[jki275]

Are you suggesting it wasn’t known that battery replacements were available for iPhones? I know I personally replaced several batteries over the years in iPhones, I don’t think that was a big secret. There were shops you could drop your phone off at and have anew battery put in for fifty bucks in an hour overseas at least.

[movedx]

> There were shops you could drop your phone off at and have anew battery put in for fifty bucks in an hour overseas at least.

Actually I bought my iPhone 6S in Australia and had the battery replaced for free in Vienna under their battery replacement program. It was done in 45 minutes.

[mthoms]

>Are you suggesting it wasn’t known that battery replacements were available for iPhones?

I'm asserting as fact that Apple retail and support employees were kept in the dark about throttling. So, even if you had Applecare, your "genius" would tell you that your phone wasn't slowing down (you were imagining it) or that the slow down was an inevitable result of ever more complex OS upgrades. The end result is that you were told nothing could be done.

So no one was told the simple truth. That poor performance was related to poor battery health and could be rectified by a simple battery replacement.

[jki275]

Are you sure about that? I thought it was pretty much common knowledge that your battery going bad would degrade performance and it was time to get a new battery.

[chipotle_coyote]

What I believe mthoms is saying that the "battery management" software was the secret thing, because it was. We all have a basic idea that when your battery is going bad you should replace it, I imagine, but the software fix Apple silently pushed out arguably prolonged battery life at the expense of making the phone run slower. But if the Apple Geniuses weren't told this was happening, they wouldn't be able to say, "Oh, yeah, your phone's turned on battery management because your battery isn't doing well."

[jki275]

I get what he's asserting, I just think he's wrong.

[mthoms]

The phrasing you've chosen ("degraded performance") is purposefully vague in order to move the goal posts. Please don't do that.

We're specifically talking about lower CPU clocking. Now, are you claiming to have known that Apple was throttling Phones with aging batteries before the rest of the world? Because well, that's a pretty amazing feat.

[jki275]

No, I'm not "moving the goalposts".

The accusation is that Apple downclocked the phone in order to degrade the phone's performance and make people buy new phones.

In fact, Apple downclocked the phones so that already degraded phones could continue to function without becoming unusable.

That's all it was.

[mthoms]

You made two very snarky comments above that implied people should have known about the throttling:

>Are you suggesting it wasn’t known that battery replacements were available for iPhones? I know I personally replaced several batteries over the years in iPhones, I don’t think that was a big secret.

>I thought it was pretty much common knowledge that your battery going bad would degrade performance and it was time to get a new battery

You're now walking that claim back it seems.

>The accusation is that Apple downclocked the phone in order to degrade the phone's performance and make people buy new phones.

No it isn't. Re-read my comments. The accusation is that Apple purposefully hid the throttling from its customers denying them of the choice to replace the battery and bring the phone back to 100%. As I said - whether this act was nefarious is not clear.

Look, you're just not being intellectually honest, nor do you seem to be carefully reading the thread so I've no more interest in debating you.

[jki275]

No, I didn't "imply people should have known about the throttling", I said that pretending people didn't know a bad battery would cause the phone to perform badly was silly.

The exact nature of that bad performance isn't even really important. You're arguing trivialities, that people might have known exactly why their phone went bad. To most people, a phone is a black box, it works or doesn't. Apple allowed the phone to keep working even when the battery had degraded to the point where the phone would randomly crash if they did not address that problem. Apple made the choice to degrade performance in order to keep the phone in service -- that's against their bottom line (they'd have likely sold another phone if they didn't do that), and it gives the customer the ability to keep using a phone without replacing the battery even when it needs a battery replacement.

[schadara]

Apple didn't inform users that battery replacements would make their sluggish phones fast again.

[movedx]

But they did, though? I got an email telling me my battery was part of a replacement program before this throttling "scandal" broke. I had it replaced for free in Vienna (phone was bought in Australia) in 45 minutes. I had noticed the throttling taking place but it wasn't until the email that I knew about the fault.

[mthoms]

You were likely part of a very specific recall.

It's been established (and admitted to by Apple themselves) that the throttling was not properly explained to consumers.

[acdha]

More accurately, Apple didn’t have a UI notification. This was not a secret and support people recommended it if you actually contacted them.

[mthoms]

>This was not a secret and support people recommended it if you actually contacted them.

False. The retail and support staff were not informed of the throttling. See my other comment.

[acdha]

True, as personally witnessed.

[mthoms]

Besides your singular anecdote, do you have any evidence that frontline staff were notified of throttling? Everything that's come out so far says otherwise. It's a key part of the class action lawsuit to which Apple agreed to settle.

It's possible that some staff deduced that replacing the battery would help, based on personal observations, but they were never advised by corporate to do this as policy. As such, the vast majority of them were not recommending battery replacements.

You must have got lucky.

[movedx]

But they did, though? I got an email telling me my battery was part of a replacement program before this throttling "scandal" broke. I had it replaced for free in Vienna (phone was bought in Australia) in 45 minutes. I had noticed the throttling taking place but it wasn't until the email that I knew about the fault.

[addison-lee]

It's almost as if you get ideas to improve products as time goes on. No, that can't be it.

[mthoms]

So they wrote code to deal with degrading battery health while at the same time didn't know about degrading battery health?

[schadara]

Not sure how neglecting to inform users of throttling is some kind of improvement.

They have an article about hardware microphone disconnects, prolonging battery life, etc. yet they neglected to write an article about hardware throttling.

It's almost as if they had a hardware problem and instead of issuing a recall, they quietly pushed a software fix. No, that can't be it.