Heh. I can't blame them for doing this, but not telling people what's happening (and why) was the big mistake.
People generally want their gadgets to be as lightweight as possible, cheap as possible, last as long as possible, and be reliable. There's tradeoffs in balancing those. eg: overbuilding the battery to make the device run longer in the face of degradation adds weight, size, and cost. Somebody has to make a call on where the balance should be.
What nobody really talks about in the context of device longevity is wear levels in the onboard flash. A battery replacement or three doesn't extend that clock. It's pretty good but it doesn't last forever. This is more of an issue on devices with smaller amounts of flash storage with a lot more storage churn.
One nice thing HN has taught me is that I should be wary of anti-Apple claims like this. Inevitably someone comes along to add context or explain what's actually going on, and 9 times out of 10 it turns out that Apple's solution wasn't unreasonable at all.
Which isn't to say that things like the 30% app store cut is entirely defensible, though you can certainly make some halfway plausible claims in that direction (based mostly on how retail works, especially at the time iPhones were invented). Or sideloading. There are legitimate gripes. But a lot of crap spewed regularly on HN turns out to be exactly that, crap.
You can always find a reason to defend any feature. In the case of this article you could say it's more seamless to open Outlook links in their browser. And that's exactly what Microsoft's PR says.
But for some reason Apple's fans are way more insistent in defending everything and sticking to the PR department's arguments. No criticism is allowed to stand.
I find that more often than not, the anti-fans are more strident these days than the fans are. What I like is that there are some knowledgeable fans here on HN that don't just retort with "nuh-uh!" whenever a critic levels some sort of unfounded conspiracy theory at Apple, but actually explain what is going on. They provide context, documentation, and important details that seem to get lost when the only discussion is emotional.
HN isn't perfect, but it's so much better than a lot of other online discussion forums these days.
Shipping a device that will overheat and reboot when the device is a couple years old and fixing it by silently throttling the device isn't pro consumer either
Those devices really should have been recalled or offered a generous trade-in value to account for the fundamental design flaw
It has nothing to do with overheating. It is battery ageing. The internal resistance of a battery increases as it ages, leading to brownouts when peak current happens.
The throttling feature still exists in iOS. All that’s changed is that you will be made aware that it’s happening and you can switch it off if you prefer a brownout when your battery is degraded.
Other manufacturers are happy to let your handset reboot, it could lead to another sale for them. Some would call that planned obsolescence.
> It has nothing to do with overheating. It is battery ageing. The internal resistance of a battery increases as it ages, leading to brownouts when peak current happens
yawn Why my 8 years old Moto XT910 eat the battery like cookies but did not reboot? It's battery wasnot only old, but swollen a bit, it's USB port was damaged so sometimes the charge didn't actually happened... but it still could survive a couple of hours with enabled radio and GPS, serving a navigation app with 3G updates? And didn't reboot?
I’m not sure what answer you’re looking for here - each system is different. Design, manufacturing, usage patterns will all play a part.
When batterygate happened my wife’s phone was throttled but mine wasn’t. She didn’t care and never got the battery replaced but she definitely would have upgraded sooner if it was rebooting.
Are you saying that Apple use different battery technology to everyone else? Or what is your point?
It was a rhetorical question, yet a Jobs' fanboi couldn't resist, see the neighbouring comment.
> each system is different
Except in that part it's pretty much the same. Or your battery, even discharged, can keep up with a full load from a CPU, GPU, WiFi and GPS modules eating amps, or it couldn't even when it's fresh.
If at 3V your battery couldn't power the system then you shouldn't show 3V as 30%, you should show it as 0% and adjust %/V curve accordingly.
It's simple, it's about momentary load in amps, but "only some iPhone 6S models manufactured in September and October 2015 had suffered from a battery manufacturing defect" yet millions of iPhones were slowed down ~~totally not beacuse Apple needed to sell the next iPhone~~.
And as an anecdote - even after the years of abuse, the last time I used my XT910 it was literally showing 10% when I enabled the radio so I could receive a SMS from my bank on it. I really expected it to just shutdown (because enabling radio means data too, so all that bullshit rushed to update their things and using data => more power draw) and for me to be stranded in a remote city without money. But not only it did survive that, it kept chugging for another 4 hours, with radio disabled, ofc. *shrug_emoji*
> Or what is your point?
What people would eagerly drink any Koolaid what would make them feel entitled or standing out. Which most Apple fanbois vehemently deny.
NB: there are people who just use iPhones/Macs/whatever and don't engage in defending 'their favourite brand', of course they aren't fanbois.
This is a low quality comment not fitting with the discussions we try to have on HN. Please stop trying to call people fanboys for no reason.
> yet millions of iPhones were slowed
Citation needed. Only handsets with degraded batteries were slowed, and only after the first brownout. Replacing the battery brought it back to full speed. This is the main point people don’t understand. Every phone got the software update. The feature still exists today. But not all phones were slowed. My iPhone 11 will slow if the battery degrades.
If they wanted to sell you a new phone, was that the best way to do it? Couldn’t they… have just done nothing instead? Like the other manufacturers? Instead of prolonging the life of resetting handsets?
I had one of the early generation 17" MacBook pros that ended up with a swollen battery. And when I say swollen, I mean the case eventually split in two and was about 1/2" taller than it was originally.
Granted this happened because glue in the battery was compromised by excess heat because Steve Jobs preferred heat over the sound of a fan, but the machine never rebooted or shut down due to heat or decreased max voltage.
I haven't actually seen Google specifically call out that their devices will be throttled in a year or two. I'd be curious to see thatif you have a link though, I haven't kept as up to date with the more recent pixel devices.
Anecdotally: a while back while I was running a long build in termux in a warm room with my tablet plugged in to charge, I got a notification that my device was being throttled to prevent thermal damage. I wouldn't be surprised if this was common I haven't gotten such a message since, however I also don't have a habit of building software on my tablet (I have a vague memory that whatever it was didn't offer a cross compilation method outside of qemu/emulation)
> most devices are designed with a commination of passive and active cooling
Smartphones with active cooling? You must live in world that's very different from the one I live in.
Also, as mentioned in other replies, your whole point about "overheating and rebooting" is a straw man. Throttling was introduced to address battery aging. Again, a problem that affects every device with rechargeable batteries.
> Apple just has a history of prioritizing design asthenic and they're willing to push the limits on thermal regulation.
Device design is always constrained by the current technology. It isn't impossible to make a phone with current battery tech that doesn't overheat after a year or two of normal use
Apple just pushed design to far and underestimated the cooling/heat dissipation required
Heat had nothing to do with it. The internal resistance of the battery increases as it wears out, lowering the peak output current.
Increased heat when operating near the current limit is a symptom, not a cause. Adding a fan or a chonky heatsink to your iPhone wouldn't magically raise this limit.
I don't believe I ever said heat was the cause, if I did I misphrased my point. Excess heat was absolutely the symptom, but it was a symptom of a design that was pushed beyond the limits of regular operation.
A two year old lithium battery under normal use will hardly degrade at all. Any design that pushed the limits so far that a degredation of a few percent over promised and under delivered. In Apples case it could be remedied with a software update, but that doesn't mean the device held up to the original performance claims over a standard life cycle of device use.
The phone didn’t overheat. That’s just the point. The options were either the phone slows down to keep the phone from shutting off when the battery got weak or the phone shuts off. What was the other alternative?
You keep mentioning cooling / heat - this is the first I’ve ever heard of this in relation to batterygate, and in fact the first I’ve ever heard of any battery “overheating” (generating more heat?) as a result of a normal ageing process - where are you getting this from?
My understanding was that the concerns were related to degraded batteries having a lower voltage potential.
The hardware and software were shipped with performance optimized to the initial voltage curves of the battery. Once that voltage curve decreases slightly the device will either reboot when the processor attempts to run at a higher clock speed than the battery voltage can support, or the battery can technically keep up though begin to overheat as the operating voltage is a higher draw than the battery can safely handle.
Dont get me wrong I'm not aware of any concerns over the phone actuary catching fire like that one generation of Samsung years ago, but the degraded battery would either lead to reboots or excess heat.
