[MBCook]

Apple probably knows how often this happens. Perhaps enough users just buy new phones it’s not that common (as a percentage of phones in use).

That said can you imagine the furor if Apple just started popping up a dialog essentially saying ‘Pay us $130 or we’re going to cripple your phone’?

The press would have a field day. It would perfectly fit the ‘Apple breaks your phone’ narrative.

I mean they fixed the ‘my phone randomly restarts when it has plenty of battery left’ and now they’re in trouble for this.

They can’t win.

[mikeash]

They could win by anticipating battery degradation and designing the electronics to draw no more power than a reasonably aged battery can supply.

[pwinnski]

They did that using something they call 'powerd' and that's exactly what the current kerfuffle is about.

Unless you're saying all phones should be constrained to only use the power a two-year-old battery can supply?

[mikeash]

Yes, that second one. Size the battery and the electronics so that when everything is operating at 100%, it doesn't pull so much power that it would shut down on a reasonably degraded battery.

Personally I'd like to see this done by keeping the electronics the same but making the battery bigger.

[MBCook]

If you do that the battery will last longer. So what you didn’t up with is basically what’s already happening: you have longer battery life on the phone is new and shorter battery life when the phone is old.

And then people will once again claim that Apple is shortening their battery life with updates.

Of course you could artificially The battery life so that people can’t tell that when new it’s longer than it appears.

But someone will figure that out and clean that Apple is purposefully hampering things so they can make people buy new phones. Because they ARE.

There is no solution to any of these problems that people will like and won’t end up with terrible headlines.

[mikeash]

This isn’t about battery life, it’s about sudden shutdowns. Older batteries can’t supply as much current. Apple limits performance to avoid pulling more current than the battery can supply. A bigger battery can supply more current.

People expect battery life to get worse as the battery ages. They don’t expect performance to get worse or for the phone to start shutting down spontaneously.

[pwinnski]

And yet that's what battery life getting worse does: spikes cause shutdowns. If people don't expect that, they don't know much about lithium-ion batteries. Which is fine, but that's exactly 100% what Apple is handling here.