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Comment by Olreich | Hacker News Reader

The throttling was battery related. They could either have the phone shut off or just throttle down, they chose the latter. The fault is assign there is not communicating what the problem was and how to remediate it. They will still swap out your battery for a new one for something like $80 out of warranty, giving the phone another 3+ years of life.

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Batteries are always maintenance parts. The fact that modern smartphones and notebooks don't make changing them a trivial operation is condemnable.

At least you can install new batteries with different form factors now. Technically it would be trivial to just have a lid to install new ones.

Profit orientation is worse than customer orientation. It is also an ecological problem. Instead of changing batteries after 2-3 years, people buy new phones.

> Technically it would be trivial to just have a lid to install new ones.

Lids ruin waterproof designs. Not so trivial.

One might say that the original fault was to include a battery that was somewhat too small, so that after a bit of normal wear, the battery was no longer able to provide the voltage required for demanding situations (e.g., launching the Camera app).

Fortunately, they learned from that mistake and started to make iPhone batteries significantly more powerful. As a nice side effect, even a two-year old iPhone XR, for instance, still has excellent battery life today.

I'm sure this was true for certain phones, but it that case the 'testament to build quality' is clearly unwarranted.

As far as I am concerned my phone never shut off randomly, I was perfectly fine with it. And yes indeed they made absolutely no effort to tell the customer that they could get the battery replaced for like a 10th of the price of a new phone, I don't believe for one second it was a communication error, and not a simple trick to get people to buy a new iPhone.

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