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 They were doing their best to prolong the life and/or maintain a decent experience for the phones that had become outdated.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

[thebruce87m]

When they originally brought out the feature, it supported the new phones but the OS update was also made available for older models that were outside of warranty since Apple continue to support their hardware years after release. Simply doing nothing and letting the batteries in the older models degrade further would cause them to reboot more and become unusable. Surely this would drive sales more? Isn’t supporting device that are out of warranty the opposite of planned obsolescence?

My wife and I both had iPhones when batterygate happened. Turns out her battery was degraded and mine was fine. She never did get her battery replaced, she was quite happy with the (reduced) performance she had. If it had been randomly rebooting it would have forced her to buy a new model. Instead she just waited until her next upgrade cycle and didn’t care, despite me telling her to get it replaced.

The battery is a consumable part. For my (second hand) iPhone 11 Pro Max it’s a £69 charge to get a new battery. After multiple years of use and two owners this isn’t unreasonable, not that it needs it of course (yet). I’ll still get years more of use out of this phone, and multiple more OS upgrades, all while other manufacturers pump and dump the next version of their handsets. We should be forcing every manufacturer to support handsets for 5 years minimum to save on e-waste.

[fartcannon]

Its a circle of planned obsolescence. Battery gets old, so they degrade phone performance. There's no way for you to change that. They get sued, lose, and maliciously comply by making a switch that maybe causes your phone to reboot randomly. Its all formulated to think, 'I need to replace this'.

Phone manufacturers should be forced to unlock their phones, release drivers and provide user replaceable batteries. Then you can say Apple isn't trying to force you to upgrade.

[google234123]

Without this feature an old phone can crash when the battery gets down to 30% capacity

[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.

[Klonoar]

Citation on that admission?

[robin_reala]

I was intrigued by that as well, so I did some digging and turned up the transcript of the “Microsoft Fiscal Year 2019 First Quarter Earnings Conference Call”: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/events/FY-2019/earn... . If you search through that for “Hacker News” you’ll find Satya saying:

In fact this morning I was reading a news article in Hacker News, which is a community where we have been working hard to make sure that Azure is growing in popularity and I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have made a lot of progress. In some sense that at least basically said that we’re neck to neck with Amazon when it comes to even elite developers as represented in that community.

[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.

[ben174]

Yep. Law == fact. Always. 100% of the time. If the ruling says it's so. It's 100% so. Let it be written.

[sgjohnson]

Yeah. They were engaging in planned obsolescence by prolonging the lifespan of their devices.

Epic.

[neilalexander]

At this point I’m convinced you are merely trolling, so I’m engaging no further.

[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.

[thebruce87m]

I can easily change it. I simply pay them £69 and get it changed. Maybe I’ve found the loophole? Or maybe they’re really bad at planning obsolescence?

To me this is no different than when I pay for new parts for my car. Could I do it myself? Maybe, but I’ll happily pay someone who knows what they’re doing to do it properly. If a bush wears down is that planned obsolescence? Should I be outraged after 60,000 miles that I have to replace it?

I’m actually old enough to have owned phones with removable batteries. Guess how many times I changed a battery? 0. All the way from the 3210, t68i, P900, Note II and a bunch I’ve forgotten and I’ve never needed to change a battery. I’ve had maybe 4 Apple phones with non removable batteries and never needed to either.

[fartcannon]

That 69 dollars happened AFTER the lawsuit (a petty reaponse) and is yet further example of planned obsolescence! Pay 70 bucks, or put 70 bucks towards a new phone.

[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?

[fartcannon]

Well they got sued for using planned obsolescence and lost. So theres not much to argue about, is there?

[deadlocked]

A cursory search would tell you that they didn’t lose anything.