Old iphones become more stable if you change the region from France!
In all seriousness, it frustrates me how much of the focus was on the bad half of the tradeoff rather than the lack of messaging. Now you have people who believe apple deliberately slowed old models for no reason other than because they're old.
No, the focus was exactly where Apple wanted it to be. Talking a lot about 'tradeoffs' when the real issue was Apple cheating its own customers - Apple denied the throttling, so people would buy a new iPhone instead of a cheap battery replacement.
Wouldn’t a rebooting phone have the same outcome? Why go to the bother of only targeting specific handsets with degraded batteries with this strategy? Why return the phone to full speed when you replaced the battery?
>Wouldn’t a rebooting phone have the same outcome?
Yes it would, but in a way that would have hurt the brand much more.
>Why go to the bother of only targeting specific handsets with degraded batteries with this strategy? Why return the phone to full speed when you replaced the battery?
The iOS patch wasn't all that specific, and it isn't sure it really did target degraded batteries. For all we know, they slowed down old devices without really checking the battery but merely assumed the battery was bad based on age.
But assuming that Apple messaging is true this time, and remembering Apple used to deny the throttling, we can reach the logical conclusion: According to Apple itself, Apple benefited from consumers upgrading iPhones when they could have just upgraded the battery.
It really was that specific. My wife’s phone was throttled and mine wasn’t. You could run a benchmark to find out until they updated the settings for more visibility.
My wife never did get her battery replaced - she was just happy with her phone as it was. If it randomly rebooted she wouldn’t have been happy and would have upgraded.
The feature still exists in iOS by the way, now it just tells you when it’s doing it and you can disable it if you prefer reboots. The feature kicks in when a brownout happens, that’s how its “targeted” at phones with degraded batteries.
My iPhone would die randomly whenever it would try to draw too much on an old and dying battery.
Thing was, it was slowed down already.
If i was in France i would have replaced the battery sooner because i imagine it would happen a lot more frequently, and earlier on.
I'm pretty sure software is a major factor. My Android phone is currently 5 years old and never done anything like that before. Neither have any of my Android phones in the past.
If this is some law of physics, then why did it only happen to Apple phones?
Yeah, if it didn’t happen to you doesn’t mean it didn’t happen to any of the hundreds of millions Android phones from a plethora of manufactures around the world. You can’t generalize from your anecdote.
> The throttling is there to prevent the instant shutdown due to old batteries having a lower peak output
Sure, but it would be nice to be informed about it (so I can choose to get my battery replaced instead) and to be able to turn it off without changing the location to France
You are. When the phone reboots as a result of power problems, you get a notification that says:
"This iPhone has experienced an unexpected shutdown because the battery was unable to deliver the necessary peak power. Performance management has been applied to help prevent this from happening again."
Describing CPU throttling as "performance management" is perhaps a little stilted, but all the basic information is there.
> to be able to turn it off without changing the location to France
You can. It's in the Battery settings. It's not super obvious (small text link that says "Disable..." after a description of the throttling), but it's there.
For comparison, on Mac when the battery starts dying, you get a persistent warning in the menu bar battery indicator. Hard to miss it every day.
On the iPhone, the one-time alert with cryptic language will just be dismissed by most users without a second thought. Doesn't matter that the capability to turn this "feature" off is buried somewhere in the settings when most people don't know about it.
Apple knows how to design good UI. If they wanted to prompt people to replace batteries, they would find a good way to do that. But they much prefer people buying new phones instead.
Saying the feature is "buried somewhere in settings" feels like a biased framing. Settings are in the settings menu. This is a setting so it's in the settings menu. I assume it's categorised in some way that makes sense. Is any feature that 2 taps deep "buried"?
If you don't know that it's the battery causing your phone to be slow, you as an average user will never find that setting. And if you skip that one time dialog (by mistake or due to dialog fatigue), you won't even suspect the battery. Most users aren't technical and have no idea why a weaker battery would cause throttling.
Ah, thanks! Not having had an iPhone after the 2G one, I couldn't check myself, and I had assumed that these details would be mentioned at the beginning of the article...
I think it was an unfair move from Apple at the beginning, but given your description it seems the current status is fair and the article is basically a click bait.
I experienced this for the first time, coincidentally, when traveling around France. Sometimes the battery would suddenly drop 20% or more and then shut off.
The throttling is there to prevent the instant shutdown due to old batteries having a lower peak output