[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...

[hvidgaard]

We constantly hear about phones that die before reaching 0%, or losing the last 20% very fast. Google Nexus 6P comes to mind.

I'm fairly confident that what apple did was the most logical thing. They should have been more informative about it, but it's better than a phone dying at 20%.

[askafriend]

I’ve had many Android phones that experience unexpected shutdowns when their Li-Ion battery degrades.

This is a limitation of Li-Ion battery technology. It has nothing to do with OS or phone manufacturering like you keep trying to imply.

This isn’t really up for debate.

What is up for debate is how a manufacturer should handle this limitation and communicate it to customers.

[arcticbull]

Filed in the US (a heavily litigious society) against what was recently the worlds largest company (so right or wrong if they lose they can definitely pay)? I'm shocked that they found only 60 groups who could be both cynical and litigious :P Put yourself in their shoes.

[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.