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Comment by williamscales | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain to me how this can reasonably be considered fraud? I don't think Apple makes any guarantees about the performance an iPhone will sustain over time.

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Every year you see Tim Cook happily quote performance numbers on the keynote about how superior iPhones are compared to other manufacturers.

When you buy the iPhone, they go and slow it down to make it run slower after a two or three yearsa. Like VW would lock your 300HP Passat to 200HP after three years with excuse of keeping the mileage up... without telling you in any way.

How is that NOT considered false advertising or fraud? Our iPhones are slower than what Tim Cook smugly sells on the keynote. Deliberately, not due to tehnical limitations - the CPU can run at stated performance but Apple chose to slow them down with an update.

Cars do get weaker over time as the parts wear. And I would certainly expect the microcontroller to adjust to provide the best performance possible under the new limitations. I assume most well-made, modern cars already do that.

Well you'd loose maybe some couple percent tops over a dozen years but basically nothing more on a properly maintained car (regular oil change, spark plugs, bearings, whatever).

Here we're talking about halving the device performance after a single year because the thing is designed on such a tight rope that it can't handle the slightest voltage drop which happens to come way too soon because the battery wears out so fast.

From an engineering perspective it looks like the latest devices are designed so that they provide blistering performance out of the box, satisfactory performance 6 months in and something ranging to barely adequate to crapshoot 1 year in. That is, picture a graph f(time) with a horizontal line that defines "This device is OK" WRT your favorite metric (performance, battery life, whatever) on the vertical axis, and it seems to me that the device should be designed to stay above this line long enough, but when objectively looking at it, it appears that the line is crossed way too soon, around the 6 month mark. That is when I started to notice my phone wasn't quite holding up all day, that there were performance glitches here and there that started to annoyingly grow on me, but I was dismissing all of this because hey I shelled out xxx€ for this device, and it can't break down that so fast, because Apple, so it must be all in my head or something.

I cannot imagine Apple not having such graphs when designing a device prior to release, nor after release with all the telemetry they gather. That is, to me, where the fraud can lie: a design where the device produces delightful performance for a known short while, followed by a growing frustration to be released again through delight when a new device is bought. The question is, is this premeditated?

> Cars do get weaker over time as the parts wear.

And so does the battery life get shorter as the battery wears. We know that. This in no way allows to anticipate that CPU gets slower.

IANAL, but I would guess it's the implicit assumption that this is not done to your device without your knowledge/consent. Misdeeds can't be handwaved away with "we made no guarantees we wouldn't do that". It's the explicit choice to not be clear about intentionally hobbling devices and what consumers could have done to de-hobble them that has many up in arms (and spending lots more on a new phone as opposed to a new battery).

I really look forward to discovery and evidence in these cases if they move forward. Surely engineers raised opacity concerns.

Maybe not actual fraud, we will see.

IANAL but in places like Texas there would appear to be little to no defense against a lawsuit brought under the Deceptive Trade Practices Act where illicit behavior does not have to rise to the level of fraud.

Mainly you are supposed to get your money back plus perhaps additional compensations if you give notice within the proper time frame (this would seem to be within 2 years from when the deception was realized, or within 60 days to qualify for treble damages if a lawsuit is brought) and if the vendor fails to comply then you can sue them.

http://www.ffllp.com/cadtpa/

Violations of this consumer-protection regulation appear to rely more on whether the particular consumer was deceived than whether the deception was intentional, although if intentional it looks like treble damages.

http://www.westfirm.com/tx_dtpa_.html

Consumers over the age of 65 appear to be especially well protected.

http://statelaws.findlaw.com/texas-law/texas-deceptive-trade...

http://pdf.legalformsfortexas.com/PDFs/Civil/CIVLIT_58.pdf

They silently deprived customers of the advertised performance in order to avoid warranty claims.

Usually in the user manual of product you get informed about the battery life decreasing with time, maybe Apple did not mention that also CPU performance will drop with time. From the article it seems that customers wanted to get a new battery from Apple if the current one degraded while in the warranty so phone shutdown but Apple decided to hide the problem with an update that slowdown the CPU.

Why would you want to live in a country where adding a blurb to user manual excuses your device being crippled after few short years? Even though the hardware functions perfectly well?

The reasonable consumer expectation here is that CPU speed is unaffected by device age, since reducing the speed by battery age is entirely new behavior (both in phones and other portable computing devices) AFAIK.

This is different from degrading _battery_ performance over time, which consumers have had plenty of experience with.

Cars also wear over time and the onboard computers might retard the timing and your performance or fuel mileage might suffer but I don't see people complaining about that.

Because cars don't lose 1/3rd of horsepower after 2-3 years due to manufacturer ECU being programmed to slow them down.

A maintained car will lose less then 10% of its horsepower due to wear and tear over 150.000miles / 10 years. Note that I said "well maintained" - meaning there's a way to maintain the car to keep the advertised performance. There is no way to "maintain" iPhones to keep their performance over three years - the battery will degrade and Apple will silently make your phone slower than advertised.

This is a world of difference from losing 1/3rd of performance due to software hardcoded loss to push new sales. Intent and reason for degradation matters.

> There is no way to "maintain" iPhones to keep their performance over three years

Replace the battery? Free under AppleCare and $79 otherwise.

If you know that the battery is at fault (Apple hid that) and if Apple Store will replace it (they refused it for many people because diagnostics doesn't show an issue even if phone is throttled).

Apple is also actively fighting and lobbying against any kind of legislation that makes electronics repairable and maintainable.

Read up on the issue a bit more :)

> There is no way to "maintain" iPhones to keep their performance over three years

>> If you know that the battery is at fault (Apple hid that) and if Apple Store will replace it (they refused it for many people because diagnostics doesn't show an issue even if phone is throttled)

You narrowed your scope. (Note that Apple basically never refuses to replace a battery if you pay the $79. They will, occasionally, quibble about the 80% requirement for an in-warranty replacement.)

I agree that Apple should be better about communicating that batteries should be replaced after a couple years of use. My objection is to the claim that there is "no way to maintain iPhones".

No, stop it.

Great paper[1] by Ruhr University students. Whole research is great so take time to check it out, if you want to see bloody industry. Notable pages: 8, 17, 18 for rev. eng maps.

https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~klevchen/diesel-sp17.pdf

Apple's strategy has been to sell devices in an unstable overclocked state with marketing based on benchmarks and then secretly downgrade to a stable configuration later in life.

Its ultimately a bait and switch deception driven by fraudulent marketing.

Is Apple’s marketing driven by benchmarks? I don’t think it is. They rarely talk about concrete performance or specs and focus more on the user experiences the device enables. Might have missed some campaigns though!

They used to show charts comparing new iPhone vs. old iPhone speeds in the launch presentations. Kind of necessary when the S versions were just speed bumps. The iPhone 6 presentation had a chart crowing about "sustained performance". It was about thermal throttling but kind of ironic thinking about it now.

I don't recall any charts from the recent launch - they just seemed to lean on putting the word "bionic" in the chip name.

Which S generation was just a speed bump?

> Apple's strategy has been to sell devices in an unstable overclocked state

I can't confirm this in any way. Can you provide some links or at least an anecdote measurement on how your device was clearly overclocked?

Its overclocked wrt to the design parameters of the device (battery voltage). The rated clockspeed is what can be sustained over the lifetime of the device, not the peak speed. The fact you can temporarily push a faster clockspeed is not what you can claim is "normal".

So, the speed reduction is not "rated" -> "throttled" because it was not sustainable, it was actually "overclocked" -> "rated".

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