Forget conspiracies; Why Apple’s reason for slowing your iPhone is hostile
medium.comSo imagine Apple starts to show warning messages saying "your battery cannot hold sufficient charge and is EOL - you should replace it now".
We would have a different spin on Batterygate where Apple is greedily telling people to replace their batteries when they allegedly still work just fine, because all they care about is selling more batteries and making more profit.
Whether or not Apple alerted users is still missing the point.
I get the feeling the author has never designed hardware, much less shipped any.
That's an easy bet...
What's the relevance?
If you don’t know what you don’t know it’s hard to be pithy. You claim that one device in particular you happened to own has a certain characteristic failure, yet offer no discussion of the n on the issue, distribution, nor anything else really except “well I felt this way”
Then you claim that thermal throttling is somehow unique to Apple yet every device these days does such thermal management, and such things we’ve even visible at the user code level (e.g. selection of vector instruction use).
And when you look at the trade shipping any product, and what defects are considered acceptable... you write as if you have zero experience or visibility into any of these issues.
So what’s the relevance? Your argument is unconvincing because you haven’t made any effort to justify it.
Thanks for elaborating.
> You claim that one device in particular you happened to own has a certain characteristic failure, yet offer no discussion of the n on the issue, distribution, nor anything else really except “well I felt this way”
What I wrote: "For option [c], it’s important to view this hardware crash as a problem unique to these phones. ... Admittedly, I don’t know that it’s unique to this hardware."
I've essentially invited anyone with better knowledge to knock down my posit, while giving my reasoning with the facts that I know.
> Then you claim that thermal throttling is somehow unique to Apple yet every device these days does such thermal management
What I wrote: "unlike any rechargeable device I’ve ever owned — the iPhone 6 and 6+ suffered hardware resets (crashes) when their batteries drop below a certain output"
For starters, this isn't about thermals, as far as I understand the issue Apple was trying to solve. And what I described as unique to the iPhone 6/6s is that the hardware crashes as the battery health degrades. I've owned a lot of rechargeable devices over the years. When their batteries degrade, the battery doesn't last as long. I don't recall that any of them began to experience crashes.
> And when you look at the trade shipping any product, and what defects are considered acceptable... you write as if you have zero experience or visibility into any of these issues.
There's a lot we don't know about this iPhone 6 + battery + slowdown, like at what battery health does Apple begin to slow down phones, how long before users reach that battery health (within warranty?), how can users identify if they're affected by this, and how many devices are actually affected. It is entirely possible that the problem is overstated, and not widespread. It's possible that nearly every device is affected within warranty. Probably somewhere in between.
But none of that is my point. My point is that -- on the assumption that this is a hardware/software design problem unique to these devices, and I invite you to kill this assumption -- resolving the crashing problem by slowing down devices is hostile in that it penalizes consumers for a problem Apple created.
I have had to use this exact strategy myself at the suggestion of a colleague. This was not invented by Apple, much less invented by them for this one piece of hardware.
Every year I see hardware folks write breathlessly about how good the performance of Apple's AX chips. In retrospect, seems like Apple is pulling a fast one: amazing performance, but only while the phone is new (coincidentally, when all the benchmarks get run). I'm curious how this will impact future reviews of iDevice performance.
Following his own logic, then you could also argue that Apple not recalling its broken iPhones is also a matter of incentive = avoiding negative PR.
So to be consistent, he should admit that in both cases Apple is in the wrong and user-hostile. Apple could avoid the issue for the majority of users by increasing battery size and quality (Samsung has said that its S8 battery will only drop 5% of its charge after 3 years, for instance).
Instead, Apple chooses the easy and more profitable way out - degrading users' performance, which coincidentally also happens to get users to buy iPhones more often.
There is a false dilemma not just between "conspiracy vs not conspiracy", but also between "performance vs battery life", a dilemma manufactured by Apple itself.