78Bandit

airnerd said:

I think the request is silly, but because the lawsuit is silly, but also silly is the idea that something they charged their customers to remove from a phone is too dangerous to not destroy.  If it is THAT dangerous then they should be offering to remove them for free to protect their customers.   

I don't think a single battery is that dangerous, but having a stockpile of a million or more used batteries in a warehouse somewhere would be a ticking time bomb unless Apple stored them individually in fireproof boxes like Samsung used when returning the exploding Note 7.  There is no way to guarantee every battery is OEM or than every one is completely undamaged, and a fire from one would quickly get out of control.

This is a ridiculous request.  Saving the diagnostic data is reasonable, but requiring every individual battery to be retained sounds like just another way for the lawyers to force Apple into a settlement rather than incur the storage expenses.

StrangeDays said:

feudalist said:

rob53 said:

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.

They should probably just cancel it.  I don't see foldable display technology being ready for mainstream devices anywhere in the near future.  Bendable displays may work, but having a 180 degree fold with millimeter level radius is a recipe for disaster.  I don't care how well it performs in a laboratory setting, in the real world debris like sand particles that get between and under the display as well as flex in the device as users apply uneven pressure during the folding process is going to cause failures just like we've seen with the review units.

If you really need a multi-panel device then it would seem having separate glass displays aligned with mechanical hinges would be the best solution.  You'll still have some type of cable to hook them together, but that can be run on the outside of the panels and avoid such a tight bend.

This actually fits nicely with the rumor Apple is restarting production of the X because it has a glut of OLED panels it was obligated to purchase from Samsung.  If that rumor is true and Samsung had a guaranteed minimum number of panels Apple agreed to acquire then any slowdown in OLED iPhone sales wouldn't affect its revenue in an unanticipated  major negative way.  You wouldn't see the effects on Samsung's revenue until the after the contract was up for renewal as Apple couldn't cut it's order mid-cycle like it can with smaller suppliers.

Windows Phone, when combined with Skype, OneNote, Excel, Word, and PowerPoint apps, was a powerful business tool.  It beat the pants off the iWork apps as well as the other office compatible apps that were available on iOS.  I did use MobiSystems office suite for a while, but found it didn't work as well as I wanted it to.  It was fine for emergency edits but things frequently turned out jumbled when I opened the documents once I was back on my computer.

Once Microsoft started actively supporting iOS and Android the use case for a WP went down a lot.  I'm happy with iOS and Microsoft at the moment, but I do wish Apple would look at how well live tiles worked on WP and give us more control over what is displayed on our home screens.

racerhomie3 said:

VRing said:

jd_in_sb said:

Apple’s intentions were good but I can see how some will twist it into a sinister upgrade scheme. People love conspiracies. 

I disagree, especially when even Apple Store staff remained in the dark. They couldn't even suggest for a user to replace their battery to fix any performance issues.

There was a warning in the battery section of Settings. How stupid are people?

The throttling was occurring without the warning appearing in the Settings app.

jbdragon said:

All Apple did was normal battery management. As long as your battery is OK, nothing changes. The simple fact is, my iPhone 6 runs quite a bit better into it's 4th year then my iPhone 4 by quite a bit going into it's 4th year.

After every single yearly major iOS update, the phone gets a little slower. This is perfectly normal. The OS grows, gets more complex, it needs more power. But along with the OS, the app's themselves also grow and get more complex and resource hungry. This all makes older hardware get slower and slower. This happens with every OS.

What Apple did is allow older phones to work better as the battery gets weaker. If anything, what Apple did is allow people to use and hold onto their iPhones LONGER without having to do anything. Apple shouldn't have to explain themselves when they do this. Again, normal battery management that happens with all devices in the background.

Doing a speed test, is doing exactly what Apple is trying to slow down, so of course you'll see the worse kind of hit. But it's not real life operation. So many people, really clueless about what is going on, but jumping on the Negative Apple bandwagon over something that's NORMAL.

What Apple did was not "NORMAL'.  All indications are Apple was the first major phone manufacturer to implement performance reduction based on normal battery degradation.  This wasn't reduced CPU cycles during idle times which would be expected, this was a major cut in performance right at the time the users needed it the most.  Apple didn't even know they had a problem until after they got repeated complaints of phones unexpectedly shutting down, implemented diagnostic procedures to figure out why in iOS 10.2, and finally implemented throttling on 6 and 6S devices with iOS 10.2.1.

Apple's solution may have allowed those particular devices to work longer than they could have, but it was implemented as a direct result of major problems with the phone's design in the first place.  There is no way Apple should have let a phone out the door that was going to be subject to unexpected shutdowns after little more than a year due to normal battery degradation.  Apple did the best they could in a bad situation, but proper design wouldn't have put them in that position in the first place.

What Apple did may have worked as a band-aid to nurse devices along, but they certainly should have explained themselves regarding their decision to cut performance by up to 60%.  Consumers needed to know this so they could make an informed decision to either replace the battery or accept the throttling.  For some reason Apple decided to bury the explanation behind a meaningless statement like "improved power management under peak workloads".  This wasn't particularly altruistic of Apple, they simply couldn't take the hit to their reputation as unexpected shutdowns affected more and more devices less than three years old nor were they going to tip consumers off the batteries may not be performing as expected while the devices were still under warranty or AppleCare contract.

Mississippi's AG has had it out for Google for years.

I'm not saying Google doesn't need reining in some, but AG Hood does seem like he has an axe to grind.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170118/17262236516/google-hating-mississippi-attorney-general-sues-company-with-ammo-eff.shtml

blastdoor said:

Apple was so tiny back in 1990, as was the rest of the PC industry. It was kind of like the automobile industry prior to the model T. 

Today Apple, and the industry, are all grown up. Apple and Microsoft today are kind of like GM and Ford in 1960 — big, powerful, and nearly invulnerable. It would take decades of consecutive bad decisions to place these companies in any real peril. 

It may take decades after some bad decisions before the peril becomes obvious, but if you remember history you will know that Ford, GM, and Chrysler made major missteps in a very short period of time that ultimately doomed them.  They completely missed the need for efficient, reliable vehicles and the competitiveness in the manufacturing labor market.  In the space of less than a decade between 1970 and 1980 they became uncompetitive and had their tails handed to them by the Japanese imports.  Yes, they had enough cash and the financial market willing to give them money to withstand the onslaught for a while, but the damage was done.  They never recovered and ultimately GM and Chrysler both went bankrupt and Ford barely skated by.

My point is it doesn't take decades of bad decisions to imperil a large, well-established company.  It can happen in just a few years even though the ultimate extent of the damage isn't realized until much later.

StrangeDays said:

dicebier1 said:

StrangeDays said:

dicebier1 said:

Pretty much expected this.... nothing exciting......sort of like a lame duck year until 5G arrives.
Will keep my iPhone XS Max for another year.

If you're expecting annual upgrades to be riveting you'll likely be disappointed for life. Normal people don't upgrade every year, so it's no surprise the updates are the usual 50% processor improvements, camera improvements, etc. You just got an awesome phone last year, so no tears for you.

5G, when it arrives, just means faster loading web pages when not on wifi. Big whoop.

Cmon man, A camera with a processor bump. Really?

I didn't expect much more as I stated in my post. 

You may post a lot but I'm sure many people would agree that LATELY (so you don't take it out of context) Apple's iPhones have been evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

SHOW ME SOMETHING NEW

You don't get Apple. It's almost always been evolutionary, not revolutionary. Gruber wrote about this almost a decade ago. Read up.

https://www.macworld.com/article/1151235/macs/apple-rolls.html

...iterative product development is the name of the game. It’s how we got from the original iPhone/Mac/Watch/whatever to the current versions, or iterations. They're tools, they aren't designed to alleviate you of boredom on a Tuesday afternoon.

Apple is the one who titled the event "By Innovation Only".  Personally I didn't see anything that would be considered innovative.