Hacker News Reader

Comment by reducesuffering | Hacker News Reader

I think this is the crux of the issue. Apple had to make a call for their customers: ensure the low battery is as long-lasting and predictable as possible around 1-5%, or keep high performance as the phone battery degrades quicker and shuts off. I think many people thoroughly understand how crucial it can be to have that last 1-2% and going into a situation where you think you have 5%, but then the phone dies, is a pretty bad experience for the "premium experience" that Apple sells. So for most customers they made the right call to preserve the battery.

This is an engineering trade-off and not something that typically gets publically broadcast to customers. I'm sure there's lots of other niche feature tweaks like this to the iPhone that we're unaware of. They definitely could've and should've been more transparent about this, but I understand why it didn't occur to them.

View on HN

You're talking about 'transparency' but as the article points out, Apple flat-out denied the issue existed.

Apple had a call to make: Inform the users of the battery issue, or deny the issue and reap extra sales from iPhone replacements. That's not an 'engineering trade-off' but a ripoff.

No it is not an engineering trade off. If you had one of these phones you would know.

The throttling here was so bad, the phones were completely unusable during the throttling. Sure, the operating system was running but doing basic tasks like using Apple maps or even sending a message would be effectively impossible. Imagine trying to play a video game at 2 frame per second. Unusable.

The real decision was that Apple didn't want to pay for millions of battery replacements, so Apple came up with a "software" fix for a hardware problem... Except that the software fix made the phone unusable.

I experienced it as well and this isn’t true either. The throttling was significant (40%, rough ballpark) but the phones were usable. A game that played that poorly would not have run well at full power. Maps and messaging was functional.

They should have communicated the change, in case that qualification is needed.

Have you ever considered that multiple generations of phones were effected by this issue and your single anecdote doesn't describe the full spectrum of behavior.

I don't appreciate being called a liar, especially about an issue that personally effected me to the point I left the Apple ecosystem for years. (I gave up my iPhone before the revelations, but I am 100% sure in retrospect I was being throttled)

Did you ever confirm if the device was being throttled? It was only not user-discoverable for a few months before a point release added the ability to see it from the Settings>Battery menu.

I don't think the person you were replying to called you a liar. They just had a different experience than yours.

> I experienced it as well and this isn’t true either.

I think you'd have to be knowingly looking the other way to take this so positively. Telling someone that what they said "isn't true" is analogous to calling them a liar.

Yes, I apologized to them for that reason. While I did mean to suggest they perhaps misremembered, I don’t think that is the same as lying, and either way the wording was too strong.

Yes, I experienced the throttling on the two slowest processors affected.

I did not mean to call you a liar. I'm sorry about that. However, you were wrong that anyone with experience would agree with you.

You're not understanding the issue here. This had nothing to do with how fast the battery degrades. This was only ever about how the phone acts with an already degraded battery. The two choices are 1. Shut off the phone suddenly if any high performance tasks are attempted 2. Throttle the phone performance to keep it from shutting off.

Apple chose #2, which is best for customers, and got forced to pay $113M from it. It's ridiculous.

> Apple chose #2, which is best for customers, and got forced to pay $113M from it. It's ridiculous.

You're missing out the part where they did not inform the user why their device was being throttled and nor did their internal tooling inform the genius that a simple battery change can fix the issue.

Apple chose to silently degrade the performance of their device, which would lead customers to think that their device wasn't capable of keeping up anymore, rather than that they just needed to change the battery. My guess is that they made a good portion of $113M from this (it's best for customers to drain their bank accounts) so no need to cry for them.

edit: and I'm reading that this would happen within the warranty period. It's best for customers to keep them from getting their device fixed during the warranty period.

Option 3: Inform customers of the problem and let them decide if they prefer the shutdowns, throttling, or to simply pay for a battery replacement.

This is what they did in the end, and is the state of affairs today. It's transparent, fair and honest.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com