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Comment by IncandescentGas | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if reliability was a factor in ending this feature.

3D touch malfunctions badly with a slightly swelling battery pressing against the lcd backplate inside the phone. Or a bend in the phone chassis. The 6s case was bent for every person who carried it in their back pocket. I saw malfunctioning 3d touch several times every week back when I was in phone repair. Especially with carrier insurance refurbs, where the replacement parts were of especially poor quality. Carrier refurbs often had the cheapest batteries, screen assemblies and sometimes non original chassis.

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I wonder if reliability was a factor in ending this feature.

I think the issue is more that it was not very discoverable. A bet the vast majority of non-tech users didn't even know it existed and perhaps accidentally activated 3D touch much to their confusion.

Removing it simplifies the hardware, avoids accidental activations and is less maintenance work.

I still miss 3D Touch :(. I am happy that Macs still have Force Touch, even though Force Touch and haptic feedback are criminally underused. There are so many useful applications, e.g. OmniGraffle gives subtle haptic feedback when dragging an object and it aligns with another object. It's such a nice feature that other apps could learn from.

I’m a tech user and barely knew this feature existed. I noticed it wasn’t there yesterday because I didn’t accidentally engage it like I normally do.

It’s tough to sell a feature that has no interface. A little too minority report arm flailing for me :)

My daily phone is a beat-up iPhone X that I bought new on release, making it almost 5 years old.

It has a cracked screen (dead OLED is slowly spreading out from the top-right corner), shattered back glass, battery at 81% health, and the earpiece speaker doesn’t work properly so to make a call I have to use a headset or speaker mode.

But 3D Touch still works perfectly!

My iPhone 12 mini is a bit over 1.5yrs old and has a 86% battery health. I hope this trend does not continue as fast or I guess I'll have to replace it sooner than later.

That sounds pretty fast, my 12 Pro Max is roughly the same age and at 96%

What's usually missing from these comparisons is how long people are actually using the phone and how they handle the battery.

Mine is an iPhone 7 I bought refurbished back in February 2017. This phone is likely to have seen less use than a friend of mine's phone bought at the end of 2021. It spends 95% of its life connected to a power source (even when I actively use it), so I expect the battery to last quite some time.

> What's usually missing from these comparisons is how long people are actually using the phone and how they handle the battery

According to my phone, over the last 10 days I had an average screen time of 3h34m per day. I use it to communicate and to consume media while commuting. I charge it whenever it needs some juice, it does get to down to 10%-20% sometimes.

But honestly I don't see how my usage can hurt it so much. And if my usage is indeed what damages the battery so much, then that seems to be Apples issue, considering how I'm really not a poweruser or whatever.

What battery health does your phone have? I can't imagine that having a phone connected to a power source 95% of its lifetime can be especially good for the battery.

Letting it go down to 20% before charging it back up means the battery has to cycle, and as I understand, that's what "ages" it. And managing that is on you, it's not Apple's fault that you won't (or can't) plug it in.

What can be Apple's fault is the battery going to 10% after using it for 3h, but I don't think that's the point here.

I'm sorry, but how can it be my fault for using a device until it's battery is low-ish?

> Letting it go down to 20% before charging it back up means the battery has to cycle

Apple actually says themselves, that "You complete one charge cycle when you’ve used (discharged) an amount that equals 100% of your battery’s capacity — but not necessarily all from one charge." [1]

The iPhone 12 mini has a 2,227mAh battery. Its battery health is at 86%, so effectively I have 1915mAh. But now you're also telling me that I can't use it past 20%, which leaves me with 1530mAh, or 68% of the original capacity.

I can totally agree that with long-term usage it's up to the user to optimize their battery usage for health. But my device was at 92% battery health after not even a full year and I simply won't accept that this is on me. Especially if we consider how expensive and complicated Apple makes it to replace a battery. Apple also tells me that I can charge my battery whenever I want.

To give more insight, GPS is fully disabled 99% of the time, it runs in dark mode, auto-brightness is disabled and I usually set it to a pretty low brightness, 5G is disabled and generally I remember disabling lots of things like "double tap to wake screen", "lift phone to wake screen" etc.

[1] https://www.apple.com/batteries/why-lithium-ion/

That's not at all my point.

Whatever time it spends unplugged, is time spent draining the battery. Down to 90% or down to 0%, it's just a difference of amount.

If you keep it plugged most of the time, and only drain it to, say, 90% (and this is an arbitrary number), you only used 10% of one cycle. If you let it unplugged until it's down to 0%, you use 100% of one cycle.

If every day you let it go down to 0% and then charge it back up, in 10 days you've used 10 cycles.

If every day it only loses 10% (total) and charge it back up, in 10 days, you've used 1 cycle.

I'm not saying "it's your fault" or that "you shouldn't do it", I'm talking about objective use of the battery.

Yeah, I know it's a mobile phone, so one of the reasons for buying that is to use while out and about.

But the point is that not everyone uses it that way, which can explain why some people see the battery health going down faster than others, on the same device.

And that's not Apple's fault. Sure, you could argue that the battery life is ridiculously short, that the battery's health shouldn't degrade as fast, and so on. And I'd agree with that. But still, it's a different issue.

I both agree and disagree with the first part of your comment, but you summarized my thoughts on your own with "it's a mobile phone, so one of the reasons for buying that is to use while out and about".

> not everyone uses it that way, which can explain why some people see the battery health going down faster than others

True, yes. However, and feel free to disagree, but from my experience the minority of people keep their phones plugged in as much as they can, at least in my social circle and work environment.

I knew that I would have to live with shorter battery life when buying a small phone with a small battery and I also know that batteries just loose health and that this is normal. The drop on my device just makes me think that maybe my device has some kind of issue, or received a battery which would be placed on the left side of a bell curve.

Wanted to check the exact stats - So, I bought it in the end of April 2021. That's 16 months ago. If a 14% loss of battery health during that time is normal, then maybe I had wrong expectations. It just seems excessive when comparing with other people/devices.

I understand your questioning, and I think it's fair to want to know that. But my whole point was that care should be taken when making comparisons, because the actual use of different people can have an effect on the metric of battery health.

I'd agree with your point that people keeping the phone plugged in all the time are a minority. But even so, I wonder if screen time is enough of a metric to gauge "similar use patterns".

For example, my phone absolutely drains the battery when using Google Maps, whereas browsing HN on a basic text-only app doesn't seem to make a dent.

Being constantly charging is actually bad for the battery life. Being around 100% stresses it… so that’s why some Apple devices now try to determine how much charge is needed and keep it at 80% if possible

It does. But does it stress it more than charging to 100% then draining it to, say, 10%, then charging it again? Hence, racking up cycles at a faster rate?

I know it's anecdotal, but I mostly keep my battery-powered electronics plugged-in when possible, and their batteries tend to degrade much less over the years compared to a friend's, who tends to unplug them and charge them when needed. And the electronics in question are fairly similar: iPhones and same-gen Macbooks.

Same for my work laptop (hp) which, after 4 years, still has around 80% of its original battery life, when my colleagues', who use them much more often on battery, only last around 50% of their new condition, if they weren't changed because of swelling.

The one kind of battery among mine that seem to have shorter lives are camera batteries. Which, of course, tend to get drained more since I don't have an outlet handy when out in the woods.

1.5 years old 12 Pro, 83% battery health.

But I mostly do iOS software engineering, so the device spends most of it’s time plugged in.

In a few months, it won’t even need to try to stay under 80% anymore. It just will.

I bought my 12 Mini at launch and it's at 84% capacity. If I'm remembering correctly, it was at around 86% at the start of this year.

There were some battery drain issues in different versions of iOS 14 and I believe there was some unnecessary wear in there, as well as a couple 'recalibrations' of battery health in iOS. Maybe the phone was falsely reporting 100% at release and was corrected to a lower percentage.

I'd be curious to see if anyone with a fall 2020 still has over 90% battery health.

Just adding my +1 to this issue. iPhone 12 mini at 83% health is really low after such a short period of time.

3D touch added 14g (+10.8%) and 2mm (+3%) to the iPhone 6s vs the 6.

> The 6s case was bent for every person who carried it in their back pocket

Baloney - it was the 6 Plus, not the 6S, and it was far more rare than twitter would have had you believe.

You're probably thinking of the bend gate controversy, where the bend in the case in the plus model was severe enough to damage the logic board. That, also, was not rare. We saw it constantly in the shop. Nearly every iphone 6, 6s or 6p that entered the shop had a bent case to some degree.

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