[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 They were doing their best to prolong the life and/or maintain a decent experience for the phones that had become outdated.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?

[thebruce87m]

They didn’t say that’s what they were doing. Now they do. The feature still exists today on brand new phones.

[fartcannon]

That 'feature' is planned obsolescence. They're degrading your phone, without an easy way to fix it (user replaceable batteries). You will dislike the experience and be encouraged indirectly to buy a new one. Planned obsolescence.

[smoldesu]

Hacker News in 2022 is a strange place, it's hard to engage with people who already have their opinion of Apple decided before they've heard how they've messed up this time. The notch was particularly funny, watching everyone's incredulous reaction while people immediately went to damage control with the "but it's still 16:10!!!" addendum.

This goes to everyone: Give up. All of these companies suck, the only thing their money buys them is better marketing. It's not worth your time being their PR lackey for them.

[fartcannon]

Microsoft's CEO admitted that they have been gaming Hackernews for a while, so it's highly likely the other big brands do the same.

[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.

[neilalexander]

You keep parroting the term “planned obsolescence” over and over again in every comment but I do not think you understand what it actually means. Planned obsolescence is when the device becomes useless after a given amount of time. So to use the battery example, arguably a phone that ends up misbehaving or shutting down unexpectedly due to a failing battery without any mitigations is “useless” — it ceases to function as a useful phone or emergency device if that happens.

That’s not a trait specific to iPhones though — the same thing will happen on most battery-powered devices these days. It’s just that someone decided to pick a fight with Apple about it, hence a lawsuit was born. There’s nothing remarkable about this case otherwise — it could have just as easily been any other phone manufacturer.

In this example, the mitigation Apple chose (and admittedly very badly communicated at the time) was to reduce the frequency with which these shutdowns happen by dropping peak performance a bit and reducing the peak power draw as a result. That action actually prolonged the device’s “usefulness” for its intended purpose as a phone and emergency device, even if it negatively affected auxiliary functions.

In any case, if the phone slows down a bit, you might think “okay, it may be time to replace the phone soon” and you like to use this as your excuse for it being planned obsolescence. What you’re conveniently ignoring is that if the phone shuts down at random, you are probably going to think “well, damn, I need to replace the phone _now_” because a non-technical person will not likely to draw the conclusion that the battery was at fault, they’re much more likely to believe there’s a much deeper and unfixable fault.

Finally, while the batteries indeed are not user-replaceable, they are still replaceable. Any Apple Store will do it for you (many even on a walk-in basis) and it’s not even expensive to have done. Many other third-party shops and service centres also have the capability to do the same.

[fartcannon]

They lost a lawsuit about it. They were engaging in 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.

[thebruce87m]

They weren’t slowing down ageing devices, only handsets that had degraded batteries. It’s an important distinction. The change that they made is now when your battery degrades you can choose to get peak performance at the risk of reboots.

[fartcannon]

If you could easily change the battery, there'd be no problem with this function. As it stands, the glued in battery is also planned obsolescence.

There's quite a bit of it, isn't there? If your battery doesn't die, the software will cripple your phone. If you choose not to let it, you'll exepreince random reboots.

Its all a big elaborate plan to make you upgrade.

They're smart folks at Apple. They'll try something even more sneaky next time.

[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.

[fartcannon]

Sure, still, planned obsolescence.

[robin_reala]

I’d probably agree with you were it not for the fact that the “planned obsolescence” happened 18 months after the release of the iPhone 6S, but they then went on to give it a further 5.5 years of software updates. Maybe someone at Apple didn’t get the message?