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Comment by Izkata | Hacker News Reader

Most likely this is about CPU throttling when the battery's health degrades, not software updates.

I think they could’ve messaged better around that, but some people seem to have the fairly ridiculous notion that Apple purposefully made the batteries degrade. Which is a bit like suing Nike for the rubber on your shoes wearing down.

That being said, Italian courts are a bit notorious for doing insane things. Italy ended up jailing some seismologists for failing to predict a deadly earthquake, which is both ridiculous and obviously has done nothing to make Italians safer.

> Italy ended up jailing some seismologists for failing to predict a deadly earthquake

That was a first level sentence, which was revoked in 2015 https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/11/italy-s-supreme-cour...

> The ruling marks the end of a 5-year legal process that has proven immensely controversial in the scientific world and beyond.

That is already bad enough

Yeah, it is bad, but let me be the devil's advocate: Italy's justice has three levels, and it's very easy to be judged guilty during the first step, the judge needs only a small evidence and he/she defers to the next level. Frankly, I don't feel the Italy's justice system to be worse than other countries, it's pretty fair IMHO (disclosure: I'm Italian but in no way related to Italian justice)

The phrase American defense lawyers use is “the process is the punishment.” Even if a higher tier eventually exonerates the wrongly accused, they’ve already been dragged through years of stress, had their reputation ruined, and probably have gone bankrupt.

Unfortunately the higher levels allow those currently invested in the system as is to say “see, they were exonerated” and ignore the massive amount of purposeful damage done in the process.

> [...] for failing to predict a deadly earthquake

That's not what they were accused for. After a earthquake swarm that scared the people, the head of the national service for civil protection asked them to reassure the population, and they obeyed, publishing a statement that said that everything was OK and there was nothing to worry about.

After the definitive absolution, some of them kept saying that they were tried for being scientists, but the truth is that they were tried for NOT being scientists: saying what politicians ask you to say is very far from being a scientist.

Did they jail the politicians? And if not, why not?

Interesting. Or if car manufacturers, detecting thin walls on your tires or mileage put on your tires, throttled the top speed of the car to avoid deadly blowouts at highway speeds.

Feature or nuisance? I'm on the fence. Maybe a warning light when you pass some critical speed.

> I think they could’ve messaged better around that

It wasn't bad messaging, it was no messaging. That's why they got slapped with a fine. People saw their phones were slowing down, assumed the phones were just old and bought new ones. If they knew they just needed a battery change, many wouldn't have bought a new phone. Don't tell me that wasn't deliberate.

you can turn that off now

Wait, really? How?

Settings -> Battery -> Battery Health -> Peak Performance Capability. There should be a small link to disable this.

Here is an article describing everything:

https://www.macrumors.com/guide/disable-performance-manageme...

Apple added that very quickly after the scandal came to light. A clear sign that they knew it was wrong to artificially slow down customers' phones without notifying them.

But that is specifically meant to preserve the battery longer, and at any rate can be fixed with a new battery, just like my car needed new breakpads.

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