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by Multicomp 3103 days 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

3 comments

Or make the battery replaceable...

It pains me that I effectively have to choose between replaceable batteries and IPXX ratings.... T_T

iPhone batteries are replaceable.

Making iPhone batteries user-replaceable means making the phone worse, heavier, larger, more expensive and with worse battery life.

The easiest way to get an IP rating is to use lots of glue.

If they went the o-ring route, it would take up more volume and would probably require replacement when the phone was opened as damage from dirt/age will make reusing the o-ring hard. Even worse is that resuse isn’t obvious to a layperson as it could be IP69 with a new o-ring and IP67 with reused o-ring.

The Samsung S5 is IP67 rated and has a user replaceable battery.
It also has a headphone jack while being IP67 and is still reasonably thin, which is an insurmountable design feat according to some opinions I've seen here.

"User replaceable" barely does it justice either. I just had the battery in my hands in under 5 seconds easily. People earlier in the thread stating iPhone batteries are easily user replaceable are ridiculous, when the process can take upward of 20 minutes, and can leave the phone temporarily inoperable if any of the multiple connectors aren't quite seated correctly. I'm also intrigued as to where all this imaginary extra weight and bulk is coming from when implementing specifically the S5 battery enclosure design, because having stripped down hundreds of iPhones and dozens of Galaxy variants I just don't see it.

> WOW. Conspiracy was real the whole time!

No, because this is a new feature as of the iPhone 6. The conspiracy way predates that.

Why haven't I observed my old iPhone 4 or 5 spontaneously rebooting?
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!

iPhone 3GS had a 600 mhz 32 bit processor with only 256 megabytes of RAM. The last update for it was iOS 6. Like all operating systems, iOS's memory and CPU demands have grown over time, that's likely why your perceived performance suffered.
Less speed stepping, making battery prediction easier?
> 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.

If only we had such a technology as a scary warning message with a 5 second wait time before you can toggle the switch... Maybe in 10 years, meanwhile we'll just have to keep crippling old phones and tripling revenue!