More than anything else, I think Apple has learnt a very valuable lesson on communication here.
People are skewering Apple for thinking about the life of their products. The whole thing could have been averted with a little open communication.
Possibly true, but the whole user response was ridiculous in any case and is only possible because of the fake and panic news medium of social media. Apple did nothing wrong. Slowing down the phones to keep weak batteries from shutting down the device is not a bad thing - it's no different than low power mode with the possible exception that one is notified and given a choice when the phone goes to low power mode. Apple probably should have made the slowdown part of low power mode and added the appropriate notice. But these are trolls controlling public discourse.
There are plenty of legitimate things to complain about Apple, although all are known before purchasing an Apple device. I'd like to go back to the days when one could easily replace a cell phone battery. On a MBP, I'd like to go back to the days when the memory, storage and battery were easily user replaceable and upgradable.
And this Senator getting involved is also ridiculous. If he cares about tech users, where is his bill to restore net neutrality?
I'm still using an iPhone 6. It's over 34 months old and it's still working fine. It does generally need to be charged every night (but it always did) and unless I'm on it a lot during the day, I do get through the whole day. I've detected no slowdowns, although I don't play games on it. And if Apple is willing to give me a new battery for $29, I'd certainly do it and consider that a big win.
Here we go again, someone who knows next to nothing about how rechargeable batteries work. Why is it nobody cares about all their battery operated devices needing new batteries? We hardly ever hear about those but everyone is complaining about Apple's batteries as if they expect them to last forever.
If forever means 2-3 years usefull life out of 800 to 1000 USD priced phone, yes we are not expecting but requesting that.
Who the heck told you an $800-$1000 phone is only "useful" to 2-3 years? Does it suddenly stop working? Are you not able to take that phone to an Apple store 2-3 years later (or somewhere else) and have the battery replaced with a brand new one for < $100?
The battery in my car lasts between 3-4 years. Should I expect the car to be unusable after that as you imply?
Car battery is like fraction of one percent of car price. And it’s there just to start real power source. Iphone battery is about 20% or more of used iphone resale value, so that’s considerable expense.
Regarding usefull life, Apple said that, implicitly, pushing this feature to one year old iphone 7’s when some of them imediatly started throtling, confirmed by geekbench anallysis. If you don’t like facts, you have bigger problem than some anonymous on internet.
Here we go again, someone who knows next to nothing about how rechargeable batteries work. Why is it nobody cares about all their battery operated devices needing new batteries? We hardly ever hear about those but everyone is complaining about Apple's batteries as if they expect them to last forever.
If forever means 2-3 years usefull life out of 800 to 1000 USD priced phone, yes we are not expecting but requesting that.
Who the heck told you an $800-$1000 phone is only "useful" to 2-3 years? Does it suddenly stop working?
Apple implied that when they pushed this feature to one year old 6s at time and recently to 7 at same age. Interestingly enough, throtled 7’s instantly apeared in geekbench analyssis. My 7 is fine and I’m happy as allways but this secretly deployed sollution makes me dissapointed and a bit anxious about future. I’m holding on 11.1 because I want to be able to see problems when they arrive not to be bounced from one possible solution to another and never see real problem. That’s not apple customer service I know. I don’t think that there was intention to sell defective units, that this quallifies as planned obolescence or anything nefarious regarding theyr intentions. Considering everything said and done, Apple, most likely, played on razor thin reserve in battery capacity trying to shave another tenth of milimeter of case thikness and that not played well. Two or three year development cycle, extremly powerfull SoC associated with high instantenous power draw to move that silky user interface got them on wrong foot. There must be considerable large number of affected units and potential to hit buttom-line that they decided to hide this problem. Otherwise, why bother, there was recall before, anyway.
Here we go again, someone who knows next to nothing about how rechargeable batteries work. Why is it nobody cares about all their battery operated devices needing new batteries? We hardly ever hear about those but everyone is complaining about Apple's batteries as if they expect them to last forever.
If forever means 2-3 years usefull life out of 800 to 1000 USD priced phone, yes we are not expecting but requesting that.
So you are yet another person that has zero idea what caused the throttling or why. All affected phones are 2 + years old, and a new battery will fix any slowdown issue. This is getting so tiresome now. Please educate yourself on the actual issue, or stop posting wanna be snarky nonsense.
There is no 2+ y old iphone 7 in existence. But some of them are allready throttled acording to geekbench analyssis. Educate your self, it’s public knowledge.
Here we go again, someone who knows next to nothing about how rechargeable batteries work. Why is it nobody cares about all their battery operated devices needing new batteries? We hardly ever hear about those but everyone is complaining about Apple's batteries as if they expect them to last forever.
If forever means 2-3 years usefull life out of 800 to 1000 USD priced phone, yes we are not expecting but requesting that.
You never answered my question on your other ill informed posts -- do you have similar fits when your aging car battery fails to provide the needed peak power draw necessary to crank a car in the winter or hot summer? Because that's when a sane person says, "Oops, time to change my battery!" and moves on with his life in a normal fashion.
Do you not do that too? Sincerely want to know.
Oh, when is’s to your advantage car analogy is fair, otherwise is stupid. I’ll bite: my honda has this unusually tall battery which is pricey but it’s very easy to replace if there will be need. 7 years and counting (panasonic unit). When car battery is gone, you have very clear indication what’s wrong, go change it. Done.
I allready mentioned that I had defective battery on iphone 5. There was numerous, unpredictable shuttdowns, battery didn’t lasted through day so I changed in warranty. Very easy and allmost pleasant experience. Now it’s opposite. You can’t possibly know whats wrong, users are conflating battery with numerous other issues and all of that happened pretty early in life cycle of 6s and 7 so battery is even less suspectable. When affected users askd help from apple they deflected because even theyr own employees, at time, didn’t know whats wrong. There is no reason not to beleive that because, after anonymous forum posts and some testing by others, Apple confirmed and apologized
Here we go again, someone who knows next to nothing about how rechargeable batteries work. Why is it nobody cares about all their battery operated devices needing new batteries? We hardly ever hear about those but everyone is complaining about Apple's batteries as if they expect them to last forever.
If forever means 2-3 years usefull life out of 800 to 1000 USD priced phone, yes we are not expecting but requesting that.
Right... I suppose you throw a away your car instead of changing the tires, or the battery in your car no matter the usage, no matter the conditions you used / use them in huh bud.
I like this analogy and I will take it little further. So, if it happens that manufacturer used special bolts only accesible in manufacturer aproved service stations, of course without any warranty whatsoever but you will loose warranty for car if you make change in nearest garage, and they are prone to sudden loss of pressure unrelated to use/abuse before they are fully worn-out, what would be your expectation about longevity?
Stupid extended analogy, especially when referring to Apple. There aren't any "special bolts" in any Apple device that there aren't screwdrivers for. Just check out iFixit's website for the tools. As for losing a warranty (nobody has loose warranties, they're very tight and specific), as long as you're still under Apple's warranty, either 1 yr or the extended 2 yr warranty, Apple replaces all parts for free and doesn't charge for labor. I know this is true because I took in my iPhone 6s on the last day of the two year AppleCare warranty because the home button was acting erratic and they ended up replacing the entire front panel, logic board, and battery and didn't charge me anything. The same thing happens with most car manufacturers along with reputable tire dealers. If my Les Schwab tires have an issue before the tread has worn beyond the accepted amount, they will replace the tire and mount it for free. I also have a 7 year warranty that covers most of my Toyota truck, except, here it comes, the BATTERY, tires and normal consumables, like air and oil filters. If you don't take advantage of these warranties and simply complain then I suggest you transport yourself back in time to the middle ages where people had not guarantees for anything, except death.
Here we go again, someone who knows next to nothing about how rechargeable batteries work. Why is it nobody cares about all their battery operated devices needing new batteries? We hardly ever hear about those but everyone is complaining about Apple's batteries as if they expect them to last forever.
If forever means 2-3 years usefull life out of 800 to 1000 USD priced phone, yes we are not expecting but requesting that.
You never answered my question on your other ill informed posts -- do you have similar fits when your aging car battery fails to provide the needed peak power draw necessary to crank a car in the winter or hot summer? Because that's when a sane person says, "Oops, time to change my battery!" and moves on with his life in a normal fashion.
Do you not do that too? Sincerely want to know.
The normal life of a car battery is 60 months. Some may last longer while others may fail sooner but overall it is reasonable to expect a car battery to perform adequately for five years unless you have an extreme use case like living in Alaska or the Sahara. I've had batteries fail after three years and I get pissed because my expectations weren't met. I change the battery and move on because sometimes you just have bad luck and get that one battery that wasn't quite as good as usual. However, to relate it to Apple's situation, imagine if I found out a much higher than normal percentage of consumers' batteries were failing at the two-to-three year mark. Then I am going to rightfully blame the manufacturer for putting out a product that is lower in quality than typical.
Same thing with phone batteries. A two or three year old battery may be out of warranty, but given other devices' tendency to simply experience reduced runtime as opposed to crashing or throttling as the batteries age, it is reasonable to expect Apple products to perform similarly. Battery failures in older iPhones up through the 5S were quite rare as customers regularly got many years out of their devices without crashing. They knew to replace their battery when they couldn't get through the day without their battery meter running down to 0% which may have been only 2-3 years for heavy users or 5+ years for light users.
Suddenly with the iPhone 6 the devices weren't stable and began unexpectedly crashing even with more than 50% battery level indicated as the battery aged moderately. That behavior is not acceptable. Apple's band-aid fix of throttling performance by up to 60% isn't acceptable either, but it was the only choice they had to regain stability. Changing the battery may fix it initially, but to expect it to be normal for even light users to be required to replace their batteries every two years or face severe performance degradation is quite ill informed as to what other devices and even Apple's previous devices will do.
Ultimately though, this is likely not a battery issue. Unless Apple has some unique specification for the batteries used since the iPhone 6 they should be performing and degrading the same as every other Li-ion battery on the market. The problem is in the power requirements of Apple's design which is simply drawing more power than the battery can supply after moderate use. There is no way Apple's engineers shouldn't have known this was going to be an issue as the charge-cycle/power output curve of a Li-ion battery is a known variable.
Whether you like it or not Apple's products are not performing up to consumer expectations that are based on real-world performance of typical battery powered devices.
The performance characteristics, chemistry, and reactant volume between a lead-acid car battery and a lithium-ion battery are so far removed, that there is no comparison that can be made between the two.
Consumer expectations and realities driven by physics can be two entirely different things. Your assumption relies on this not happening in other Li-ion powered devices, when in actuality the voltage drop and crashing does and always has -- and the other device manufacturers do literally nothing about it. The only thing that's new here is slowing down the phone in cases of a chemically worn battery.
I agree there isn't any direct comparison between lead-acid and Li-ion batteries. Unfortunately it is a strawman argument that keeps coming up and I got sucked into it.
Voltage drop in any battery as it ages is going to be a simple fact of life. That is a hard physical limitation of all current battery designs. I know it has caused issues in other phones (the S3 & S4 seem to have quite a few complaints), but that shouldn't be an excuse for accepting the choice between crashing or substantially reduced performance after a short period of time as normal. A properly designed phone takes into account the normal degradation of the battery. Either something unusual happened to Apple's batteries or the engineers missed something to allow the unexpected shutdown issue to get to the point it did before Apple identified it with the diagnostics implemented in iOS 10.2.
Apple didn't have this issue in any meaningful way on devices up through the 5S. The iPad and MacBook lines seem to still be working just fine. It would appear Apple didn't specify a battery that would allow the iPhone 6 and up to perform the same way their previous ones did. They did what they had to do to make the affected phones stable by implementing throttling. I'm glad Apple fixed it instead of ignoring it like some other manufacturers, but the bigger question is whether this was a design problem that will be fixed in future phones or will Apple continue with throttling as the primary way of handling normal battery degradation?
I think that is part of what is so polarizing in the discussion. Posters are taking a black or white approach to what they find acceptable and get indignant when others disagree with their opinion. The fact is any solution is going to be a compromise that is dictated by physics and consumer expectations.
My opinion is Apple made a design mistake and inadvertently underspeced the battery in an effort to meet Jony Ive's obsession with thinness. They need to design future phones to ensure the power draw of their phones under maximum load doesn't exceed the expected output of their specified battery within the stated useful life of 500 full cycle charges and 80% capacity. I'm also of the opinion that the stated life cycled is a minimum, not an average. I expect every device to work at least that long in the absence of a manufacturing defect. Most devices will generally last longer. I'm fine with gradually shortening runtime, but I'm against aggressive throttling, and this jives with my previous experience with a majority of the battery powered devices I have owned.
While that is just my opinion, I do think it generally matches what the average consumer expects and is certainly within the realm of physics as being reasonable even if the phones need to be a little thicker as a tradeoff.
Other are just as firm in their opinion that having to replace the battery every 2-3 years to maintain advertised performance is perfectly fine and should be the new normal, but I just don't think you will ever get consumer sentiment to accept replacing the battery that frequently or potentially face a 50% performance cut as being OK.
Either way, as long as Apple is transparent with their decision everything will work out fine. If Apple communicates to consumers to expect battery replacements on their $1,000 iPhone X every couple of years or face a performance reduction then they can make an educated choice whether or not to purchase one.
I’m seeing this more and more in my Twitter timeline. Apple has software quality issues they need to address. Stop making excuses or blaming the user for Apple’s problems.
Ian Poulter (@IanJamesPoulter) 1/10/18, 8:43 PM Is anyone else having problems with the software on the new iPhone... it’s so slow and unresponsive.. I didn’t even do the new software download as that’s supposed to be worse... @Apple are having problems big time...
Here we go again, someone who knows next to nothing about how rechargeable batteries work. Why is it nobody cares about all their battery operated devices needing new batteries? We hardly ever hear about those but everyone is complaining about Apple's batteries as if they expect them to last forever. People need to get a grip and realize we're not using Star Trek era power sources that last longer but also don't last forever. As for Apple being required to give people free replacement batteries, if the courts demand this then I'm suing every manufacturer of battery operated devices for a lifetime supply of batteries, starting with my rechargeable batteries in my power tools. It's the same thing and don't get me started on Apple changing software to slow their devices down a bit to extend the life of the power in their batteries. This makes sense and people should appreciate it. As for the law firms going after Apple, I think Congress should investigate them and all the other ambulance chasing lawyers. Get rid of them.
This is really getting ridiculous! First of, I do feel what Apple did, slowing down the phone, was to provide better value for the customer. It allows them to push their buying decision for new phone further down the line. Rechargeable batteries do have some end of life. As far as the speed goes, let's get real - Phones are communication and utility device, they are not solving some mission critical problem where a slowness is impacting the owners need. Yes, Apple did one thing wrong. Not informing their customer that they are switching into that mode. Couldn't they have used the "Power Save" mode to do exactly what they were doing otherwise?
In any case, Apple apologized and I think they have provided a generous deal for battery replacement. What I don't like is some French government action prompted this administration to question Apple and that too from an official who doesn't understand technology. Maybe, we should have out representative go question auto car manufacturer - It is commonly known that there are speed governors in car with electronics where it controls your max speed limit. The car can really go much more faster. Obviously the car companies do it so for the safety of the owner of the car, but also so that it doesn't destroy the engine due to prolonged running of engine at higher speed. Kind of sound familiar, doesn't it.
To all of you: your outrage and criticism is just about as silly as the outrage and criticism aimed at Apple over all of this. If you bothered to look at the original WSJ article, you'll see that Thune's questions are more related to how Apple is handling the issue with consumers and not directly with the battery and software issues themselves. Good grief.
You have to realize there are some on here that are incapable of issuing well-founded criticism to Apple. To them Apple can do no wrong, no matter how wrong that is. I'm a big apple fan, but some here just can't get over Tim Cook's new robes!
Here we go again, someone who knows next to nothing about how rechargeable batteries work. Why is it nobody cares about all their battery operated devices needing new batteries? We hardly ever hear about those but everyone is complaining about Apple's batteries as if they expect them to last forever.
If forever means 2-3 years usefull life out of 800 to 1000 USD priced phone, yes we are not expecting but requesting that.
You never answered my question on your other ill informed posts -- do you have similar fits when your aging car battery fails to provide the needed peak power draw necessary to crank a car in the winter or hot summer? Because that's when a sane person says, "Oops, time to change my battery!" and moves on with his life in a normal fashion.
Do you not do that too? Sincerely want to know.
The normal life of a car battery is 60 months. Some may last longer while others may fail sooner but overall it is reasonable to expect a car battery to perform adequately for five years unless you have an extreme use case like living in Alaska or the Sahara. I've had batteries fail after three years and I get pissed because my expectations weren't met. I change the battery and move on because sometimes you just have bad luck and get that one battery that wasn't quite as good as usual. However, to relate it to Apple's situation, imagine if I found out a much higher than normal percentage of consumers' batteries were failing at the two-to-three year mark. Then I am going to rightfully blame the manufacturer for putting out a product that is lower in quality than typical.
Same thing with phone batteries. A two or three year old battery may be out of warranty, but given other devices' tendency to simply experience reduced runtime as opposed to crashing or throttling as the batteries age, it is reasonable to expect Apple products to perform similarly. Battery failures in older iPhones up through the 5S were quite rare as customers regularly got many years out of their devices without crashing. They knew to replace their battery when they couldn't get through the day without their battery meter running down to 0% which may have been only 2-3 years for heavy users or 5+ years for light users.
Suddenly with the iPhone 6 the devices weren't stable and began unexpectedly crashing even with more than 50% battery level indicated as the battery aged moderately. That behavior is not acceptable. Apple's band-aid fix of throttling performance by up to 60% isn't acceptable either, but it was the only choice they had to regain stability. Changing the battery may fix it initially, but to expect it to be normal for even light users to be required to replace their batteries every two years or face severe performance degradation is quite ill informed as to what other devices and even Apple's previous devices will do.
Ultimately though, this is likely not a battery issue. Unless Apple has some unique specification for the batteries used since the iPhone 6 they should be performing and degrading the same as every other Li-ion battery on the market. The problem is in the power requirements of Apple's design which is simply drawing more power than the battery can supply after moderate use. There is no way Apple's engineers shouldn't have known this was going to be an issue as the charge-cycle/power output curve of a Li-ion battery is a known variable.
Whether you like it or not Apple's products are not performing up to consumer expectations that are based on real-world performance of typical battery powered devices.
The performance characteristics, chemistry, and reactant volume between a lead-acid car battery and a lithium-ion battery are so far removed, that there is no comparison that can be made between the two.
Consumer expectations and realities driven by physics can be two entirely different things. Your assumption relies on this not happening in other Li-ion powered devices, when in actuality the voltage drop and crashing does and always has -- and the other device manufacturers do literally nothing about it. The only thing that's new here is slowing down the phone in cases of a chemically worn battery.
Voltage drop in any battery as it ages is going to be a simple fact of life. That is a hard physical limitation of all current battery designs. I know it has caused issues in other phones (the S3 & S4 seem to have quite a few complaints), but that shouldn't be an excuse for accepting the choice between crashing or substantially reduced performance after a short period of time as normal. A properly designed phone takes into account the normal degradation of the battery. Either something unusual happened to Apple's batteries or the engineers missed something to allow the unexpected shutdown issue to get to the point it did before Apple identified it with the diagnostics implemented in iOS 10.2.
...
As allways, very good, balanced and informative post. Thank you. Regarding iphone batteries,engineers are faced with numerous trade-ofs, first is capacity which is limited by internal volume. Then there is req. to sustain high power draw and that’s conflicting with given capacity and volume. Etc etc Cell phone enviroment as such is allready demanding because pulsed discharge and high variability in current draw is detrimental to batterie longevity. There is question of response curve to high instantenous load which is function of number of free ions near to electrodes. (amount of electrolyte is trade-of for capacity in given volume) because electrolyte detoriates with ageing and affects internal impedance but not capacity everything looks like it should, but it’s not. that’s exactly in line with users complaints. Maybe they placed to high bet on random QC and contractor abillity to produce hundreds of millions batteries of high quallity with very small variations betwen them, skipping proper, long time testing in real world environment which is costly and very often unpractical
As 'Battery Gate' continues it never ceases to amaze me at the amount of idiots and shithole polititians that don’t understand anything at all and want to blame someone else for their own lack of mental capability!! Get over it idiots, your warranty was up, it is at least a 3-4 year old phone, the manufacturer actually was helping you and now you want them to give you something for nothing!!!!
I so completely agree. The people and governments are making a mountain out of a molehill. The only think Apple is guilty of is not being transparent about the software or firmware update. They should have made this known from the start. Apple realizes this and is doing their best to rectify the situation. Now the whiners don’t feel it is not enough and that they should get the battery replacement for free. I guess next time I take my car to a mechanic I will have them change my oil and replace my battery for free! Batteries are disposable commodity people. They do not last for ever. Be happy with your very cheap battery replacement and move on with your life. There are way more pressing issues then this crap.
Comments
There are plenty of legitimate things to complain about Apple, although all are known before purchasing an Apple device. I'd like to go back to the days when one could easily replace a cell phone battery. On a MBP, I'd like to go back to the days when the memory, storage and battery were easily user replaceable and upgradable.
And this Senator getting involved is also ridiculous. If he cares about tech users, where is his bill to restore net neutrality?
I'm still using an iPhone 6. It's over 34 months old and it's still working fine. It does generally need to be charged every night (but it always did) and unless I'm on it a lot during the day, I do get through the whole day. I've detected no slowdowns, although I don't play games on it. And if Apple is willing to give me a new battery for $29, I'd certainly do it and consider that a big win.
Iphone battery is about 20% or more of used iphone resale value, so that’s considerable expense.
Regarding usefull life, Apple said that, implicitly, pushing this feature to one year old iphone 7’s when some of them imediatly started throtling, confirmed by geekbench anallysis. If you don’t like facts, you have bigger problem than some anonymous on internet.
There is no 2+ y old iphone 7 in existence. But some of them are allready throttled acording to geekbench analyssis. Educate your self, it’s public knowledge.
my honda has this unusually tall battery which is pricey but it’s very easy to replace if there will be need. 7 years and counting (panasonic unit). When car battery is gone, you have very clear indication what’s wrong, go change it. Done.
I allready mentioned that I had defective battery on iphone 5. There was numerous, unpredictable shuttdowns, battery didn’t lasted through day so I changed in warranty. Very easy and allmost pleasant experience. Now it’s opposite. You can’t possibly know whats wrong, users are conflating battery with numerous other issues and all of that happened pretty early in life cycle of 6s and 7 so battery is even less suspectable. When affected users askd help from apple they deflected because even theyr own employees, at time, didn’t know whats wrong. There is no reason not to beleive that because, after anonymous forum posts and some testing by others, Apple confirmed and apologized
Voltage drop in any battery as it ages is going to be a simple fact of life. That is a hard physical limitation of all current battery designs. I know it has caused issues in other phones (the S3 & S4 seem to have quite a few complaints), but that shouldn't be an excuse for accepting the choice between crashing or substantially reduced performance after a short period of time as normal. A properly designed phone takes into account the normal degradation of the battery. Either something unusual happened to Apple's batteries or the engineers missed something to allow the unexpected shutdown issue to get to the point it did before Apple identified it with the diagnostics implemented in iOS 10.2.
Apple didn't have this issue in any meaningful way on devices up through the 5S. The iPad and MacBook lines seem to still be working just fine. It would appear Apple didn't specify a battery that would allow the iPhone 6 and up to perform the same way their previous ones did. They did what they had to do to make the affected phones stable by implementing throttling. I'm glad Apple fixed it instead of ignoring it like some other manufacturers, but the bigger question is whether this was a design problem that will be fixed in future phones or will Apple continue with throttling as the primary way of handling normal battery degradation?
I think that is part of what is so polarizing in the discussion. Posters are taking a black or white approach to what they find acceptable and get indignant when others disagree with their opinion. The fact is any solution is going to be a compromise that is dictated by physics and consumer expectations.
My opinion is Apple made a design mistake and inadvertently underspeced the battery in an effort to meet Jony Ive's obsession with thinness. They need to design future phones to ensure the power draw of their phones under maximum load doesn't exceed the expected output of their specified battery within the stated useful life of 500 full cycle charges and 80% capacity. I'm also of the opinion that the stated life cycled is a minimum, not an average. I expect every device to work at least that long in the absence of a manufacturing defect. Most devices will generally last longer. I'm fine with gradually shortening runtime, but I'm against aggressive throttling, and this jives with my previous experience with a majority of the battery powered devices I have owned.
While that is just my opinion, I do think it generally matches what the average consumer expects and is certainly within the realm of physics as being reasonable even if the phones need to be a little thicker as a tradeoff.
Other are just as firm in their opinion that having to replace the battery every 2-3 years to maintain advertised performance is perfectly fine and should be the new normal, but I just don't think you will ever get consumer sentiment to accept replacing the battery that frequently or potentially face a 50% performance cut as being OK.
Either way, as long as Apple is transparent with their decision everything will work out fine. If Apple communicates to consumers to expect battery replacements on their $1,000 iPhone X every couple of years or face a performance reduction then they can make an educated choice whether or not to purchase one.
Regarding iphone batteries,engineers are faced with numerous trade-ofs, first is capacity which is limited by internal volume. Then there is req. to sustain high power draw and that’s conflicting with given capacity and volume. Etc etc Cell phone enviroment as such is allready demanding because pulsed discharge and high variability in current draw is detrimental to batterie longevity. There is question of response curve to high instantenous load which is function of number of free ions near to electrodes. (amount of electrolyte is trade-of for capacity in given volume) because electrolyte detoriates with ageing and affects internal impedance but not capacity everything looks like it should, but it’s not. that’s exactly in line with users complaints. Maybe they placed to high bet on random QC and contractor abillity to produce hundreds of millions batteries of high quallity with very small variations betwen them, skipping proper, long time testing in real world environment which is costly and very often unpractical