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by blensor 3103 days 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

1 comments

> 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.

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.