dewme

mike1 said:

"Nobody even remembers the Lighting to headphone adapter"

Not true at all. My wife has yet to find a wireless, in-ear headphone that she finds comfortable and will stay in her ear while even simple walking, never mind a real workout.

She has a Lightning and a USB C to headphone jack so she can use her wired headphones with her phone or iPad.

And I do still see other people with them occasionally, for whatever reason.

I use the Lightning to 3.5 mm dongle a lot. I even use USB-C to 3.5 mm with my iPad mini. I like the AirPods Pro a real lot, but I still prefer listening to the bulk of my music with an open back headphones, or even a good closed back headphone, over the AirPods Pro. The AirPods Pro are stellar for watching & listening to Apple TV when there’s someone else in the same room reading a book or otherwise engaged. 

Umm, of course they will make the best of the situation.

When the EU hands you lemons - you make lemonade. 

Why would anyone expect otherwise? Apple has to answer to shareholders who really don’t care about debating technical details and purity as long as the stock price keeps going up and they get their dividends. Some battles are not worth fighting, especially Lightning in 2023.

Long live Lightning and thank you Apple for saving us from the heinousness that was micro-USB. 

mayfly said:

Can't imagine what's going on here. If this is accurate, those pastels are nasty! The black is OK, but all the others look like 1950's bathroom tiles. If Apple is targeting the consumer market, why don't they make brighter colors? If they're targeting the business market, then why not use the same color scheme as the Pro phones?

Too funny. Not “nasty,” like your cat puking in your slippers, but definitely throwback or a ride in the Wayback Machine. Some of those colors are very reminiscent of kitchens and bathrooms in apartments I’ve lived in as well as my first ranch style house, which was built in the late 1950s.

If Apple continues on this path we should expect to see Apple graduate to the 1970s next year and bring out the Harvest Gold, Avocado Green, and my favorite, Coppertone iPhone 16s. All of those would look totally fetching with a nice fake wood paneling case. Oh yeah. 

appleinsideruser said:

dewme said:

I’m confused by the article’s reference to product failure rates following a bell curve. In all of my years working with electrical and electronics based product development, including working closely with reliability engineers and component engineers, the failure rates of such products and systems have followed a bathtub curve model, not a bell curve. 

What is your source of this bell curve failure rate model? It seems intuitively incorrect simply from a standpoint that nothing that I can think of would cause a reduction in failure rate as a product gets older and accumulates more runtime and cycles. 

The bathtub failure rate curve reflects the fact that electronic components and systems built using these components tend to have an early higher failure rate due to “infant mortality” failures, including manufacturing defects, then dip to a much lower failure rate for a very long period of time, but then increase again as components wear out over extended run times power cycles, component degradation, environmental stress, heating and cooling effects, etc. 

If the batteries in smartphones degrade with an increasing number of charge-discharge cycles, exposure to thermals, etc., I would expect the failure rate for batteries to be monotonically increasing with time. What would cause a battery’s failure rate to decrease at some point in the future?

The only thing I can think of is that the author is trying to describe the total number of reported failures over a product’s lifetime. As the product is removed from service later in its lifetime of course the number of failures that get reported would decrease because there are far fewer of the products still in use. But that’s not the definition of failure rate within the scope of reliability engineering. 

I feel the distinction is that bath-tub curve is for component failures (high early failures, then a great mid-life, followed by old-age problems). The Normal distribution is useful for variations if the performance across a population — battery aging isn't really a failure issue, it's that different samples/batches work better than others.

Okay. You’re reiterating what I said in your first sentence. Battery aging, I.e., wear-out, is already considered in the bathtub shaped failure rate curve. That’s all part of what you call old-age problems and it is a failure mode. Failures are failures. Keep in mind that even during the flatter part of the bathtub failure curve failures are still occurring, but at a lower rate than the higher parts of the curve. Product failures that occur during the flatter part of the curve are potentially due to what you call bad-batch and not-quite as good as others issues.

Keep in mind that every unit has its own failure curve. The failure rate curves that are produced by reliability analysis are done with large sample sizes and by applying statistical methodology. If you wanted to talk about bell curves and normal distributions you could probably say that the population of products that conform to a product’s predicted “bathtub curve” failure rate model is based on a bell curve model, where the majority tend to follow the predicted failure rate curves and there is a distribution and outliers on both sides that don’t follow the predictions at all, both better and worse.

Getting back to iPhone 14 battery drain, my iPhone 14 Pro Max is still at 100% after about 9 months of use. I don’t do anything special to affect battery life and leave it all up to the iPhone’s charging circuitry. I’ve never tried to babysit my products and rely on them to do their jobs as designed. I very rarely unplug or turn off any of my computers, PCS and Macs, but just let them sleep. Some of them have essentially been running for more than a decade with occasional cleaning and making sure airflow to cooling fans and ports is okay.

If I was investigating why an iPhone or Mac was losing battery capacity in an accelerated manner I’d take a look at what’s running and the CPU load, number of active threads, etc., kind of things. Apple is always adding more background processes for all of the new features, e.g., crash detection, so you’d have to at least consider that the device is being asked to do more when you think it’s idle. Same thing with notifications and constant updates for social media apps like TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, etc. I’d want to know what the heck is going on to consume more CPU cycles and battery capacity, if indeed that’s the case.

I have noticed an infrequent issue with the latest iOS release version on my iPhone 14 Pro Max. What I’ve noticed a few times is my phone will go into a state where it jacks up the screen brightness beyond my selected level and run the CPU at a rate that causes the phone to heat up considerably. If it’s in my pocket will notice it immediately, but if it’s just sitting on a desk or counter I may not notice it for a while. It seems like it is in a thermal runaway state because the normally cool iPhone is unusually hot. If I restart the phone everything is fine.

I think there is a bug in the latest iOS version that is causing the CPU to get into a hot spin cycle. If you don’t notice it because you don’t have your phone on you where you can feel it, this would very likely drain the battery much faster than normal and heat up the phone unnecessarily, which is also bad for batter life.

Unfortunately I can’t get the phone into this state in a repeatable manner or else I’d submit a bug report. It has happened when running Maps at least two times, but it’s also happened outside of Maps. It’s only appeared in the last few point iOS updates.