petri

Mike Wuerthele said:

rjd185 said:

Mike Wuerthele said:

Remy said:

Users: My old iPhone is kinda slow now. APPLE: (silence) Users: OK, now my 1-year-old iPhone is sluggish as well... this is getting old. APPLE: (silence) OK...yeah, that's us. USERS: (silence) APPLE: Don't worry, we're doing it for you. Old batteries can lose charge faster. USERS: ...er... yeah, we know. APPLE: You see, the lithium-ion batteries... (bla bla) ...cold conditions... (bla bla) ...device unexpectedly... (bla bla bla)...electronic components! USERS: So... you secretly made my iPhone slower and less responsive 100% of the time to avoid a shutdown that could occur maybe 1% of the time? APPLE: Exactly! USERS: Because... you're interested in prolonging the life of my device? APPLE: See! You get it! USERS: ...and my iPhone feels sluggishly obsolete for 10 hours/day, instead of smooth and quick for 8 hours/day? APPLE: (silence)

You're conflating three different things, including the additional demand that newer system software puts on older devices, and the fact that the shutdown is far, far more prevalent than 1 percent.

Believe what you want.

Like the Futuremark benchmarks for example which definitively demonstrated no such artificial slowdown was present and were grounds to insist those who experienced otherwise should take their conspiracy theories elsewhere I guess?

https://forums.appleinsider.com/discussion/202204/futuremark-analysis-debunks-rumor-that-apple-slows-older-iphones-down-on-purpose-with-ios/p1

Yes. And like I said in this article that you very clearly didn't read, it still proves that there is no conspiracy.

They still prove that a properly functioning phone with a non-depleted battery is not slowed in any way. Even the new benchmarks from the GeekBench founder proves that.

You keep trotting out this quote with your bit in bold about the battery as if that answers everything, except that nobody was ever asking whether their old phone with a “non depleted battery” was being slowed down.  Why?  Because there was absolutely no logical reason for them to suspect the state of their battery had anything to do with the performance of their phone.  Apple sure as hell never hinted at that before now.  Nor is it likely or even possible that anyone’s older phone would have a “non depleted battery” unless they had replaced it, and again - why would they have done that?

The question was - “does Apple deliberately slow down older iPhones?”

And the answer is an emphatic and undeniable “yes”.

GeorgeBMac said:

macxpress said:

I know people will bitch about this, but I think it makes sense for Apple to do. I'd much rather have more battery life than a faster phone. If you don't have the battery life, then the speed of your phone doesn't matter so much anymore. When your battery starts to crap out, something has to give. So Apple could do nothing about it and just let the phone be the same speed and listen to people complain that their battery dies too quickly, or they can do something about it which is what they did. Either way, Apple is probably gonna catch crap. 

Yeh,  except:  I don't think they did it to "prolong battery life".
My experience with it was:  My phone would be sitting at 30% charge and within seconds of starting a video the battery would drop to 0% charge and the phone would shut down with a dead battery.  As soon as I put it on a charger, the charge jumped right back to 30%.
Sitting at home that irritating.

But it could also be dangerous:
If I was outside in the cold (say running alone in a remote area) where I depended on my phone to call for help if needed, the phone would also suddenly shut down with a dead battery and become a brick until I could get home to charge it.  (Often it would not even restart from my car's charging system).   That was beyond irritating and became dangerous.

Apple did the right thing to protect their customers by preventing that from happening.

I’m with you up to a point, I experienced this fault (and I use the word fault advisedly) on my 6S after just a year.  

As you say this was not about eking our more battery life from an elderly device - this was a relatively new device which claimed to have perhaps 30-40% charge spontaneously shutting down and refusing to reboot until plugged in. This appears to be the issue that Apple are now “fixing” fixing with this software feature, despite  Apple admitting at the time it had a faulty batch of batteries and offering a replacement programme. 

At best what seems to have happened is Apple realising that battery issue was much more widespread, balking at the idea of a much wider recall, and quietly implementing this software fix instead - presumably on the basis that owners of older phones are less likely to make a fuss about slower phones than crashing ones.

To swallow the beneficent Apple narrative that they’re simply protecting us all and interested in the “longevity” of our devices, you first have to rationalise the fact that they kept quiet about all this and didn’t take the opportunity to advertise and sell a few battery upgrades, and you also have to accept it as a fact of life that older phones - any older phones - will spontaneously shut down after a year or so of battery life, and that this is a perfectly acceptable and common hardware characteristic .  Personally I’m struggling to see any evidence of that.

Mike Wuerthele said:

MonicaMT said:

Mike Wuerthele said:

MonicaMT said:

This respond does not convince me.I can use a power bank If I do not want my iPhone to shut down.
I recently bought iPhone X just because my iPhone 6 is too slow to use.If this happens again,I would absolutely choose another mobile phone brand.

Three full years of a chemical process running day in and day out, and you don't expect your battery to die?

The battery problem is impersonal,it is unstoppable.But the CPU-slowdown is a man-made plot.

It is utterly and absolutely nothing of the sort. The only CPU slowdown you may have is in regards to your battery's chemical depletion, and literally nothing else.

Your previous article on this when the news broke before Apple admitted this contained a bold statement about this definitely not being anything to do with Apple wanting you to buy a new phone.. I called you on it in the comments and you continued with this line that it was just a coincidence and Apple were just selflessly saving us from ourselves.

Here’s the thing - when we talk about a battery’s “chemical depletion” we’re not talking about some form of user error or act of god - we’re talkign about ageing.  All batteries have a limited lifespan, and all battery chemistry “depletes” as it’s charged and recharged throughout the life of the device - it’s an inevitability.  Given that these batteries are an integral built-in component of the iPhone, it is a given that as an iPhone ages, so too does its battery - you can pretty much measure the age of an iPhone, or at least the amount of “wear” and use that it’s had, by the chemical depletion of its battery.

So when Apple implement a feature that slows down the processors of iPhones in relation to the level of their battery’s “chemical depletion” they are pretty much literally slowing down older phones.  

Now it would behoove any “news” outlet such as yourselves reporting on this, to at least ask the question why.  What is Apple’s motivation here and does it stack up?

The official version is that without this “feature”, iPhones - apparently any iPhones since they state they’re rolling it out to the whole range - would all spontaneously shut down once their batteries were less than optimal.  I saw this happen with my own 6S, I do know that’s a thing.  The thing is though, when that happened to the 6S, Apple declared it was down to faulty batteries and launched a replacement programme.  So how do we square that with this?

How is it that countless other manufacturers are able to produce hardware that does not spontaneously shut down when batteries age, without this software feature?  

Surely this shutdown issue is a hardware problem rather than something to fudge in software by crippling performance?  Isn’t it?

ASSUMING there is nothing that could have been done in hardware to avoid this, not only in the 6S but the 7, 8 and X too (all of which have or are getting this “feature” in time for their own batteries to age) how do we then explain why Apple would introduce it silently with no indication to the user at all that their battery is now defective and crippling the performance of their phone?  How do we explain why Apple would still have been entirely silent on this issue even now if it hadn’t been for some user comparing notes on Reddit?

Tell me again about Apple’s motivations here?

lorin schultz said:

In 2011 I bought the fastest computer Apple offered. It seemed fast.

The computers made in the next few years were even faster. Mine started to feel slower by comparison.

With newer computers came software intended for faster hardware. Installing those updates made my computer seem even slower.

I've been going with the assumption that this is what's happening when people complain about their phones slowing down over time. My gut feeling is with the original software the vast majority of them are still just as fast as they were on Day 1, but comparison to newer devices makes them SEEM slow, and updates to software that does more and puts more stress on the phone is the primary cause of any actual slowdowns.

You can go with that assumption if you like, but it doesn’t begin to explain why people are able to empirically prove that their older phones are slower than they should be using recognised benchmarks, and then become faster and benchmark higher again after battery replacement, which is what this article is actually about.

“As a side-effect of the thread, and consequent reporting of it, the conspiracy theory suggesting that Apple intentionally slows down older iPhones to force purchasing a new device has risen again. While it has been conclusively proven that older iPhone hardware with an adequately functioning battery is no slower than it was at launch, any routine to down-clock an iPhone processor in an environment where the battery is weak can be dealt with by a battery replacement -- without mandating a new iPhone purchase.”

The problem is that since Apple have done nothing to explain or even reveal this behaviour, the average customer has absolutely no reason to believe any performance issues are battery related and are far more likely to believe they need a new phone rather than a battery replacement.  So this resurgence of what you call a “conspiracy theory” is actually pretty justified.  

In actual fact this phenomenon flat out proves that, in practice, older iPhone hardware really is deliberately underclocked and slowed down by software.  So actually those conspiracy theorists weren’t imagining it - they were onto something.