It's choosing the lesser of two evils. The two options are to have the phone run slower, or have the phone shut down unexpectedly with shorter battery life.
Personally, I agree with Apple's call on this one.
Personally, I agree with Apple's call on this one.
If they're having to go to measures this drastic to keep their phones from shutting down, their batteries are underspec'd and their processors are overspec'd.
The iPhone 7 came out a year ago. iPhone 7 users are also being offered the $29 battery replacement.
For example, they could have altered the calibration of the battery indicator so 0% charge corresponds to the charge level where random restarts/throttling starts to occur.
Calibrating for a new "0%" effectively lead to a "shorter battery life".
I don't know the intricacies of these options, but I can make a guess. The point which a phone resets isn't accurately predicted. Some user actions may cause larger voltage drops than others. For which action do you calibrate to 0%? What if you only do that action once a day? Is this trade off worth sacrificing 1% of your full capacity? What about 10% or 30%?
That seems almost useless. Certainly worse than having a slower phone that has hours of battery life.
Any time my phone was under ~15% battery, it would randomly crash during demanding tasks. I'd think the battery had died, but turning it back on would work immediately and my battery wouldn't be at 1%/0%.
At that point the battery capacity might as well be 85% of the already degraded value since the phone stops being stable.
When you have people running 3rd party apps to determine whether their phones are still running fine, and then going to get battery replacements and finding performance returning, and nothing the OS told them indicated anything was wrong, that's a problem.
Hmm, that could work, but I feel like that might go against Apple's ethos. Not malicious, they just seem to like telling the user what's best and surfacing fewer options. I feel like the average user doesn't want to have to make this decision
>Plus, having the phone shutdown would force users to upgrade out of necessity without feeling swindled.
I'd disagree, but may be in the minority. I would hate having to upgrade because my battery life is shot. A large reason I chose iPhone was the battery life