I think it’s right to call for receipts here. It’s a common refrain that older devices getting updated causes performance to slow to a crawl but exceedingly rare that someone is actually able to demonstrate with data that it was directly tied to an update. That’s not to say it doesn’t happen, but I treat any claim like that with a good deal of skepticism without anything other than anecdata
Notice that Apple admits it did this, for the date that makes sense for what the user is claiming.
The only debate point is whether they actually did it for the reason of trying to save failing batteries, or whether that was a smokescreen for incentivizing users to buy a new device.
Given the evidence, I think it's wrong to call for receipts here.
Even that was handled badly. In my case when I went to authorized shop in central London. The guy did some test and said everything is ok and I didn't quality to change of battery (I tested using coconutBattery.app battery health was below 80% and I still was on warranty). I asked for battery replacement and pay for it out of my pocket and he also said he cannot do it because they are not allowed to change battery if their tooling said everything is ok. Had to buy 3rd party battery and replace myself.
Heh. Here in Australia, after that debacle Apple offered cheap battery replacements to anyone who wanted one for a year. I took my 3yr old iPhone 6S in and had them replace the battery. After I got it back, GPS stopped working. So I took it back in and they replaced the whole phone free of charge with a new (well factory refurbished) phone.
It was annoying coming and going to the Apple Store. But hey - replacing my 3yr old phone with a new refurb for $30? That was a great deal.
For these kind of things (common repairs that are easy (for a specialist with the right tooling) to do), you're often better going to the cheap local phone repair place rather than the official store.
You can replace the battery. You always have been able to. I did a few months later. So I don't know what you're complaining about.
But why do it before you need to? I'd vastly prefer my OS to be able to continue supporting a degraded battery before I get a chance to replace it, rather than just shut down without warning.
It did not go far enough. I discovered during a recent Internet outage that my iPhone 13 Mini will shut off at 9% if I use it as a mobile hotspot for my iPad. I had expected it to go until 0. The remaining battery capacity is at 85%.
Anecdotally, the iPhone in my post did have its battery wear down to the point that it had the "slowdown" thing enabled (can't recall what it was actually called). It was somewhat slower, but I wouldn't call it unusable. Maybe it depends on what people actually do with the phone. Google Maps, web browsing and such didn't seem to be that different.
I then went ahead and disabled that thing and, sure enough, it started randomly crashing when the battery wasn't full. I then went in and changed the battery for the same price as my previous Samsung's battery would have cost (plus the annoying fact of having to schedule the visit). It did get somewhat faster (not sure whether placebo or not) for another 2-3 years until the battery started swelling and I replaced the phone (I need it to be relatively waterproof, since I use it often as a GPS on my motorbike).
I do concede that I did find it weird and user hostile that, once you'd disable the "protection" mode, you wouldn't be able to turn it back on. Just like I find it odd that that specific model couldn't do the "trickle charge overnight" thing. And that my current iphone14 pro can't be told to stop charging at 80%, whereas newer models can.
I have a completely unusable nexus tablet. It sat with 50% charge for years, I tried to boot it up and it took minutes to do anything. So I flashed it with the latest image available, and it took minutes to do anything.
When I put it up, it was fine.
Compare this to an EeePC, where it happily runs a web browser in Gentoo, snappy. The EeePC is two or three years older, and cost half as much as the nexus.
The flash memory on the Nexus tablet was pretty poor quality. Like many Android devices of the era, eventually you get higher and higher rates of read failures which makes the error correction try again and again to get a good read massively reducing disk performance. It's hardware falling apart.
I've had several Android devices from several manufacturers experience the same issues whether or not they got updates.
Did it, though? There was no reason for it to slow down. I used it plugged in to a beefy supply.
If i said "i put it up in a cabinet because trying to watch youtube on it was becoming a hassle" would that change anything? I put it up for a reason, but i can't remember why. It wasn't because i bought another tablet, because i never have.
So unrelated to updates. The tablet just slowed down enough to be unusable while plugged in.
sure is a coincidence that this mirrors other people's experiences.
i still have the nexus. I can mail it to you and you can then diagnose it and be 100% certain that it wasn't updates. Then you can be correct on the internet.
or, here, i am wrong. It wasn't updates. It was crap "google" hardware and planned obsolescence. Or stray gamma rays.
what i'm being is sarcastic in the face of someone who refuses to step back from my single tablet to everyone else in this thread mentioning the same thing
and like i said, you're welcome to my tablet, i'll mail it to you, then you can be certain you are correct.
You made a post that was entirely about your tablet. But when I respond with a post that's also about your tablet in particular, that makes me unreasonable?
And this idea that I'm super insisting on being right about your tablet... you pulled that out of nowhere. Do you do this any time someone disagrees with you?
But the OP talking about an iPhone? I’m sure some devices get bricked (for real) by updates. The iPhone slowdown wasn’t that (though it still should have been optional and/or well advertised)
the term of art is "Planned Obsolescence" and manufacturers have been designing stuff this way since the 80s, around when credit cards were introduced.
I had one of these phones that would crash under load and the update fixed it. The technical fix was sound. Batteries can't supply full power as they age, and the CPU needs high power when it runs faster. It's an annoying reality of battery powered devices that looks like a conspiracy to boost sales.
Should be coming back in 2027, when the EUs battery regulation goes into effect. While it doesn't iirc require easily swappable batteries (like the Nokia of the olden days, where you just took off the back cover and put a new one in), it's specifically designed to put a stop to the current amount of device waste coming from poor quality batteries.
A "user-serviceable battery," by requirements, is going to be a hard shell plastic sort of thing - which means a decent fraction of the "total battery space" is a protective layer, not active cell components - so some significantly reduced capacity compared to having a "non-replaceable" battery ("slightly more difficult to replace"). You also end up having to devote space to whatever mechanisms keep the rear shell in place, and may have a harder time waterproofing it as a result (which seems to be standard anymore - the number of people I see at the gym using their phones in the hot tub or sauna is boggling).
Batteries, under light use of phones not kept in pockets, last a very long time - 3-5 years isn't unreasonable, and many will last longer. Batteries, under heavy use of a phone kept in a pocket and run hard, will still typically last 1.5-2 years. So in exchange for "slightly more inconvenience less than annually," you get a good bit more capacity and runtime.
Apple, in general, hasn't made their batteries nonsensically hard to replace. They've used the "pull tab sticky" sort of thing for some while, which is far nicer than "glue the whole thing down," and their newer devices are using some sort of electrically released magic (apply 9V to the adhesive, battery pops out).
That's a whole lot of words to just carry water for a bunch of anti-user stuff Apple continues to inflict on their Stockholm Syndrome afflicted customers. The whole water proofing thing is dumb--why is it that every digital watch I've ever owned is simultaneously unbelievably easier to service and also manages to survive being under water way better than any phone I've seen, Apple or otherwise? It's like gasket technology doesn't exist. You could have your shiny metal back and just have it secured with a handful of machine screws. And as far as their batteries not being a pain, they're way harder than a Motorola, for example, and again frankly needlessly so.
It's so weird that we just come to expect to be screwed on these phones, when if it was anything else, especially the sort of devices that are more commercially focused than consumer, you'd demand better.
Samsung’s Galaxy S5 or so was water resistant and had a replaceable battery. I remember a test where it survived a full washing machine program without any issue.
no one asked for water resistance, but literally everyone said "we want replaceable batteries and don't care about phone thinness either", but Apple doesn't care.
I'm pretty sure that a lot of people are very happy with water resistance in exchange for having to do a bit more work to replace a battery (that they don't actually replace).
The number of people using their phones in the hot tub, or in the sauna, astounds me on a regular basis. I can't imagine doing that. But, with modern devices being genuinely "drop them in the pool" grade waterproof, neither does it seem likely to be a problem.
I'll agree on thinness, though. The number of phones in massive, chunky cases says "A lot of people don't care about thin."
> The number of people using their phones in the hot tub, or in the sauna, astounds me on a regular basis. I can't imagine doing that.
and the number of people who desperately look for a way to replace their batteries or upgrade to a new model just because their phone battery degraded is quite saddening.
I've suggested to a range of people that if their only complaint is runtime, and the phone is a few years old, getting someone to replace the battery is far cheaper than a new phone. It's a novel concept, and I'm quite unsure if people just don't know if that's a thing, or if that's the socially accepted excuse to spend a lot of money on a new phone.
Manufacturers put water-sensitive indicators in electronics to flag this during warranty claims. Before water resistant phones, people would desperately google for how to save their phones.
> don't care about phone thinness either
There are rumors the next iPhone with have a thin model. You should also look into the original Motorola Razr. It was the original sexy phone precisely because of how thin it was.
i never needed waterproof phone. i dont throw my devices into water. on contrary i've changed batteries many times when phones had replaceable ones.
there were waterproof phones before this whole BS, so this "argument" disintegrated. seems more like you are happy being held hostage by corporation.
I don't just go throwing my devices into water intentionally, but having waterproof phones has been a lifesaver for me. I've fallen into pools with my phone. I've had phones around a pool I thought we're safe but still got soaked from splashes. I've been caught in pretty massive rainstorms without a waterproof pocket or bag. I've had things spill while cooking. I've had kids with sticky fingers get all kinds of greasy nasties all over my phone and been happy I could just rinse it in the sink.
I’m not defending Apple here because I don’t buy the “water resistance requires non-replaceable batteries story” (there have been plenty of phones that were water resistant and had replaceable batteries + TRS sockets)
However it’s worth noting that in the era you described where phones had replaceable batteries, water damage was also a lot less permanent.
Back then, you would whip the battery out, leave the phone in rice for a day, then it would power up the following day as if nothing had happened.
These days I couldn’t see that working even if you could remove the battery. And when you also factor in how much more essential phones are to our every day lives (they’re our wallet, plane boarding pass, health monitors, location tracking for nervous parents, etc. we don’t even remember important phone numbers like we used to). Regardless of whether you agree with all these use cases, it does result in a scenario where water resistance is a lot more important than it used to be.
I’m assuming you meant “user
replaceable”, because that’s really the key thing to understand here. Almost every phone had those, but most of them switched over half a decade. There was a long period where consumers had tons of options with removable batteries, and the market unequivocally rejected them. It’s always a mistake to assume that people drop hundreds of dollars on worse products based on nebulous claims about marketing, so clearly the average phone buyer thought that they were buying a better product. Why?
Removable batteries were useful in two situations: before a phone could last all day, swapping batteries was handy for people who spent a lot of time away from chargers … but most people don’t need that very often, if at all. The other situation is a few years in, when the battery life is starting to be noticeably worse. For that to be a big deal, it has to happen before you want to buy a new phone for other reasons. This is a valid complaint but you only experience it every few years and can fix it by spending the equivalent of a month of phone service and waiting roughly the amount of time it takes you to get lunch.
Now, what did we gain? Using a sealed battery made phones far more durable – people used to joke about dropping their phone and having the battery fly out! – and especially made it easier to make them dust and waterproof. It also made them cheaper, smaller, lighter, and sturdier.
So basically the average buyer gave up benefits they rarely used in exchange for things they noticed literally every time they picked up the phone. The day the iPhone came out, the entire market re-evaluated what they wanted in a phone and almost everyone decided that they didn’t make 18 hour flights with no charging often enough to give up that solid, luxury feel. Just as Google’s software developers made a crash project to copy the iOS UI, the hardware designers saw the lines around the block at Apple Stores and correctly concluded that nobody minded the drawbacks of a sealed battery.
> This is a valid complaint but you only experience it every few years and can fix it by spending the equivalent of a month of phone service and waiting roughly the amount of time it takes you to get lunch.
I don't spend $90-100 on service. So make that three months. With 1/5 or less of the price going to the actual battery.
> people used to joke about dropping their phone and having the battery fly out!
You can solve that with a screw.
> The day the iPhone came out, the entire market re-evaluated what they wanted in a phone and almost everyone decided that they didn’t make 18 hour flights with no charging often enough to give up that solid, luxury feel.
Things have changed a lot since then. Batteries are huge, chips are efficient, and phones are thinner. These days the loss of half a millimeter of battery, or making the phone half a millimeter thicker, would be just fine in a ton of cases.
> cheaper, smaller, lighter, and sturdier
The sliver of thickness is real, but you can keep the same sturdiness, and what kind of price difference do you have in mind? If the phone costs a dollar more but you save more than fifty dollars on battery replacement that's a pretty good deal.
> the hardware designers saw the lines around the block at Apple Stores and correctly concluded that nobody minded the drawbacks of a sealed battery.
Ugh. People liking a product is not an endorsement of every single aspect of that product!
> I don't spend $90-100 on service. So make that three months. With 1/5 or less of the price going to the actual battery.
The cost of the battery is more than that unless you’re buying no-name fire hazards off of Amazon – and even 20 years ago the batteries cost a similar amount, it’s not like competition was keeping the price down – so you’re looking at something like $50-60 dollars in labor. Not cheap, but clearly not something the average person is changing buying decisions over.
> You can solve that with a screw
We can look at the many, many past devices and learn that it’s not that simple. Those fell out over time due to thermal expansion and contraction, complicated waterproofing, cost more, and added weight and volume – especially when done in a way which was durable and felt solid.
Again, my point isn’t that the sealed case is perfect with no drawbacks of any sort but rather that there was an extended period where people had options on the market, and consistently, overwhelmingly picked the sealed phones. That strongly suggests that people value those everyday benefits more than the cost of replacing a battery. Things like waterproofing are a good example: not having to worry about replacing your phone because of rain or a spill has a peace of mind which most people appreciate because they fear an unexpected $500 loss more than possibly saving $50 on batteries every 2-4 years.
> The batteries I looked at through ifixit are $20. No-name goes below $10.
The cheapest for my phone is $35, and Apple will do it for $90 or third parties for a bit less. If you’re seeing different numbers for your phone, I’m sure that’s true but don’t think it’s fundamentally changing the cost into a number which changes the average phone buyer’s decision. Again, I’m not saying it’s trivial but that people pay hundreds of dollars upfront and usually thousands over the life of the device. There just don’t seem to be that many people who intend to own the same phone for many years and factor the cost of installing a replacement battery into their decision.
> You can be pretty water-resistant while also having a cover normal people can remove.
Yes, nobody has said otherwise. It’s just more expensive and makes a physically larger device if you are making an equivalently durable device because you need to add screws, seals, etc. and make a mechanically more complex case.
Again, my point is simply that the entire phone market had removable batteries but shifted away over roughly a decade and it’s usually a mistake to look at a durable consumer preference and dismiss it as marketing or some kind of conspiracy. Apple is a single vendor so maybe they’re a lost cause but there have been many Android phone makers and their buyers also followed the same trend despite a vocal minority urging otherwise.
I'm not trying to say that more than half of people care, I'm saying that a lot of people care, but it's a situation where "vote with your wallet" would only work if it was a very strong preference, because the competition for good phones is limited and too many features are bundled together. So millions of people have their desire unmet despite the technology being able to meet it with a small size penalty and at negligible dollar cost.
It's not a conspiracy that manufacturers will all make a choice that saves 50 cents if 99.9% of people that care will suck it up for other reasons. But if two phones were offered with everything else equal except battery replacement, half a millimeter, and $1 on price, I'm confident that a very significant fraction of people would pick the replaceable battery option.
Apple may slow down iPhones just because they keep adding features and layers to iOS architecture. Good architecture is removing old code, but most software tenda to be write-only.
I think it's specifically a combination of 2 things for Apple, one of which Apple will absolutely never admit to, but it's something that I've definitely noticed back when I still got Apple devices. I was into jailbreaking at the time and that often meant deliberately not upgrading the main OS, which often made my phone last much longer compared to others of the same model who were running the last version of iOS.
The first is that Apple forbids you from downgrading the iPhone to a lower firmware. They're not the only device maker that does this, but this is mostly unique in the realm of "personal computing devices" - I can downgrade most Android phones to a prior Android version through fastboot if I wanted to and usually the only thing blocking you from installing older Windows versions is a lack of driver support for them (same deal with Linux distros). Even macOS at least in the past used to make sure that if you booted from the Recovery partition, it'd contain the installer for the version of macOS you got with the computer. Apple claims it's in name of security, which is probably true (although I do believe that a company like Apple should just maintain at least the last two major versions of it's software at a bare minimum and let users freely move between every version they've ever released - voided warranty is acceptable for this), but it leads into the next point.
Which is that I suspect Apple deliberately "overspecs" the burden of running basic iOS with newer devices. Basically, the iPhone 4 (yes I'm going back this far) last supported iOS 7.1.2, but if you read reports at the time, the actual most performant version of the phone at the time was iOS 6, not iOS 7, which was mostly characterized as being a slow mess on iPhone 4's that Apple only barely patched up to not be device crippling. I've from personal experience seen this pattern repeated over and over until I just switched to Android (with the main reason for doing so being the fact that Apple killed a bunch of older phone games I was playing by killing 32bit support in iOS).
By doing this, they can essentially force people to move to new devices, simply by making the last supported version borderline unusable for regular use. "Batterygate" was essentially the main consequence of this practice, but it was a symptom coming from Apple's support practices, not the cause. It's just something they boiled the frog with (because after the iphone 4, it stopped being reported, although I can personally attest to all their devices that hit EOL in the years afterwards having the exact same issue.)
It was more to prevent unexpected shutdowns. Which, I'll add, were a problem with Android devices at the time, and the Nexus 5, in particular, had three battery OEMs, one of which would only last a year before being unable to run the device in high demand situations (say, "taking a picture with the flash").
As lithium batteries age, their internal resistance goes up - you can model a battery as a voltage source and a series resistor accurately enough. Over time, that resistance goes up, which means, for a given current, you end up with less voltage "at the output." Most power supplies will compensate by pulling more current to provide the needed power, which will drop the voltage more until you slam into the low voltage protection circuitry that cuts power.
The Nexus 5s are the ones I'm most familiar with, and they absolutely had this problem with one of the battery OEMs (the only way to tell which OEM you had was to pull the battery out, they were labeled on the back). The typical symptom was, "The phone shuts down when you try to take a picture," because camera modules are power hungry, the CPU was spinning hard to keep up with rendering the view from the camera (and possibly doing some pre/post frame capture to find the best frame, I don't recall when that showed up), and the flash pulls a LOT of current, very briefly. So everything would simply shut down when you hit the button to take the picture.
Apple decided to attempt to limit this problem, and they locked out the highest tiers of CPU performance (which are the most power hungry), if the device was having brownout issues. It's a reasonable enough strategy. Where they failed (IMO) was in not alerting the users that it was happening, or that it was a battery health issue. The later iterations of it, where it tracks battery health, and will tell you if your battery is going bad and needs replacement, are what they should have rolled out, and didn't. My guess is that they didn't think it was going to be a major issue for many devices, so it was just a CYA sort of thing that would prevent shutdowns. Unfortunately, that also happened right around the same time that US carriers started dropping the "New phone every 2 years on contract!" thing, and so the iPhones of that era started being used rather substantially longer than the previously-expected 2 years, and, Apple, so drama for clicks.
Had they just gone about telling users, "Hey, it looks like your battery is getting weak, would you like to schedule a replacement? Otherwise, we've limited performance slightly to prevent shutdowns." - I think it would have been fine. And they did settle on that eventually. It just took a few iterations.
I experienced those shutdowns several years before that update was released when I was using an old worn out iPhone 4. Several times it died on me in the middle of an important call at 30-40% battery. I would’ve absolutely preferred it slowing itself down if it would’ve prevented that.
It wouldn’t have hurt to include a setting, but I think turning it on by default for devices under a certain threshold of battery health at least was the right call, both because of non-technical users who don’t understand it and wouldn’t turn it on or those who would leave it off and then attribute the crashes to unrelated things (“they put crashes in my phone to force me to buy a new one!”)
There was no need for anyone to guess what was happening when their phone crashed, and there was no need for any default behavior at all. Every time I let my battery SoC go below a certain percentage -- 5% or 10% -- a message pops up asking if I'd like to switch to low-power mode to extend the remaining charge. I appreciate that. Nobody ever objected to that. No lawsuits were filed, no outrage was farmed on Facebook, no hit pieces were published by Bloomberg. So why in the world didn't Apple do something similar following a crash?
The dialog box practically writes itself. "Sorry! Your iPhone has just recovered from an oopsie-poopsie caused by a tired battery. Please choose an option: <Continue operating normally for as long as possible> <Reduce performance to extend battery life> <Schedule an appointment at your nearest Genius Bar to install a new battery (and check out the new iPhones!)>"
It's utterly inexplicable the way they handled this. Someone should have been fired. But then we say that a lot about Apple around here, and it never seems to happen.
I'm guessing you've not dealt with power electronics and batteries terribly much.
Depending on what limit has been hit, it's quite likely there is no way to log the cause of the error. Low voltage protection circuitry on most batteries doesn't have a status line. It's never supposed to trigger except in exceptional cases, and it just cuts power. All you know is that the power disappeared suddenly, and you've rebooted. Telling the difference between that and assorted other hardware faults, especially if you never designed the hardware to look for it, is really difficult.
You can certainly design a system that will latch the cause of the shutdown in the battery management IC - but you can't really add this in after the fact.
Sometimes things are much simpler than they seem at first. You set a nonvolatile flag at startup time: badShutdown=true. Prior to shutting down normally, you clear the flag. Then, if the flag is ever found to be set at startup time, you can assume that a crash occurred.
Whether the crash was really due to the battery can be inferred from the battery's age. If the battery is relatively new or is otherwise determined to be OK, don't issue this particular warning. If it's within, say, 90% of the expected service life, then the warning makes sense.
In any event, logic similar to the above was employed at some point to determine when to degrade the phone's performance. That is the point where the warning should have been issued. There are no valid excuses for not doing so.
I had a 2016 Intel MacBook Pro with integrated graphics. It was one of the first Apple laptops with a Retina display.
Well. That machine got progressively slower with each major release of macOS. The graphics performance degraded most clearly. If you did the gesture to show the desktop, the animation was noticeably janky - like maybe 20fps or so. Maybe Apple was increasingly using less efficient / more complex compositing or something with each new macOS version and the little Intel integrated graphics chip couldn’t keep up.
I almost forgot how bad it was - but then just before I sold it, I booted into recovery mode to wipe & reinstall the original OS. Turns out the recovery partition was still running whatever version of the OS that the machine shipped with - and holy cow performance was night and day. I’d almost thought I was making it up - but moving windows around was so delightfully snappy again!
I don’t think it was malicious at all on Apple’s side. I think they just didn’t care enough to make sure each new version of macOS didn’t degrade performance. I’m sure their engineers were excited to add visual flourishes using metal - even if older machines struggled to render them.
In retrospect I could have screen recording it or something for proof but I didn’t bother. I was getting rid of the machine anyway. Maybe I should have? But the difference was very real and very obvious.
(And no, I didn’t have any 3rd party software clogging up my machine. The only thing that would routinely peg my cpu was - for no reason - photoanalysisd and the spotlight indexer. Both part of macOS itself.)
