I bought my iPhone 2 years ago (iPhone 6, new) -- it's since been plagued by slowdowns that are incomprehensible to me as a software developer. How can something go from completely responsive to absolutely useless in 2 years with virtually no major changes to the OS?
Scaling the CPU down with battery capacity seems like a great way to hand-wave away planned obsolescence accusations.
I was curious about the results my phone would receive, so I bought the Geekbench app mentioned in the reddit post. Indeed, my phone scores max out at half of what it claims the iPhone 6 should benchmark at.
In the Reddit comments somebody claims this is actually a software fix for the 6s battery problem that was causing shutdowns when battery level fell below certain level.
There's a free battery replacement program for the models affected [1].
My phone was one of the affected, but never got around to take it to repair shop because I thought the few random shutdowns were the only problem.
The problem is, there are other people in the thread claiming their iPhone 6 or iPhone 7 were also performing poorly according to Geekbench. Surely iPhone 7 isn't / shouldn't be affected by this batch?
If this is true that apple throttle its performance due to battery Cycle, I will pissed too. Apple should have noted to me within iPhone that i should get a Battery replacement in the Apple Store, or I will be bringing my own Battery Pack when I am out.
I'm in the same situation. You can still replace the battery for free. I just got the battery replaced today for free. Geekbench CPU scores increased 2.5x. It's like I have a new phone.
Interesting if that's the reason - my 6s had a battery replacement last year because it was one of the affected devices. The device has notably slowed down since iOS 11.
Bought it in straight cash a couple years ago. Was completely content and extremely happy... until now. It feels D.O.A. Random pauses for almost every action. Answering the phone even takes a good 2-3 seconds. Music crashes randomly. Podcasts pauses like it's meant to be intentional behavior. Battery drains noticeably faster now. I used to get at least 2-3 or more days. Now I can barely make 1. Similar problems started with my Apple Watch (2.0 bought in April).
When the iPhone was first announced by Steve Jobs I seem to recall him exclaiming how everything was nearly instant, fast, responsive, and smooth. I feel like it must have been in a dream now.
Exact same here. I’m on 11.1.2 iOS, and after that forced upgrade without my consent I went into apple and complained and got nowhere.
The reason I complained is that after the upgrade the user experience was similar to that above where these problems persist; tapping on certain things don’t work, pauses in apps, crashing apps etc.. but also most notably for me is that my speaker volume is less than when it was new.
Ditto. Haven't complained or followed up with anyone yet, but seeing all of this info has me now thinking it's not just me.
Every action is noticeably slower (~1s response for everything) and now, as of last week anyways, need to recharge my phone midday where I've never had to do that.
So the phone would pompt and say that it would upgrade late at night, but it would ask you to confirm it to do so, then allow you to delay the upgrade - requiring your pin...
welp, I ALWAYS delayed that upgrade and told it NO, ask me later and entered my pin....
Yet, I woke up one morning and it reported to me it had successfully upgraded.
I was livid (this was right after the calc animation-deay-bug was made public)
So I went into apple store walnut creek, super pissed off.
I said to the "genius" "Do you know who Jonny Ive is?" he said "Yes", so I said "well if he were here in this store I ould punch him in the face"
I specifically did NOT want to upgrade the iOS on my phone because I use a lot of features that were reportedly buggy in the new release.
Apple told me there was "no way they could revert my iOS version whatsoever"
but the upgrade was done literally without my consent..
I was really angry...
Now, the farking thing is falling into the bug group of the 6S+ phones that have the faulty battery problem, yet my SN doesnt hit in their list of bad SNs that are suposedly affected:
Poor batt perf, touch screen taps stop working/delayed like mad, batt drains in less than a day, random shutdowns, random reboots, app crashes, etc...
so yeah, this isnt a conspiracy theory - the 11.1.2 iOS deserves someone at apple needs a shovel to the face.
I bought my 6 Plus on release. Plagued with problems from day one. Only one I ever had to bring in for service. Four times (half of that was me breaking the screen though).
I replaced it with an 8 and other than waking up if I hold my case with even the slightest amount of pressure, it's been great.
If the battery is so small that it can't last 2 years of normal wear without becoming "horrible", the design is bad. Papering over the bad design by making the phone run at less than 60% of rated speed, on purpose, is even worse. Battery wear is expected, but it is not reasonable to expect that the CPU will be affected too, and this has never been disclosed AFAIK. Also, replacing a non-user-replaceable battery is not a "simple" solution.
(1) All batteries degrade. Really not sure why you think Apple would be any different.
(2) Replacing the battery is simple. You take it to a phone shop or to Apple and in about an hour it is done. Most people aren't self servicing electronics or pretty much anything these days.
(1) All batteries degrade. This should be accounted for in the initial design, so that there is sufficient battery life at the end of product life, not just at the beginning.
(2) Replacing the battery should be simple. Pop open the back cover, pull out the battery, and push the new one in. Heck, I used to carry a spare battery just in case, because it took 15 seconds to swap. Taking it to a phone shop and waiting an hour isn't what I would call simple.
My LG V20 has a replaceable battery, and a head phone jack. It has the best sounding headphone jack ever available on a phone. It's a great phone and didn't sell well. The market is clear replaceable batteries and head phone jack just are not at the top of their wish list.
> The market is clear replaceable batteries and head phone jack just are not at the top of their wish list.
No, the problem is that Apple can do whatever the fuck they want and people still will literally rip the entire stock out of Apple Stores. The newest Macbook Pros still have 16GB RAM tops and not a single miniDP or USB connector, thus leaving people with a pile of useless junk when they upgrade (or have to replace, e.g. due to dead mobo) their older Macbooks. Not to mention the ultra ... "keyboard". People still keep buying them by the masses.
>No, the problem is that Apple can do whatever the fuck they want and people still will literally rip the entire stock out of Apple Stores.
Ie. "the world is idiots and I know better" as opposed "people have different priorities".
>The newest Macbook Pros still have 16GB RAM tops
And for a very good reason. Low-powered (suitable for laptop use) support for 32GB memory wasn't there in Intel chipsets. But not only you didn't bother to investigate, but you know better.
>and not a single miniDP or USB connector, thus leaving people with a pile of useless junk when they upgrade
Or, you know, they can buy a couple of $10 USB-C cables or a $50 hub and be done with it. I prefer the move towards USB-C only faster, than them releasing yet another laptop with 5 different types of ports that will drag on the migration.
People aren't idiots. But if you swapped Apple's high-level design choices with, say, the LG V20's high-level design choices, people would still buy the Apple phone over the LG V20.
They're buying the brand, and they're making the call that having something that has Apple-level quality is better than buying a design they would prefer with inferior quality.
But that doesn't preclude Apple's high-level design choices leading to objectively inferior quality (even if the objective inferiority is only to a hypothetical Apple that made better high-level design decisions.)
They're more buying the vendor lock-in. When I have invested 4-digit sums into Apple Music, Apple Movies and games, I can't port that all over to Android. Yes, I can port DRM-free music over, but no such luck with movies and games - there are games like Real Racing where you can sync progress across platforms but they're rare.
Add in that Apple will (as evidenced in the article!) artificially slow down phones to the point of being unusable, and you have the explanation why people keep throwing money at Apple. It's like gamblers throwing more and more money into the slot machine - it's the sunk cost fallacy.
When I have invested 4-digit sums into Apple Music, Apple Movies and games, I can't port that all over to Android. Yes, I can port DRM-free music over, but no such luck with movies and games
Yes you can port most movies over. Download Movies Anywhere (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/movies-anywhere/id1245330908...), link your iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, and/or Vudu account and any movies you bought from one service from a participating studio automatically shows up as a purchase in any of the other stores.
>They're more buying the vendor lock-in. When I have invested 4-digit sums into Apple Music, Apple Movies and games, I can't port that all over to Android
You very easily can, the lock-in argument is tired.
And even if it didn't, it's a subscription service. Nobody invests much in it, except your monthly subscription. One can cancel at anytime and go to Google Play, Amazon, Spotify, etc.
As for the music download (paid songs), from the major vendors it was Apple who famously spearheaded the "kill music DRM" thing, and has been offering DRM-free music for a decade or so. Which, one can easily play on Android, etc. No lock-in there either.
Games? As if mobile games or even computer games are not casual and replaced by new ones every so often? Plus, with Steam et al, aren't those transferable as well?
Same with movies. Who even buys those? It's the era of Netflix, subscriptions and at least renting.
>there are games like Real Racing where you can sync progress across platforms but they're rare.
As if that's what's holding people from moving away the Mac...
> Plus, with Steam et al, aren't those transferable as well?
No, they are not. The only thing to buy anything on iOS is the App Store, and it is not transferable - the only things transferable on the iOS Stores are, as both you and I mentioned, music (of course, excluding music bought prior to the no-DRM switch!) and stuff like newspaper subscriptions bought on iOS stores but bound to an account on the newspaper's platform.
Steam is for OS X only (not iOS) and there are no major games on OS X that are not available on Windows (but a huge number of games not available on OS X, thus creating a lock-in to Windows).
> Same with movies. Who even buys those?
It's about the collection you have. I personally have no stakes in that game as all I have is physical media, but I know people with four-digit-sums investments in digital movies and other purchases. For them, the vendor lock in is real (and it's not just Apple - I, for example, got my Amazon account blocked for unpaid bills back from a time where I was financially ... unstable, to say the least, and I literally have no way of ever getting that account reinstated and thus access to my three-digit-worth ebook collection!).
>No, they are not. The only thing to buy anything on iOS is the App Store, and it is not transferable - the only things transferable on the iOS Stores are, as both you and I mentioned, music (of course, excluding music bought prior to the no-DRM switch!)
I was speaking of the Mac. Who "invests" in iOS games, and would care to play them for years on end? For the huge majority, it's a casual thing.
Same with movies. Anybody who invested "four-digit-sums" in digital movies should just move on, like people did with VHS, DVD, and other early formats (and people had even more substantial collections there -- they had been burned enough times not to invest in digital movies). Besides, their "digital movies" already would look archaic in today's 4K screens (unless the service updates them).
>and it's not just Apple - I, for example, got my Amazon account blocked for unpaid bills back from a time where I was financially ... unstable, to say the least, and I literally have no way of ever getting that account reinstated and thus access to my three-digit-worth ebook collection!
That's a separate issue -- not being able to reinstate a rental account is crazy, especially if one doesn't only think of US, Japan, Western Europe and co, but the huge 70% of the world, where temporary issues with stability (in jobs, economy, etc) can often lead people to unpaid bills.
> Who "invests" in iOS games, and would care to play them for years on end?
I'm not talking about games only, there also is a vast amount of productivity software on the iOS platform.
> For the huge majority, it's a casual thing.
And for those who fall into the category of "whales" in F2P or pay-to-win games, it's sometimes six figures.
> like people did with VHS, DVD, and other early formats
For a DVD, I can grab an USB DVD drive - or my BD player. Which will play back anything down to a CD-ROM. The content is easily accessible, and if I want I can do a bit perfect backup even for copyrighted stuff with AnyDVD. For a VHS tape, I actually have a dual-head player - it can do recording on both tape and DVD, as well as transfer a VHS tape to DVD. (Yes, tapes are really oldschool)
I'm not talking about games only, there also is a vast amount of productivity software on the iOS platform.
How much productivity software exists on iOS that's available for Android that you don't pay for via a subscription that allows you to use the same software on any platform?
>Add in that Apple will (as evidenced in the article!) artificially slow down phones to the point of being unusable, and you have the explanation why people keep throwing money at Apple.
Also, the slowdown only occurs if and when the battery is at the end of its useful life. My iPhone 6 from 2014 still runs as fast as ever, and considering the OS update policy of Android phone makers, my iPhone is also a lot cheaper per year than any comparable Android phone.
That said, I find it completely idiotic on Apple's part to slow down the phone instead of letting users know when the battery is at its end of life.
No, instead you have two, with differing capabilities but the same form factor. And you have way more than 5 different cable types, each capable of different things, again, with the same form factor.
Just buy high-end USB-C cables from a reputable vendor and you are set. As long as some product (e.g. a printer or hard drive) comes with a specific USB-C cable, use it with that, and it will be good for it. End of story.
Offering it a cheaper price for one of the most common uses where people need > 1 cables (one for home/office etc)?
Or the fact that's very easy to just buy another one for data/video etc?
I guess the standard could do with some color coding, but it's not like its the end of the world. Or worth it to have N different connector technologies just so we can differentiate what does what.
>>The newest Macbook Pros still have 16GB RAM tops
>And for a very good reason. Low-powered (suitable for laptop use) support for 32GB memory wasn't there in Intel chipsets. But not only you didn't bother to investigate, but you know better.
You're actually proving his point for him. This excuse wouldn't work for anyone else but Apple.
Of course normal DDR4 is perfectly fine to use in laptops (compared to lpddr3) without severely damaging your battery life, other manufacturers manage to do it just fine.
And while I'd agree that ekeing out those extra standby (because there isn't even much difference in load efficiency between the two) minutes is great for the smaller devices, it becomes ridiculous when one consciously orders a device with a 45W TDP Quadcore CPU, 2TB SSD and dedicated GPU with 4GB GDDR5.
>Of course normal DDR4 is perfectly fine to use in laptops (compared to lpddr3) without severely damaging your battery life, other manufacturers manage to do it just fine.
Not according to Intel either, so the point is moot.
> Ie. "the world is idiots and I know better" as opposed "people have different priorities".
The point is, people who desperately need more resources on OS X for whatever reason - be it game development, video/photo editing or even using a web browser - are stuck since years on Apple. With nothing more than Chrome, Excel, Word, Slack, iTerm and Outlook running, I have all my 16GB RAM and 15GB swap usage. I actually work (as a web dev) exclusively in the terminal on a remote server via ssh, because phpStorm, Eclipse or any other IDE on the laptop plus a server environment makes it unbearably slow.
> Low-powered (suitable for laptop use) support for 32GB memory wasn't there in Intel chipsets. But not only you didn't bother to investigate, but you know better.
Laptops in the Windows area have had 32GB support since over 7 years with the release of the Dell M6500 (https://www.geek.com/chips/dell-ships-a-17-precision-m6500-l...). Apple has not even fucking tried supporting what their actual power users need, all in the name of "we have to build a laptop as thin as a feather". Yes, it would have eaten battery life - but why not do the same as the Windows manufacturers did and use a bigger battery?
Apple could have kept selling the MacBook line as low-powered/long-battery-lifed version for those who just want to look like hipsters by having a MacBook, and the MacBook Pro line as powerhorses for the mobile work force of 2017. But no, they screwed up both user groups - the hipsters get to carry a suitcase full of ugly dongles for even the most basic tasks, and the power users watch in awe at the Windows colleagues, who have a crappy OS but a machine that can literally do work.
> Or, you know, they can buy a couple of $10 USB-C cables or a $50 hub and be done with it.
I'd like to be able to plug in a USB thumb drive without a dongle that I'll lose, forget or having it loaned (aka stolen) by a coworker in less than a week. Or, Apple even removed the HDMI port, right after people started building HDMI sockets in conference rooms instead of VGA which was the norm for the latest 20 years. Thanks for having to buy yet ANOTHER dongle. Oh, and a new dongle for the keyboard, another one for the mouse, a new one for wired Ethernet... and no, docking stations are not a solution, not in a "flexible office" layout with different generations of Mac and Windows hardware.
The only thing that actually DID turn out well is that the power brick and the cable are now separate - but oh wait, the new cable can actually break instead of having it flap out elegantly... and because the plug is long instead of short and stubby like many Windows laptops have it, it's prone to cats trying to sit on it, and bending it in the process.
For all of the times that I've had to work from home and forgot my charger at work, I'm glad that Apple didn't decide to use the power vampire configuration in the MBP.
Intel dropped the ball here. There are battery life expectations in the prosumer market and Apple would not have come close to them withing sticking to the low power configuration.
It's also not even remotely the only laptop brand that made that same decision.
> There are battery life expectations in the prosumer market
That's what the MacBook line was supposed to cover, and MacBook Pro, like the name said, was the professional line.
> It's also not even remotely the only laptop brand that made that same decision.
But from those brands which cater to enterprises, there is always the ultra-high-power lineup that power users can choose from. HP has the EliteBook range, Dell the XPS range and Lenovo the ThinkPad P. Some of them I can even order with 64GB RAM.
Apple leaves me at a quarter of the RAM. Apple has left power users like me standing in the rain. The problem is that it's really hard to switch, because Windows 7 nears its end of business and I won't touch anything above it with a 10 feet pole due to privacy and UI problems, and Linux is way too buggy when it comes to energy efficiency, new hardware support or proper support for Optimus and friends. Of course Hackintosh would at least solve the UI problems but it's difficult enough on a desktop platform, and I would never dare to use a Hackintosh for work stuff due to the legal issues.
> That's what the MacBook line was supposed to cover, and MacBook Pro, like the name said, was the professional line.
That ship sailed away pretty much right around when Intel Macs started shipping. Stop clinging to the past, honestly.
That market is deader than dead in every brand. Even Thinkpads. Especially Thinkpads. The only strong market (read: at the scale that Apple sells products) that exists for performance (read: 17") laptops is in gaming. It's also _tiny_.
Not much to cling for, actually - I jumped ship from Windows only three years ago and back then, it was fine. The problem is that software seems to have evolved as if RAM is an infinite resource (hello, Electron apps, especially Slack). Windows ecosystem has kept up with the demand, Apple... not so much.
> That market is deader than dead in every brand.
But it nevertheless exists in every major brand, and big companies buy them en masse, or at least: enough of them to make the manufacturing of these models worth itself. Only exception is Apple, and that's part of why professionals are highly afraid that Apple has lost its track.
> The problem is that software seems to have evolved as if RAM is an infinite resource (hello, Electron apps, especially Slack)
This is a point I'm 100% in agreement with you on! :)
> But it nevertheless exists in every major brand, and big companies buy them en masse, or at least: enough of them to make the manufacturing of these models worth itself.
I used to be in a role where I had purchasing information for computers for a nationwide big-box retail chain. You would be surprised at how low the order quantity on some of those 17" laptops is. I'm not talking about for the stores but for the manufacturer. Often it's in the low thousands (per market, of which there's really only 4 and for those laptops really 2). Those big laptops are a price anchor to sell more mid-range laptops that have higher margins. Big laptops get the least amount of hardware design engineering effort/QA. Their volume is low enough that the support costs are minimal, even if many of them malfunction or fail. Toshiba in particular is notorious for this.
Apple sells north of 5 million Mac computers a quarter. A freakin' quarter! It is absolutely not profitable for them to divert attention to low volume products. The opportunity cost lost is enormous. They could spend their efforts making the existing inventory a fraction of a percent cheaper or more successful and it would dwarf any profits made from a 17" laptop.
Most of those other brands can afford to sell 'performance' laptops mainly because they have to: they aren't selling 20 million laptops a year. Keep in mind, PC sales have _cratered_ and Lenovo is bleeding money. So is HP, but this year they had an up year...mostly off of selling Chromebooks.
> Their volume is low enough that the support costs are minimal, even if many of them malfunction or fail. Toshiba in particular is notorious for this.
Toshiba isn't what I see in enterprise environments... there I see HP and Dell, but especially Lenovo/Thinkpad.
> It is absolutely not profitable for them to divert attention to low volume products. The opportunity cost lost is enormous.
I agree with you on the general point. The problem and danger for Apple is: their initial success and brand was built by artists (no matter if photo, video or audio) and designers where the performance of Apple equipment pretty much left Windows based systems dead in the water. When these professionals jump ship to Windows, the appeal of Apple as "hip" and "modern" gets lost.
Apple does not have much time left to prevent this - people doing heavy loads like 4K or 8K video work are already jumping ship left and right where possible (of course, anecdata rather than scientifically valid data, but the trend is alarming) because Apple equipment fails to deal with the requirements on every front... especially as more and more video production shifts to 4K.
Apple isn't that alarmed by it. The artists have been leaving for a long time. Creative Cloud and Office 365 were the final nail. Apple is still selling increasing numbers of laptops every year. Apple hardware has lagged for those kinds of workloads for like 6 years.
The only video production houses I know still using Apple only buy it because the people in charge of purchasing either are 10 years out of date or they want their clients to see all the slick, expensive hardware they have around the office as a truth signal.
The market has proved that Apple doesn't have to care.
>This should be accounted for in the initial design, so that there is sufficient battery life at the end of product life, not just at the beginning.
If this was the case, the title of this post would be "iPhones don't use all available battery power" instead of what it is. You can't please all the people all the time.
I'm really not sure how that follows at all. If the battery life of a new device is 3 days, and the battery life of a 2-year-old device is 1 day, at no point is there battery power that is unused.
People would be so upset that they didn't have to charge their phone so often and that the completely sealed in battery lasted longer before making their phone appear to become obsolete?
1) It is accounted for. Just not in the way you'd like, with your priorities.
2) No. It should not be simple, and there should not be a crappy "back cover" which "pops" open. If you do that, you've made a fragile piece of crap with no water resistance and much less durability and you've wasted a lot of space. Space which is in very short supply.
Who said anything about crappy? High quality is achievable.
> If you do that, you've made a fragile piece of crap with no water resistance
As opposed to a fragile piece of crap with (some) water resistance? I'm not an expert on water resistance but I'm guessing something can be both resealable and water resistant.
> much less durability
Providing a back cover that would pop off if you drop the phone probably improves durability, due to the ability for energy to escape.
> Space which is in very short supply.
Why is it in short supply, other than because Apple tells you that you need a thinner phone?
Who said anything about crappy? High quality is achievable.
Indeed, in their heydey Blackberry had a leather-covered removable back cover. It was a premium product designed to be familiar to fancy people who wore hand-made suits and shoes. Indeed it was far more "quality" than the blingiest gold iPhone, which is just tacky.
A back cover that pops off _appears_ more fragile to most people.
Similar thing with water resistance. They could make a resealable back cover. However, you now have support trying to determine if someone's phone has water damage due to manufacturing issues or because they didn't put the cover back on. This leads back to the phone appearing more fragile (or Apple seeming petty).
You also have the scenario where the phone is dropped hard enough for the cover to come off and then land in water.
> I'm not an expert on water resistance but I'm guessing something can be both resealable and water resistant.
I’m not either, but you’d have to figure out an extremely special way to create a water-resistant phone with battery contacts that would not corrode on contact with water.
My Nexus 7 has a pop out cover, yet when it fell in a stream of running water, it never even shut down. Opening it revealed only two small drops of water.
Plus, battery contacts don't corrode from a short exposition to water (otherwise, so would the headphone plug).
>My Nexus 7 has a pop out cover, yet when it fell in a stream of running water, it never even shut down. Opening it revealed only two small drops of water.
Plus, battery contacts don't corrode from a short exposition to water (otherwise, so would the headphone plug).
I have a Nexus 7 as well and I have no idea what this pop out cover means. Can you please help me understand? Thanks
Sorry, probably a wrong name, I mean the back cover just snaps together (and can be removed easily, even with one's nails) rather than having screws and such.
Uhhhh, not to rain on your parade but the device I've been using for the last 6½ years - a Motorola Defy - is waterproof (IP67) yet still has one of those 'crappy "back cover[s]" which "pops" open' (with a latch to prevent it from popping when popping is unwarranted). It is also supposed to be rugged and I guess this is confirmed by the fact that it still lives after those 6½ years in my care. Need I say I have a farm with quite a bit of forest, the which I regularly maintain using tractor, saw and axe? That phone has survived nevertheless. When it gets too disgusting to hold I clean it under running water. Just a week ago I happened to use the thing to provide some light when changing light bulbs in my wife's car. What do you know, it slipped down and landed on the plastic cover underneath the engine, there was no way to reach it without disassembling part of that cover. Since we were on our way home I just left it there, drove home (about 11 kilometres) and got out the tools required to rescue the phone. I found it wedged between the oil pan and the plastic cover. It was no worse for the wear other than possibly some extra scratches on that 'crappy "back cover"', I wouldn't know since the thing is scratched beyond recognition anyway. Yet... it still works.
I guess I don't need to elaborate on the survival chances of an iPhone - any iPhone - in these circumstances.
>there should not be a crappy "back cover" which "pops" open. If you do that, you've made a fragile piece of crap with no water resistance
I'm quite happy with my Samsung Galaxy S5 mini. It is fully waterproof, despite replaceable battery located behind a removable back cover. The cover also never came loose on accident.
> not sure why you think Apple would be any different.
I don't and my comment doesn't suggest that. What I suggest is that phones with non-user-replaceable batteries should be designed with capacity large enough so that life is still acceptable after two years of normal wear without throttling the CPU.
As for how "simple" replacing the battery is, I don't consider a $79 repair that requires an appointment and driving to an Apple Store and wasting an hour of my day "simple".
>I don't and my comment doesn't suggest that. What I suggest is that phones with non-user-replaceable batteries should be designed with capacity large enough so that life is still acceptable after two years of normal wear without throttling the CPU.
Whether user serviceable or not is irrelevant, as long as they have a support program to replace your battery.
> As for how "simple" replacing the battery is, I don't consider a $79 repair that requires an appointment and driving to an Apple Store and wasting an hour of my day "simple".
A support program is still far more trouble than user-replaceable batteries.
All batteries degrade. Not all batteries degrade into uselessness after a mere two years. My car is coming up on three years old and its battery capacity is still better than 99% of new.
Lithium-ion and lead-acid battery technologies are very different. A lead-acid battery performs extremely well so long as power keeps flowing through it - my first car was 12 years old when written off and had its original battery, because it was driven often and kept charged.
Lithium-based batteries suffer chemical degradation of their electrodes related to time as well as charge cycles. Even an unused lithium-ion battery can die before it's ever installed in a product. The electrode damage is what causes the capacity to decline.
For the record, lead-acid batteries can suffer similar degradation due to sulphur build-up on their internal plates, but regular use keeps this at bay and a well-maintained battery will just keep working. Part of the problem is that it's nearly impossible to maintain modern batteries as they're all sealed by design.
Your cars battery is cooled instead of being abused as a heat sink, is nearly never emptied, and uses a battery chemistry that doesn't degrade when fully charged.
Smartphone battery degradation is indeed a consequence of design choices, but I think those choices are reasonable. I prefer battery power and processor power now over long term battery life, as long as the battery is replaceable.
Except people tend to vote with their wallets for thinner lighter phones. Probably I’d prefer a slightly thicker phone myself but I’m probably not typical.
People's purchases aren't 'votes' in some context-less void.
Many folks (most in the last couple of years?) are firmly entrenched in the Apple ecosystem. Wanting a nicer camera and nicer screen, while not having to worry about migrating data and apps, forces the 'lighter/thinner' option on people. People moving from an iphone 5s to a 7 aren't necessarily "voting" for a thinner phone. They are more likely "voting" for a better camera or more storage, but are forced in to 'thinner' as a byproduct.
I've never met anyone in the last 5 years who's upgraded to a new phone based on their current device being 'too thick'. Camera, storage, speed and screen size are factors; thickness has never been a motivating factor I've heard from people.
Indeed. I really wish Apple would offer an option to have a phone that's twice as thick as their current offerings, with the extra space filled with extra battery. Keep the thin ones available for people who prefer those. But I'm not getting my hopes up for such a thing.
(And to preempt the typical responses to this: I know battery cases exist, but they're a substantially inferior solution.)
It's not just us geeks. My wife and kids (at least, the daughters who are full-time snapchat users) would definitely select the larger phone with bigger battery.
If you had both choices before you in the store, who wouldn't start to wonder if they'd regret the thinner/lower capacity choice?
I would love it if they came out with a real Pro version of their products. Call them the "Pro Black" edition or something.
Imagine a "Black Edition" of the iPhone that's thicker, has a headphone jack and an integral rubberized case. The aesthetic would be similar to military style watches.
Imagine a thicker MacBook Pro that doesn't require dongles. Don't announce them initially but show it in some hacker movies. Make them special order initially. I can dream...
I have somewhat mixed feelings myself. On the one hand I would like to have true all day battery life for those relatively rare days when I’m really hammering on the battery. OTOH maybe I really do prefer less thickness and weight for the 90% case and just top it off with an external battery on the other days.
Geeks (illustrated by those of us reading HN) tend to value function over form. Unfortunately this is not the market Apple appeals to. They have successfully managed to appeal to enough people that 'thin is good' at the expense of everything else, and here we are with laptops and phones you can practically shave with.
If the battery life becomes "horrible" within two years, I'd question if it was sufficient in the first place. I've had non-Apple phones in use for significantly longer than that without meaningful battery loss (i.e. I don't have to charge more frequently).
It also seems that you could throttle the CPU, but provide the user a way to override it. That'd be far more reasonable IMO.
In terms of user experience, having the option to override might confuse those who aren't power users, and some users may unintentionally experience something that isn't the "ideal path" chosen by Apple if they do choose to opt out of the throttling experience.
Of course, maybe iPhones could just tell the users to replace batteries if battery life starts to deteriorate below a certain threshold.
Failing is painful, though. I replaced an iPhone's charging plug (which means replacing a small network of cables), got everything working and charging, then crushed the screen when closing it up :|
Same experience and my camera literally will not focus anymore. No drops or water damage. I simply cannot explain the loss in function or drop in battery life.
What is better: for software writers to only be able to multiply two billion 64-bit numbers per second instead of four billion, or for you to have 5 hours instead of 10 hours of battery life?
It is absolutely, 100% the right choice that a low-powered mode is used, and entered into, in software.
I don't believe replacing a battery every 24 months is unrealistic if you want screaming-fast performance.
There are a handful of exceptions I can think of:
- There is no excuse not to give full power when plugged into a charger.
- The OS should not be slow: its UI should be developed against the slower core.
- The OS should allow a certain amount of high-power usage, if it is intermittant. In other words, apps should be able to request please, please be able to process something quickly, they promise not to use much power for a long time afterward.
This may improve user experience in some cases.
In general I would say Apple is making the right choice here.
Your point is fair. (I'm not the one who made that statement you quoted, though I'm further upthread.)
Your parent poster is a moderator here. Hacker News has one of the best places on the planet and it's amazing that it's been maintained, through the very hard work of the moderators. As you're a new user, the moderator pointed out the style conventions here.
I personally think that often the knee-jerk reaction is a fine starting point. We get exactly what you meant by:
> Hobbyists can always run their own custom mobile OS version.
HAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHA
Next this should be edited to this form:
> Hobbyists can always run their own custom mobile OS version.
Surely even you do not seriously believe this.
And suddenly we have a substantive discussion. (I assume this is what you meant.) Welcome to Hacker News.
Also bear in mind that app developers are also reactive to Apple's choices. (If they need to optimize their software, they will do so. On the other hand, if they can skip optimizing by just telling users to turn on a setting, many will do just that.)
I'd rather Apple make developers have to look up what an algorithm is, and spend hours - hours! - of their life turning an iterative exhaustive search into a binary search (for example), because they have to work on a slow core too, than for me to have to dig around in settings, turn on a "Force high-CPU usage" and let developers keep being lazy.
This goes for Apple's developers too, and I realize their own first-party software such as the OS is too slow on the low-power core. I mentioned this above.
I stand by my original comment.
Bear in mind that there might be applications that use state of the art algorithms, can run, but just barely, on the high-powered cores but not on the low-power cores, and are not intermittant. I am saying that it is acceptable to have to replace battery every 24 months, or plug in the phone, if you want to keep using them.
I can give you another analogy for why I don't agree with your take. Back in the day there was an "iPhone hand warmer" that drained the battery and spun the processors. These days that application would get throttled, it would not be able to warm up the phone by draining its battery.
Except, until today, no-one knew their phone was being throtlled, because Apple doesn't want to tell anyone about this. So no-one knew they could improve cpu performance with a new battery.
There's a decades-long meme that Apple purposefully slows down older hardware to push people to buy completely new hardware.
Interesting that this effect may be a byproduct of automatic scaling the CPU frequency based on remaining battery capacity, rather than the newer OS versions being purposefully poorly optimized (like most people assume)
I used to think that was a joke, but since updating to ios 11 my 6s+ has been completely unusable. A bunch of the apps are now unresponsive for 5-10 seconds after they launch, the input lags and the standard ios animations are dropping a ton of frames. Battery is also sometimes draining 20-40% in a span of 15 minutes.
I have a 6s plus and had the exact same thing. Phone was totally unusable. But I did a full backup and reinstall and it’s gone back to normal speed. Feels like a new phone. Give it a try.
My 6 Plus turned to absolute sluggish crap after iOS 11. Will try the reinstall this week. Suspected that might be worth a try, but had been hoping the first two 0.x updates might've solved it first... no luck!
A common approach on Android. Nobody really seems to know exactly why, but evidently crap accumulates, either from old apps or from sloppy in-place OS upgrades. A full reset clears all the crap, and you start anew.
I prefer to skip even the backup step, instead relying on cloud sync for contacts etc, and manually dumping a couple apps.
Yes -- give it a try. My iPhone 7 Plus was nearly out of storage space, and also rather sluggish. Much of the storage space was being consumed by internal Apple files according to usage details within the Settings app.
After doing a full backup using iTunes, then resetting the phone to factory conditions, and finally restoring the iTunes backup -- my storage space returned to normal, and the speed increased dramatically.
I suspect that over time, internal files accumulate (e.g. log files & upgrade restoration points), and this accumulated cruft gradually consumes space & degrades performance.
Yeah it made it soooo much quicker. I was about to throw it in the bin. Now set for another year of retro phone. Mine was being really shitty though, it took a massive speed nose dive after ios11. If that’s what happened to you defo worth trying.
I thought I was just unlucky because nobody else shared the same experience as I have had, but you describe exactly the same behavior I've encountered since iOS11
Solely from a performance analysis standpoint, you've just perfectly described something using 100% CPU across all cores.
But you aren't reporting the phone being warm to the touch, so... hm.
Have you tried wiping and restoring it?
It could be interesting to back it up, wipe it (and maybe remove the SIM card for completeness?), install the worst performing apps on the fresh install, and _then_ (maybe wipe again(?), then) restore it back to normal.
If app performance is terrible in the fully-wiped state, I'd take the phone into an apple store (regardless of warranty status) just to see what they say.
Hmm. Just thought of this: maybe your battery is like the OP's from reddit but in really bad condition, and your phone is downclocking itself to compensate?
My iPhone 6s Plus gets extremely hot, battery life sucks, camera doesn’t focus, and apps are not responsive. Whenever I’ve brought it to an Apple store they said there are no issues...
basically there are times when it will drop sigbnificantly in a short period, but i have also had it last significantly at 1% and go from ten to 1 in a second - then i rush to plug it in and as soon as I plug in the cablee it immediately jumps back to ~15%
Do you charge it with a stand or fast charger? Anything with more amps than the original plug? If I do that it really screws up the phone and it loses charge really quick. A few days of old fashioned charging and it’s ok again. Same thing screwed up my wife’s iPhone battery
Not remotely true. The iPhone is designed to gracefully accept charging from, for instance, Apple's iPad chargers, which provide either 2x or 2.4x the power of the bundled iPhone charger. There is no evidence that this degrades the battery.
Now, if you use crappy 50-cent third-party chargers, I don't know what happens.
You say it’s not the but it is my exact experience of them. Happens every time. Tried it a few times to be sure it’s that. Using a Belkin dock and an Anker charger. Both decent enough brands.
It's up to the phone how many amps to draw from the charger. Just because the charger has a higher amp rating doesn't mean that the phone is drawing more current from it.
Voltage is applied, current is drawn. It’s basic physics. You’ll fry a phone by connecting a charger that operates at a higher voltage level, but it’s perfectly harmless use a charger with a higher amperage rating
iOS 11 was the same way on my 6s+. Then I swapped the device for a new one. It doesn’t feel nearly as sluggish. My battery works like it did on iOS 10. My old device had a battery that was barely in the acceptable range. Obviously, my experience is anecdotal.
I'm light on battery though. No movies, no books, a wee of games, some browsing. Heaviest use is sports tracker and maps. I do use it for testing apps nearly daily. But usually it's hooked up to Xcode.
Do you use Google Voice? The latest updates are horribly unresponsive. I think they are sending data to Google with each key typed and all on the main thread.
If they purposely want to slow down older phones, they will do it in a way like this that gives them plausible deniability, so I wouldn't discount the possibility.
> There's a decades-long meme that Apple purposefully slows down older hardware to push people to buy completely new hardware.
I seem to recall the first several years—maybe even the first decade—of OS X being marked by each new release being faster on the same hardware, though dropping support for the oldest hardware. It was definitely true for the first few releases of OX X, because 10.0 was notoriously sluggish. I also don't recall any slowdowns with my 2006 iMac across the several upgrades it received before Apple made 64-bit firmware a hard requirement.
If there's any truth to the meme you cite, it probably stems from the mobile side of things, where iOS started out fairly efficient but the hardware was very underpowered. (And in that case, I'd like to point out that the iPhone is only 10.5 years old.)
At that point Apple sold the OS upgrades, though, and now they only make money on the hardware (well, and services etc., but not on OS sales). So it makes sense that things have changes as their incentives have realigned, in addition to the factors you cite.
Apple has never sold updates for iPhones. What you’re misremembering is them selling updates for iPod touches back at iOS 2 because of some perceived accounting issue, and the cost was pretty token, something like $5-10 IIRC correctly. Hardly a cash cow that would have had them making more optimisations then they do today
Entirely the mobile side of things due to upgrading iOS. I was forced to upgrade from iOS 10 to 11 on my iPhone 6 to be allowed to use two factor authentication for my work place. Instantly it become a sluggish mess.
I feel like Apple (and any other manufacturers that do this) may be vulnerable to a class action here. If the article is true and performance tanks over 40% in 2 years, then planned obsolescence isn't just a conspiracy theory anymore. It's real and they have never disclosed it.
It’s done in a deviously clever way, though. It’s not “planned obsolescence” if it’s “performance scaling for battery life optimization” combined with “you can always buy a new battery.”
This effect has been in here since iOS 10.2.1; so it doesn’t explain any slowdown that occurred prior to that OS release
It’s very real though. A fresh clean reset of my old iPhone 7 had a significantly lower Geekbench score, and that went away after the battery (capacity: 78% of design) was replaced.
Not completely related, but my parents’ iPad Mini (first generation) became really slow over the last year or so, lots of freezing, some system apps refusing to open etc.
I was preparing to do a backup, wipe and restore (which made my first gen iPad Retina somewhat usable again) but first thought I’d try some of the tips online for speeding up iPads, and to my surprise it really worked and made it much more responsive.
If I remember correctly, the ones that seemed to make the most difference were: disabling animations (in accessibility) and disabling any kind of notifications/background app refresh/auto update, but if you’re in a similar situation it’s certainly worth trying some of the other tips in guides like https://www.macworld.co.uk/how-to/ipad/how-speed-up-slow-ipa... and if that doesn’t help, doing a backup and restore.
> Interesting that this effect may be a byproduct of automatic scaling the CPU frequency based on remaining battery capacity, rather than the newer OS versions being purposefully poorly optimized (like most people assume)
1. If such a common complaint has such a simple fix, why isn't Apple shouting this information from the rooftops? Why do we need anecdotal information posted on Reddit to figure this one out ten years after the launch of the first iPhone?
2. Being a byproduct of automatic scaling or the commonly cited flash degradation doesn't explain the abrupt spikes in the search for "iPhone slow" around the release of a new iPhone (Google Trends: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=iphone%2...). Could it be a purely subjective, psychological effect? Does anyone have actual benchmark data on this?
Can you imagine the number of devices that get needlessly replaced because of this? Talk about taking planned obsolescence to the next level. Battery wear is as certain as death and taxes in a mobile device, and this feature converts obvious battery wear into ambiguous device wear.
I would not be surprised if this were class action lawsuit material.
I did some googling and the level of public outrage at this seems to be very low! Given the shit storm after they dropped the headphone jack I expected more of a reaction to this news... Maybe news outlets haven't picked it up yet?
I found a more permanent solution. Instead of replacing it with a new battery, I replaced it with a Samsung S8. There are some things I miss about the iPhone, and maybe I'll consider it again in the future..but after 3 iterations of iPhones I got off the hype train when "it just works" became "it just doesn't work". I also had issues with backups and lost data...
My wife got the iPhone X (yes...I know, $1000) and she's encountered a few bugs/crashes. I make fun of her for it. I find the usability of my Samsung not as good as iPhone when iPhone was at the peak, but I'm ok with it beacuse I'm not buying a device that touts itself as 'it just works'...plus I got it for 1/3rd the price after massive discounts.
Once the Android platform starts offering a default security posture somewhere above "wide open barn door", that always provides the latest Android updates and doesn't involve installing a rootkit on your phone, I may give it some consideration.
Also don't somewhere around 80% of the available Android phones on the market have JTAG connectors on them? No thanks. Cool if you want something hackable, but not cool for a device that follows you everywhere and knows everything about you.
Edit: This seems to be an unpopular opinion, but really platform and application security are a feature set and it happens to be the one where iOS is kicking Android's ass. Some people may or may not care about it, just like some people may or may not care about battery replacement. For me it's the #2 thing I need my phone to do after make and receive calls.
...for now. Google has shamelessly abandoned Nexus and Moto devices in the past: who's to say they won't just do it again when they decide it's too much work/not shiny enough?
I had similar problem with Samsung's Galaxy Nexus. It was fast, but after 2 years it became super-slow. Software updates were released only in first year. Maybe they use the same CPU limiting?
The whole industry of portable ad-clicking devices is awful. Just accept that you have to buy new hardware every 1-2 years. You can't even buy "regular" calls-only phone now.
I'm saying I've invested a lot of money in a platform that touts itself as the best and user friendly. My recent personal experiences has shown that it is not. Hence, I refuse to pay the luxury tax on an item that does not provide me a good experience. Their tagline is "it just does". Sorry, no, it doesn't.
I saved ~$500 when purchasing the flagship phone of another platform, so even if the experience is poor, I have an extra $500 in the bank.
Also - the Samsung S8 gives you very fine control on throttling the CPU to save power.
I think the issue here is CPU performance being tied to battery degradation as a method of planned obsolescence, rather than a complaint about iPhone battery life.
It's not really planned obsolescence, they made the trade off of CPU speed instead of battery life when the battery gets old. This is more reasonable than you might think as deep discharges use up batterie life faster. The other option is for the phone to not keep it's charge for nearly as long which would likely be more annoying.
In either case it's a ~40$ repair to replace a phones battery and IMO a good idea at ~2-3 years old on all phones. Assuming you keep your phone for 4-5 years.
Last week, I replaced the battery for my iPhone6s, because the old battery has almost died. After that, it becomes much faster than before. The old battery often shuts down even though there is 50% left. My phone is on the recall list but I can never book a slot for replacing the battery in any Apple store here in Hangzhou, China. They are always full. Very disappointed with Apple's service.
Then I bought a third-party battery on Taobao for less than 20$ and replaced it by myself. When my phone turns on again, I feel it's so fast and smooth. Then I realized iphone drops cpu frequency when battery dies. The new battery is 2200mAh, 550mAh larger than original. Now my phone can last a whole day under normal use.
I wonder if Android does the same thing. My understanding if batteries is that @ 100% charge they are going to sit around a certain voltage. They will never stay at the maximum voltage under use though. Is it possible that the OS needs to drop the CPU freq due to the voltage requirements (which maybe a 70% healthy battery could NEVER hit), and ultimately stressing/draining the battery quicker at higher frequencies.
LiPo batteries generally supply from 4.2V to 3.7V from a fully charged state to a fully discharged state. Modern CPUs run at under 2V. If the battery was directly connected to the CPU, the CPU would fry.
Definitely. I replaced a screen on a 4 using an iFixit guide. Very detailed.
A great tip I used, iPhone parts are so small and fiddly. Print out the instructions, and at each step, if you remove screws, tape them to the whitespace beside each step. Then when you reassemble in reverse order, you know exactly which screws to use.
One tangential weird experience: My iPhone 6s plus battery went obviously bad, as in reduced battery life and really big jumps down from 100 -> 70 and then from 40 -> 10 from minimal use. After months of dealing with the bad battery, hooking it up to my mac & running Coconut battery showed it was 46% good.
So I took it to the store for an official replacement (I decided I would pay for it). The genius ran a diagnostic which showed the battery as fine (green, he called it) and almost immediately started to tell me why it may be something else in the phone and started pointing me towards buying another phone instead of getting the battery replaced.
But for some reason their diag tool is worse than coconut battery or just wrong? If my battery were 60-70% good and they had lowered thresholds that's one thing, but my battery was long gone and they told me it's fine. And of course I insisted and the phone is fine now with a new battery.
I know there's probably a decent explanation for it but it certainly felt like they really wanted me to buy a new phone, and that their diag tool perhaps isn't the most truthful right now when it comes to battery health.
Yup, I did and mine was fine. I mean I used the hell out of the phone since it came out and I knew the battery was bad just based on the cycle count and my heavy usage.
I believe the tech checked as well right when I brought it in. What was weird was they told me the battery was fine and something else was wrong. And the phone has been fine since the replacement.
And I think coconut is pretty reliable. We ran it on a couple of coworker phones before bringing my phone in, and mine was by far the lowest. Everyone was up in the 80s and mine was in the 40s. It ran multiple times with the same result.
The apple tech told me green means it's in the 80s.
Very nice tie-in to the planned-obsolescence theme others are throwing around - Apple would much rather push you towards buying a new phone (and because of their advertising, their target market would probably accept their reasoning) while a simpler option exists that won't make them nearly as much money.
I replaced an aging battery on my 6S Plus a few months ago myself and installed iOS 11 at the same time (figured it was a good opportunity to do both together).
Immediately I noticed my phone was basically unusable, incredibly slow, everything was crashing or locking up completely, I couldn’t believe it. I thought iOS 11 was the culprit, and even did a complete reinstall without restoring any backups to no avail. Finally, I noticed a slight dark spot on the LCD - the brand new battery I had bought was already bulging and in bad shape.
I sprung for a better quality battery from ifixit and immediately the phone was running like brand new again. I thought the cheap battery had been supplying an unstable current, but perhaps there is indeed an issue with the software itself.
One key thing I realized - ANY battery work done outside of Apple’s official repair means they will never work on your phone again. So if you care about having Apple do any kind of work on your phone (even if totally unrelated to battery), you will have to get it replaced by them.
+1 on ifixit. I've yet to be disappointed with anything I've purchased from them, and I've done probably a dozen battery swaps, screen replacements, etc.
You can find parts for less, but it's really a roll of the dice as to what you're going to get.
Actually I feel almost any component in general sadly. I had to replace the front camera assembly as well and after trying almost four different parts from multiple vendors and none match the quality of the original.
Another thing I learned is that Apple would replace the entire display and front assembly (front camera, earpiece, speaker, brightness sensor, proximity sensor) for only ~ $150. However, due to the third party battery they couldn’t work on it anymore.
Thanks - that is really interesting. So Apple designed the system in a way that definitely hides deteriorating performance due to throttling from the end user? Can you point to any documentation that validates this?
This is certainly a solid correlation, but I’d want to see the same device with the old battery again (or even better another device of the same model) to prove that is the cause. Disconnecting the battery resets things that aren’t reset by other methods.
After a while my iPhone 5 battery started swelling. It swell so much that the screen popped out. I took it to an Apple Store, paid the fee and got a refurbished new one. With iOS 10 it's really responsive. The only complaint I could make is about storage. In the age of spotify and bloated applications, living with 16G of storage is not pleasant.
I have lots of devices for testing apps/games and four 5/5s generation iPhones/iPods. All of them did the same lithuim-ion/swelling with the battery within 2-3 months where the screen pops out and you can see inside on the edges.
This is heavily common and prevalent with that generation I found out. iPhones/iPods both had it happen.
It was a little bit twilight zone like before I looked into how common it is, bought them at different times.
If you aren't constantly using a device turn it off because LiB batteries they use only last about 2 years / 400 charges and overcharging ends up swelling.
Thanks for the notice, I didn't know about it. Unfortunately iPhone 5 is my primary phone so I use it daily. I was always charging the phone with a 2A charger back then, now I switched to 1A. I thought maybe slow charging will help preserve the battery.
Anyways 2 years is a reasonable time for me considering the age of my phone, after 2 years I'll probably switch to a new phone.
There are lots of articles on it but here is one from 6S/7 regarding 300-400 cycles [1]. You can look for Apple battery swelling and nearly every gen since 5 has some issues with it, it seems related to overcharging. Even iPhone 8 is having issues with swelling. [2]
Shouldn’t be very expensive. I run a chain of independent repair shops — most iPhone batteries are $49-$59 to replace and take about 20 minutes. Apple Store charges $79 for most iPhones.
A friend of mine went to a repair shop to fix their battery, it was half the cost of Apples repair.
But the issues that ensues were whenever they went to speaker phone massive amounts of static seamed to be sent to the mic. If you where on the other end of the call it would be very annoying. To the point we joked about being 'Brain Hacked'
Mobile phones have vastly changed in the last few years from once you could replace a battery very easily, to today where it seams you needing $100k equipment to do it properly.
My current phone is the 6 SE which up till the last few months has been able to give me a solid 48hrs on a charge, but I've been diligent with making sure I get a full battery cycle. Coupled with no touch ID and only face ID on iphones im a little lost. The pixel doesn't seam like its for me. Maybe I will go back to Motorola, at least they have new expansion slots which remind me of my Compaq Windows CE phone with a PCIe slot.
I don't know what im going to do when it starts to crap out. I'm gonna give an official battery replacement a try before I buy something new.
But still I feel we have peaked and are tracing back down in mobile phone quality.
>but I've been diligent with making sure I get a full battery cycle
Do you mean that you ensure that the battery fully discharges down to zero every time? Because if so, that is one of the worst things an average consumer can do to a Li-ion or Li-poly cell over the long term life of their device.
Im not an EE but i've always heard that full battery cycles are best to preserve its life. If not going from 100% to 0% and then charging fully to 100% is the best behavior please inform me.
I did a brief stint as a research assistant at a battery manufacturer which is why I was so horrified by your comment.
Essentially, from the moment you manufacture a lithium-ion cell, the materials inside start reacting and losing capacity. When fully discharged, this reaction rate is increased by quite a bit.
The capacity of a lithium cell is dependent on the minimum and maximum charge voltages. These are chosen to balance the capacity of the cell, as well as the cycle life of the cell. It is assumed that you will only run the cell to 0% on the rare occasion, otherwise that you will charge it before it gets too low. FYI, Battery university is a good resource on just about everything batteries [1].
My advice when it comes to caring for the battery in your phone is incredibly simple: Plug the device in each night when you go to bed and unplug it when you get up in the morning.
Fully discharging a battery was only necessary with nickel-cadmium cells that suffered from a severe memory effect. Nickel metal hydride cells didn't, but could be affected reversibly by a minor drop in voltage from repeated partial discharges. Most rechargeable battery technologies in use today are significantly harmed or completely destroyed by a complete discharge. Devices using lithium ion cells all turn themselves off long before the cell is completely empty, as a protective measure.
Again, I'm not versed on the chemistry behind this, but friends who got new phones around the same time and plug them in to charge every chance they get have had their batteries fail earlier than me. I guess my data is anecdotal, but doing full cycles has allowed me to get 40+ hour standby with 10+ hour screen over the last one and half years. Where my friends cant even get more than 10 hour standby.
As someone who builds battery systems (yes, I'm "that battery guy" that shows up in HN battery threads) wtallis is correct: full discharges harm modern batteries, although every battery protection circuit has a cut-off voltage set to prevent discharging them too far (at which point your phone will turn off.)
The practical applications of those two facts, however, are much more nuanced. Ultimately, the biggest killer of batteries is heat. Charging your phone and using it battery-intensively (max brightness/lots of processing stuff) are the biggest heat-causing things that come to mind. Another thing that can happen is heat buildup: you might not be using it very intensively, but if you use it for hours on end the heat can eventually build up and the phone will get hotter over time.
It's entirely possible that your method of using your phone actually does cause less stress on the battery. However, this is 100% dependent on what you and your friends do with your phones, before and while they charge, as well as the kind of phone, its charging circuitry and a million other factors.
At the end of the day, all I can say is "batteries are basically magic, use less power, and don't let your phone get too hot." The only universal recommendation that will guarantee better battery lifetime - with every battery chemistry - is to draw less current from the battery (on a phone: turn down your brightness, turn off things you're not using, etc etc.)
For LithIon, there are really 3 things that are bad (That I've heard of):
1) Fully charging them
2) Fully discharging them
3) Heat
These are all monitored by the battery support software/hardware but all will affect performance.
The phone will not let charge or discharge to 100% even though it says so. Min/Max values are stored on the phone and adjust as your battery ages. 100%/0% per you phone's display is really just the max/min allowed values.
Last week I replaced the battery in my 6S. Today I replaced the battery in my 2011 MacBook Air 13”.
In both cases it was a breeze and both devices seem to have a new lease on life with fresh batteries and being freshly wiped.
I’ve had the 6S in airplane mode on the counter for 7 days now and it’s at 47% charge since the first time I charged it. Obviously it’s just sitting in ultra/standby super low power system constantly but I’m still impressed.
$100k equipment is absolutely not needed. $10 screwdrivers and maybe some experience with anything electrical but it’s certainly not advanced!
The MacBook Air battery in particular was super easy to swap out. About 10 screws which all came out easily and the metal back pops off incredibly cleanly fully exposing the battery. It’s a beautiful design and case was a pleasure to work with. Putting it back together took 2 minutes and everything lined up perfectly. The only mistake was slightly over-torquing one of the screws holding in the battery, with no ill effect.
2011 was the last good year for Apple products that are repair/upgradeable, atleast for computers. When people ask if they should buy a new iMac to build games with Unity I always tell them to get a cheap 2011-2012 MacMini and upgrade the ram and disk. But thats a 7 year old device, you're stuck with a dataed CPU (which can get the job done,) but def not my every day.
If you want to get a desktop device and save on hardware, the best option these days is probably to go Hackintosh (though I've read it can sometimes be a bit annoying to upgrade the OS). iMacs generally are surprisingly good value though.
Hackintosh user for 4? years there. Stick to verified specs and you'll be fine. Haven't had any problems since setting everything up. Although I do keep hot backups just-in-case... But I'd do that using OEM iMac too, so not much of a disadvantage.
Yea I could. I hear rumors of a new CE coming out. I feel like I can deal for another 6 months and pray we get an 8 SE. But still official repair vs buying new is a big difference in price.
The free app "Battery Life" will report the percentage loss of your battery and advise how soon yours needs replacement.
It reported that my 5S has lost 39% of its life and should be replaced immediately. The phone works fine, but loses all its charge in 48 hours, even if it isn't used.
BTW, Linpack (free app) reports the same speed score when connected to the battery charger vs not, so obviously iOS isn't throttling due to its weak battery.
Knowing the issues with fixed in batteries these day, I purchased myself an LG G3, one of the few good smartphones with a replaceable battery. The idea is that once it goes bad, it'll be a simple switch.
The problem nowadays is that it's almost impossible to get an original battery. On Amazon, everything is a fake. In stores, the battery does not exist anymore or is super expensive. It seems LG doesn't care, maybe they speculate people will just buy new phones.
In a way, my approach to have replaceable batteries failed.
ZeroLemon batteries have worked well for me for the last 3 years. I now use a gigantic 10,000 mAh battery with included custom back plate for my phone.
I wonder if any consumer protection laws will come into place. Particularly, those in the EU.
While I see any argument for Apple doing this (helps keep the battery life high), this is not a disclosed feature. It's intentionally limiting the product's capabilities from what's marketed.
People expect batteries to become worse with time - there is no getting around the fact that the chemical reaction becomes worse with use. A CPU, though, that should never see significant scaleback unless it's faulty.
CPU running at max speed requires a lot of power. Degraded batteries have a higher internal resistance, which lowers the amount of power they can provide. So when the CPU draws a lot of power, the voltage on the battery drops. If the voltage drops to low, the battery protection circuit will shut it off.
What people here don’t seem to understand is that capacity, battery health, and max power output are related.
Old batteries just can’t provide the current that the phone needs.
Battery replacements are cheap, and when your battery is degraded you should just swap it.
Consumer protection laws won’t help you here. Apple is not pretending to sell a phone that doesn’t need service; on the contrary, they even strongly advertise their “protection plan” that would cover degraded batteries.
I think the biggest issue here is that your phone will do this silently. I think a better solution would be to notify the user and ask them if they want to go into the reduced power mode.
I have an S7, and when the battery level gets really low it does exactly that (although it can actually take it even further if you want, switching off the radio, making the display monochrome etc).
Low power mode is something different, and iOS has that too.
The problem here isn't that iOS isn't just trying to conserve power to last a bit longer. At some point the battery physically can't deliver the current required to run the CPU at max speed.
At that point, the phone battery settings screen says something like "Battery Service Required".
For some reason a lot of people get annoyed when their phone needs service. It's understandable, but I really don't see what Apple should do about it.
When a car's battery needs to be replaced, people don't go complaining how their car is suffering from planned obsolescence, they just replace the battery.
Apple offers iPhone battery replacement for around $80, third party repair shops will do it for $30, and if you do it yourself you can order a kit (battery+required tools) on Ali Express for under $10
I bought an 8+ over an 8 hopping typing would be more accurate and faster on the larger screen (it’s not) thinking I would return it in the “no questions asked” period if not, but stayed for the incredible battery life.
Before this, I had forgotten what it was like to be able to use your phone all day even after forgetting to plug it in the night before.
Apple can make batteries that have awesome run times - they just choose not to so the phone can be x% slimmer. Bummer.
I'm thinking about getting SE as I have small hands and it looks like a perfect fit but I think it's kind of pointless to get a new iPhone with so serious, known and most likely impossible to fix, bug?
SE is expensive to me as it is, I don't want to replace battery every year or so (I'm a heavy user).
Both my wife and I have three year old 5Ss, but our experience with iOS 11 has been completely different. For me it works just as well as 10, maybe even slightly better. For her it has turned her phone into a complete dog, even opening a contact in Messages takes seconds.
Recently her battery has started to show signs that it is wearing out, such as jumping instantly from 5% to 30% when plugging it in to charge, so it looks like this behaviour is a software 'feature' on all iPhones.
I have an SE, nearly 2 years old and I didn’t notice any difference in performance with iOS 11, only improvements in the UI. Definately nothing as described by iPhone 6 owners which makes me think this is specific to certain devices.
How do they even detect that? Monitoring voltage drop on current spikes to determine internal resistance?
I had a phone with a faulty battery and it would simply turn off on a large current spike (think camera with flash taking a picture) presumably since the voltage crashed.
The device could track the battery's capacity pretty reliably by measuring inputs during charging and outputs during use. The necessary data is even available to third party apps on both iOS and MacOS (Battery Life, and Battery Health are two examples)
It sounds like the idea is that the OS is throttling the performance to extend the battery life of a battery in poor condition, more than it sounds like it is limiting current draw to avoid "brownouts".
I can see why this is a good idea and a bad idea, in that many people simply want a full day of being reachable on the phone more than they want smartphone features, but others who are considering replacement would like to know that a $100 fix would make their phone less frustrating.
It is pretty simple to figure out the capacity by monitoring cell voltage and discharge current over time. Monitoring the impedance would be an additional bit of data that would correlate to the health of the materials in the cell, but is neither the easiest, nor the most accurate way of monitoring cell health.
Had massive issues with my 6s during the last weeks. Upgrading to 11.2 significantly improved the laggy behaviour issue. However the Geekbench 4 results are interesting. Benchmark numbers for my iPhone 6S: Compute: 5551 / Multi-Core: 1732 / Single Core: 1045 versus "normal" 6S Benchmark numbers (taken from the app): Compute 10143 / Multi-Core: 3994 / Single Core: 2376. In summary my iPhone 6s is SIGNIFICANTLY (~2x) underperforming in this benchmark to where a "normal" 6s should be. How trustworthy are the benchmark figures in the app? Any other ideas? For the time being this seems to justify the suspicions.
I'd actually be comfortable claiming that everyone's slow iPhones are actually faulty. Because mine (5S) was really slow and not even a clean reinstall would help, and I went to the support service for my carrier and they sent it for service and after a few days sent back a new iPhone because the old one was broken. The new one was much faster even thought it was the same model, and had the same OS version. So, people, get it checked out, it might be faulty, for example the NAND flash memory might wear out or the base firmware might've been corrupted, or hey, the battery might be bad...
Damn my 6S is doing exactly this, loaded up CPU DasherX and it's showing it at 1200mhz instead of 1848mhz the 6S is supposed to be at. Just setup a service through Apple at the local BestBuy in an hour. Thanks!
Curious if this is the case on iPads too (can't see any reason why it wouldn't). I have a lot of iPad 2's at work, and they definitely get slower with age. OS upgrades are a bit problem; after iOS 6 (I think) performance decreased very noticeably (and I have the luxury of being able to compare side by side with other units). But recently the unit I've been using with ios6 has started to slow considerably. I figured that it's an ageing flash memory issue, but this is another contender.
I used the AnTuTu benchmark app as I am cheap... and I found out my IO have scored lowly. Turns out having only a few hundred megabytes hinders the performance a great deal. After wiping 3GB of photos and videos the phone's gone back to it's snappy self. Though I'm still on iOS 10.3 or so...
It works! Replaced my battery now after this post and my score went from 810 to 1455, with a huge noticeable performance improvement and lower app loading time.
Let me share one experience that was neither a battery problem nor a faulty iPhone.
After my iPhone 6 (ios 10) got stolen, I've bought a brand new iPhone 6s (ios 11) on the official apple store.
It was totally unusable, all problems people shared I've had as well. It would take several seconds for an app to open, the phone would freeze for one minute, volume controls on the lock screen wouldn't work, my Bluetooth range was literally less than 10cm, sometimes when I called the phone would mute my voice.
I've tried resetting the phone twice. No luck. Then I've downgraded to iOS 10 and all problems went away; performance was similar to my previous phone.
So, no battery problem, no buggy phone, just a very very buggy operating system (or an OS that purposefully slows down on older devices).
Scaling the CPU down with battery capacity seems like a great way to hand-wave away planned obsolescence accusations.
I was curious about the results my phone would receive, so I bought the Geekbench app mentioned in the reddit post. Indeed, my phone scores max out at half of what it claims the iPhone 6 should benchmark at.
I'm pissed.