[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.

[mthoms]

>You're arguing trivialities

Wait, what? I'm precisely on topic. The topic of this particular comments chain being throttling of iPhones without notifying the user [0]. It's also the topic of a several hundred million dollar class action suit to which Apple settled[1], after admitting it was a failure to not properly inform consumers[2].

You keep trying to derail it from the topic. No-one is arguing whether the throttling is a valid technological solution to a problem beyond Apple's control. It's a great solution, and it works well to this day — What's being debated is wether or not it was ethical to hide the throttling.

And no, throttling of computer devices based on battery capacity certainly was not, in any way, something to be expected. No manufacturer had ever done it before in a portable computing device (laptop, PDA, smartphone). At least to my knowledge.

Sure, it makes sense now that we understand it. But to somehow imply that it should have been anticipated or just blindly accepted is being grossly dishonest.

I've used Apple computers exclusively since 2005 and phones since around 2009. I'm a very satisfied customer. But I'm not so fanatical that I can't look at them objectively. I certainly couldn't imagine defending something that courts around the world, the vast majority of their customers, the technical press, and Apple themselves have admitted was wrong. I just can't understand the logic.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22769621 [1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/2/21161271/apple-settlement-... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/28/16827248/apple-iphone-ba...