[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...

[darkerside]

Cars break. They don't rate limit you. Please share with me a model of vehicle that reduces your max speed because you're low on gas.

[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)