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Comment by sleepybrett | Hacker News Reader

It's a tradeoff, would you rather have to charge it more or have it slow down slightly to extend battery life?

My iPhone 6 was plenty fast and had pl not of battery life to last a day with typical use before the last iOS major update.

I think that the media are being far to sympathetic to this battery life idea. Really the ought to be tearing Apple apart for the 6S’s shutdown problem!

Who does this hurt? Consumers. Who does this help? Apple.

I am OK with it slowing down, I am NOT OK with it not telling me about it.

It's disingenuous on Apple's part to slow down the phone without notifying the user. So instead of a user knowing the battery is degrading and can be replaced for just $79, the user is led to think the phone performance is degrading and probably needs to upgrade the whole thing.

But the part that makes this trick even more ingenious is that you will not notice phone slowing down by 1% every month and write it off as being some sort of observational bias.

I don't believe that the phone is slowing down to extend battery life. I believe it is because when batteries degrade, they can no longer supply the same max voltage they used to. This can lead to CPU instability, and CPU voltage requirements can be reduced by underclocking. It makes more sense to me since the race to sleep would be faster if the iPhone still had its higher max clock speed, which would actually save your battery more often than not.

This is probably it. There is no way to tell the remaining charge of a lithium battery other than estimating it from the voltage which drops with the level of charge. It also drops more when it provides more power and this gets worse as the battery is aging (increasing internal resistance). This is why your phone might think that it has 20% battery remaining according to the voltage, but the second you open a power hungry app, the voltage drops below a safe level and the phone shuts down.

Slightly?

IIRC from those Geekbench scores it seemed as low as 50%.

Can confirm, my 6s with an 11 months old battery serviced by Apple, 95% of original capacity, and ~400cycles throttles between 30% and 50%.

You missed option 3: Replace the battery.

I'd like to be able to choose actually. But Apple has really changed over the years and choice isn't part of the user experience, everything is pretty passive aggressive. Examples:

* aggressive high sierra push notification * "skip for now" instead of "no thanks" for icloud sign-in * really really hard to disable features (like application resume)

When were Apple about choices? Maybe in the Apple II days?

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