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Comment by todd3834 | Hacker News Reader

This article has me wondering if I’ve ever turned my phone off besides restarting it or the battery died. I’m sure I have but I bet it is very uncommon.

That being said, if it were off and lost, this feature would be amazing. Apple is very transparent about it and also allows you to disable it as far as I remember.

The OP has a follow up tweet that iOS 15 made their phone hot during charging. Kind of feels like they might just not be having a good time with their new iPhone or is trying a little too hard to capture some Apple outrage attention. There are better things in the ecosystem to complain about in my opinion but to each their own.

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There is an obvious trend on HN turning against Apple since the image hash stuff. Search 'Apple' in the last month and you'll see stories about Apple screwing over blind people, copying other people's ideas, screwing over employees, removing apps from the app store, disabling FaceID if you try to change the screen etc.

From my POV (a non-Apple user) they have not changed, they have always been pretty anti-consumer. But even I can see that most of these stories have a clear agenda and are exaggerated to capture the current anti-Apple outrage sentiment. That kind of discussion doesn't do anyone any favours.

It's helping show people that "they have always been pretty anti-consumer".

Almost all of the digs at Apple have been things that apply industry wide and it is an interesting observation. There was one recently worded something like "EU to require Apple to update phones for 7 years" but if you look at the actual proposal, it applies to all phone makers and Apple is the only one anywhere close to compliant to this proposal.

Other scandals like Samsung disabling the cameras when unlocking the boot loader go practically unnoticed. Almost everything said about Apple is true and I don't dispute that, but people seem to believe that Apple is the only one using questionable labor, gluing in batteries, or applying software restrictions when it's basically industry standard right now.

I don't know I feel Apple really got worse than the competition. It started with "You are holding it wrong.", horrible keyboards, "you need to use USB-C for everything, except our iphones come with lighting + old USB cables", to charge your mouse you need to plugin the cable on the bottom etc. That's kind of standard.

Yet, the recent moves: Snitch Software that works against the user with a worldwide localization network + no care about security at all.

I mean after Pegasus hit the news, Apple announced their picture scanning initiative. They didn't acknowledge or try to fix their horrible bounty program (compared to Microsoft and Google) and waited for a non-profit (awesome Citizen Lab) to find and fix their bug ... (a 0 click in iMessage)

That's not industry standard for me.

This is sort of more of the same as what I was saying. Android phones have horrible hardware flaws and they don't gain much attention. At the same time as "You are holding it wrong" Nexus 5x phones where bricking due to bad NAND chips. Nexus 6P phones where crashing due to battery issues similar to the iphone but they did not throttle the phone and left it to crash. Samsung had phones that would explode in to fireballs. Samsung's flip phones crack at the fold and are extremely expensive to fix. Google Photos has been doing the exact same image scanning for the whole lifetime of the product and no one noticed or cared.

All OEMs have had hardware issues or scandals but they are all quickly forgotten while any fault on an iPhone becomes memorialized forever. They were all real faults but they weren't ever any worse than the rest, only more news worthy.

There are an endless

Apple should have fixed these things with their iron grip on their production line. They shouldn't have had malfunctioning GPUs or CPU's shorting because they're too close to the display's power line, and they certainly shouldn't have dragged out the USB-C transition on iPhone so long. But they have, and it's always the same bullshit excuses that nobody wants to hear from the most powerful company in the world. These devices start to lose their 'magic' once you understand how the sausage is made (and at what cost), so I think criticism of them is perfectly warranted. Imagine how silly you'd look 15 years ago if you tried arguing that Microsoft didn't have a browser monopoly, or even today if you tried defending Facebook for 'trying their hardest'. It's all lip-service when your company is thousands of people large.

yes, aggree with you on the hardware.

yet, what's new for me is the combination of not caring about security, scanning on your phone (not in the cloud) and implementing a world wide localization network.

the road to hell is plastered with good intentions ...

>scanning on your phone (not in the cloud)

The scanning only touches photos which are stored on iCloud. Yes it does it on your phone but the reality is the same on iCloud or Google Photos. Both Apple and Google can push out changes live to every phone without warning, so what they may do in the future doesn't really matter. Only what they claim to be doing now. This is actually a more privacy friendly approach because it would be compatible with encrypted cloud storage.

again the scanning is implemented on the phone. That's what matters for me. I have some code on my device that works as snitch against me. That might just be a feeling and irrational, yet I really don't want that.

I know how it works. I don't use google photos. I don't WANT to use icloud ... Maybe I'm just too stupid, yet I enabled iCloud several times by accident due to updates/new devices. That won't happen with my grapheneOS nexus5 :)

If you care about privacy and security, you need to leave iOS as quickly as you can ... 2 days ago: https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5gan4/apple-still-investiga...

https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/all-seeing-i

That’s because you pay more attention to news relating to Apple.

As someone with little general interest in the smartphone market, the digs seem to be pretty widespread nowadays. Samsung did indeed take flack for disabling the camera. Complains about the Play Store and Google anticompetitive behaviors are common and Apple is often in the press due to their high profile legal battle with Epic.

This. I could get infinity upvotes by constantly shitting on googles lack of support and ban bots. HN is starting to feel like an eco chaimber

Starting? On certain topics it’s been an echo chamber for a while. I personally stick around because sometimes there are incredible comments and articles that I never would’ve found otherwise. But I’d say a lot of HN in the past few years especially have been echo chambers.

Agreed, I'm getting whiplash from how quickly I've found myself on the "actually this isn't that terrible" side of every Apple thread.

Apple is just the latest fun punching bag. Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, etc. People love to hop on the pitchfork bandwagon.

Except* for Comcast. FUCK Comcast.

* And also EA.

Saying that the company with consumer products that consumers love is "anti-consumer" reduces the meaning of "anti" to be pretty much useless.

They might be anti-you as a consumer, but I for one very much like this feature and feel that Apple was more transparent than they needed to be in this case, so they are certainly not anti-consumer to me (a consumer).

Sure, I'm talking about their practices of using proprietary cables and not allowing parts to be replaced, forcing all apps to use Safari, not allowing scripting in their apps, making in-app payments difficult etc. But I fully accept that for many consumers these things are non-issues. So 'anti-_me_ as a consumer' might be a better phrasing.

There is a normal trend that Apple users want to deny reality and downvote or flag facts articles about zero days, or articles about bad developer relations or articles about bad relations with security researchers. Then you had Apple vs Epic that also released some dirt on Apple so is normal that the number of Articles on Apple is larger this year(I did not checked) and add on that the CSAM failed launch and I can see some Apple power users getting frustrated)

We always have an article about Facebook and Google when something bad or interesting is happening and I thionk this article qualifies because from the comments it is clear that the majority of people if asked "if the iPhone is powerd off if it really off? " would have said Yes, because we are used to power off to mean off and sleep like state to be labeled different.

> trying a little too hard to capture some Apple outrage attention.

Exactly the vibe I got.

The heat part is especially weird considering androids also go scorched earth when fast or wireless charging. It’s just got phones work currently. And their point about losing 15%, after an update all phones are going to do reinfecting. My Samsung flip drops battery like crazy when not doing anything too. Phones are one of those grass isn’t greener things.

My phone has always run hot after an OS update or syncing to a new phone. My understanding is that the CPU is ramping up during that time, reindexing and the like.

Yep, a lot of it in newer updates is ML stuff (rebuilding personalized neural nets locally on your device), which obviously pegs the "neural engine" in your chip for a while.

I would bet that a lot of owners of newer iPhones don't even know how to turn them off. It used to just require holding down the sleep/power button and then swiping across the screen. On newer iPhones, you have to (in order): hold down one of the volume buttons, then hold down the sleep/power button, then swipe across the screen.

I honestly didn't know this until I just googled it. Apparently what I've been doing (vol+, vol-, sleep/power) is the 'hard reset'.

I just do "Settings > General > Shutdown" instead of remembering the button combinations. It also appears in the search results when you do a Spotlight search for "shut" from the Home Screen.

You just hold either of the volume buttons + the lock/unlock button for a few seconds. Order doesn't matter.

It definitely was simpler/more discoverable back before they got rid of the home button, since the lock/unlock button wasn't pulling double duty as the Siri launcher. "Hold the button longer to shut down harder" is how computers have worked since forever.

Interesting — I wonder why my google search turned up such specific instructions. Looks like there are a number of ways to shut down. I've learned two new ones from this thread!

> This article has me wondering if I’ve ever turned my phone off besides restarting it or the battery died. I’m sure I have but I bet it is very uncommon.

I turned mine off on a 6.5 hour flight when I wanted to ensure I'd have battery later and knew I wasn't going to use it for entertainment in-flight. That's really the only time I've turned my phone off in the past few years.

In my experience, airplane mode on keeps battery usage at maybe 1% per hour (if you keep the screen off). Has the advantage of being available much faster and that the phone can be used if necessary.

Because of that, I haven't switched off a phone in years (just for swapping Sim cards), airplane mode was always sufficient.

Last time I truly turned off my phone was at a 10 day meditation retreat in 2019.

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