78Bandit

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.

Mike Wuerthele said:

78Bandit said:

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.

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.

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.

I firmly believe this issue is the result of incompetence by some Apple engineers and not some grand conspiracy to force devices to be unusable.  If Apple had included the code in iOS to begin with the argument would have a little more weight, but ultimately the throttling was implemented after multiple users complained of unexpected shutdowns.  This was a bandaid fix to a flawed design.  For whatever unknown reason the iPhone 6 and later need more voltage than the battery can supply under normal operating conditions when the battery is only slightly degraded.  If Apple was planning on "encouraging" upgrades they certainly could have found a much better way to do so.

The biggest question to me is why didn't Apple have a clue this was going to happen as fast as it did?

Apple engineers knew enough about the A8 chip to claim 25% CPU and 50% GPU performance increases over the A7 while needing half the battery power.  I can't imagine they ever thought the phones would start unexpectedly shutting down after only a year or two.  It was only after the unexpected shutdowns continued to become more prevalent and they introduced specific diagnostic software in iOS 10.2 to try and figure out what was going on that they identified the voltage problem.

This significant issue caught them completely off guard which would normally be unfathomable for Apple.  Something unanticipated happened with the hardware.  Possibly the actual real-world power draw was higher than the engineers expected, the A8 had a higher critical voltage requirement, or the batteries deteriorated faster than previous ones.

This article is full of great information as to what is happening, but I don't think we'll ever figure out exactly why the phone didn't perform as the engineers expected.