[notable_user]

I’m not sure what you mean by “address the root issue”.

The root issue is that batteries degrade over time, for everyone, not just apple. iPhone’s did a good job hiding that away by degrading performance along with it.

The same thing still happens with new phones, but now apple just tells you when it happens. My X crashed in the cold and it said something like “your battery couldn’t provide peak power and your phone is now in degraded performance mode. Disable this setting in the settings app.”

[L0stLink]

The main difference is _consent_ and it should not require an explanation on why it is important. May be I am strange for wanting transparency? I do not want such facts to be hidden. Slowly degrading my user experience over time with no way of me knowing why is not a good way of handling battery degradation. And so I strongly disagree with you and the child comment, Apple did not do 'a good job' hiding it, and them now handling it as they should have in the first place does not deserve praise.

[AndrewKemendo]

At the level of battery management, yes I think you are "weird" in the general population (like all of us here by the way).

I don't see this as any different than the thousands of other OS management decisions like how to manage memory of new tabs or apps when you have a dozen open. What if you want to keep the memory/bandwidth etc... going for one app and not the others? Where's the consent there? Same idea IMO

[nathankunicki]

Because in most other examples the decisions it makes have a virtually hidden effect. However in the case of the battery issue, the performance degradation was _very_ noticeable, causing years of comments on Apple intentionally obseleting old devices by slowing them down.

Put this way - if your car suddenly refused to go above 30mph when previously you'd happilly race along the highway at 70mph, you'd wonder what the hell was wrong, and not think "Oh well, my car manufacturer is just trying to extend the life of my vehicle, it's fine."

[Aaargh20318]

> the performance degradation was _very_ noticeable, causing years of comments on Apple intentionally obseleting old devices by slowing them down.

You just disproved your own point. This throttling was only implemented shortly before it got noticed and Apple announced it’s existence, like a couple of months at most. Apparently it wasn’t ‘very noticable’ and the perceived slowdowns were all in your head because for all those years you claim this was going on, it wasn’t.

[leetcrew]

your car analogy is not a good one.

modern cars retune their engines on the fly based on engine temperature, fuel quality, local air pressure, and other factors. this is to extend the life of the engine in general and to prevent catastrophic failure from knocking.

if you use your car as an appliance (the way most people use phones/computers), you will barely notice the fact that your car's performance is constantly varying other than a bit of sluggishness on a cold morning. to an enthusiast, it's almost impossible not to notice what the car is doing.

most apple customers just want their phone to not crash. if you offer them a performance/stability tradeoff they won't know what to pick anyway.

[cwp]

Sure. Except the manufacturer is not trying to extend the life of your vehicle. They're trying to avoid you running out of gas at 70mph on the highway.

[darkerside]

You realize that literally no cars actually do this, basically proving parent's point

[atoav]

Exactly this happened to my father last fall with a Audi Q1. It finally turned out to be a electronics issue, but the car was limiting itself to very low max speeds (40 kmh or so, which legally disallowed my father from using the Autobahn).

With a car the obvious answer is: get the thing checked immidiately. He did, and he still had to drive around like this for 2 weeks till a replacement part arrived.

[esmi]

I don’t realize that. It happens all the time. There are many services dedicated to helping stranded people because of it.

The analogy is not quite right though. It’s more like they are forcibly reducing max speed to prevent a high speed stall.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/azdailysun.com/news/local/state...

[snowwrestler]

> Slowly degrading my user experience over time with no way of me knowing why is not a good way of handling battery degradation.

Your user experience will always degrade with battery age. This is an unavoidable consequence of using a rechargeable battery. It is physically impossible to run a Li-ion battery through hundreds of charge cycles and have it work just as well as it did the day it was new.

Without power management, the phone would turn off sooner, in some cases a lot sooner. That is also a bad user experience, especially if you need the phone to make an emergency call. This is one example of why using software code to prolong phone availability creates a better user experience, even if comes at the expense of peak performance.

[emn13]

You say degradation is inevitable, hence implying this kind of degradation is unavoidable.

But to draw an analogy: that's kind of like saying death is inevitable, so there's nothing we can do about infant mortality. It's absurd to suggest that some kind of physical inevitability caused the symptoms actually observed to any significant extent whatsoever.

Battery aging does not need to lead to any user experience degradation within the first few years at least, because you can overprovision a battery, and because such overprovisioning actually not only provides some runway, but also reduces even the relative rate of battery decay.

Not to mention there are a bunch of other things a manufacturer does that influence battery lifespan. Which design aspects are at fault here? Apple surely knows by now, but they're not saying.

But even if you do choose to allow slow degradation - entirely reasonable! - the rate of decay is largely a matter of choice for the manufacturer. You can sell em to last for at least a decade if not more, or you can push em to the limits and have em degrade in months. Sure, that might cost a few extra grams and cost a few percentage points of the maximum initial charge - but nothing a user would likely notice, let alone mind.

Apple simply sold near dumpster-level quality li-on battery integrations - whether by accident, or to save money, or to limit device lifespan - we can't really know.

[oarsinsync]

> you can overprovision a battery

Which comes at a cost, in dollars, size and weight. Which is why it's probable no phone manufacturers actually do this.

[emn13]

That's not true; every manufacturer, including apple, does this. The question is simply to what degree. Battery chargers need to decide upto which voltage level to charge, and at which voltage level to consider a cell depleted; and similarly need to decide at which temperature to throttle during discharge - and at least as importantly - during charging. And it's not like it's got to cost and arm and a leg; even small amounts of additional headroom can likely prevent problems like apple's.

Basically: you can throttle after the battery is damaged or before. And if you throttle beforehand, you need to throttle a lot less.

Finally, you imply this is costly - but don't forget that apple's phones are amongst the most costly out there, and similar sized batteries are found in devices a small fraction of the cost. Clearly the bill of materials for the battery isn't a going to be a big deal for apple, compare to those competitors, which also happened to ship higher quality batteries.

[ryacko]

That makes Li-ion pretty bad for motor vehicle use now, doesn’t it?

[_ea1k]

Not really, but its a fair question. An automotive application will degrade significantly over hundreds of cycles as well. As a result, the power output will decline a little (not quite as good 0-60 times as new) and range will decline as well.

The significance of this will vary, largely based upon the range of the car. Think about how many cycles the battery takes after 100,000 miles on a car with a 100 mile range vs one with a 300 mile range, for example.

[snowwrestler]

No, it is simply a maintenance issue. There are already plenty of those in motor vehicles, and people are well-trained to track and manage them.

[mschuster91]

> No, it is simply a maintenance issue. There are already plenty of those in motor vehicles, and people are well-trained to track and manage them.

In addition, car batteries have:

a) vastly better charge controllers than the cheap crap that's put in phones

b) better quality cells to start with, or at the very least higher QA standards

c) BETTER CHARGERS. Cheap cellphone chargers can kill the battery with their unclean power, especially when linked with cheap charge controllers in the phone.

d) better thermal management with cooling and (iirc) heating, compared with a cellphone battery that has to endure anything between double-degree negative temps in winter to +40 °C when it gets held by the user or the CPU gets active.

[gehsty]

Apple did not slowly degrade the user experiebnce over time, they throttled the cpu in order to prevent the phone crashing due to a old battery, do you think that a phone that crashes sporadically is a better user experience?

As you state it is an issue of consent to this throttling, if it was communicated effectively this wouldn’t have been a ‘Gate’.

A good way described in a podcast (think it was Rene Ritchie on the talk show) would be to let the phone crash then pop up a message with an explanation of what’s happened, that the phone is now dialled down to prevent future crashes, you can turn it off in settings etc..

[L0stLink]

It is simple really, if the battery's health has declined enough to warrant a down clock, just let me know so I can:

a) replace the battery.

b) opt-in to degraded performance.

c) upgrade my device.

Rather than (in effect) tricking me into an upgrade before it was really needed.

[davrosthedalek]

a) It is perfectly possible to include a battery, that, even degraded over some time, can provide enough peak power. b) They could have sold their approach as a feature. Or they could have included a warning: Slowed down, replace battery. Similar to what they do now. But no, they kept it secret. Ask yourself why.

Also, if you have that functionality, why crash and then display a message. Write: Crash prevented, but clocked down. Look what a Raspberry PI does: It flashes an icon if the power supply is not keeping up.

[megablast]

> The main difference is _consent_ and it should not require an explanation on why it is important.

What a copout. There is no good reason. Your phone already does a 1000 things that you don't know about. Do you also want access to how many cores are used, which ones, what speed they are running at, which frequency your phone is using, how the GPS is getting its location, etc...

[belltaco]

Why not? PC BIOS provides access to a ton of advanced settings on gaming motherboards. If you don't want to fiddle with things, don't, but don't tell others they cannot.

[jcims]

Most of those examples don't directly impact user experience, create an increasing performance gap with new phones that would make an upgrade a bit more desirable or in cases where there are applications that push new hardware to the limit, make applications effectively incompatible with the hardware.

[AlisdairO]

no, but if my phone is going to massively slow down I want to know why so that I can correct it, rather than being left in the dark and ending up buying a new phone for no good reason.

[mcny]

I think the key legal point was that they changed how the phone worked after that sold it. (I anal)

[emn13]

This is so misleading as to be false.

Batteries do not all degrade alike; not even close. There are huge differences in the rate of decay, and those are significantly impacted by the way the battery is used in the device (particularly maximum charging level, temperature, discharging level, power draw, charging rate) and the quality of the battery.

Apple did NOT do a good job of degrading performance along with it; because if they had, they could have degraded performance before the battery became damaged. As a ballpark, I'd expect a life extension for the iphones in question by at least a factor 10 would be technically fairly simple and affordable; i.e. this isn't peanuts that apple left on the table here. A 10 year life expectancy is totally doable.

So a battery as old as the decaying iPhone batteries need not have decayed significantly, as should be obvious considering that not all phones (let alone other Li-On battery devices!) degrade to this extent. The fact that iPhones did decay like this is almost entirely due to choices that Apple made (even if they made those choices without considering the consequences). Apple is pretty competent, so I'm a little skeptical they didn't know they were pushing the edge of what's reasonable, but sure, maybe it was incompetence rather than intentional penny-pinching or planned obsolescence.

User choices can matter too, but given how locked down these devices are and how managed the environment and how technically nuanced the necessary user actions are to have an ameliorating effect it's unreasonable to assume users had any practical ability to avoid this outcome.

[beerlord]

Can you please expand on how users can maximise battery longevity through their charging and usage techniques?

[emn13]

Sure: try to avoid the phone getting hot; don't charge the phone when it's hot; and definitely don't use the phone while it's charging if doing so causes it to become hot. Problematic phones are probably tuned to close to the physical limits; so "retune" manually: disconnect the charger before it reaches 100% (even a few percent matter). Never use quick charging on phones that are living near the edge like this (or accept that each time you do you're doing a little damage to the cells, so use it sparingly). Similarly, don't run the phone completely to 0% charge. But also don't recharge constantly after each tiny usage.

It's much harder for users to do this reliably than for the battery controller. Damage is maximized when all factors align; that's e.g. why controllers automatically turn of quick charge for the last few percent; similarly you can get away with violating a few rules without too much damage as long as you don't violate them all.

Finally, 0% and 100% charge are nebulous floating concepts. What you're really guessing at are the voltage levels in the cells - but again as a user it's kind of hard to guess those in a simplified UI. Is 95% worse than 5%? Typically high charge is worse but... who knows, without knowing what the controller actually interprets as those percentages.

I've never looked, but I'd be willing to bet you can find software to do most all of this automatically on a rooted android; to what degree you can automate care on other platforms - I'm not sure.

But again, the whole situation is mildly idiotic: all of these things the battery controller/OS can do too, and probably better that any user. There shouldn't be a need for much user handholding. The only thing the OS really can't do is choose for you when you're willing to accept a small amount of damage for a temporary dash of extra charge or quicker charging; a feature that by default kept your battery in "care mode", with a temporary toggle to charge more quickly or to a higher level.

A quick google find stuff like https://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_l...; and research articles such as https://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/binary/pdf/corporate/tec... and http://publications.lib.chalmers.se/records/fulltext/249356/... and https://res.mdpi.com/batteries/batteries-02-00013/article_de... - and I'm sure there are hundreds more. It's not too hard to find info on Li-ion battery degradation, but it's a little much to expect even expert users to actually do much about it (IMHO).

[skellera]

I essentially was doing this on my own when I had a Galaxy. Battery started dying faster so I would leave the battery saver mode on.

Apple is good about doing things so the user doesn’t have to think about it. The media just ran with that shit and made it out to be way worse than it was.

[pxeboot]

The issue wasn't that the battery only lasted 3 hours instead of 5. A degraded battery literally couldn't provide a high enough voltage to keep the CPU running, so the phone crashed. Apple covered this up by always throttling the CPU.

[snowwrestler]

Apple does not "always throttle the CPU". Battery performance management only kicks in when the battery starts to get low. A fully charged iPhone battery, even an old one, can supply sufficient voltage for max performance. Peak voltage falls off only as the charge is depleted.

[Spivak]

What do you want them to do, make the device unusable?

Look they could have been more transparent about it and gave the user a heads up but I see it as a super reasonable response. I think people would rather have a phone that's slower than one that crashes at 29% battery.

[pxeboot]

No, I expect Apple to provide a large enough battery to ensure the device is still usable after a year.

This was a design flaw. Before the throttling update, there were ~1 year old iPhones that would reboot anytime you took a photo or opened a large app if the battery was below 90% charged.

Now I get why Apple did it, a recall would have been far more expensive, but nobody should be surprised by the media shitstorm and lawsuits that followed.

[arcticbull]

Thats a very cynical perspective. There's two ways to look at this:

(A) Apple's terrible because they should have released the device with a "better" battery. One that's not "defective". One that could allow the CPU to run at full-throttle all the time for the usable life of the device. They slowed the device secretly to match the capabilities of the battery because they're trying to cover up a manufacturing defect, and they dont want to foot the bill for repairing everyone's phones.

(B) Apple was trying to get the most performance possible out of the physical capabilities of the battery. Unfortunately, it turned out that as the battery aged, due to physical changes, the battery couldn't keep up with the demands of the CPU running as fast as they thought it could over time. To prevent devices from shutting down and forcing users to replace the battery/phone earlier, they scaled CPU performance with battery age and therefore capabilities. Because batteries are consumable and their performance characteristics change over time. This means that the phone always give you just as much performance as physically possible at any given age.

IMO (B) is way, way more likely than (A).

[pxeboot]

The ~60 lawsuits [1] filed over this point to (A) in my opinion.

If this was normal behavior, we would see similar throttling on previous iPhones, Android's and laptops.

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2018/02/26/iphone-slowdown-class-a...

[askafriend]

There's no Li-Ion battery currently available that is immune from this problem.

Your expectation is entirely unrealistic and emotional. This has nothing to do with the size of the battery.

[2muchcoffeeman]

I always find it amazing how many ‘technical’ people have a warped view of reality and it’s physical limitations.

I guess the take away here is that for the X13, they should just clock it way down from the start and just maximise battery life. Which is not a bad idea.

[AlisdairO]

> What do you want them to do, make the device unusable?

I want them to say (as you do mention) 'hey, your device has been slowed down because your battery is old. Get it replaced to restore full performance'.

I'd absolutely rather have a slow phone than one that arbitrarily dies at 29%, if and only if I'm given this heads up. At least with one that crashes at 29% battery, I might suspect the battery is dying and get it replaced. The average user has no reason to think that an old battery will slow their phone down, and just ends up with a super-frustrating user experience.

[CamperBob2]

Apple is good about doing things so the user doesn’t have to think about it

There's a fine line between that approach and the approach of actively disregarding the user's need to control their own device. Apple too often falls on the latter side of the line, and "Batterygate" was a prime example. I certainly appreciate it when I don't have to think about something, but when I eventually do have to think about it, I need to be able to do something about it.

I do give them some credit for fixing the issue by making the phone work the way it should have all along.

[brazzledazzle]

I don’t mind the lack of knobs as much as I mind the lack of a notification. If Apple throttles my cpu because my battery is degraded I expect that of Apple. What I don’t expect is them doing so without telling me because I can fix the issue by replacing the battery. Since most people would understandably assume a performance degradation over time was software updates they stood to profit from this omission. That looks bad and that’s why they replaced batteries.

[helloindia]

iPhone already has Battery-saver mode feature which kicks in at 20% battery. Involuntary CPU throttling feature & voluntary battery-saver feature, is wrong comparison.

I'd have preferred to prevent the CPU throttle by replacing battery within the phone warranty period than having to know it(cpu throttling) afterwards, when my phone was already out of warranty.

[jdietrich]

>The root issue is that batteries degrade over time, for everyone, not just apple. iPhone’s did a good job hiding that away by degrading performance along with it.

Apple sacrificed battery capacity for size and weight. They built several generations of phone that had just barely enough capacity for a full day of use and could just barely deliver enough current for peak performance. Unlike their Android rivals, they failed to over-provision the battery to account for degradation over time.

The Xiaomi Mi 6 had a 3300mAh battery. The Samsung Galaxy S8 had a 3000mAh battery. The Huawei Mate 9 had a 4000mAh battery. The iPhone 8 has an 1800mAh battery. See the problem?

[___alt]

Isn't the iPhone more power-efficient than many Android counterparts? That would explain why they can afford a smaller battery (but may not explain all the gap).

[dwighttk]

Yeah: those first few phones are really inefficient.

[izacus]

No, since they actually last for at least twice as long as iPhones.

[dwighttk]

So about 3 days of solid use on a single charge? I'm surprised, I've never heard any reviewers say anything about a phone that lasts that long.

[LoSboccacc]

> The root issue is that batteries degrade over time, for everyone, not just apple.

What? No.

First of all, battery degradation is a design parameter. You can easily verify from apple own pages that iPads are rated for twice the charging cycles of iPhones. Apple intentionally included a low rated battery to limit the product life.

> iPhone’s did a good job hiding that away by degrading performance along with it.

And no.

Apple did an awful job, lets not forget the phone where crashing before apple introduced massive throttling killing the device performances. Neither of which sounds like a "good job".

Here's what a good job would have looked like (since apple sells top of the line devices at peak pricing): from the processor minimum voltage and battery degradation metrics figure out a voltage margin that would satisfy the processor constraints after one or even better two years of degradation.

Or, second best, start of with a throttled processor to begin with, but that would have ruined marketing precious "x times faster than previous generation", so they decided to do the shady thing: selling something as fast and killing it's performance six month after purchase.

And of all this what amuse me most is people defending it.

[jakobegger]

> iPhone’s did a good job hiding that away

The iPhone 6 became practically unusable due to throttling. They were not hiding the issue effectively. But they didn't tell people that the issue was the battery. Affected users complained on forums, and tried all kinds of things like factory resets and uninstalling certain apps but couldn't find out why there phone was unusably slow. And Apple support didn't help either. They just suggested to install the latest update.

Only after Batterygate became public did people find out that they needed to swap the battery to fix their phone. I bet a lot of people threw away their phones becUse they didn't know. (why bother replacing the battery when your phone has become unusably slow?)

[mnemnc]

I never really understood the narrative of the "Batterygate"...

I absolutely agree, Apple should have alerted the user when the throttling was enabled (and given the user a choice) from the day this feature was implemented.

However, I actually prefer my phone being slower and usable rather than fast but randomly shutting down. But somehow this does not seem the general consensus?

[emn13]

In general, Li-On batteries don't degrade like this; only design flaws could lead to this kind of behavior.

[JustSomeNobody]

But Apple uses smaller batteries and much more powerful processors, so the effects are noticeable much sooner than with other phones.

[stouset]

Apple’s processors are significantly more energy-efficient than their counterparts’. They might be “more powerful” but are also competitive in terms of battery life.

[PhasmaFelis]

Serious question, is it not possible to simply recalibrate the "battery remaining" readout to match the battery's reduced capacity? I feel like it shouldn't take many cycles of the phone suddenly shutting down at 10% for the system to realize that 10% is the new 1%.

[kalleboo]

The issue wasn't lowered overall capacity but lowered peak performance. During basic usage when the CPU is mostly idle (reading email and whatnot) the peak current draw was fine and the battery could handle it. But if the CPU suddenly peaks to full usage (load a heavy web page), the battery can't deliver the instant amount of current and the phone browns-out and shuts off.

Temperature also effects the performance of the battery so if you're out in the snow it could handle less than being indoors in the heat.

That's why the CPU throttling worked. It kept the CPU from pulling too much power in one instant, and then the battery lasted fine all they way down to 1%

[tinus_hn]

These specific batteries were terrible, I had one replaced and the replacement went to unusable in a year. Apple stance is that that is normal. Unfortunately the law does not provide for warranties for parts that are replaced for free.