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Apple Says It Slows Older iPhones to Save Their Battery Life

249 points by lyk 9y ago

yehosef 9y ago
Seems like a good idea.
djrogers 9y ago
It's not only to make them run longer - they're reducing the peak demand on the batteries to avoid spontaneous shutdown when the aged battery can't handle the load. This seems like a good idea, and it appears to be well executed (ie it's not apparently based just on age or milage like a crappy car maintenance reminder), but Apple should probably have something in iOS that tells people their phone is running slow because the battery is 2 years old. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/20/apple-addresses-why-people-are-saying-their-iphones-with-older-batteries-are-running-slower/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/20/apple-addresses-why-people...
- Blazespinnaker 9y ago
  How about just the ability for a user to replace the battery? Should be a law to cut down on ewaste.
  - jrs95 9y ago
    Most phones are probably getting recycled now anyways, so it really doesn’t matter. In fact, I would think user serviceability would increase waste because people would throw their old batteries away.
    - justonepost 9y ago
      Not if you have a fee on the battery such that you have to provide the old one to get a discount.
  - derpaderp1 9y ago
    If they did that then the NSA couldn't turn back on a "powered off" device while you are asleep to bombard you with ultrasonic waves.
  - IBM 9y ago
    iPhones have the longest life of any smartphone and you can verify that yourself by looking at the used market for it (and any Apple product). User replaceable batteries may ironically decrease that and increase waste.
    - justonepost 9y ago
      How would replaceable batteries decrease the life of the smartphone?
      - jhiska 9y ago
        It wouldn't. It would obviously increase the lifespan of it. The spinsters are deliberately confusing "lifespan" with "resale value".
        IBM 9y ago
        >The spinsters are deliberately confusing "lifespan" with "resale value". I realize I'm responding to someone arguing in bad faith. But lifespan directly influences the resale value.
        jhiska 9y ago
        Replaceable batteries increase lifespan. The iPhone is a well-made phone which would have greater lifespan if the batteries were replaceable. As it is, users who bought an older iPhone now have to pay middle-men to replace the battery or face degraded performance.
        valuearb 9y ago
        The iPhone already has replaceable batteries. Making them user-replaceable just reduces battery capacity, increases size/weight, all so in 2-3 years you can save about 5% of your purchase cost by replacing the battery yourself. iPhone users buy iPhones because they wanted the best in class functionality, if they wanted to save money they'd buy a phone with a replaceable battery.
  - mikestew 9y ago
    Alternatively, folks buy batteries they don’t need just because they can. I did that with my Galaxy Note, bought a spare because they were $30 and because I could. Never used it, the Note had great battery life. Now it sits on a shelf, waiting for me to recycle it.
    - jhiska 9y ago
      Somehow I am reminded of the lyrics "You spin me right round, right round, baby." The spin, I feel, is that somehow being able to replace one's batteries is bad. Whereas having an iPhone with degraded performance and an expensive-to-replace battery is good. You "bought a spare because you could" and "now it sits, waiting for you to recycle it", thus creating waste, but one can argue that anyone buying stuff they don't need creates waste, and that being able to replace one's phone battery isn't about saving the environment but saving one's hard-earned money.
      - mikestew 9y ago
        Alternative ways of looking at things is “spin” in your mind, huh? Well, that’s one way to keep a narrative, I suppose.
        jhiska 9y ago
        I guess I could call them alternative facts, if you prefer.
      - valuearb 9y ago
        First, you can replace an iPhone battery, just take it to your Apple Store. It's reasonably affordable ($79) or free if still under warranty/Applecare. User-replaceable batteries don't change anything for the environment. Second, user-replaceable batteries don't come for free. They come with a series of trade-offs. Small increases in cost, space, even weight. If you plan to keep your phone for more than 2 years, user-replaceable will be more important to you than if you intend to replace every 2 years. I remember when I switched to MacBook Pros from my Dell laptops. I had two flights a week that were about 5 hours each. I had to buy an extra laptop battery and charger so my Dell would last the entire flight. And sometimes I'd forget to charge both batteries and I'd be back to a dead laptop halfway through the flight. Then I read the reviews of these new MBPs that lasted 7-8 hours instead of 5 hours, that used sealed batteries. I switched and my new MBP worked like a charm, easily lasting the entire flight every time. One big reason Apple made that advance was entirely because they abandoned removable batteries. They were able to fit more battery using a custom form factor that would have been super expensive to make removable. No one had done this as well before, because Apple was the first to implement good embedded battery conditioning software so they would last a couple years without needing replacement. Sealed batteries aren't always better, but they typically are for most users and use cases.
  - gnopgnip 9y ago
    There are quite a few good phones with a user replaceable battery, but that is just not what consumers want most of the time. The LG v20 is the most recent one that comes to mind
- IBM 9y ago
  It does say in iOS that your battery needs to be replaced [1]. Everyone keeps saying they never told anyone about this but they basically announced it to the press with a statement (as well as the notice in iOS) when iOS 10.2.1 was released [2]. [1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207453 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207453 [2] https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/23/apple-says-ios-10-2-1-has-reduced-unexpected-iphone-6s-shutdown-issues-by-80/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/23/apple-says-ios-10-2-1-has-...
  - ben_jones 9y ago
    Millions of people own iPhone's and don't jump up and down meticulously reading every press release or notification. Hell I can't remember the last notification that didn't catch be at a bad time, prompting me to punt it off my screen as quickly as possible.
    - squiggleblaz 9y ago
      Yeah, iPhone's notification system is terrible. Based around "deal with it now because we told you to!". Makes me sad.
  - was_boring 9y ago
    I read both, and couldn't find any verbiage indicating they limited the cpu speed based upon the condition of the battery. Only that they "fixed a bug" to reduce "unexpected shutdowns."
    - IBM 9y ago
      Yes I think it's safe to assume that Apple is not going to be notifying users about CPU speed adjustments and when those occur, given that it changes based on anything from cold to hot temperatures.
      - frogpelt 9y ago
        It wouldn't have to be an event notification. It could be a once-a-month reminder that performance may be degraded.
- jrs95 9y ago
  It IS a good idea. My step mom had a high end Samsung phone (not sure exactly which one) and it’s battery degraded enough within a year that it began to shut down randomly a lot.
  - jhiska 9y ago
    I guess that means all Samsung phones ("not sure which ones") are inferior to Apple phones, hm? ;)
    - jrs95 9y ago
      Haha, no. It just wasn’t a Note or Galaxy S, but it still cost like $700. Was a bit smaller. No idea what device it was specifically. And she couldn’t replace the battery easily, either. It was non-removable, as are basically all high end Android devices now.
      - wccrawford 9y ago
        I had to replace the batteries in our Nexus 6Ps recently. I didn't buy from Google, so they wouldn't deal with it out of warranty, despite it being a defect. They're replaceable, but they are clearly not meant to be done by the user. There were many opportunities to break pieces of the phone or ruin it completely. It's a horrible design.
        jhiska 9y ago
        Both the iPhone and the Nexus 6Ps have horrible battery-swap design, but I still don't want to pay middle-men for what should be simple service I should be able to do at home.
        wccrawford 9y ago
        I fully agree. When I said I replaced the batteries, I meant it literally. I did the work. It was ugly. But it was a hell of a lot cheaper than the quote I got from the repair shop, and I didn't break anything. (Which isn't a surprise... I like fixing things.)
- scotty79 9y ago
  > they're reducing the peak demand on the batteries to avoid spontaneous shutdown when the aged battery can't handle the load. It doesn't seem to help my gf had an iPhone 5 that started dying on peak demand but only after it got upgraded to new ios (i guess 8.0). We replaced it (it had bad battery from the start and apple had a program for replacing those). After few years on new battery it started doing the same thing again. I replaced the battery and it stopped. But I know what I can expect in two years or so. Maybe I should stock on iPhone 5 batteries? Do they age less if they are unused?
  - valuearb 9y ago
    All batteries wear out after a few years of use.
    - scotty79 9y ago
      I understand lasting shorter on charge but shutting down when I turn on the camera while on 40% is uniquely apple experience.
      - shoobedowop 9y ago
        nope.
      - nradov 9y ago
        I've seen the same shutdown problem on multiple different Android devices with degraded batteries.
        scotty79 9y ago
        I must have been lucky then.
- basseq 9y ago
  This comment deserves more attention. And, in fact, means the headline is wrong. Apple is not slowing down devices to extend battery life. Apple is slowing down devices to prevent the thing from crapping out entirely ("unexpectedly shutting down"). Arguably, this does more to prevent obsolescence than plan it. Agreed with @djrogers suggestion to alert the user to the situation. It should not be a user choice. "Last year we released a feature for iPhone 6, iPhone 6s and iPhone SE to smooth out the instantaneous peaks only when needed to prevent the device from unexpectedly shutting down during these conditions [cold, low battery, battery age]."
  - mempko 9y ago
    Strange, I have an old HP veer That is 6 years old and it doesn't spontaneously shut down. I have a 3 year old android phone that doesn't spontaneously shut down. What is so special about iPhones and why do they crap out in 2 years?
    - swiley 9y ago
      All of the Android phones I've had do when the battery starts to get old, Especially when you use the camera while it's low. Maybe you take better care of your batteries?
    - nogridbag 9y ago
      My 2013 Macbook Pro would spontaneously shut down with anywhere between 30-40% battery. I tried a few tips I found online to fix it, but nothing seemed to work.
    - esmi 9y ago
      This post gives us an estimate for what percentage of the iPhones are getting throttled by this issue. I think it's reasonable to use this as a proxy to estimate how many units were at risk of shutting down and it is the minority of units. Happily it appears both of your devices are in the majority of units which don't exhibit this issue. https://www.geekbench.com/blog/2017/12/iphone-performance-and-battery-age/ https://www.geekbench.com/blog/2017/12/iphone-performance-an...
- jhiska 9y ago
  You make a good point. If you consider that you can't easily change the battery in an iPhone without voiding the warranty or paying a premium price to Apple Support then one can make a strong argument that it's sneaky planned obsolescence. Then again, a battery that dies down after a few years and is so difficult to replace is also planned obsolescence.
  - justonepost 9y ago
    It's just another nail in the coffin. OS upgrades requiring more CPU usage, the lack of repair-ability, dying batteries, and now this CPU tweak. It's pretty obvious what apple is doing. We need a law to make them stop or at least one which requires them to declare in obvious language about the things that reduce the functioning of their devices over time.
- caconym_ 9y ago
  Yeah, this is a real problem that I’ve had with devices in the past and as someone who doesn’t buy the hot new phone every year, I appreciate that Apple is taking steps to keep my 5S happy. That’s a commitment to long-term support that I would not expect from the average Android phone vendor.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- jtbayly 9y ago
  I think the problem is deeper. They put batteries in these devices that cannot handle load the rest of the hardware demands. Their solution is to just slow down the rest of the hardware. I've got a phone that is nowhere near to needing a new battery. It holds 87% of its original charge capacity. Yet it never runs above 50% speed unless it is above 97% charged, and even then it only runs at 2/3rds original speed.
  - compiler-guy 9y ago
    The batteries handle the load just fine until they start wearing out around 500 cycles.
    - JustSomeNobody 9y ago
      How are people getting to 500 cycles in one year?
      - xenadu02 9y ago
        It isn't purely about cycle count. If you ever forget and leave your phone on the car dash in the summer that heat has a permanent negative effect on your battery.
- shill 9y ago
  My geekbench CPU scores (single-core 1458, multi-core 2480) show that my 6s has been throttled but honestly I hadn't noticed a slowdown. In which apps would I notice a significant difference if I replace my battery? If Safari page load speeds increased I would be happy, but I assume that is more influenced by bandwidth and mobile optimization.
- zkms 9y ago
  > It's not only to make them run longer - they're reducing the peak demand on the batteries to avoid spontaneous shutdown when the aged battery can't handle the load. Yes. I used to have spontaneous shutdowns on my iPhone 6 in cold weather when the fuel gauge indicated a number like 20% and it was this sort of problem that was meant to be fixed: the CPU using too much current, causing the battery voltage to drop enough to trigger the low-voltage/brownout detector, causing the phone to die. The battery would last long enough (from last full charge to needing to recharge) -- it wasn't inadequate in the energy department -- it just couldn't deliver enough power in cold conditions. Throttling the CPU in those cases (when the aged battery can't deliver enough current) is sensical and extends the life of the phone -- the only serious issue is that the user might think that there is a problem with the CPU or the software (and replace the whole phone) when the problem can be adequately fixed with a new battery (far less expensive than a new phone). The feature is good but Apple's software should be far more proactive in notifying users that this is happening, if only because users jump to a conclusion of "my old phone can't handle this new iOS update, damn Apple making me buy a new phone" rather than "my battery is too old to reliably deliver whatever current the SOC wants".
  - nielsbot 9y ago
    I think you wanted sensical -> sensible. I'll show myself out.
    - valuearb 9y ago
      Stop being non-sensical. Just be sensical, man.
  - twoodfin 9y ago
    I think there’s more to this story than mere aging batteries. I had the exact symptoms of this issue with my one year old iPhone 6 Plus in fall of 2015. Add in some very strange battery % readings: Even when it failed to shut down, the phone would drop rapidly from 20% to 1% but then remain there for ten minutes or more. Bizarrely, this behavior (albeit less frequent or severe) jumped to my brand new iPhone 6S Plus in November of that year when I restored it from a backup of the 6 Plus. Both phones had Geniuses run battery diagnostics without finding any unusual degradation. My guess: Apple’s battery “farming” code designed to maximize its life, level drain and charge across the cells, manage load, estimate charge % remaining... is incredibly sophisticated, even so far as to profile your typical use of a device to inform these decisions and estimates. There have been user-visible bugs in this code related to manual clock updates (something I did a fair bit while traveling), and I bet some fraction of these downclocked users have been the victim of that or related bugs. If the code is “farming” the battery incorrectly, some cells may be charged or drained too much for too long, and greatly increase a phone’s susceptibility to these voltage drops, even while the global status of the battery reads as fine.
- LusoTycoon 9y ago
  Apple did that and people would start cracking iphones open to replace batteries. Not in line with Apple's philosphy.
- dbingham 9y ago
  Or they could, you know, design the thing so that the battery is replaceable and provide easily accessible replacement batteries.
  - cjensen 9y ago
    Apple will replace the battery for $79 [1]. When you consider the cost for a battery, the labor for replacement, the confidence that this is not a junk replacement, and the warranty for the service, that's a very reasonable price. There is no way Apple is making money on this. [1] https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/battery-power https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/battery-power
- blensor 9y ago
  I can't tell how well it's executed but the major issue I have with this is that this is not properly communicated to the user. I guess most people already get the feeling that their devices slow down after time, or the new apps/OS's just require more potent hardware and replacement of the devices is necessary as time goes by. But for many of those it seems that a "simple" battery replacement would have done the trick as well. If my device has to substantially throttle the performance to avoid a complete shutdown I expect a major notification that something is terribly wrong and I better do something about it. My car had an occasional issue with an exhaust regulation valve and drastically reduced the performance in those situations. Every time I received a notification on the dashboard that the power was reduced but that I can continue driving but that I should visit a service partner as soon as possible. That would be exactly what I expect from a smart device
  - xster 9y ago
    > not properly communicated to the user s/user/buyer Selling a car that markets 300,000 miles but can't drive over 3,000 rpm anymore after the first year is not a car, and marketing it as such is fraud.
    - blensor 9y ago
      In my car case it was a know issue of this model and repaired for free within one hour. And while a degraded battery is nothing that needs to be replaced for free, the manufacturer of the phone probably sunk a lot of time and money into developing a strategy to cope with the phone shutdowns due to a degraded battery. During that process it is hard to imagine that no one ever came up with the notion that maybe it would be a good idea to also notify the user that a serious issue is developing which should be handled some time. After all this is not going to get better since the battery will continue degrading (and probably with increasing rate) if it is not replaced.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- falcolas 9y ago
  > avoid spontaneous shutdown when the aged battery can't handle the load This doesn't make sense to me. I've been playing with LiPo batteries on quadcopters for a few years now, and I've found that battery capacity is directly related to its voltage, and the voltage decreases in a deterministic fashion according to use. High quality and well maintained LiPo batteries just don't behave randomly - that's why we feel safe attaching them to our houses in the form of Tesla Powercells. Or, in other words, if a phone is showing 40% charge when it shuts down, that's not the battery "spontaneously" being unable to cope with load; that's a bad charge indicator.
- xster 9y ago
  It's fine rationalizing it but how is that conceptually different from say Comcast saying: "Well actually your 100Mbps connection was just a first year promotional speed and now dropped to 20Mbps unless you sign another limited period contract. Oh, and actually, it's all for good reasons because the crappy modem that you rented at 10$ a month just kinda starts melting if it keeps transmitting at 100Mbps so we just saved your house from burning down. No need to thank us. Sorry we didn't disclose any of this to new customers but don't worry, just give us more money and everything will be ok."
- racl101 9y ago
  > but Apple should probably have something in iOS that tells people their phone is running slow because the battery is 2 years old. Or a disclaimer telling people the caveats (or cons) of upgrading their OS. More transparency would be great instead of making people feel like the company is pushing them out of their, otherwise, perfectly functional smartphone which cost them a fortune.
trynumber9 9y ago
Should be a switch in the settings. Prefer battery life or prefer performance. One more setting won't kill anyone.
- roc 9y ago
  The whole problem is that the batteries can't deliver that performance. They can throttle the chip to what the battery can deliver or it will crash. Maybe Apple's more conservative on the throttling, and some amount of performance could still be achieved without a crash, but there's zero chance Apple's putting a "make my phone unstable" switch in Settings.
  - jlmorton 9y ago
    That doesn't pass the sniff test. The available voltage from a lithium ion battery will decrease as it is discharged. When your phone turns off, that does not mean there is no more energy in the battery. It means there is no longer enough voltage to power the phone. Over the course of many discharge cycles, the battery will lose capacity, and the point when the voltage is no longer sufficient to power the phone will come sooner. But this is overly pedantic. People generally consider this point to be simply an "empty battery." Android phones do not suffer these performance changes. Instead, the phones lose battery life over time, and within a year or so, you might be lucky to get 12 hours of life out of a full charge. You can make an argument that we should optimize for duration or performance, but the difference is that casual Android users are aware that their battery is deteriorating, while casual iPhone users believe their phone is itself deteriorating, or else much slower than the newer models.
    - jtbayly 9y ago
      Wrong. The peak demand from the phone can exceed the available voltage even if you're at 30%, causing an immediate shutdown. That's what we saw a year ago. Now they no longer shut down unexpectedly, but the performance of the phone sucks, even with a battery that holds 87% of its original capacity.
bec123 9y ago
Dear one of the richest damn companies on the face of the earth: MAKE . IT . EASIER . TO . REPLACE . THE . BATTERY !!!
- nicky0 9y ago
  You can replace it an an Apple Store for $79.
  - CaptSpify 9y ago
    Why should anyone have to pay to do trivial service to their own phone?
    - esmi 9y ago
      One has the choice to pay $79. But you don't have to: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPhone+6+Battery+Replacement/29363 https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPhone+6+Battery+Replacement/29...
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- nephrite 9y ago
  Yes. Also make the batteries standard, like they did with the chargers.
  - elsonrodriguez 9y ago
    wat
  - valuearb 9y ago
    Yes, lets have lower battery capacity, and heavier thicker phones so that 2 years from now a user can save $30 replacing their battery.
  - andai 9y ago
    Like, AAA?
Upvoter33 9y ago
THIS MAKES SO MUCH SENSE. I always thought I was going crazy, thinking my increasingly "old" phone seemed slow. This is really irritating and disingenuous on Apple's behalf - as said above, they should at least add a switch.
- fleitz 9y ago
  The bigger effect is probably how software is developed. Most devs have a shiny new phone on their desk, we make it fast enough and then stop, therefore an older phone will appear to be slower because the app is still fast on our devices. QA will test on a older phone but most companies don’t have tight performance targets so what used to be 60 FPS is now 45 and what used to be a 200 ms load is now 250 ms. The difference is imperceptible during dev because each new feature shaves a few FPS and adds a few ms.
- gdulli 9y ago
  My smartphone in 2008 was an iPhone. It slowed down unacceptably and I never bought another piece of Apple hardware again. My 3 phones since then all remained usable past 2 years until I was ready to replace them on my own schedule.
  - C6C6C6C 9y ago
    Same experience, but I went back to the iPhone once, only once, with the iPhone 5s, and then already deeply regretted it after updating iOS to the latest. I should have known they'd do it again after what I experienced with the iPhone 3g last update, which made the thing so slow it was unusable. The iPhone 5s should have hardware that is much faster than what's in a Moto G2. Yet, my friend's Moto G2 feels smoother in use, transitioning between apps and the like, than the 5s. I bought the Honor 8 to replace it, a somewhat cheap, midrange android device. Everything on it feels so fast I probably won't replace it until its battery gives out completely. On the paper, the hardware of the Honor 8 is not as fast as modern iPhones. In practice when I open apps it's pretty much instantaneous. The device has enough RAM to keep everything running. People keep complaining android manufacturers aren't updating the OS fast enough. I'd say good on them to make sure they only give us an OS build that's actually usable on said hardware. Apple doesn't even let you install previous iOS versions. Unlike iOS, most of Android's platform APIs are updated through the Play Store. Things like your web browser are also updated through the play store. So unlike iPhones where refusing new iOS updates means being stuck with browser engines that can't keep up with the web, your android handset stuck on older android is not actually becoming obsolete. No matter how much nicer Apple's hardware looks and feels in the hands, I ain't ever giving them more of my money again. Premium prices should command more durability in time than this. Chosing to stay on an old iOS means you can't install new apps built on newer SDKs or get newer browsers and so on, so you really have to suffer the slow down treadmill with Apple. You don't have to on Android.
jamra 9y ago
I got down voted to hell trying to say this here on hacker news. On a side note, does anyone else feel as though there is a lot of astro turfing going on here? A few commenters owe me an apology.
- jsmthrowaway 9y ago
  > Don't accuse others of astroturfing or shillage. This always degrades discussion and rarely hits the mark. Email us instead and we'll look into it. > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
golemotron 9y ago
Well, that makes me want to upgrade.
- OscarTheGrinch 9y ago
  ...to android.
- mmcconnell1618 9y ago
  What makes you think that Android isn't subject to the same physical limits of older batteries? You have more ability to customize the Android phones response to the battery condition but that doesn't change the underlying reason for the slow down: The battery can't handle the requested load anymore.
  - C6C6C6C 9y ago
    The battery can't handle 1 year of use because they undersized it. A 1 715 mAh battery will, once aging, be less able to provide the voltage asked by peak CPU usage than a 2900 mAh battery that has aged for about the same amount of charge cycles. iPhones are the only device sold by Apple that are only rated for 500 charge cycles before degradation starts. Macbook, iPads and Apple Watches are rated for 1000 cycles. In the case of the Apple Watch I'd guess it's because despite being tiny, the SOC also doesn't ask for as much peak voltage as the phone SOC. I've had the Honor 8 for a year. It's still holding a great amount of charge and running fine and as fast as the day I bought it. And unlike my 5s, no phone update is coming to turn it into a slow crawl. The iPhone battery problem with regards to the topic, spontaneous shutdown at 30% and less battery remaining, is probably exacerbated since the evolutions that made those SOC more powerful than before. There wasn't a large wave of 5s owners having spontaneous shutdown requiring an OS update to throttle the CPU. That only started with the iPhone 6. A combination of paltry battery and modern SOCs having peak power usage that stress such battery more than before.
    - dep_b 9y ago
      > And unlike my 5s, no phone update is coming to turn it into a slow crawl. That's one way to celebrate being an Android user.
Multicomp 9y ago
WOW. Conspiracy was real the whole time! Devil's Advocate to spark discussion (I'm not an iPhone owner so no dog in fight): Apple did the right thing by not putting a switch in to toggle this slowdown[1]. For many iPhone users, the phone is a magic box that gives them videos and apps and (unlike our HN audience) don't have a clue about how it works, nor do they care. If such a switch existed, these same people would see a twitter comment saying "speed up yuor (sic) IPhone by turning off this setting~~~!!!!1" and would just do it. The result? iPhones dying at a faster rate. Even today, as Android phones are barely updated at all, it is still a desirable selling feature of an Apple iPhone that it will be supported for years. People turning that switch on without understanding the consequences would shorten the life of their devices and then //still// complain about how the device didn't last that long. I would think that a jailbreak-locked option would work IE you have to know enough about how your phone works to make the change, thus increasing your chances of making an informed decision on whether to shorten its life or not. [1]Which is different than not telling people about it, which IMO is shady Edit: remove italics
- jdminhbg 9y ago
  > WOW. Conspiracy was real the whole time! No, because this is a new feature as of the iPhone 6. The conspiracy way predates that.
  - poorform 9y ago
    Why haven't I observed my old iPhone 4 or 5 spontaneously rebooting?
    - mfoy_ 9y ago
      After my iPhone 3g's (not even 3G S) last update, it became noticeably slower. It became one of the main reasons I upgraded my phone. It never spontaneously rebooted, but it definitely became slow. I ended up getting a Samsung Galaxy S5 in 2015. I've replaced the battery once after the original started swelling, and it's still going strong. I plan to next upgrade my phone in 2018/9. I'd be pissed if the OS updated and suddenly made it very slow before then!
chrisdbaldwin 9y ago
Planned obsolescence
oger 9y ago
How come that the MASSIVE slowdown of my iPhone 6s occurred after upgrading to iOS11? TBH the spin that Apple is sending out to make us believe that this was all a clever implementation (which it still might be) does not match with the reality that iOS 11 was creating the slowdown of a device that was working 'fine' before. And yes - this 6s is eligible for the battery replacement program and the Geekbench scores also indicate that this device has an issue. tl;dr: it seems that this is not the only explanation of the slowdown. Any thoughts?
- nyolfen 9y ago
  did you upgrade from a version prior to 10.2? apparently that was when this was implemented
- unreal37 9y ago
  You can see that a LOT more devices were affected on iOS 11. I assume they tweaked the algorithm as to when it's triggered. https://www.geekbench.com/blog/2017/12/iphone-performance-and-battery-age/ https://www.geekbench.com/blog/2017/12/iphone-performance-an...
- thinkythought 9y ago
  I had this issue, restore it and set it up "as a new phone" then manually reinstall your apps. the backup-restore process introduces all kinds of crappy issues
heisenbit 9y ago
Maybe, just maybe the batteries should be larger even if the case is slightly thicker. It is one thing for Apple to compensate for weaknesses of current phones in the field. It would be another story if they plan to do this going forward without telling consumers at the time of sale. Car companies got in trouble over mileage...
LeoJiWoo 9y ago
Not a good implementation, this feature should be been far more explicitly stated in some sort of alert rather than buried. This is something that is burning the good will towards apple. Something that is in shorter supply since the days of Steve Jobs. You can see the polarization about it on social media. Again whether the feature was good/bad, there is clearly something to be learned from the shitstorm that it is causing. Something I hope Tim Cook learns quickly.
- the_gastropod 9y ago
  I'm not sure what the right move is here. Apple does have a notification once the battery reaches some threshold of "bad". But maybe it's too conservative? Clearly, notifying an iPhone customer that their battery is going bad when they're throttling CPU by 1% is too aggressive. 75% is too late. Where the right number lies, I don't know.
  - nwndarkness 9y ago
    I ran the benchmark and my phone is affected (showed 1650 and 3000 when it the average for my phone is 2400 and 4000). I went into the battery menu people are saying that this notification shows up and there is nothing there about my battery needing to be replaced or serviced.
JustSomeNobody 9y ago
Sounds to me like Apple didn't factor the degradation of battery into the design of the phone and instead focused solely on their relentless push for thinness.
- cjensen 9y ago
  All modern batteries degrade past the point of usefulness. It doesn't matter how big the battery is if you leave it in the Sun long enough it will die. The question is, "what then?" Many people are reasonably asking that they be made aware of the problem instead of quietly kneecapping the phone.
forkerenok 9y ago
I'm somewhat impressed that such a detail hasn't leaked through Apple's walls in all these years. Tells a lot about secretive culture at Apple.
- ouid 9y ago
  My reading of the article was that it's a pretty new "feature". I'm running iOS 9.1 on a 5s, and it neither shuts down in the cold, nor runs slower than it used to.
  - EpicBlackCrayon 9y ago
    I have a hunch that it isn't, and they tweaked the algorithm around iOS 10, which made it a lot more noticeable.
laurentoget 9y ago
I hope they will do the same with their cars. When the tires get old, just slow down the car to keep it safe. Having a light come up that tells me my car needs maintenance is so old school.
- cjensen 9y ago
  "A run-flat tire is a pneumatic vehicle tire that is designed to resist the effects of deflation when punctured, and to enable the vehicle to continue to be driven at reduced speeds" [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run-flat_tire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run-flat_tire
Neil44 9y ago
Let's get real here, they did this to reduce battery related warranty claims.
invisiblea 9y ago
Had the battery in my iPhone SE replaced about an hour ago to test this out Geekbench 4 benchmark before https://twitter.com/invisiblea/status/943439761066397696 https://twitter.com/invisiblea/status/943439761066397696 And after https://twitter.com/invisiblea/status/943891561661812736 https://twitter.com/invisiblea/status/943891561661812736
- bluetidepro 9y ago
  What app or site are you using to test that?
  - dhimes 9y ago
    And what battery did you (GP) replace the original with?
  - frogpelt 9y ago
    It looks like Geekbench 4.
  - unreal37 9y ago
    Geekbench https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/geekbench-4/id1130770356 https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/geekbench-4/id1130770356
  - invisiblea 9y ago
    It's Geekbench 4
- lukewrites 9y ago
  Did you have it replaced at an Apple Store or by a third party? I'm deciding between the two – my gut is to go with the Apple Store, but the apple website makes it sound like it could take up to 5 days, which is too long.
  - invisiblea 9y ago
    I'm based in London, so dropped it off with https://www.ismash.com/ https://www.ismash.com/ in St Pancras. Was done in half an hour and cost £40. Can't vouch for the quality of the battery yet, but they are a pretty big chain now so I'm assuming it won't be awful. However I've had batteries replaced (different phones) at the Apple Store before and it took about an hour.
chrislomax 9y ago
My wife had a phone replaced off Apple about 6 months back because it was shutting down for no reason about 40% battery life. She’s recently upgraded from 10.x to latest version. She’s noticed an actual decrease in performance to the point where she’s nearly punching the phone. It just locks up for no reason. I’d like to blame this on the battery or age of the phone but I can’t. It is an iPhone 6 but it is only half a year old. I believe that this phone should be able to handle the latest release just fine. She’s now looking at upgrading the phone.
- unreal37 9y ago
  Run the benchmark test and see if performance is way below expectation. Just because Apple replaced the phone doesn't mean the battery isn't deficient.
- valuearb 9y ago
  Was her replacement phone a refurbished or new unit? Either way, she can probably get a brand new battery just by taking it in to the Apple Store. Also, battery age isn't actually time based, it's cycle based. If your wife uses her phone so heavily that she has to recharge it multiple times a day, she's putting more cycles on the battery. Still should last more than 6 months though.
  - chrislomax 9y ago
    I’m not 100% on whether it was refurb or brand new. It came in a non branded box without a charger etc. The phone looked brand new. I’m going to install the app to check what the CPU is running at. It’s still ridiculous that she was running 10.x fine, she only updated because someone sent her some emojis that her phone didn’t understand and now is it’s running like crap
    - valuearb 9y ago
      The last time I heard of someone buying an iPhone in a non branded box, she ended up getting a box filled with potatoes. Your wife is already ahead on that person.
francisofascii 9y ago
So they started this with the Iphone 6, so I guess my Iphone 5s became slow for other reasons?
walterbell 9y ago
Has it been confirmed whether Apple stops slowing the phone when the phone is plugged into AC power, i.e. the battery is not being used?
- jtbayly 9y ago
  It has been anti-confirmed by me. My iPhone 6S continues running at 50% CPU speed, even when charging from the OEM adapter. Only thing that makes it run (a little bit) faster is if the battery charge gets above 97%. (Also worth noting that the battery in my phone still holds 87% original capacity.)
  - starky 9y ago
    That this is happening when the cell is still at 87% capacity is really the problem here. How do you justify degrading your system's performance when the cell is still soundly in the healthy region?
    - cjensen 9y ago
      Capacity is not power. Old batteries produce less power (volts times amps) no matter how full they are.
      - walterbell 9y ago
        What threshold(s) are used by Apple to determine when to throttle? If a new battery is purchased today, how many months of daily usage will cause Apple throttling to begin? If a Samsung and Apple phone are purchased on the same day, used the same amount and benchmarked each day for 24 months, would their performance graphs look similar?
      - starky 9y ago
        Regardless of what chemistry they are using, a lithium cell should be capable of producing more than enough power for a cellphone at any residual capacity before it becomes useless. You aren't discharging at more than 0.5C on a portable device.
macns 9y ago
I don't get it. An old iPad 2 was running fine card games until we upgraded to IOS 9 a few weeks ago. Now it's almost unusable. Pretty sure we had the same battery before we upgrade, so why wasn't cpu throttled before we upgrade? This looks more like Apple needed to slow down devices to sell new ones and found a really good excuse for it.
- mfoy_ 9y ago
  Exactly. I had an old iPhone 3G that was working fine until Apple released an update that crippled it after I held on to it too long after their product line had moved on... I mean, to all those who might think "well, old phones be old", it's not that simple. The OS was running very smoothly, it's Apple, after all, but then I installed an OS update and after the update everything was slow and painful and took long to load, etc. It was night and day, pre-update: perfection, post-update: laggy as hell. You can't tell me that this is anything but a way to force users of older models to upgrade.
- compiler-guy 9y ago
  There are two issues with older phones running more slowly, and you are probably encountering both of them 1. Newer versions of iOS demand more processing power because they do more (or perhaps do it less efficiently). 2. Old batteries can't deliver as much power. So an old phone will new version of the OS mores slowly than a new one, regardless of the battery situation. But, if the battery was marginal but hadn't hit the limit before the upgrade, then you get a double whammy 1. The phone simply can't run a more demanding OS as fast as the old one 2. The increased demand pushes the battery over the limit At some point, the battery was going to age out anyway, so it was only a matter of time until you hit the second issue. But the upgrade made you hit it sonner rather than later.
  - verytrivial 9y ago
    > 2. Old batteries can't deliver as much power. Does anyone have a citation for this? I know capacity falls, but what fraction of peak current is lost with age? And what fraction with throttling just the CPU to 50% save in total load?
johansch 9y ago
So this might be the largest scam, ever? We're talking trillions USD. (Their yearly revenue is around $200B, most of it iPhone.) (Wow, that was downvoted almost instantly.)
- mfoy_ 9y ago
  Apple's _total_ revenue since 2000 has been less than 1.2T, and it's not like they provided no value. Calling it a "scam" in any capacity is already a stretch. Calling it a scam in "trillions" is utterly hyperbolic, and equally stupid.
  - johansch 9y ago
    I clearly owe you an apology. It's not a trillion-dollar scam, it'a half-trillion-dollar scam. That totally changes everything.
bitL 9y ago
...and this somehow coincides with new iOS updates. After an explanation, everybody applauds this wise choice, protecting their phones from not working at all!
Mizza 9y ago
Much more importantly to me: Does this happen in MBP/OSX?
- cjensen 9y ago
  My 2008 MacBook Pro has a removable battery. Apple documents that without the battery (i.e. on AC Power) the CPU is underclocked because there is not enough power available. So it wouldn't be unprecedented. And I wouldn't be surprised if other manufacturers do the same.
  - randac 9y ago
    > Apple documents that without the battery (i.e. on AC Power) the CPU is underclocked This is an utterly absurd apology on behalf of Apple, something very common in this thread it seems. Alternatively, perhaps Apple should sell their high-end model with an appropriately powerful AC adapter, regardless of the absence of the battery?
raincom 9y ago
- Apple has disabled to check how many cycles the battery has. - Battery recall over shutdown issues - Software to slow down the phone to save battery All these three should explain Apple's behavior.
Codestare 9y ago
Alternative title: Apple uses crappy batteries
christmasity 9y ago
My friends used to complain about this but I always thought it was them trying to justify buying the newer iphones. They always said their iphones would slow when new iphones came out. Sounded like conspiratorial nonsense back then.
pweissbrod 9y ago
If the phone OS was open source there would be no need for all the conjecture, black box research and revelations, all of this would have been available knowledge
wnevets 9y ago
Remember it wasn't until someone ran benchmarks before and after replacing their battery that apple decided to let the world know this was a thing.
- MollyR 9y ago
  This is probably the most scandalous part about this.
iwcai 9y ago
Even if any of this is accurate and true, replacing a battery in my older phone did absolutely nothing for increase in performance. This is undoubtably planned obsolesce.
verytrivial 9y ago
Is it ALL old phones based upon aggregate statistics and a heuristic, or are they monitoring supply voltage. Apple have not, to my knowledge, provided any data to support their claim. And even if they did, batteries vary in quality, even from the same batch. Why not a setting you can override? It is a MASSIVE performance hit. This feels a lot like Epson or whoever blocking old or third party supplies to "assure peak performance". People hate that but put up with this? Edit: In case the subtext wasn't clear, without battery wear data, evidence of these power related resets, or active opt-in to the throttling, this behaviour is identical to an artificial hobbling of old phones to encourage future hardware sales. Yadda yadda lawyers.
- verytrivial 9y ago
  Not that it look deep insight, but I am vindicated. Here come the yadda yadda lawyers. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/22/apple_sued_iphone_cpu_speed/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/22/apple_sued_iphone_c...
expertentipp 9y ago
My iPhone 6s had two iOS updates in recent months. After these updates the iPhone is significantly slower, occasionally the screen doesn't respond to touch events, occasionally the screen is becoming black with little round loader in the center. Safari hangs. No other incident happened with the phone meanwhile, the only reason of the deteriorated behavior I could think of are these iOS updates.
greedo 9y ago
This isn't a new thing with smartphones, nor limited to iOS/Apple smartphones. Android does/did it too: https://plus.google.com/+YgorCortes/posts/CZ2GhoxgHk3 https://plus.google.com/+YgorCortes/posts/CZ2GhoxgHk3
szajbus 9y ago
Why doesn't it run on normal speed when connected to the charger?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
rkapsoro 9y ago
Does anyone know if any Android vendors are using a similar approach? I have an Android phone which apparently has a 40% degraded battery (60% total capacity remains, at least according to a battery health estimation app that I used since Android does not appear to surface battery wear via API) that is always painfully slow, even if I'm careful to ensure that at least 10 gigs of free space to avoid storage slowdown.
ChiliDogSwirl 9y ago
The ability of HN readers to rationalize Apple's consumer-hostile practices is nothing short of breathtaking.
songco 9y ago
Maybe provide an option in settings is a better idea... Or even better, provide a level of battery saving.
mandeepj 9y ago
do you recall "low power mode" in your iphone? This is exactly what it is. So, even your new iphone will operate slowly during low battery
vbezhenar 9y ago
Is it widespread issue with other phones? I have a suspicion that either they have faulty batteries or they just got bitten by their tiny batteries. I think that battery should have some real life time (not one year, at least 3 years, preferably 5 years) and should be able to provide all the energy phone needed for functioning. Sure, capacity might be reduced, it's understandable, but that's all.

249 points by lyk 9y ago

Seems like a good idea.

It's not only to make them run longer - they're reducing the peak demand on the batteries to avoid spontaneous shutdown when the aged battery can't handle the load. This seems like a good idea, and it appears to be well executed (ie it's not apparently based just on age or milage like a crappy car maintenance reminder), but Apple should probably have something in iOS that tells people their phone is running slow because the battery is 2 years old. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/20/apple-addresses-why-people-are-saying-their-iphones-with-older-batteries-are-running-slower/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/20/apple-addresses-why-people...

Blazespinnaker 9y ago
How about just the ability for a user to replace the battery? Should be a law to cut down on ewaste.
- jrs95 9y ago
  Most phones are probably getting recycled now anyways, so it really doesn’t matter. In fact, I would think user serviceability would increase waste because people would throw their old batteries away.
  - justonepost 9y ago
    Not if you have a fee on the battery such that you have to provide the old one to get a discount.
- derpaderp1 9y ago
  If they did that then the NSA couldn't turn back on a "powered off" device while you are asleep to bombard you with ultrasonic waves.
- IBM 9y ago
  iPhones have the longest life of any smartphone and you can verify that yourself by looking at the used market for it (and any Apple product). User replaceable batteries may ironically decrease that and increase waste.
  - justonepost 9y ago
    How would replaceable batteries decrease the life of the smartphone?
    - jhiska 9y ago
      It wouldn't. It would obviously increase the lifespan of it. The spinsters are deliberately confusing "lifespan" with "resale value".
      - IBM 9y ago
        >The spinsters are deliberately confusing "lifespan" with "resale value". I realize I'm responding to someone arguing in bad faith. But lifespan directly influences the resale value.
        jhiska 9y ago
        Replaceable batteries increase lifespan. The iPhone is a well-made phone which would have greater lifespan if the batteries were replaceable. As it is, users who bought an older iPhone now have to pay middle-men to replace the battery or face degraded performance.
        valuearb 9y ago
        The iPhone already has replaceable batteries. Making them user-replaceable just reduces battery capacity, increases size/weight, all so in 2-3 years you can save about 5% of your purchase cost by replacing the battery yourself. iPhone users buy iPhones because they wanted the best in class functionality, if they wanted to save money they'd buy a phone with a replaceable battery.
- mikestew 9y ago
  Alternatively, folks buy batteries they don’t need just because they can. I did that with my Galaxy Note, bought a spare because they were $30 and because I could. Never used it, the Note had great battery life. Now it sits on a shelf, waiting for me to recycle it.
  - jhiska 9y ago
    Somehow I am reminded of the lyrics "You spin me right round, right round, baby." The spin, I feel, is that somehow being able to replace one's batteries is bad. Whereas having an iPhone with degraded performance and an expensive-to-replace battery is good. You "bought a spare because you could" and "now it sits, waiting for you to recycle it", thus creating waste, but one can argue that anyone buying stuff they don't need creates waste, and that being able to replace one's phone battery isn't about saving the environment but saving one's hard-earned money.
    - mikestew 9y ago
      Alternative ways of looking at things is “spin” in your mind, huh? Well, that’s one way to keep a narrative, I suppose.
      - jhiska 9y ago
        I guess I could call them alternative facts, if you prefer.
    - valuearb 9y ago
      First, you can replace an iPhone battery, just take it to your Apple Store. It's reasonably affordable ($79) or free if still under warranty/Applecare. User-replaceable batteries don't change anything for the environment. Second, user-replaceable batteries don't come for free. They come with a series of trade-offs. Small increases in cost, space, even weight. If you plan to keep your phone for more than 2 years, user-replaceable will be more important to you than if you intend to replace every 2 years. I remember when I switched to MacBook Pros from my Dell laptops. I had two flights a week that were about 5 hours each. I had to buy an extra laptop battery and charger so my Dell would last the entire flight. And sometimes I'd forget to charge both batteries and I'd be back to a dead laptop halfway through the flight. Then I read the reviews of these new MBPs that lasted 7-8 hours instead of 5 hours, that used sealed batteries. I switched and my new MBP worked like a charm, easily lasting the entire flight every time. One big reason Apple made that advance was entirely because they abandoned removable batteries. They were able to fit more battery using a custom form factor that would have been super expensive to make removable. No one had done this as well before, because Apple was the first to implement good embedded battery conditioning software so they would last a couple years without needing replacement. Sealed batteries aren't always better, but they typically are for most users and use cases.
- gnopgnip 9y ago
  There are quite a few good phones with a user replaceable battery, but that is just not what consumers want most of the time. The LG v20 is the most recent one that comes to mind
IBM 9y ago
It does say in iOS that your battery needs to be replaced [1]. Everyone keeps saying they never told anyone about this but they basically announced it to the press with a statement (as well as the notice in iOS) when iOS 10.2.1 was released [2]. [1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207453 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207453 [2] https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/23/apple-says-ios-10-2-1-has-reduced-unexpected-iphone-6s-shutdown-issues-by-80/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/23/apple-says-ios-10-2-1-has-...
- ben_jones 9y ago
  Millions of people own iPhone's and don't jump up and down meticulously reading every press release or notification. Hell I can't remember the last notification that didn't catch be at a bad time, prompting me to punt it off my screen as quickly as possible.
  - squiggleblaz 9y ago
    Yeah, iPhone's notification system is terrible. Based around "deal with it now because we told you to!". Makes me sad.
- was_boring 9y ago
  I read both, and couldn't find any verbiage indicating they limited the cpu speed based upon the condition of the battery. Only that they "fixed a bug" to reduce "unexpected shutdowns."
  - IBM 9y ago
    Yes I think it's safe to assume that Apple is not going to be notifying users about CPU speed adjustments and when those occur, given that it changes based on anything from cold to hot temperatures.
    - frogpelt 9y ago
      It wouldn't have to be an event notification. It could be a once-a-month reminder that performance may be degraded.
jrs95 9y ago
It IS a good idea. My step mom had a high end Samsung phone (not sure exactly which one) and it’s battery degraded enough within a year that it began to shut down randomly a lot.
- jhiska 9y ago
  I guess that means all Samsung phones ("not sure which ones") are inferior to Apple phones, hm? ;)
  - jrs95 9y ago
    Haha, no. It just wasn’t a Note or Galaxy S, but it still cost like $700. Was a bit smaller. No idea what device it was specifically. And she couldn’t replace the battery easily, either. It was non-removable, as are basically all high end Android devices now.
    - wccrawford 9y ago
      I had to replace the batteries in our Nexus 6Ps recently. I didn't buy from Google, so they wouldn't deal with it out of warranty, despite it being a defect. They're replaceable, but they are clearly not meant to be done by the user. There were many opportunities to break pieces of the phone or ruin it completely. It's a horrible design.
      - jhiska 9y ago
        Both the iPhone and the Nexus 6Ps have horrible battery-swap design, but I still don't want to pay middle-men for what should be simple service I should be able to do at home.
        wccrawford 9y ago
        I fully agree. When I said I replaced the batteries, I meant it literally. I did the work. It was ugly. But it was a hell of a lot cheaper than the quote I got from the repair shop, and I didn't break anything. (Which isn't a surprise... I like fixing things.)
scotty79 9y ago
> they're reducing the peak demand on the batteries to avoid spontaneous shutdown when the aged battery can't handle the load. It doesn't seem to help my gf had an iPhone 5 that started dying on peak demand but only after it got upgraded to new ios (i guess 8.0). We replaced it (it had bad battery from the start and apple had a program for replacing those). After few years on new battery it started doing the same thing again. I replaced the battery and it stopped. But I know what I can expect in two years or so. Maybe I should stock on iPhone 5 batteries? Do they age less if they are unused?
- valuearb 9y ago
  All batteries wear out after a few years of use.
  - scotty79 9y ago
    I understand lasting shorter on charge but shutting down when I turn on the camera while on 40% is uniquely apple experience.
    - shoobedowop 9y ago
      nope.
    - nradov 9y ago
      I've seen the same shutdown problem on multiple different Android devices with degraded batteries.
      - scotty79 9y ago
        I must have been lucky then.
basseq 9y ago
This comment deserves more attention. And, in fact, means the headline is wrong. Apple is not slowing down devices to extend battery life. Apple is slowing down devices to prevent the thing from crapping out entirely ("unexpectedly shutting down"). Arguably, this does more to prevent obsolescence than plan it. Agreed with @djrogers suggestion to alert the user to the situation. It should not be a user choice. "Last year we released a feature for iPhone 6, iPhone 6s and iPhone SE to smooth out the instantaneous peaks only when needed to prevent the device from unexpectedly shutting down during these conditions [cold, low battery, battery age]."
- mempko 9y ago
  Strange, I have an old HP veer That is 6 years old and it doesn't spontaneously shut down. I have a 3 year old android phone that doesn't spontaneously shut down. What is so special about iPhones and why do they crap out in 2 years?
  - swiley 9y ago
    All of the Android phones I've had do when the battery starts to get old, Especially when you use the camera while it's low. Maybe you take better care of your batteries?
  - nogridbag 9y ago
    My 2013 Macbook Pro would spontaneously shut down with anywhere between 30-40% battery. I tried a few tips I found online to fix it, but nothing seemed to work.
  - esmi 9y ago
    This post gives us an estimate for what percentage of the iPhones are getting throttled by this issue. I think it's reasonable to use this as a proxy to estimate how many units were at risk of shutting down and it is the minority of units. Happily it appears both of your devices are in the majority of units which don't exhibit this issue. https://www.geekbench.com/blog/2017/12/iphone-performance-and-battery-age/ https://www.geekbench.com/blog/2017/12/iphone-performance-an...
jhiska 9y ago
You make a good point. If you consider that you can't easily change the battery in an iPhone without voiding the warranty or paying a premium price to Apple Support then one can make a strong argument that it's sneaky planned obsolescence. Then again, a battery that dies down after a few years and is so difficult to replace is also planned obsolescence.
- justonepost 9y ago
  It's just another nail in the coffin. OS upgrades requiring more CPU usage, the lack of repair-ability, dying batteries, and now this CPU tweak. It's pretty obvious what apple is doing. We need a law to make them stop or at least one which requires them to declare in obvious language about the things that reduce the functioning of their devices over time.
caconym_ 9y ago
Yeah, this is a real problem that I’ve had with devices in the past and as someone who doesn’t buy the hot new phone every year, I appreciate that Apple is taking steps to keep my 5S happy. That’s a commitment to long-term support that I would not expect from the average Android phone vendor.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jtbayly 9y ago
I think the problem is deeper. They put batteries in these devices that cannot handle load the rest of the hardware demands. Their solution is to just slow down the rest of the hardware. I've got a phone that is nowhere near to needing a new battery. It holds 87% of its original charge capacity. Yet it never runs above 50% speed unless it is above 97% charged, and even then it only runs at 2/3rds original speed.
- compiler-guy 9y ago
  The batteries handle the load just fine until they start wearing out around 500 cycles.
  - JustSomeNobody 9y ago
    How are people getting to 500 cycles in one year?
    - xenadu02 9y ago
      It isn't purely about cycle count. If you ever forget and leave your phone on the car dash in the summer that heat has a permanent negative effect on your battery.
shill 9y ago
My geekbench CPU scores (single-core 1458, multi-core 2480) show that my 6s has been throttled but honestly I hadn't noticed a slowdown. In which apps would I notice a significant difference if I replace my battery? If Safari page load speeds increased I would be happy, but I assume that is more influenced by bandwidth and mobile optimization.
zkms 9y ago
> It's not only to make them run longer - they're reducing the peak demand on the batteries to avoid spontaneous shutdown when the aged battery can't handle the load. Yes. I used to have spontaneous shutdowns on my iPhone 6 in cold weather when the fuel gauge indicated a number like 20% and it was this sort of problem that was meant to be fixed: the CPU using too much current, causing the battery voltage to drop enough to trigger the low-voltage/brownout detector, causing the phone to die. The battery would last long enough (from last full charge to needing to recharge) -- it wasn't inadequate in the energy department -- it just couldn't deliver enough power in cold conditions. Throttling the CPU in those cases (when the aged battery can't deliver enough current) is sensical and extends the life of the phone -- the only serious issue is that the user might think that there is a problem with the CPU or the software (and replace the whole phone) when the problem can be adequately fixed with a new battery (far less expensive than a new phone). The feature is good but Apple's software should be far more proactive in notifying users that this is happening, if only because users jump to a conclusion of "my old phone can't handle this new iOS update, damn Apple making me buy a new phone" rather than "my battery is too old to reliably deliver whatever current the SOC wants".
- nielsbot 9y ago
  I think you wanted sensical -> sensible. I'll show myself out.
  - valuearb 9y ago
    Stop being non-sensical. Just be sensical, man.
- twoodfin 9y ago
  I think there’s more to this story than mere aging batteries. I had the exact symptoms of this issue with my one year old iPhone 6 Plus in fall of 2015. Add in some very strange battery % readings: Even when it failed to shut down, the phone would drop rapidly from 20% to 1% but then remain there for ten minutes or more. Bizarrely, this behavior (albeit less frequent or severe) jumped to my brand new iPhone 6S Plus in November of that year when I restored it from a backup of the 6 Plus. Both phones had Geniuses run battery diagnostics without finding any unusual degradation. My guess: Apple’s battery “farming” code designed to maximize its life, level drain and charge across the cells, manage load, estimate charge % remaining... is incredibly sophisticated, even so far as to profile your typical use of a device to inform these decisions and estimates. There have been user-visible bugs in this code related to manual clock updates (something I did a fair bit while traveling), and I bet some fraction of these downclocked users have been the victim of that or related bugs. If the code is “farming” the battery incorrectly, some cells may be charged or drained too much for too long, and greatly increase a phone’s susceptibility to these voltage drops, even while the global status of the battery reads as fine.
LusoTycoon 9y ago
Apple did that and people would start cracking iphones open to replace batteries. Not in line with Apple's philosphy.
dbingham 9y ago
Or they could, you know, design the thing so that the battery is replaceable and provide easily accessible replacement batteries.
- cjensen 9y ago
  Apple will replace the battery for $79 [1]. When you consider the cost for a battery, the labor for replacement, the confidence that this is not a junk replacement, and the warranty for the service, that's a very reasonable price. There is no way Apple is making money on this. [1] https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/battery-power https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/battery-power
blensor 9y ago
I can't tell how well it's executed but the major issue I have with this is that this is not properly communicated to the user. I guess most people already get the feeling that their devices slow down after time, or the new apps/OS's just require more potent hardware and replacement of the devices is necessary as time goes by. But for many of those it seems that a "simple" battery replacement would have done the trick as well. If my device has to substantially throttle the performance to avoid a complete shutdown I expect a major notification that something is terribly wrong and I better do something about it. My car had an occasional issue with an exhaust regulation valve and drastically reduced the performance in those situations. Every time I received a notification on the dashboard that the power was reduced but that I can continue driving but that I should visit a service partner as soon as possible. That would be exactly what I expect from a smart device
- xster 9y ago
  > not properly communicated to the user s/user/buyer Selling a car that markets 300,000 miles but can't drive over 3,000 rpm anymore after the first year is not a car, and marketing it as such is fraud.
  - blensor 9y ago
    In my car case it was a know issue of this model and repaired for free within one hour. And while a degraded battery is nothing that needs to be replaced for free, the manufacturer of the phone probably sunk a lot of time and money into developing a strategy to cope with the phone shutdowns due to a degraded battery. During that process it is hard to imagine that no one ever came up with the notion that maybe it would be a good idea to also notify the user that a serious issue is developing which should be handled some time. After all this is not going to get better since the battery will continue degrading (and probably with increasing rate) if it is not replaced.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
falcolas 9y ago
> avoid spontaneous shutdown when the aged battery can't handle the load This doesn't make sense to me. I've been playing with LiPo batteries on quadcopters for a few years now, and I've found that battery capacity is directly related to its voltage, and the voltage decreases in a deterministic fashion according to use. High quality and well maintained LiPo batteries just don't behave randomly - that's why we feel safe attaching them to our houses in the form of Tesla Powercells. Or, in other words, if a phone is showing 40% charge when it shuts down, that's not the battery "spontaneously" being unable to cope with load; that's a bad charge indicator.
xster 9y ago
It's fine rationalizing it but how is that conceptually different from say Comcast saying: "Well actually your 100Mbps connection was just a first year promotional speed and now dropped to 20Mbps unless you sign another limited period contract. Oh, and actually, it's all for good reasons because the crappy modem that you rented at 10$ a month just kinda starts melting if it keeps transmitting at 100Mbps so we just saved your house from burning down. No need to thank us. Sorry we didn't disclose any of this to new customers but don't worry, just give us more money and everything will be ok."
racl101 9y ago
> but Apple should probably have something in iOS that tells people their phone is running slow because the battery is 2 years old. Or a disclaimer telling people the caveats (or cons) of upgrading their OS. More transparency would be great instead of making people feel like the company is pushing them out of their, otherwise, perfectly functional smartphone which cost them a fortune.

trynumber9 9y ago

Should be a switch in the settings. Prefer battery life or prefer performance. One more setting won't kill anyone.

roc 9y ago
The whole problem is that the batteries can't deliver that performance. They can throttle the chip to what the battery can deliver or it will crash. Maybe Apple's more conservative on the throttling, and some amount of performance could still be achieved without a crash, but there's zero chance Apple's putting a "make my phone unstable" switch in Settings.
- jlmorton 9y ago
  That doesn't pass the sniff test. The available voltage from a lithium ion battery will decrease as it is discharged. When your phone turns off, that does not mean there is no more energy in the battery. It means there is no longer enough voltage to power the phone. Over the course of many discharge cycles, the battery will lose capacity, and the point when the voltage is no longer sufficient to power the phone will come sooner. But this is overly pedantic. People generally consider this point to be simply an "empty battery." Android phones do not suffer these performance changes. Instead, the phones lose battery life over time, and within a year or so, you might be lucky to get 12 hours of life out of a full charge. You can make an argument that we should optimize for duration or performance, but the difference is that casual Android users are aware that their battery is deteriorating, while casual iPhone users believe their phone is itself deteriorating, or else much slower than the newer models.
  - jtbayly 9y ago
    Wrong. The peak demand from the phone can exceed the available voltage even if you're at 30%, causing an immediate shutdown. That's what we saw a year ago. Now they no longer shut down unexpectedly, but the performance of the phone sucks, even with a battery that holds 87% of its original capacity.

bec123 9y ago

Dear one of the richest damn companies on the face of the earth: MAKE . IT . EASIER . TO . REPLACE . THE . BATTERY !!!

nicky0 9y ago
You can replace it an an Apple Store for $79.
- CaptSpify 9y ago
  Why should anyone have to pay to do trivial service to their own phone?
  - esmi 9y ago
    One has the choice to pay $79. But you don't have to: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPhone+6+Battery+Replacement/29363 https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPhone+6+Battery+Replacement/29...
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
nephrite 9y ago
Yes. Also make the batteries standard, like they did with the chargers.
- elsonrodriguez 9y ago
  wat
- valuearb 9y ago
  Yes, lets have lower battery capacity, and heavier thicker phones so that 2 years from now a user can save $30 replacing their battery.
- andai 9y ago
  Like, AAA?

Upvoter33 9y ago

THIS MAKES SO MUCH SENSE. I always thought I was going crazy, thinking my increasingly "old" phone seemed slow. This is really irritating and disingenuous on Apple's behalf - as said above, they should at least add a switch.

fleitz 9y ago
The bigger effect is probably how software is developed. Most devs have a shiny new phone on their desk, we make it fast enough and then stop, therefore an older phone will appear to be slower because the app is still fast on our devices. QA will test on a older phone but most companies don’t have tight performance targets so what used to be 60 FPS is now 45 and what used to be a 200 ms load is now 250 ms. The difference is imperceptible during dev because each new feature shaves a few FPS and adds a few ms.
gdulli 9y ago
My smartphone in 2008 was an iPhone. It slowed down unacceptably and I never bought another piece of Apple hardware again. My 3 phones since then all remained usable past 2 years until I was ready to replace them on my own schedule.
- C6C6C6C 9y ago
  Same experience, but I went back to the iPhone once, only once, with the iPhone 5s, and then already deeply regretted it after updating iOS to the latest. I should have known they'd do it again after what I experienced with the iPhone 3g last update, which made the thing so slow it was unusable. The iPhone 5s should have hardware that is much faster than what's in a Moto G2. Yet, my friend's Moto G2 feels smoother in use, transitioning between apps and the like, than the 5s. I bought the Honor 8 to replace it, a somewhat cheap, midrange android device. Everything on it feels so fast I probably won't replace it until its battery gives out completely. On the paper, the hardware of the Honor 8 is not as fast as modern iPhones. In practice when I open apps it's pretty much instantaneous. The device has enough RAM to keep everything running. People keep complaining android manufacturers aren't updating the OS fast enough. I'd say good on them to make sure they only give us an OS build that's actually usable on said hardware. Apple doesn't even let you install previous iOS versions. Unlike iOS, most of Android's platform APIs are updated through the Play Store. Things like your web browser are also updated through the play store. So unlike iPhones where refusing new iOS updates means being stuck with browser engines that can't keep up with the web, your android handset stuck on older android is not actually becoming obsolete. No matter how much nicer Apple's hardware looks and feels in the hands, I ain't ever giving them more of my money again. Premium prices should command more durability in time than this. Chosing to stay on an old iOS means you can't install new apps built on newer SDKs or get newer browsers and so on, so you really have to suffer the slow down treadmill with Apple. You don't have to on Android.

jamra 9y ago

I got down voted to hell trying to say this here on hacker news. On a side note, does anyone else feel as though there is a lot of astro turfing going on here? A few commenters owe me an apology.

jsmthrowaway 9y ago
> Don't accuse others of astroturfing or shillage. This always degrades discussion and rarely hits the mark. Email us instead and we'll look into it. > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

golemotron 9y ago

Well, that makes me want to upgrade.

OscarTheGrinch 9y ago
...to android.
mmcconnell1618 9y ago
What makes you think that Android isn't subject to the same physical limits of older batteries? You have more ability to customize the Android phones response to the battery condition but that doesn't change the underlying reason for the slow down: The battery can't handle the requested load anymore.
- C6C6C6C 9y ago
  The battery can't handle 1 year of use because they undersized it. A 1 715 mAh battery will, once aging, be less able to provide the voltage asked by peak CPU usage than a 2900 mAh battery that has aged for about the same amount of charge cycles. iPhones are the only device sold by Apple that are only rated for 500 charge cycles before degradation starts. Macbook, iPads and Apple Watches are rated for 1000 cycles. In the case of the Apple Watch I'd guess it's because despite being tiny, the SOC also doesn't ask for as much peak voltage as the phone SOC. I've had the Honor 8 for a year. It's still holding a great amount of charge and running fine and as fast as the day I bought it. And unlike my 5s, no phone update is coming to turn it into a slow crawl. The iPhone battery problem with regards to the topic, spontaneous shutdown at 30% and less battery remaining, is probably exacerbated since the evolutions that made those SOC more powerful than before. There wasn't a large wave of 5s owners having spontaneous shutdown requiring an OS update to throttle the CPU. That only started with the iPhone 6. A combination of paltry battery and modern SOCs having peak power usage that stress such battery more than before.
  - dep_b 9y ago
    > And unlike my 5s, no phone update is coming to turn it into a slow crawl. That's one way to celebrate being an Android user.

Multicomp 9y ago

WOW. Conspiracy was real the whole time! Devil's Advocate to spark discussion (I'm not an iPhone owner so no dog in fight): Apple did the right thing by not putting a switch in to toggle this slowdown[1]. For many iPhone users, the phone is a magic box that gives them videos and apps and (unlike our HN audience) don't have a clue about how it works, nor do they care. If such a switch existed, these same people would see a twitter comment saying "speed up yuor (sic) IPhone by turning off this setting~~~!!!!1" and would just do it. The result? iPhones dying at a faster rate. Even today, as Android phones are barely updated at all, it is still a desirable selling feature of an Apple iPhone that it will be supported for years. People turning that switch on without understanding the consequences would shorten the life of their devices and then //still// complain about how the device didn't last that long. I would think that a jailbreak-locked option would work IE you have to know enough about how your phone works to make the change, thus increasing your chances of making an informed decision on whether to shorten its life or not. [1]Which is different than not telling people about it, which IMO is shady Edit: remove italics

jdminhbg 9y ago
> WOW. Conspiracy was real the whole time! No, because this is a new feature as of the iPhone 6. The conspiracy way predates that.
- poorform 9y ago
  Why haven't I observed my old iPhone 4 or 5 spontaneously rebooting?
  - mfoy_ 9y ago
    After my iPhone 3g's (not even 3G S) last update, it became noticeably slower. It became one of the main reasons I upgraded my phone. It never spontaneously rebooted, but it definitely became slow. I ended up getting a Samsung Galaxy S5 in 2015. I've replaced the battery once after the original started swelling, and it's still going strong. I plan to next upgrade my phone in 2018/9. I'd be pissed if the OS updated and suddenly made it very slow before then!

chrisdbaldwin 9y ago

Planned obsolescence

oger 9y ago

How come that the MASSIVE slowdown of my iPhone 6s occurred after upgrading to iOS11? TBH the spin that Apple is sending out to make us believe that this was all a clever implementation (which it still might be) does not match with the reality that iOS 11 was creating the slowdown of a device that was working 'fine' before. And yes - this 6s is eligible for the battery replacement program and the Geekbench scores also indicate that this device has an issue. tl;dr: it seems that this is not the only explanation of the slowdown. Any thoughts?

nyolfen 9y ago
did you upgrade from a version prior to 10.2? apparently that was when this was implemented
unreal37 9y ago
You can see that a LOT more devices were affected on iOS 11. I assume they tweaked the algorithm as to when it's triggered. https://www.geekbench.com/blog/2017/12/iphone-performance-and-battery-age/ https://www.geekbench.com/blog/2017/12/iphone-performance-an...
thinkythought 9y ago
I had this issue, restore it and set it up "as a new phone" then manually reinstall your apps. the backup-restore process introduces all kinds of crappy issues

heisenbit 9y ago

Maybe, just maybe the batteries should be larger even if the case is slightly thicker. It is one thing for Apple to compensate for weaknesses of current phones in the field. It would be another story if they plan to do this going forward without telling consumers at the time of sale. Car companies got in trouble over mileage...

LeoJiWoo 9y ago

Not a good implementation, this feature should be been far more explicitly stated in some sort of alert rather than buried. This is something that is burning the good will towards apple. Something that is in shorter supply since the days of Steve Jobs. You can see the polarization about it on social media. Again whether the feature was good/bad, there is clearly something to be learned from the shitstorm that it is causing. Something I hope Tim Cook learns quickly.

the_gastropod 9y ago
I'm not sure what the right move is here. Apple does have a notification once the battery reaches some threshold of "bad". But maybe it's too conservative? Clearly, notifying an iPhone customer that their battery is going bad when they're throttling CPU by 1% is too aggressive. 75% is too late. Where the right number lies, I don't know.
- nwndarkness 9y ago
  I ran the benchmark and my phone is affected (showed 1650 and 3000 when it the average for my phone is 2400 and 4000). I went into the battery menu people are saying that this notification shows up and there is nothing there about my battery needing to be replaced or serviced.

JustSomeNobody 9y ago

Sounds to me like Apple didn't factor the degradation of battery into the design of the phone and instead focused solely on their relentless push for thinness.

cjensen 9y ago
All modern batteries degrade past the point of usefulness. It doesn't matter how big the battery is if you leave it in the Sun long enough it will die. The question is, "what then?" Many people are reasonably asking that they be made aware of the problem instead of quietly kneecapping the phone.

forkerenok 9y ago

I'm somewhat impressed that such a detail hasn't leaked through Apple's walls in all these years. Tells a lot about secretive culture at Apple.

ouid 9y ago
My reading of the article was that it's a pretty new "feature". I'm running iOS 9.1 on a 5s, and it neither shuts down in the cold, nor runs slower than it used to.
- EpicBlackCrayon 9y ago
  I have a hunch that it isn't, and they tweaked the algorithm around iOS 10, which made it a lot more noticeable.

laurentoget 9y ago

I hope they will do the same with their cars. When the tires get old, just slow down the car to keep it safe. Having a light come up that tells me my car needs maintenance is so old school.

cjensen 9y ago
"A run-flat tire is a pneumatic vehicle tire that is designed to resist the effects of deflation when punctured, and to enable the vehicle to continue to be driven at reduced speeds" [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run-flat_tire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run-flat_tire

Neil44 9y ago

Let's get real here, they did this to reduce battery related warranty claims.

invisiblea 9y ago

Had the battery in my iPhone SE replaced about an hour ago to test this out Geekbench 4 benchmark before https://twitter.com/invisiblea/status/943439761066397696 https://twitter.com/invisiblea/status/943439761066397696 And after https://twitter.com/invisiblea/status/943891561661812736 https://twitter.com/invisiblea/status/943891561661812736

bluetidepro 9y ago
What app or site are you using to test that?
- dhimes 9y ago
  And what battery did you (GP) replace the original with?
- frogpelt 9y ago
  It looks like Geekbench 4.
- unreal37 9y ago
  Geekbench https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/geekbench-4/id1130770356 https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/geekbench-4/id1130770356
- invisiblea 9y ago
  It's Geekbench 4
lukewrites 9y ago
Did you have it replaced at an Apple Store or by a third party? I'm deciding between the two – my gut is to go with the Apple Store, but the apple website makes it sound like it could take up to 5 days, which is too long.
- invisiblea 9y ago
  I'm based in London, so dropped it off with https://www.ismash.com/ https://www.ismash.com/ in St Pancras. Was done in half an hour and cost £40. Can't vouch for the quality of the battery yet, but they are a pretty big chain now so I'm assuming it won't be awful. However I've had batteries replaced (different phones) at the Apple Store before and it took about an hour.

chrislomax 9y ago

My wife had a phone replaced off Apple about 6 months back because it was shutting down for no reason about 40% battery life. She’s recently upgraded from 10.x to latest version. She’s noticed an actual decrease in performance to the point where she’s nearly punching the phone. It just locks up for no reason. I’d like to blame this on the battery or age of the phone but I can’t. It is an iPhone 6 but it is only half a year old. I believe that this phone should be able to handle the latest release just fine. She’s now looking at upgrading the phone.

unreal37 9y ago
Run the benchmark test and see if performance is way below expectation. Just because Apple replaced the phone doesn't mean the battery isn't deficient.
valuearb 9y ago
Was her replacement phone a refurbished or new unit? Either way, she can probably get a brand new battery just by taking it in to the Apple Store. Also, battery age isn't actually time based, it's cycle based. If your wife uses her phone so heavily that she has to recharge it multiple times a day, she's putting more cycles on the battery. Still should last more than 6 months though.
- chrislomax 9y ago
  I’m not 100% on whether it was refurb or brand new. It came in a non branded box without a charger etc. The phone looked brand new. I’m going to install the app to check what the CPU is running at. It’s still ridiculous that she was running 10.x fine, she only updated because someone sent her some emojis that her phone didn’t understand and now is it’s running like crap
  - valuearb 9y ago
    The last time I heard of someone buying an iPhone in a non branded box, she ended up getting a box filled with potatoes. Your wife is already ahead on that person.

francisofascii 9y ago

So they started this with the Iphone 6, so I guess my Iphone 5s became slow for other reasons?

walterbell 9y ago

Has it been confirmed whether Apple stops slowing the phone when the phone is plugged into AC power, i.e. the battery is not being used?

jtbayly 9y ago
It has been anti-confirmed by me. My iPhone 6S continues running at 50% CPU speed, even when charging from the OEM adapter. Only thing that makes it run (a little bit) faster is if the battery charge gets above 97%. (Also worth noting that the battery in my phone still holds 87% original capacity.)
- starky 9y ago
  That this is happening when the cell is still at 87% capacity is really the problem here. How do you justify degrading your system's performance when the cell is still soundly in the healthy region?
  - cjensen 9y ago
    Capacity is not power. Old batteries produce less power (volts times amps) no matter how full they are.
    - walterbell 9y ago
      What threshold(s) are used by Apple to determine when to throttle? If a new battery is purchased today, how many months of daily usage will cause Apple throttling to begin? If a Samsung and Apple phone are purchased on the same day, used the same amount and benchmarked each day for 24 months, would their performance graphs look similar?
    - starky 9y ago
      Regardless of what chemistry they are using, a lithium cell should be capable of producing more than enough power for a cellphone at any residual capacity before it becomes useless. You aren't discharging at more than 0.5C on a portable device.

macns 9y ago

I don't get it. An old iPad 2 was running fine card games until we upgraded to IOS 9 a few weeks ago. Now it's almost unusable. Pretty sure we had the same battery before we upgrade, so why wasn't cpu throttled before we upgrade? This looks more like Apple needed to slow down devices to sell new ones and found a really good excuse for it.

mfoy_ 9y ago
Exactly. I had an old iPhone 3G that was working fine until Apple released an update that crippled it after I held on to it too long after their product line had moved on... I mean, to all those who might think "well, old phones be old", it's not that simple. The OS was running very smoothly, it's Apple, after all, but then I installed an OS update and after the update everything was slow and painful and took long to load, etc. It was night and day, pre-update: perfection, post-update: laggy as hell. You can't tell me that this is anything but a way to force users of older models to upgrade.
compiler-guy 9y ago
There are two issues with older phones running more slowly, and you are probably encountering both of them 1. Newer versions of iOS demand more processing power because they do more (or perhaps do it less efficiently). 2. Old batteries can't deliver as much power. So an old phone will new version of the OS mores slowly than a new one, regardless of the battery situation. But, if the battery was marginal but hadn't hit the limit before the upgrade, then you get a double whammy 1. The phone simply can't run a more demanding OS as fast as the old one 2. The increased demand pushes the battery over the limit At some point, the battery was going to age out anyway, so it was only a matter of time until you hit the second issue. But the upgrade made you hit it sonner rather than later.
- verytrivial 9y ago
  > 2. Old batteries can't deliver as much power. Does anyone have a citation for this? I know capacity falls, but what fraction of peak current is lost with age? And what fraction with throttling just the CPU to 50% save in total load?

johansch 9y ago

So this might be the largest scam, ever? We're talking trillions USD. (Their yearly revenue is around $200B, most of it iPhone.) (Wow, that was downvoted almost instantly.)

mfoy_ 9y ago
Apple's _total_ revenue since 2000 has been less than 1.2T, and it's not like they provided no value. Calling it a "scam" in any capacity is already a stretch. Calling it a scam in "trillions" is utterly hyperbolic, and equally stupid.
- johansch 9y ago
  I clearly owe you an apology. It's not a trillion-dollar scam, it'a half-trillion-dollar scam. That totally changes everything.

bitL 9y ago

...and this somehow coincides with new iOS updates. After an explanation, everybody applauds this wise choice, protecting their phones from not working at all!

Mizza 9y ago

Much more importantly to me: Does this happen in MBP/OSX?

cjensen 9y ago
My 2008 MacBook Pro has a removable battery. Apple documents that without the battery (i.e. on AC Power) the CPU is underclocked because there is not enough power available. So it wouldn't be unprecedented. And I wouldn't be surprised if other manufacturers do the same.
- randac 9y ago
  > Apple documents that without the battery (i.e. on AC Power) the CPU is underclocked This is an utterly absurd apology on behalf of Apple, something very common in this thread it seems. Alternatively, perhaps Apple should sell their high-end model with an appropriately powerful AC adapter, regardless of the absence of the battery?

raincom 9y ago

- Apple has disabled to check how many cycles the battery has. - Battery recall over shutdown issues - Software to slow down the phone to save battery All these three should explain Apple's behavior.

Codestare 9y ago

Alternative title: Apple uses crappy batteries

christmasity 9y ago

My friends used to complain about this but I always thought it was them trying to justify buying the newer iphones. They always said their iphones would slow when new iphones came out. Sounded like conspiratorial nonsense back then.

pweissbrod 9y ago

If the phone OS was open source there would be no need for all the conjecture, black box research and revelations, all of this would have been available knowledge

wnevets 9y ago

Remember it wasn't until someone ran benchmarks before and after replacing their battery that apple decided to let the world know this was a thing.

MollyR 9y ago
This is probably the most scandalous part about this.

iwcai 9y ago

Even if any of this is accurate and true, replacing a battery in my older phone did absolutely nothing for increase in performance. This is undoubtably planned obsolesce.

verytrivial 9y ago

Is it ALL old phones based upon aggregate statistics and a heuristic, or are they monitoring supply voltage. Apple have not, to my knowledge, provided any data to support their claim. And even if they did, batteries vary in quality, even from the same batch. Why not a setting you can override? It is a MASSIVE performance hit. This feels a lot like Epson or whoever blocking old or third party supplies to "assure peak performance". People hate that but put up with this? Edit: In case the subtext wasn't clear, without battery wear data, evidence of these power related resets, or active opt-in to the throttling, this behaviour is identical to an artificial hobbling of old phones to encourage future hardware sales. Yadda yadda lawyers.

verytrivial 9y ago
Not that it look deep insight, but I am vindicated. Here come the yadda yadda lawyers. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/22/apple_sued_iphone_cpu_speed/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/22/apple_sued_iphone_c...

expertentipp 9y ago

My iPhone 6s had two iOS updates in recent months. After these updates the iPhone is significantly slower, occasionally the screen doesn't respond to touch events, occasionally the screen is becoming black with little round loader in the center. Safari hangs. No other incident happened with the phone meanwhile, the only reason of the deteriorated behavior I could think of are these iOS updates.

greedo 9y ago

This isn't a new thing with smartphones, nor limited to iOS/Apple smartphones. Android does/did it too: https://plus.google.com/+YgorCortes/posts/CZ2GhoxgHk3 https://plus.google.com/+YgorCortes/posts/CZ2GhoxgHk3

szajbus 9y ago

Why doesn't it run on normal speed when connected to the charger?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

rkapsoro 9y ago

Does anyone know if any Android vendors are using a similar approach? I have an Android phone which apparently has a 40% degraded battery (60% total capacity remains, at least according to a battery health estimation app that I used since Android does not appear to surface battery wear via API) that is always painfully slow, even if I'm careful to ensure that at least 10 gigs of free space to avoid storage slowdown.

ChiliDogSwirl 9y ago

The ability of HN readers to rationalize Apple's consumer-hostile practices is nothing short of breathtaking.

songco 9y ago

Maybe provide an option in settings is a better idea... Or even better, provide a level of battery saving.

mandeepj 9y ago

do you recall "low power mode" in your iphone? This is exactly what it is. So, even your new iphone will operate slowly during low battery

vbezhenar 9y ago

Is it widespread issue with other phones? I have a suspicion that either they have faulty batteries or they just got bitten by their tiny batteries. I think that battery should have some real life time (not one year, at least 3 years, preferably 5 years) and should be able to provide all the energy phone needed for functioning. Sure, capacity might be reduced, it's understandable, but that's all.