TikTok is still your one-stop shop for total nonsense about Apple
A man claiming to work for Apple prior to 2010 is sharing what he calls the "dirty secrets" about the company -- but as you'd expect it is just conspiratorial nonsense. Here's why, and why we know.
iPhone System Storage isn't planned obsolescence
One TikTok video shared by user @nabeel_co got 2.8 million views and counting, claiming that Apple used "System Data" storage on iPhone as a planned obsolescence tactic. This has no basis in reality.
The user goes on to make other claims based on his history working for Apple. Saying that the company had actually cared about speeding up the iPhone, once, before Steve Jobs died. Now, Apple apparently profits from breaking users' devices on purpose, so... more people buy iPhones, he claims.
This claim is 100% unadulterated nonsense.
When asked for more dirt on Apple, he goes into a tirade about how AppleCare is used to "trick" customers into paying for defects. This unsubstantiated claim is demonstrably false, as Apple tends to swap products under AppleCare, at no cost. We've been on all sides of this equation, both as previous representatives of Apple, as recipients of service swaps under AppleCare, and without.
We're not sure why this TikTok creator has picked a bone with Apple, perhaps driven by a certain Twitter CEO. However, it is clear that people love to hear something controversial, no matter how easily proven false.
Even if the man is a former Apple employee, and we think he probably did some time at an Apple Store, the company has changed so much since his time there over 12 years ago that it is improbable that he knows how the company functions today. And, the claims he makes about how the company was then, are wrong too.
In one instance, he states that Apple has an internal policy not to address bugs that lead to users upgrading more often. We know without a doubt that this claim is a total lie.
Why do we know it's a complete lie? Because at AppleInsider we too have experience with working for Apple, and supporting users at retail in its own retail stores and outside of them. Our experience isn't limited to the '00s either -- ours dates back to the '80s at independent dealers all the way through the '10s at retail, specialists, service, and support continuously, and that's not even including what we do here, daily.
We can conclusively say without fear of contradiction that there has never been an Apple policy to not address bugs that lead to users buying new hardware. And we suspect there never will be.
However, there are methods to delete the System Data from their device. Users can delete unused apps, clear caches, or even restore from a device backup. These steps are unnecessary but can give users peace of mind who are bothered by the storage allocation.
The TikTok user continues with various posts filled with, well, total bullshit and lies. The most recent video shares information about iPhone battery life that is so fundamentally wrong, we're not sure where to begin addressing it.
Oh, wait. We already did.
We at AppleInsider hope that we can keep our readers educated enough to identify such misinformation. The concept of planned obsolescence is so broken it only takes a moment of actual, coherent, thought to understand why it isn't happening.
Read on AppleInsider
iPhone System Storage isn't planned obsolescence
One TikTok video shared by user @nabeel_co got 2.8 million views and counting, claiming that Apple used "System Data" storage on iPhone as a planned obsolescence tactic. This has no basis in reality.
The user goes on to make other claims based on his history working for Apple. Saying that the company had actually cared about speeding up the iPhone, once, before Steve Jobs died. Now, Apple apparently profits from breaking users' devices on purpose, so... more people buy iPhones, he claims.
This claim is 100% unadulterated nonsense.
When asked for more dirt on Apple, he goes into a tirade about how AppleCare is used to "trick" customers into paying for defects. This unsubstantiated claim is demonstrably false, as Apple tends to swap products under AppleCare, at no cost. We've been on all sides of this equation, both as previous representatives of Apple, as recipients of service swaps under AppleCare, and without.
We're not sure why this TikTok creator has picked a bone with Apple, perhaps driven by a certain Twitter CEO. However, it is clear that people love to hear something controversial, no matter how easily proven false.
Even if the man is a former Apple employee, and we think he probably did some time at an Apple Store, the company has changed so much since his time there over 12 years ago that it is improbable that he knows how the company functions today. And, the claims he makes about how the company was then, are wrong too.
In one instance, he states that Apple has an internal policy not to address bugs that lead to users upgrading more often. We know without a doubt that this claim is a total lie.
Why do we know it's a complete lie? Because at AppleInsider we too have experience with working for Apple, and supporting users at retail in its own retail stores and outside of them. Our experience isn't limited to the '00s either -- ours dates back to the '80s at independent dealers all the way through the '10s at retail, specialists, service, and support continuously, and that's not even including what we do here, daily.
We can conclusively say without fear of contradiction that there has never been an Apple policy to not address bugs that lead to users buying new hardware. And we suspect there never will be.
System Data, and "Other"
The System Data storage on iPhone is space used by the device for caching and other processes. It is a flexible container that dumps data as the device storage fills up -- meaning that the user has no reason to delete it manually.However, there are methods to delete the System Data from their device. Users can delete unused apps, clear caches, or even restore from a device backup. These steps are unnecessary but can give users peace of mind who are bothered by the storage allocation.
The TikTok user continues with various posts filled with, well, total bullshit and lies. The most recent video shares information about iPhone battery life that is so fundamentally wrong, we're not sure where to begin addressing it.
Oh, wait. We already did.
We at AppleInsider hope that we can keep our readers educated enough to identify such misinformation. The concept of planned obsolescence is so broken it only takes a moment of actual, coherent, thought to understand why it isn't happening.
Read on AppleInsider
Comments
If users were given that capability and followed a few simple battery care steps (plug phone in whenever possible while limiting battery SoC, do not expose to high heat, do not fast charge) then a mobile phone battery would easily last as long as an EV battery, rather than forcing you to swap the battery after a couple of years — which, at this point, is only marginally cheaper than upgrading, and thus people make the rational choice of upgrading; ergo, planned obsolescence.
A battery replacement is between $50 and $100 on an iPhone. A new device is at a minimum $500. This is still not "planned obsolescence." Batteries die. It is a fact of physics and life.
Batteries are consumable. They will need to be replaced at some point no matter what you do. And only a very tiny minority of nerds is going to download an app and control the battery charging to the degree that it would have any noticeable effect.
Concretely, there's the case of my wife's iPhone 12, which belonged to me until the start of this year when I got an iPhone 13. While it was in my possession, I did some moderate babysitting of its battery (I've since improved the process further with my 13). Despite that, after less than a year in her hands -- with no further battery babysitting, since she's not as OCD as I am about it -- I just checked and her phone's at 89% health already. She's already starting to manifest the aforementioned "range anxiety." Quite likely I'll have to upgrade to a 14 or 15 next year so she can have my 13 with a minimally degraded battery (due to me babysitting said battery), since I won't spend good money replacing the battery of 3-year old hardware. Boom, Apple makes a sale due to their designed-in planned obsolescence.
If there was an app so that I could set the charge limit to, say, 70% and tell her to keep it plugged in while at her desk, her phone would easily last 6 years, probably more. I won't tell her to keep it plugged in without a charge limit, especially in the summer, since that destroys the battery even more than letting it drain (batteries absolutely hate the combination of high SoC and high temperature, and degrade quickly in those conditions).
2) I appreciate your personal experience in the matter, but that's still not planned obsolescence. Comparing EV batteries that are about ten thousand times more reactants, cathodes , and anodes by volume to a cellphone battery isn't a like to like comparison. Three to four years is the top of the bell curve for average lifetime on a lithium ion battery that's cell-phone sized in a phone from Google or Apple, with to two or three on Samsung, versus eight or nine on a EV battery. It's the physics and chemistry of a reaction at volume, versus in a smaller-size.
Planned obsolescence is "oh, sorry, no more support for a modern OS" in three years or less. It isn't "gee, I don't want to pay $50 to keep a phone running that still will run the modern operating system for another three or four." That's a personal decision, based on what you consider your needs, and not a conspiracy by manufacturers to keep you upgrading. I don't think if you had that mythical eight-year iPhone, that you'd keep it for more than three years anyway, to be honest, based on what you've said here so far.
Your resale discussion is about how well the iPhone retains value over time, more than anything else.
We, the rationals, do know that there is no such thing as “planned obsolescence”. Even the “battery gate” where Apple turned down the performances of a phone had actually a good intention: protecting the battery from overheating because of ageing.
I would actually recommend you (AppleInsider) to have another article about how to improve dramatically the battery life of an iPhone by stoping swiping away apps to kill them. This causes tremendous strain of the battery + watching video feeds or picture feeds like Reddit, TikTok, Instagram…
I wish more developers would do like I do where I work: I monitor if a user has been swiping away one of the apps we deploy to our users and if I repeatedly see the user doing it I present a splash screen that is dismisable only after 10sec where I explain to them not to swipe away apps to preserve battery. A lot of users do that because they don’t understand how multitasking works on an iPhone or they were Android users previously. I wish Apple reintroduced the feature they tested a couple of years ago in a beta version of iOS: after swiping up an app to close it you had to press a delete button on the card to effectively kill the app.
And as an iOS developer I must say I am the one using my iPhones a lot (I have so many of them) and using them so much I still got 100% out of my iPhone 13 Pro after a year of intense use.
Also, that user here is mentioning “high SoC” which proves he doesn’t know what a SoC is (there are no “high” or “low” SoC). Personally I have been a research engineer in microelectronics before becoming an iOS developer. So when you read such nonsense just do two thing: block temporarily the account because the person is obviously here to troll people and enjoys having a lot of people against them or simply kick them out for good.
It's getting rather crazy as people react to something that isn't real.
Regardless of whether the battery percentage indicator says 0% or 100%, that will make no difference at all to how many hours the phone will turn off if you don't connect it to a charger? It's not going to turn off within a few minutes if it's at 0%, and it's not going to last a day or more if it's at 100%?
Man, talk about post-truth...
Here's an example:
A manufacturer of a refrigerator has fitted it with a compressor designed to only last, on average, 13 months, putting the failure point just outside the warranty window so that the consumer must repair or replace the refrigerator.
The personal anecdotal examples are just personal anecdotal examples.
Also, if this were an Apple conspiracy thing, you'd be comparing Apple's phones with another phone manufacturer. Instead, you take the apples v oranges approach of comparing the very small, single-celled phone batteries with the much more massive multi-celled EV batteries.
As has been noted, there are limits of physics and chemistry that cause batteries to behave the way they do. You can read about why EV batteries last longer than phone batteries here (spoiler - it's not an Apple conspiracy):
So OK, we start by establishing that we’re talking about the same chemistry. Quite obvious, but perhaps it needs to be said do some.
Ooh, did he say “built-in obsolescence”? Probably just another troll like myself. After all, we all know for a fact that there is no such thing, and anyone saying otherwise is self-evidently a troll. Never mind if you’re a scientist, or someone who built a successful company around battery management and ran it for decades.
Back to the facts though. “A mobile phone gets charged at the end of a day and the stored energy can be fully utilized until the battery goes empty. In other words, the user has full access to the stored energy.” Funny, that’s exactly what I’m claiming breaks the battery. Guy must really be a troll. Anyway, so if we could work around that standard usage pattern and, I don’t know, limit charging to 60 or 70% SoC all the time, like I’ve been suggesting, and keeping it plugged in all the time, I wonder what would happen? Maybe we would get closer to the EV charge/discharge model and thus to the EV battery lifespan? Nah, impossible.
Now someone might argue: “I don’t like the tradeoff of my phone battery lasting half as long daily, so that it lasts for many years.” Well OK, I respect your point of view — only wish someone respected mine as well and lobbied for having the sort of API call that’s required for this to work. But anyway. If, like me, you work at a desk all day, then the whole point is moot. Just plug the phone when you sit at your desk, unplug when you leave. Except if you do that today it charges to 100% and remains there, which destroys the battery even faster. If you had the option to limit charging to 60 or 70%, it wouldn’t be an issue because each day you won’t be away from a charger for more than one hour a day. Even 10% would be enough for that (which is just as bad as 100%, but it’s just to make the point that 70% SoC is an absurd amount with a huge safety margin).
Sure most people don’t want to babysit their batteries to that extent. Again, I respect you. I just wonder why it’s so hard to respect my point of view, well supported by the facts I’ve mentioned here at length. It won’t hurt you, I promise — if you want to charge your battery to 100%, I’m not calling for a ban on that. Feel free to do what works best for you. Wish I only had the same choice.
To be continued later…
Ooh, I only wish I had mentioned previously that high temperature and high SoC destroys batteries... wait, I did! Only to be called a troll by some "microelectronics-research-engineer-turned-iOS-developer" who, get this, doesn't even know what state of charge is!
Now we finally come to something we can't work around, right? I mean, drawing continuous high current, pulsed loads, etc. Except, perhaps, maybe, just maybe, if we could leave the phone plugged in all the time so that these loads are placed on the charger rather than the battery. Well, it'd be great to do that, so long as Apple provides a blessed API call and approves an app to limit charging, since otherwise leaving the phone in the charger all the time will keep the battery at 100% (you know, the concept that doesn't really exist according to our microelectronics research engineer friend, of high SoC?) and as we just established, that destroys batteries, even more so when combined with high temperature.
Well, I just finished reading the article and was unable to find why a mobile phone battery that is: 1. connected as often as possible to a charger with a charge limit in place of say 60 or 70%, 2. avoids heat, 3. avoids fast charging (all as stated in my first post) should last less than an EV battery -- in fact it should last more.
But maybe I'm wrong. If that's the case, please quote the exact sentence or paragraph from the article that contradicts the above statement. I'm done with the "EV batteries are just different" sleight of hands from people that couldn't point out where lithium is on the periodic table if their life depended on it.
The reactants are the same, the reaction is (more or less) the same when under load and being charged. What is not, because of cell volume and differences in power demands as a percentage of maximum power draw and charging power is the stoichiometry of the equilibrium reaction, and the physics of damage to the cell. Oxidized tendrils pop up in battery cells all the time, and they have less effect in the larger cell versus the much smaller one, given that the tendrils that pop up in both are about the same size.
There are other factors such as peak-power, mid-life power, and critical power based on what the device housing the battery demands, but those have less effect on this discussion than stoichiometry and physics of damage do because of that physically larger cell size in EVs.
Could there be an eight-year on the average iPhone cell given existing power demands and time-to-off limitations? Sure, technically, but the iPhone would be about two inches thick.
I respect your want to have newer hardware, and that's fine. Your finances and the like are your own. Like I said, that's a personal choice. This is still not planned obsolescence, unless you count Apple not wanting to have a two-inch iPhone that.