78Bandit

StrangeDays said:

k2kw said:

nethan9 said:

I don't buy this story. Apple is trying to force you to buy to a new iPhone, each time it releases new one. I's called planned obsolescence.

Maybe it was purposeful unplanned obsolescence.    Either Way looks real bad.   I expect there to be an FEATURE/EDITORIAL this weekend from DED saying what apple did was the absolute best thing and of course better than android especially Samsung.

Yes, what Apple did was reasonable - extend the lifespan of a device with an expired, used up battery. 

only haters have a problem with it. 

But they have been throttling devices that were either under warranty or an AppleCare contract.  With 11.2 they are adding the iPhone 7 to the throttling list and that phone is only slightly more than a year old.  Only devices fully depleted and charged more than once a day would exceed the stated 500 charge cycle battery lifespan.  These devices didn't have an expired, used up battery; they had a design flaw that prevented the phone from working as advertised under normal operating conditions.

If they only throttled devices that failed internal testing and notified the customer the battery was bad then it would be fine.  What Apple has avoided with its lack of transparency is people with valid service agreements coming in with a battery failure and demanding a replacement under the terms of the contract.

This issue isn't as black-and-white as some would like it to be.  To the extent Apple benefited by avoiding warranty claims on covered devices by artificially slowing them down to cover up a design flaw they need to be held accountable.

hmlongco said:

If you're looking for a good, honest story on the iPhone throttling issue, how about this?

It's admitted that Apple throttles the clock speed on devices with older batteries when peak load is high... but all I hear is about how the phone is "slower."

Fine. But how much slower? What's the real world impact? Does my game drop from 30/fps to 29/fps? 20? 10? Does an app that took 2 seconds to launch now take 2.25? Or 10?

If the phone runs normally except at rare occasions during peak loads, just how is this an issue? If it runs slower all the time... then how much?

Facts would be good to have here, other that random comments about how my old phone is, "gawdalful slow."

The best evidence available right now is benchmarks which show the performance of the phones drop in ranges from 10% to 60%.  Actual real-world impact is going to vary significantly from user-to-user depending on a variety of factors including temperature, background apps, network connection quality, screen brightness, caching, etc.  Opening the same app or playing the same game may take 2 seconds on one phone and 10 seconds on another.

The argument the phone runs normally except during peak loads is a little misleading.  Effectively the throttling is putting a cap on what the phone is allowed do that is less than what it was designed for.  If the phone is operating at or below what it artificially thinks it is capable of then naturally the user won't see any difference.  It is when the user needs all the performance that they run into the cap.  It is an issue because it either takes the user longer to accomplish the same task as before or even possibly the performance is degraded enough where the app doesn't work as needed at all.  For example, users are complaining it is taking an extremely long time to load the camera app and they are missing photo opportunities because of it.

Not sure how I feel about the lawsuit, but Apple was in the wrong on this issue.  The battery may not last as long, but it should still produce sufficient power to run the phone for its stated capacity which is 80% after at least 500 full charge cycles.  The unexpected shutdowns when the battery still has 30% charge left is a symptom of a poorly designed battery.  Apple's throttling is covering up a design flaw.

It is particularly obvious when you hear of customers whose phones are being throttled yet their batteries test out as being good when they take it to an Apple store.

Apple's statement that throttling doesn't occur under most operating conditions and saying bench marking artificially triggers it is also disingenuous.  True, a normal phone call isn't going to trigger throttling, but pretty much any processor intensive app will cause it to happen just like the benchmark software does.

I don't expect my old iPhone 6 to run like an iPhone X, but I do expect it to run like a new iPhone 6 for as long as the battery is working.

Poll question:  Which would you be interested in, a Ferrari or a Kia?  If you are interested in a Ferrari do you want the California or the La Ferrari?  Such polls are meaningless as they don't accurately reflect actual purchases.

I have no doubt Apple will have a stellar quarter with revenues likely at the high end of their estimates.  There certainly was a large market built up for a premium phone since Apple hadn't significantly redesigned the phone since 2014.  The key will be the quarterly estimates for January-March.  Wait times on the iPhone X are near zero in some of the major markets.  Is this because of increased supply or satiated demand?  If Apple doesn't forecast a similar percentage growth in same-quarter revenues and unit sales than the Jan-Mar quarter in 2015 then I think it will be a strong indication they have hit a plateau and are depending on increases in average selling price to drive revenue growth as opposed to increased market share.

Apple needs to get out of the 225 million units sold rut it has been in for the past three years.  Prior to the 6 they saw regular double-digit market share increases, now it is basically flat.  The iPhone X is going to need to sell a whole lot of units in the 2nd and 3rd quarters, and I've got my serious doubts there are a lot of buyers at this point for a $1,000+ phone that are still waiting this year.

It will be very interesting to see what Apple themselves predict for the next quarter.  I don't think many of these analysts have any better information than the armchair CEOs on the message boards.

These are the problems when a company gets as big as Apple.  The Apple of 2000-2010 was slimmed down by Steve Jobs and produced just a few excellent products.  In general, those products were very simple and did only what they were designed to do without a whole lot of superfluous code.  Now Apple is finding itself in the same predicament that Microsoft has in the past.  As capabilities become greater and the platform is opened up to more and more applications (both from within Apple and by app developers) the code is getting much more complex and interrelated.  Changes that one department makes will cascade through the entire platform with unanticipated results.

I think things are going to get worse as Apple keeps adding systems like 3D cameras, facial recognition, and augmented reality.  The code gets bloated and you have many more people making changes.  Apple is doing the best it can, but now maybe Apple users can appreciate the problems they have criticized Microsoft for over the years when issues slip through the cracks and need to be fixed on-the-fly.