That was not to get you to buy another phone, in fact the opposite. It was to keep your phone functional even though it had a worn out battery.
In phones there is this concept called a ‘race to idle’. Basically, you want your phone to do nothing, because doing nothing uses very little energy. So when you do something on your phone, the goal is to do it as quickly as possible so it can go back to doing nothing and save battery. Your phone will be in this low-power idle state 99.999% of the time. You still want your phone to be responsive though, when you click on something you want it to respond without delay. That means that when you tell it to do something it has to go from this low power state back to a high speed state.
Now, iOS is really aggressive in this, it ramps up the CPU speed really fast. As a result, the power draw of the CPU goes from almost nothing to a high power draw very quickly. This causes problems with old batteries. As a battery ages it not only loses capacity, but it also becomes slower to respond to changes in power draw. If the CPU needs a lot of power quickly and the battery can’t keep up you get a brownout (drop in voltage) and the phone basically crashes and reboots.
So what Apple has done is that when iOS detects this happening (i.e. a crash due to the battery being unable to keep up), it will ramp up the CPU a little slower. Or to use a car analogy: they don’t change the top speed, but are less aggressive on the gas so it takes a little longer to get to that top speed. If you replace the battery it goes back to the original behavior.
This is basically a good thing, the alternative is that your phone keeps crashing. Where they screwed up is that they failed to inform users of this.
Walk into Apple store, hand over phone, pick it up an hour later. Couldn’t be easier. Looking at prices, 3rd party repair services using non-original parts charge the same or more as Apple does.
It doesn’t get progressively slower over time, it’s either in degraded mode or it isn’t.
If you want to use a car analogy, it’s comparable to limp mode. When your car detects an engine problem it goes into limp mode in which you don’t have full performance but you can at least get home. You’d rather have your car not do this and risk damaging the engine, or would you prefer it to simply stop working and leave you stranded?
Batteries wear out, it’s an unfortunate property of our current battery tech. You can either let your phone get unstable (risking data loss), have it refuse to work at all, or let its run in reduced performance mode so it at least stays usable. Those are your options. Pick one.
Look, I get you hate apple and desperately want to find fault with everything they do. I agree they are a bunch of greedy bastards that try to squeeze as much money out of their customers as they can, but this just isn’t one of the ways they do it. In fact it’s the exact opposite: it ensures old devices remain usable for longer.
The fuckers sold us devices that worked perfectly for years until they sent firmware updates to slow them down
This slow-down only triggers after the device already had a brown-out. That is: it has to at least crash once due to a worn out battery.
“The brakes on my car worked fine for years and now they suddenly don’t work anymore”. Batteries are a consumable. They wear out. Phones were crashing due to it. They pushed an update that ensured the devices remained usable instead of crashing under load.
Could they have communicated it better? Yes. Was it the right solution from a technical point of view? Also yes.
Like, say, slow down an older phone so one has to buy a new faster phone? Source
That was not to get you to buy another phone, in fact the opposite. It was to keep your phone functional even though it had a worn out battery.
In phones there is this concept called a ‘race to idle’. Basically, you want your phone to do nothing, because doing nothing uses very little energy. So when you do something on your phone, the goal is to do it as quickly as possible so it can go back to doing nothing and save battery. Your phone will be in this low-power idle state 99.999% of the time. You still want your phone to be responsive though, when you click on something you want it to respond without delay. That means that when you tell it to do something it has to go from this low power state back to a high speed state.
Now, iOS is really aggressive in this, it ramps up the CPU speed really fast. As a result, the power draw of the CPU goes from almost nothing to a high power draw very quickly. This causes problems with old batteries. As a battery ages it not only loses capacity, but it also becomes slower to respond to changes in power draw. If the CPU needs a lot of power quickly and the battery can’t keep up you get a brownout (drop in voltage) and the phone basically crashes and reboots.
So what Apple has done is that when iOS detects this happening (i.e. a crash due to the battery being unable to keep up), it will ramp up the CPU a little slower. Or to use a car analogy: they don’t change the top speed, but are less aggressive on the gas so it takes a little longer to get to that top speed. If you replace the battery it goes back to the original behavior.
This is basically a good thing, the alternative is that your phone keeps crashing. Where they screwed up is that they failed to inform users of this.
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Walk into Apple store, hand over phone, pick it up an hour later. Couldn’t be easier. Looking at prices, 3rd party repair services using non-original parts charge the same or more as Apple does.
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Many hundreds? I checked an a replacement for my iPhone 13 Pro battery is $89.
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You’d rather have a phone that randomly crashes?
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It doesn’t get progressively slower over time, it’s either in degraded mode or it isn’t.
If you want to use a car analogy, it’s comparable to limp mode. When your car detects an engine problem it goes into limp mode in which you don’t have full performance but you can at least get home. You’d rather have your car not do this and risk damaging the engine, or would you prefer it to simply stop working and leave you stranded?
Batteries wear out, it’s an unfortunate property of our current battery tech. You can either let your phone get unstable (risking data loss), have it refuse to work at all, or let its run in reduced performance mode so it at least stays usable. Those are your options. Pick one.
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Look, I get you hate apple and desperately want to find fault with everything they do. I agree they are a bunch of greedy bastards that try to squeeze as much money out of their customers as they can, but this just isn’t one of the ways they do it. In fact it’s the exact opposite: it ensures old devices remain usable for longer.
This slow-down only triggers after the device already had a brown-out. That is: it has to at least crash once due to a worn out battery.
“The brakes on my car worked fine for years and now they suddenly don’t work anymore”. Batteries are a consumable. They wear out. Phones were crashing due to it. They pushed an update that ensured the devices remained usable instead of crashing under load.
Could they have communicated it better? Yes. Was it the right solution from a technical point of view? Also yes.
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