their hardware.
Needing to adjust performance is acceptable. Maliciously adjusting performance to motivate people to buy new devices isn’t. Pretty sure that is one of the major factors in this case.
I never wanted software updates to be handled this way. The phone works fine with the original software. There is no reason to downgrade to the latest version that doesn’t work well on the phone other than pressuring users to buy a new one.
It always blows my mind some people actually found Apple's defense convincing.
The iPhones didn't inform users when they were throttling because they had an old battery. Apple kept the throttling a secret and coincidentally it helped them upsell new phones to people with old phones. This type of functionality was also unique to Apple, it's not like this is the only choice they had and an industry practice.
Did you have one of these phones? Because I did. I was one of those that experienced this controversy first-hand.
Most people complaining I’m guessing have very little direct experience with Apple products. Although maybe you do and just have different expectations that 5 year old tech should work the same as a new phone. We still have an iPhone 6 and the original SE in the family. My high school kid uses a 2011 MacBook Air with no problems and I have a 2014 MacBook Pro as a backup laptop for work. These devices last a long time.
Where they did fuck up is not explaining what they were doing, and the slowdowns were probably more impactful than they expected.
I had an iPhone 5 and it was slowed down after a year and a half or so. Formatted it, then disabled animations, etc, but by the end it was really slow to use. The nearest official store suggested a new phone since the model was almost 3 years ago, even though I had used it for less than 2 years.
I had no idea what the problem was. No way to disable it or a cheap way to replace the battery. All that only came after they were sued.
They fucked up by not telling anyone they were doing it and not providing a way to reverse the slow downs. Having their employees suggesting getting a new phone instead of fixing the damn problem was also what I consider to be scummy behaviour.
A few years after getting a new phone (an Android one though, I don't like to reward bad behaviour), I went back to the iPhone and it was still lagging. There was a new major update available though... which made it a bit faster. I don't know what happened behind the scenes, but only enforced my view that I was being pushed to buy a new phone.
The iPhone 5 was released 2012 with iOS 6. The throttling for old devices was introduced in 2017 with iOS 10.2.1. That’s a big gap.
Let’s be fair here. Your phone was 5 years old and trying to run the latest OS. If it’s too slow for you, sticking with an older OS version or upgrading to a new phone is probably good advice.
I bought a replacement in 2015 (months after the problem started), so no, I wasn't trying to use the latest iOS on a 5 years old phone. Even if I was, it's up to them to make sure it runs at least well enough and/or to provide a way to downgrade (something that Apple didn't [still doesn't?] allow you to do) as customers have no idea if the update has a problem before they install it and use it for a while.
Only Apple can prove this as all we have is rumours, but I believe they started playing with the idea of slowing down devices way before that wider release years later. I remember finding similar reports when I tried to find out what was happening to my phone. There were complaints even on Apple's own community forums: some owners had laggy iPhones while other owners, with the same device/model, were fine. Unfortunately, other than the usual user blaming from people that didn't have the problem and the "buy a new phone" comments, no one suggested an actual fix.
The slow down in 2017 was huge for some people. Here's a 3 year old iPhone 6 that had its frequencies go from 1400 MHz to 600 MHz: https://twitter.com/Sam_RMSI/status/943400254451335168
I'm far from being an Apple hater - I'm typing this on a M1 MBP after all - but it's not okay to slow down phones like that without any warning, information or a way to disable the "feature". The person above had their clock speeds drop to less than half of the original speeds! Like, what the heck?
I'm sure they had good intentions, but in practice they slowed down some devices too much without any warning or a way to reverse the change. Their only fixes for the problem they created all involved giving them money: you either had to buy a new phone or pay for a battery replacement which was not that cheap. They had to be sued first and only then they added a setting to disable the throttling and started offering affordable battery replacements...
This type of behaviour from companies shouldn't be defended or praised.
If Apples objective was to force people to upgrade, it would have been much easier to just discontinue support for old handsets on the newest iOS. Instead users got the latest iOS, it was just throttled because of the battery limitations.