Not to preach, but if you apple fanbois had just stored your iPhones in the fridge, none of this would have had to happen. You brought it on yourselves. You should be ashamed.
@PecosBill Thank You. As an engineer, I am constantly explaining this to people as a wise design decision. There are plenty of design decisions that Apple makes that I wouldn’t necessarily agree with, but this one was very logical.
@PecosBill NO. Suddenly shutting off-> go to store -> replace battery (cheap)
Slow-> frustrating -> assume too old -> buy new (expensive)
They replaced a simple to identify problem with something that seems to be the entire system.
They just found the perfect excuse to fool people
@frd1963 not a wise decision. Replacing a battery is cheap and not very complicated, also easy to identify. They masked a simple problem making it look complicated and expensive.
Notifying the user the battery is no good (like on a laptop when it tells you it’s time to replace the battery) and suggesting a slow down is the correct action. Their solution made ppl spend a lot of money unnecessarily
@mwgm I think you fail to realize that for some people, a phone suddenly shutting down is not a normal experience and not acceptable, not even, I hope, among non-Apple users.
I would MUCH rather have a device that does what it can with available resources rather than refusing to do anything at all until I go get those resources upgraded. I agree that an even better design decision would have been to issue some sort of notification or at least a log entry as to which resources are causing a bottleneck so that it can be addressed, or at least explained, but not shut off when your battery is getting old, which batteries tend to do.
@frd1963 Exactly, batteries tend to get old. It’s a normal wear and it’s EXPECTED.
It’s not a software bug.
There’s a simple solution to it and they hid the problem to make ppl pay more.
If your phone dies once it’s not a brick, you can keep using it knowing it’s the battery, charging often and use not as much until you get it fixed.
Their solution makes your device %50 capable (just guessing) and you have no idea why, you just assume it got old.
There’s no need for all those resources info etc., most iphone users are not tech-savvy.
The battery draining fast, phone dying when it does is very simple and obvious and much more user friendly.
Someone that has no issues with the phone being slow will never max resources and make it suddenly shut down.
Those that do have an issue with it being slow were duped into buying a new one when the obvious easy cheap solution was kept hidden from them.
Pissed me off a bit, because it influenced my wife to buy an expensive new one when I could have just replaced her battery. You just try telling her that she doesn’t need to spend used car money on a phone…
If we read all the tech notes, T&C’s, and contracts in full for products and services we interact with, we wouldn’t have time to eat or work.
Apple software and hardware engineers and Apple execs don’t read these for most of the products in their lives, either.
It’s incumbent on the business to publicize in large print any terms or conditions that might come back and bite them in the ass later; unless the business’s partners and customers are mostly powerless, and have no recourse in any case.
@ruouttaurmind The issue is that Apple forces the updates. I put off updating my 6 plus for 6 months, clicked the “Not now” button for update and the phone locked and performed a “manditory update”. Apple has the option to throttle but when the phone is that out of date, you run the risk of an old phone going into a boot loop because it can’t keep up with the new OS.
Additionally, users can now see if the power management feature that dynamically manages maximum performance to prevent unexpected shutdowns, first introduced in iOS 10.2.1, is on and can choose to turn it off. This feature can be found in Settings -> Battery and is available for iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone SE, iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus, iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus.
@brhfl Great! I already get 4 days 'tween charges, so if I turn that off and get three days between charges, but restored performance, I’m a happy camper!
What happened to the days when mobile phones would last days, even weeks, on a single charge? Oh yeah, someone had to put a power draining touch screen on a WiFi router that could play music and make calls (sometimes)!
@hchavers i get a minimum of 2 days on my iphone x. i understand you’re used to your Nokia being able to play snake for weeks without a charge…but the new snake game is very draining on your battery.
@hchavers If I don’t play games on it my Pixel will go a couple of days on a charge. That’s using it for calls, texts, maps, looking up stuff, etc. And I keep the display on full brightness and don’t have anything set to increase battery life. If I used a more conservative battery profile I’m sure it would go four days on a charge.
@narfcake I still think windows phone is the best mobile OS I’ve used. Had to give mine up after they renegged on allowing my Lumia 928 to upgrade, and, uh, made it clear they didn’t want to make phones anymore.
@KMakato Yep. Never liked Apple products. Too much telling the user how they like things, instead of allowing people to customize their experience. Every time I pull out my Samsung in front of an I Phone user, they see my calendar right on the front page and ask about it. Then I show them all the cool widgets they don’t have.
Android phones also throttle, and have also been known to cut out because of battery problems. This is a battery thing that is universal.
Where it becomes a special Apple thing is where they designed a phone having a battery was only meh-adequate for maybe a couple years (but boy is that phone uselessly thin), forgot to tell anybody that replacing batteries was even a thing, and decided it’d be better PR / better for users to silently fix the inadequate battery -> shutdown problem via throttling than actually clue anyone in.
The throttling itself is something that I’m glad is in place on my phone. It’s a cool bit of engineering. But Apple’s stupid approach to batteries, hardware design, and thinking they know best (though… they sometimes do) have always pissed me off, and always will.
@cengland0 I said that not clueing people in / communicating options was part of the problem that was fair to blame on Apple.
I think you misunderstand the problem that’s being addressed here, though. It’s not about battery life. It’s about phones shutting off suddenly. Apple opted to “fix it in software”, for the set of phones affected, rather than try to describe publicly the full spectrum of potential fixes.
(Edit) the widespread, almost willful miscommunication of the issue kind of makes you sympathetic to Apple’s point of view.
What options? From what I understand from reading comments, you can ignore the update by clicking “Later” then it would force it as a required update the next time. There are no options to keep your phone the way it was. Some people might actually want the faster CPU and then shut off suddenly. Who knows?!?!? It could easily have been made an option and then this would be no problem.
@cengland0 the notion of including a shoot yourself in the foot switch aside, I meant, primarily, the option of getting a new battery.
I remember when this was a problem. It happened to my phone. Apple’s response was something like “oops we made phones that shut off on you. Hang on… ok, we fixed it.”
If they had gone fully public at that point, doing what they’re doing now, saying “our fix involves throttling the CPU and turning off nonessential hardware, when necessary. If you do a lot of performance-intensive phone activities, or care a lot about UI responsiveness, you might want to take advantage of our battery upgrade program,” then, people would think that all perceived slowness meant that they needed a new battery, when mostly they didn’t.
They should have included UI feedback that lets people know when battery-related things happen, like they’re doing now, some quiet battery health metrics. That would have avoided this.
Apple’s always taken the stance that they better know how to handle throttling hardware to maximize battery life than an end-user does. With iPhones, I don’t think including a “go slower” switch would make a big difference in battery life — you’d just have misguided people making their phones worse for no good reason.
Apple did put in a low power mode option recently, that’s analogous to the one in your answer. It’s not a CPU throttle switch, though. It shuts off a lot of background activity that makes a meaningful difference, and it’s a case where a user’s input would tend to serve their interests.
Pushing software updates hard as a matter of policy is kind of a different thing. Currently, you can defer them indefinitely, though, still. You just tap later, and then, something like “later” on the second screen. The reason people wouldn’t have done that is because they wouldn’t have known that the fix involved a slower phone some of the time. (And because it was a good fix, short of getting a better battery.)
@InnocuousFarmer I do think I remember my phone being eligible for a free battery replacement, actually… back when the shutdowns were first happening. I’m going to see if I can get in on that.
@InnocuousFarmer I was going by one of the posts above that said this:
The issue is that Apple forces the updates. I put off updating my 6 plus for 6 months, clicked the “Not now” button for update and the phone locked and performed a “manditory update”.
As for me, I update to the latest OS version as soon as possible. I assumed they fixed bugs and patched security holes. I don’t assume they make anything worse. But I guess that what I deserve for making assumptions.
@InnocuousFarmer It’s interesting that the low power mode you mention (the non-throttling one) a: asks you before turning it on; b: provides a visual indicator that it is on; and c: lets you know when it has automatically turned itself off. The throttling mechanism, on the other hand, just silently does its thing…
@brhfl Yeah, I think the difference is in predictable power loss (something a user can handle), vs. unpredictable sudden failure (something a user can’t handle).
@cengland0 Maybe there was an update that was mandatory and I’m off base… I did put off iOS 11 for probably about that long, wanting to keep 32-bit compatibility around. It was obnoxious, but I never ran into a mandatory update…
They do pretty consistently improve… everything other than performance. That pretty reliably degrades with updates.
@InnocuousFarmer
Well, Motorola and HTC said they don’t throttle power. Maybe if Apple focused on improving battery technology, then this wouldn’t be happening.
@DVDBZN Or simply had consumer replaceable batteries like The Note 1 through 4 did. You would have thought that after the Note 7 battery issue, Samsung would have made it simple to replace the battery on the Note 8 but NOPE! Going the same way Apple did.
I can understand having a consumer replaceable battery makes it hard to be water proof. However, I don’t go swimming with my phone so I’d rather it not be water proof and allow me to change the battery.
@narfcake True that it might be a little worse but it was never intended to be a consumer replaceable battery anyway. You need a little experience before taking on the challenge to replace it on any modern phone.
I did find this interesting though:
iPhone 8, this 3.82 V, 1821 mAh cell will deliver up to 6.96 Wh of power.
To compare Apples to Apples, the iPhone 7 featured a 7.45 Wh battery.
And for reference, the similarly-spec’d Galaxy S8 packs a 11.55 Wh battery.
@narfcake Yup, it’s what I would call planned obsolescence.
Imagine buying a laptop where you cannot replace the hard drive, memory, or CPU. Oops, Apple does that too. All those components are soldered on the motherboards of their laptops. So if your laptop breaks, good luck getting the data off that SSD that is soldered on.
In a funny coincidence, Apple just announced they’ll be adding a switch to turn the throttling off:
"Users can now see if the power management feature that dynamically manages maximum performance to prevent unexpected shutdowns, first introduced in iOS 10.2.1, is on and can choose to turn it off. "
@dave That’s interesting. I don’t think they should have put that switch in there, by rights… then again, I don’t see how they could avoid it, at this point. What do you think the over/under is that Apple has to do another round of explaining, this time about how they exercised an abundance of caution with their throttling behavior.
Some of the apple hater responses here are hilariously, willfully ignorant. Bah bah evil Apple slowing our stuff down. Dudes, they made design decisions and some of them ended up being problematic, then they did the best they could to mitigate issues for users. Bottom line - batteries degrade, period. At least they didn’t BLOW UP and hurt you. Apple’s MO is to remove cognitive friction in their interactions, and so it is easily understandable why they would silently throttle extremely degraded batteries rather than presenting a new setting you have to fiddle with just to use their phone. It is completely understandable why they would go this route given their design philosophy - it’s the option that least ruins interaction with their phone as it shipped. It is the correct solution for probably 90% of users/situations, but not all, especially since the phones have been leaps and bounds ahead of the competition cpu performance-wise for several years. Unfortunately they didn’t think through the PR implications of doing this, and now they have idiots screaming bah bah Apple purposefully sabotages our phones so we buy new ones. Oh yes, because bad phones are totally what makes people want to keep getting iPhones…we need to take your logic behind the shed and shoot it.
especially since the phones have been leaps and bounds ahead of the competition cpu performance-wise for several years
Huh? What? Source please.
The A11 Bionic is 2.39 Ghz and is only 2 cores. It has 4 other cores that are much slower for a total of 6 cores.
The Snapdragon is a quad core at similar speeds (up to 2.45 Ghz but I don’t know why the following chart only states 2.35). Then it has 4 more cores at 1.9 Ghz for a total of 8 cores.
For a phone that costs more than the competition, you would expect it would be better wouldn’t you? But then I’m not so sure it is. I’d like to see your source on it.
Oh yes, because bad phones are totally what makes people want to keep getting iPhones
It’s their marketing. They have one of the best marketing teams of any company. This is how they get people to pay top dollar for mediocre products.
Apple finally put wireless charging in their phones and it seems everyone is jumping up and down like that is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Samsung (and others) have had Qi charging capabilities as long ago as the Note 2 – maybe longer but that’s when I noticed. They are now up to the Note 8. Apple is not as innovative as you might think. They have become reactive to the market now instead of proactive.
Don’t say that I’m an Apple hater either. Im typing this on a Macbook Pro Retina with a 27" external Apple Monitor, have a Macpro 12 Core, an iPad Pro 12.9", and an iPhone 5 (Yes, an older model but I like it better than the 6). However, I also have 2 android tablets, the Samsung Note 8, and a Windows PC. I can see pros and cons of each system and that’s why I have a little of everything.
I think I’m qualified to give my opinion but let the sales figures speak for themselves. For 2017, “Apple sold 74.83m smartphones worldwide, ahead of the 73.03m phones sold by Samsung”. But keep in mind that Samsung is just one player in the Android market. They may be the biggest but once you add in all the others, Android far exceeds Apple sales.
Not to preach, but if you apple fanbois had just stored your iPhones in the fridge, none of this would have had to happen. You brought it on yourselves. You should be ashamed.
I think the whole thing is hilarious, but that’s only because I’ve had nothing but Androids since giving up my Blackberry in 2010 or '11.
I still use a Motorola Razr. I couldn’t care less
Sabotage? Not even! Pick one:
What was shyte is they didn’t TELL THE USER
@PecosBill they did tell you. It was in th realwase notes for 10.2 1 I recall.
@PecosBill Agreed, this is a much better summary of the situation than I was able to explain.
@PecosBill Thank You. As an engineer, I am constantly explaining this to people as a wise design decision. There are plenty of design decisions that Apple makes that I wouldn’t necessarily agree with, but this one was very logical.
@PecosBill NO. Suddenly shutting off-> go to store -> replace battery (cheap)
Slow-> frustrating -> assume too old -> buy new (expensive)
They replaced a simple to identify problem with something that seems to be the entire system.
They just found the perfect excuse to fool people
@frd1963 not a wise decision. Replacing a battery is cheap and not very complicated, also easy to identify. They masked a simple problem making it look complicated and expensive.
Notifying the user the battery is no good (like on a laptop when it tells you it’s time to replace the battery) and suggesting a slow down is the correct action. Their solution made ppl spend a lot of money unnecessarily
@mwgm I think you fail to realize that for some people, a phone suddenly shutting down is not a normal experience and not acceptable, not even, I hope, among non-Apple users.
I would MUCH rather have a device that does what it can with available resources rather than refusing to do anything at all until I go get those resources upgraded. I agree that an even better design decision would have been to issue some sort of notification or at least a log entry as to which resources are causing a bottleneck so that it can be addressed, or at least explained, but not shut off when your battery is getting old, which batteries tend to do.
@frd1963 Exactly, batteries tend to get old. It’s a normal wear and it’s EXPECTED.
It’s not a software bug.
There’s a simple solution to it and they hid the problem to make ppl pay more.
If your phone dies once it’s not a brick, you can keep using it knowing it’s the battery, charging often and use not as much until you get it fixed.
Their solution makes your device %50 capable (just guessing) and you have no idea why, you just assume it got old.
There’s no need for all those resources info etc., most iphone users are not tech-savvy.
The battery draining fast, phone dying when it does is very simple and obvious and much more user friendly.
Someone that has no issues with the phone being slow will never max resources and make it suddenly shut down.
Those that do have an issue with it being slow were duped into buying a new one when the obvious easy cheap solution was kept hidden from them.
Pissed me off a bit, because it influenced my wife to buy an expensive new one when I could have just replaced her battery. You just try telling her that she doesn’t need to spend used car money on a phone…
Yeah, but now you can go to the Apple Store and get a new battery installed for $29. Win!
@katbyter Here are the details of how to claim it.
www.hot-deals.net/co/121/
How else did you expect them to react, I remember all the posts with users screaming and moaning when their iphones would just cut out… they fixed it.
Should they have mentioned that in the notes when they did the fix? Sure.
@thismyusername it was in the notes. People don’t read them.
@grj they went back and added that line, after the fact. but people don’t read them generally it is true.
@thismyusername
@grf
If we read all the tech notes, T&C’s, and contracts in full for products and services we interact with, we wouldn’t have time to eat or work.
Apple software and hardware engineers and Apple execs don’t read these for most of the products in their lives, either.
It’s incumbent on the business to publicize in large print any terms or conditions that might come back and bite them in the ass later; unless the business’s partners and customers are mostly powerless, and have no recourse in any case.
@f00l Deep.
/image Socrates
@f00l by reading this reply you agree to the terms and conditions.
@eonfifty
Me: derp.
/giphy derp
@f00l
/image Socrates bill Ted
Well apple sucks so there’s that
At least on Android, the battery saving option to throttle the cpu is an option. Apple didn’t give any option, that’s where the fail is.
@cengland0 Agreed. There should be an option in Settings to disable this “feature” at the discretion of the user.
@ruouttaurmind The issue is that Apple forces the updates. I put off updating my 6 plus for 6 months, clicked the “Not now” button for update and the phone locked and performed a “manditory update”. Apple has the option to throttle but when the phone is that out of date, you run the risk of an old phone going into a boot loop because it can’t keep up with the new OS.
@cengland0 @ruouttaurmind Disabling the feature will be coming in iOS 11.3:
@brhfl Great! I already get 4 days 'tween charges, so if I turn that off and get three days between charges, but restored performance, I’m a happy camper!
I think iPhone users deserve this.
I’d like to take this opportunity to boast about my phone brand and how long I’ve used it for.
@scardabums
Personally, I use the XKCD Phone 3.
@DVDBZN
What happened to the days when mobile phones would last days, even weeks, on a single charge? Oh yeah, someone had to put a power draining touch screen on a WiFi router that could play music and make calls (sometimes)!
@hchavers Moto E4 Plus. 5 amp battery means two full days with average use.
http://www.techradar.com/reviews/moto-e4-plus/2
@narfcake I usually get about 4 days from my 2 year old iPhone 6 Plus. But I make/receive few calls, so I’m sure that helps.
@hchavers i get a minimum of 2 days on my iphone x. i understand you’re used to your Nokia being able to play snake for weeks without a charge…but the new snake game is very draining on your battery.
@hchavers If I don’t play games on it my Pixel will go a couple of days on a charge. That’s using it for calls, texts, maps, looking up stuff, etc. And I keep the display on full brightness and don’t have anything set to increase battery life. If I used a more conservative battery profile I’m sure it would go four days on a charge.
I’m still one of the near 0%-ers with a Windows Phone.
@narfcake I’m sorry.
@narfcake as an iphone user…if Microsoft actually came out with the Surface phone, i would heavily consider it
@narfcake I still think windows phone is the best mobile OS I’ve used. Had to give mine up after they renegged on allowing my Lumia 928 to upgrade, and, uh, made it clear they didn’t want to make phones anymore.
Glad to hear somebody is still making it work.
Makes me want to throttle Apple.
But I want to do that anyway, so …
No diff?
Much ado about nothing.
Where’s my “Don’t care, I use Android” option?
@KMakato Yep. Never liked Apple products. Too much telling the user how they like things, instead of allowing people to customize their experience. Every time I pull out my Samsung in front of an I Phone user, they see my calendar right on the front page and ask about it. Then I show them all the cool widgets they don’t have.
@Fuzzalini that’s because your iphone user friends are dumb and don’t know how to use their phone
I’m so outraged that I’m going to keep never buying an iPhone.
Because we all know none of the other tech companies would do anything like that.
/giphy eyeroll
Android phones also throttle, and have also been known to cut out because of battery problems. This is a battery thing that is universal.
Where it becomes a special Apple thing is where they designed a phone having a battery was only meh-adequate for maybe a couple years (but boy is that phone uselessly thin), forgot to tell anybody that replacing batteries was even a thing, and decided it’d be better PR / better for users to silently fix the inadequate battery -> shutdown problem via throttling than actually clue anyone in.
The throttling itself is something that I’m glad is in place on my phone. It’s a cool bit of engineering. But Apple’s stupid approach to batteries, hardware design, and thinking they know best (though… they sometimes do) have always pissed me off, and always will.
@InnocuousFarmer Except in Android, you can turn that feature on or off.
If I press “Mid”:
Then it will throttle my CPU. But that was my choice.
@cengland0 I said that not clueing people in / communicating options was part of the problem that was fair to blame on Apple.
I think you misunderstand the problem that’s being addressed here, though. It’s not about battery life. It’s about phones shutting off suddenly. Apple opted to “fix it in software”, for the set of phones affected, rather than try to describe publicly the full spectrum of potential fixes.
(Edit) the widespread, almost willful miscommunication of the issue kind of makes you sympathetic to Apple’s point of view.
@InnocuousFarmer
What options? From what I understand from reading comments, you can ignore the update by clicking “Later” then it would force it as a required update the next time. There are no options to keep your phone the way it was. Some people might actually want the faster CPU and then shut off suddenly. Who knows?!?!? It could easily have been made an option and then this would be no problem.
@cengland0 the notion of including a shoot yourself in the foot switch aside, I meant, primarily, the option of getting a new battery.
I remember when this was a problem. It happened to my phone. Apple’s response was something like “oops we made phones that shut off on you. Hang on… ok, we fixed it.”
If they had gone fully public at that point, doing what they’re doing now, saying “our fix involves throttling the CPU and turning off nonessential hardware, when necessary. If you do a lot of performance-intensive phone activities, or care a lot about UI responsiveness, you might want to take advantage of our battery upgrade program,” then, people would think that all perceived slowness meant that they needed a new battery, when mostly they didn’t.
They should have included UI feedback that lets people know when battery-related things happen, like they’re doing now, some quiet battery health metrics. That would have avoided this.
Apple’s always taken the stance that they better know how to handle throttling hardware to maximize battery life than an end-user does. With iPhones, I don’t think including a “go slower” switch would make a big difference in battery life — you’d just have misguided people making their phones worse for no good reason.
Apple did put in a low power mode option recently, that’s analogous to the one in your answer. It’s not a CPU throttle switch, though. It shuts off a lot of background activity that makes a meaningful difference, and it’s a case where a user’s input would tend to serve their interests.
Pushing software updates hard as a matter of policy is kind of a different thing. Currently, you can defer them indefinitely, though, still. You just tap later, and then, something like “later” on the second screen. The reason people wouldn’t have done that is because they wouldn’t have known that the fix involved a slower phone some of the time. (And because it was a good fix, short of getting a better battery.)
@InnocuousFarmer I do think I remember my phone being eligible for a free battery replacement, actually… back when the shutdowns were first happening. I’m going to see if I can get in on that.
@InnocuousFarmer I was going by one of the posts above that said this:
As for me, I update to the latest OS version as soon as possible. I assumed they fixed bugs and patched security holes. I don’t assume they make anything worse. But I guess that what I deserve for making assumptions.
@InnocuousFarmer It’s interesting that the low power mode you mention (the non-throttling one) a: asks you before turning it on; b: provides a visual indicator that it is on; and c: lets you know when it has automatically turned itself off. The throttling mechanism, on the other hand, just silently does its thing…
@brhfl Yeah, I think the difference is in predictable power loss (something a user can handle), vs. unpredictable sudden failure (something a user can’t handle).
@cengland0 Maybe there was an update that was mandatory and I’m off base… I did put off iOS 11 for probably about that long, wanting to keep 32-bit compatibility around. It was obnoxious, but I never ran into a mandatory update…
They do pretty consistently improve… everything other than performance. That pretty reliably degrades with updates.
@InnocuousFarmer
Well, Motorola and HTC said they don’t throttle power. Maybe if Apple focused on improving battery technology, then this wouldn’t be happening.
@DVDBZN Or simply had consumer replaceable batteries like The Note 1 through 4 did. You would have thought that after the Note 7 battery issue, Samsung would have made it simple to replace the battery on the Note 8 but NOPE! Going the same way Apple did.
I can understand having a consumer replaceable battery makes it hard to be water proof. However, I don’t go swimming with my phone so I’d rather it not be water proof and allow me to change the battery.
@cengland0 Samsung made the battery replacement WORSE.
https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Samsung+Galaxy+Note8+Teardown/97071
The regular isn’t any easier.
https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Samsung+Galaxy+S8+Teardown/87136
https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Samsung+Galaxy+S8%2B+Teardown/87086
How Apple looks:
https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone+8+Teardown/97481
https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone+X+Teardown/98975
@narfcake True that it might be a little worse but it was never intended to be a consumer replaceable battery anyway. You need a little experience before taking on the challenge to replace it on any modern phone.
I did find this interesting though:
iPhone 8, this 3.82 V, 1821 mAh cell will deliver up to 6.96 Wh of power.
@cengland0 I love my Galaxy S8.
@therealjrn That’s the one I almost bought until I found a killer deal on Swappa for the Note 8. Couldn’t turn down that deal.
@cengland0 If it was consumer replaceable, then it’s a $15 sale versus an $800 one. And the manufacturers and shareholders can’t let that happen!
@narfcake Yup, it’s what I would call planned obsolescence.
Imagine buying a laptop where you cannot replace the hard drive, memory, or CPU. Oops, Apple does that too. All those components are soldered on the motherboards of their laptops. So if your laptop breaks, good luck getting the data off that SSD that is soldered on.
@cengland0 Yep.
Oh, you want more storage? That’d be $300 for the larger soldered SSD because heaven forbid a consumer could’ve purchase an SSD of that size for $120.
@narfcake Exactly. That’s the same with the storage on their iPhones.
iPhone 8 with 64GB = $699
iPhone 8 with 256GB = $849
Difference is $150 for 192GB
Samsung 256GB U3 MicroSD Card = $130 and you can use that in addition to the memory you already have and can remove it, replace it, transfer it, etc.
In a funny coincidence, Apple just announced they’ll be adding a switch to turn the throttling off:
"Users can now see if the power management feature that dynamically manages maximum performance to prevent unexpected shutdowns, first introduced in iOS 10.2.1, is on and can choose to turn it off. "
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/01/apple-previews-ios-11-3/
@dave That’s interesting. I don’t think they should have put that switch in there, by rights… then again, I don’t see how they could avoid it, at this point. What do you think the over/under is that Apple has to do another round of explaining, this time about how they exercised an abundance of caution with their throttling behavior.
We’ve been warning the fanbois about this for years. Never bought apple, never will. Unless it’s an iPod nano, those are still legit.
Some of the apple hater responses here are hilariously, willfully ignorant. Bah bah evil Apple slowing our stuff down. Dudes, they made design decisions and some of them ended up being problematic, then they did the best they could to mitigate issues for users. Bottom line - batteries degrade, period. At least they didn’t BLOW UP and hurt you. Apple’s MO is to remove cognitive friction in their interactions, and so it is easily understandable why they would silently throttle extremely degraded batteries rather than presenting a new setting you have to fiddle with just to use their phone. It is completely understandable why they would go this route given their design philosophy - it’s the option that least ruins interaction with their phone as it shipped. It is the correct solution for probably 90% of users/situations, but not all, especially since the phones have been leaps and bounds ahead of the competition cpu performance-wise for several years. Unfortunately they didn’t think through the PR implications of doing this, and now they have idiots screaming bah bah Apple purposefully sabotages our phones so we buy new ones. Oh yes, because bad phones are totally what makes people want to keep getting iPhones…we need to take your logic behind the shed and shoot it.
@elephant
@elephant
And … Sometimes problematic. Predictably. Resulting in cognitive friction in their interactions.
Hey there, Apple!
@elephant
Huh? What? Source please.
The A11 Bionic is 2.39 Ghz and is only 2 cores. It has 4 other cores that are much slower for a total of 6 cores.
The Snapdragon is a quad core at similar speeds (up to 2.45 Ghz but I don’t know why the following chart only states 2.35). Then it has 4 more cores at 1.9 Ghz for a total of 8 cores.
For a phone that costs more than the competition, you would expect it would be better wouldn’t you? But then I’m not so sure it is. I’d like to see your source on it.
@elephant
It’s their marketing. They have one of the best marketing teams of any company. This is how they get people to pay top dollar for mediocre products.
Apple finally put wireless charging in their phones and it seems everyone is jumping up and down like that is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Samsung (and others) have had Qi charging capabilities as long ago as the Note 2 – maybe longer but that’s when I noticed. They are now up to the Note 8. Apple is not as innovative as you might think. They have become reactive to the market now instead of proactive.
Don’t say that I’m an Apple hater either. Im typing this on a Macbook Pro Retina with a 27" external Apple Monitor, have a Macpro 12 Core, an iPad Pro 12.9", and an iPhone 5 (Yes, an older model but I like it better than the 6). However, I also have 2 android tablets, the Samsung Note 8, and a Windows PC. I can see pros and cons of each system and that’s why I have a little of everything.
I think I’m qualified to give my opinion but let the sales figures speak for themselves. For 2017, “Apple sold 74.83m smartphones worldwide, ahead of the 73.03m phones sold by Samsung”. But keep in mind that Samsung is just one player in the Android market. They may be the biggest but once you add in all the others, Android far exceeds Apple sales.
+1 for the use of the word kerfuffle.
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