[sgjohnson]

> to counter Apple's in-house planned obsolescence program

Apple does not do planned obsolescence. iPhone 6S is going to be be supported for 8 years total. (It's not going to receive feature updates anymore, as iOS 16 won't support it, but it also means that iOS 15 gets another year of support)

[refracture]

I'm hoping for two years since that's what the iPhone 5s got with iOS 12 after 13 dropped support for it, but it may just be a matter of policy for them to target 8 years since it was the 8 year mark when the final update for 12 went out last September.

This topic has become an amusing barometer for people who don't actually know anything about Apple products but love to knock on them.. there's plenty Apple does to get upset over, but this is always the one topic ignorant people bring up.

When the battery went bad on my 6s which was already several years old Apple replaced it for free. That's above and beyond the $30 program they started after their misshap handling the CPU throttling to prevent power loss on worn batteries.

[fartcannon]

The updates that downgrade the battery life without having user replaceable batteries is planned obsolescence.

[neilalexander]

It's hardly like updates are being released deliberately to worsen battery life. The more features that get added, the more CPU cycles are used therefore battery power is consumed more quickly. This should be a surprise to no one, little less a technical audience like HN. Even the battery throttling saga a couple years ago was largely with good intentions (in that it's better to run the phone a bit slower than it is for it to power off at random due to voltage drops).

Apple can be accused of an awful lot but their support story for older devices is better than any other phone or tablet manufacturer out there bar none.

[fartcannon]

They were sued and lost for exactly this reason.

https://www.npr.org/2020/11/18/936268845/apple-agrees-to-pay...

[robin_reala]

The technical explanation was that CPU speed scaling spikes would exceed the old battery’s ability to supply power, causing the phone to reset. Apple’s decision was that a slower phone was a better user experience than a phone that randomly reset when you tried to do something that required a high CPU frequency.

The upshot of that is that, yes, your phone got slower as it aged due to a software update. The battery life certainly didn’t suffer (if anything it would have improved it slightly). But it’s a little bit more nuanced than “planned obselescence”.

[ben174]

And any way you look at it, it's clear that Apple wasn't just trying to cripple old phones in an attempt to sell the newer models. They were doing their best to prolong the life and/or maintain a decent experience for the phones that had become outdated.

[fartcannon]

Which is why they were sued and _lost_?

The mental gymnastics you people use is nuts. I guess this is part of Apples PR, is it? Deny history?

[fartcannon]

No, its clear they are trying to be tricky with their planned obsolecense. They lost a lawsuit about it. They were found guilty of doing exactly that.

If they made the batteries easily user replaceable, then you'd have a point. But they don't, and you couldn't disable that function so it falls under planned obsolescence.

[pessimizer]

Apple was intentionally and silently slowing down aging iDevices to make it seem like they had just become obsolete under the higher requirements of newer software, rather than just having dying batteries. While the person you're responding to is mischaracterizing what happened to some extent and implying that it is still happening (they may still be throttled to protect from sudden shutoffs, but everybody knows now), you're propagandizing about it.

If they had the users' interests in heart at all, they could have thrown a modal that explained that the batteries were dying, and asked if the user wanted the phone to be throttled to avoid incidents of sudden power loss. If Apple had done this, they would have immediately lost sales and had complaints about expensive and inconvenient battery replacement, so they chose not to. This was the result of nothing but greed.

[fartcannon]

No, it was pretty straight forward. Which is why they lost the suit.

[robin_reala]

Sure. They should have been upfront about it, and they should have offered a switch to disable the behaviour. They were rightly punished for it.

But if we’re going to be correct about things, it was phone speed that took a hit, not battery life.

[sgjohnson]

Batteries are consumable, and there's not a shred of evidence that Apple is purposefully downgrading battery life with updates.