[KennyBlanken]

Battery wear, filesystem cruft, and solid state storage slowing down as it fills.

People complaining about their phones being slow have aged batteries, a nearly full filesystem, and have likely gone through numerous system updates.

On iOS it is trivial to move off files you don't need on the device anymore and then do a backup, full wipe, and restore.

[philliphaydon]

My 2nd attempt at android was a Samsung Note 5? Or 4? I forget. Anyway when it arrived it was crazy fast!!! Loved it. After 2 months it was annoyingly slow. Reset it. Fast. Downloaded no apps. Got slower and slower. After 1 year I switched to iPhone for the first time (6) never had an issue ever since. (I did have an iPhone 4 at one stage which made me go MS Phone cos the crashing was so bad)

[samtheprogram]

This too, but Apple was caught a while back slowing down older phones at major version updates (their reasoning was to extend battery life / device on time).

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51413724

[Aaargh20318]

It was not just battery life, it was also to prevent phones from spontaneously rebooting.

Apple’s CPUs are very bursty, and that causes them to suddenly draw a large current from the battery. Older batteries cannot handle this so the CPU doesn’t get enough power and reboots. What Apple did was to stop the CPU from suddenly ramping up speed, which means the battery doesn’t have to deal with a sudden spike in power demand and can keep up even if it’s degraded.

This does, of course, slow the phone down as it can’t ramp up as aggressively.

[zepto]

You sound like you think they were lying.

[samtheprogram]

Personally, I don’t, but I was trying to convey a neutral stance. That said, I didn’t like their approach of secrecy and, at least seemingly and anecdotally, doing it when receiving updates rather than over time based on some metric such as battery cycle count. I find this possibly related to their anti-repair practices.

[KennyBlanken]

> seemingly and anecdotally, doing it when receiving updates rather than over time based on some metric such as battery cycle count.

You have absolutely no evidence to support this statement.

> That said, I didn’t like their approach of secrecy

Apple is under no obligation to disclose every practice or behavior, especially one which is completely innocuous and benefits the customer with zero downside. The alternative to slowing down the processor to account for increased internal resistance is "the phone crashes", which is exactly what iPhone 6S models did until Apple released the fix in an iOS 10 update.

Several generations of iPhones have been clearly specifically designed to make the battery and screen easy to replace (Apple even uses pull-tab-releaseable adhesives for the battery), and doesn't place the lightning connector on the main board unlike damn near every Android phone; it's an easily replaced module.

The "slowdown" was specifically to increase the amount of time before the phone's battery would have to be replaced. Other manufacturers have done the same.

How strange that this anti-repair anti-consumer company's OS releases support their phones far longer than any other phone manufacturer...

[samtheprogram]

Didn’t see this until now, but:

> You have absolutely no evidence to support this statement.

Correct. That’s why I said “seemingly” and “anecdotally”.

> Apple is under no obligation to disclose every practice or behavior, especially one which is completely innocuous and benefits the customer with zero downside.

I didn’t say they did, I just said I didn’t like it.

[zepto]

> doing it when receiving updates

Updates are how they deliver updated battery management algorithms, not the metric they use to determine battery age.

[themodelplumber]

A convenient mansplain, as it does not match up with the fact that the devices in question here were not in the state you described, nor did you inquire. I wonder why we are giving OS upgrades such a free pass here anyway, since they are notorious for this.