Apple Confirms It Degrades Your Old iPhone

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2017/12/20/apple-iphone-kill-switch-ios-degrade-cripple-performance-battery/?utm_source=yahoo&utm_medium=partner&utm_campaign=yahootix&partner=yahootix&yptr=yahoo#34b4faa316a8

by kjhughes • 9 years ago

73 39 9 years ago

forbes.com

_sdegutis• 9 years ago

So basically it does what’s reasonable to protect your hardware. Not really worthy of the ominous clickbait title here.

for55• 9 years ago

If you buy a car with a V8 engine, and after a few months it decides to become an L4 engine, without telling you, is that ok? The headline is completely correct.

rubbingalcohol• 9 years ago

I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted when Apple advertises performance as a selling point of their devices.

lovehashbrowns• 9 years ago

I really don't think that's the case here. This issue is probably related to the battery, but the fact that there was no notice indicates to me that there are ulterior motives at play here. Obviously their corporate-speak is going to highlight the one kernel of truth in the matter, and they'll never admit that this was done for the side-effect that it would have on sales of new devices.

jackvalentine8• 9 years ago

I just wish they'd been more transparent - perhaps a message in the battery section of settings saying "your performance may be impacted because of your degraded battery. It's recommended you replace it" or something.

New batteries are $119AU which I think is a reasonable price to pay after two years or so.

Everyone knows components in cars need replacing, including batteries, so I think people can be reasoned with in to accepting the same is for consumer goods you want to keep beyond the average phone contract term.

simonblack• 9 years ago

"I just wish they'd been more transparent "

I don't see it as a lack of transparency. That smacks of underhand and fraudulent behaviour. I won't buy another iPhone.

In a similar vein, you can no longer move photos from your computer to your iPhone unless you subscribe to the paid Cloud service. iTunes will no longer allow you to do that.

jackvalentine8• 9 years ago

OK.

godelmachine• 9 years ago

Since when was this restriction imposed ?

Justin_K3• 9 years ago

119 for a $5 battery is not reasonable.

jackvalentine8• 9 years ago

With installation and warranty on the work carried out it's entirely reasonable.

narrator2• 9 years ago

I paid $10 for my brand new Galaxy Note 4 battery and it took 30 seconds to replace. My note 4 isn't slow at all either.

It's the end of Moore's law and they are going to start pulling this stuff so you upgrade, because the new phones just aren't that much better. Meanwhile, I'll stick to Note 4s still they stop making them and I can't get them used. Perfect phone, imho.

Danilka• 9 years ago

WTF, from 1400mhz to 600?! This is a one hundred percent push of new product onto people with a good preemptive coverup!

If a person uses their iPhone regularly, they will go through the battery cycles that Apple defined and he or she is a loyal customer, hence the usage. No one knows that you "suppose to" update the battery and it's not easy. So, people just buy new phones.

I am amazed that everyone is just cool with this. It is an extremely clever strategy and results in billions in extra sales for Apple.

sjg007• 9 years ago

Queue class action lawsuits.

ericzawo• 9 years ago

Why aren't more people talking about this? iPhones are wildly popular and this is a gigantic confirmation of something the public has suspected for years.

analogmemory• 9 years ago

It’ll be all over the news tomorrow.

rkhassen• 9 years ago

A co-work of mine sent me this article after his iPhone 6S slowed down considerably after installing iOS 11. He thought that his battery was defunct and causing the issue.

I suggested he turn off the animations that are designed to run on the latest phones and are more processor intensive. (One other thing that will help, however, is to cut back on the transition animations in iOS 11. Go to Settings > General > Accessibility > Reduce Motion and toggle it to off.) And like magic, his phone ran as fast as it ever did!

I did the same thing with my sluggish iPhone 5, and did a reinstall clearing all my data, and it runs really great now, as if it were brand new!

Makes me wonder how many people will think they have the battery issue when in reality they have features turned on that will inherently bog down the older phones. You'd think Apple would auto detect the model and by default have features like animation turned off. But perhaps their motivation is not to give their customers the best experience?!?

f you want to speed up your older iPhone, this article covers most of what I did for my iPhone 5 last year: http://bgr.com/2017/09/19/ios-11-features-iphone-how-to-spee...)

Totally aside from the above, I turned off the animations on my iPhone X and it seems to run slower. Not sure what that is all about.

lathiat• 9 years ago

Turning off animations feels (to me) faster even on the same phone and OS version. Probably a false sense.

Perception...

nkristoffersen• 9 years ago

Apple did disable some graphic effects for older phones during one of the big changes. I recall the iPhone 4 didn't blur the backgrounds like newer phones.

rlanday• 9 years ago

iOS 11 had some stability issues on my 6s. It got a lot better when I installed 11.1.

funwie• 9 years ago

I see no situation where slowing phone‘s performance is better compared to giving the user options to improve phone’s performance. Something is fishy.

mankash666• 9 years ago

Let's cut into Apple's bullshit. LiOn ageing is not unique to Apple. The problem is that their batteries are so horribly low powered (1800 mAh for iPhone 6s), especially for the price of the overall phone, that normal known ageing patterns would render the battery below spec of max power the iPhone draws at peak performance. It's BAD design. Note 8 ships with 3300mah and iPhone X with 2700mah. Both cost a $1000. Which one do you think will last longer if 2500mah were the max power threshold?

goombastic• 9 years ago

They should change their marketing; 50% faster than before*

In small letters: *for 500 charge cycles. After that it will run at the speed of your coffee maker.

Apple Confirms It Degrades Your Old iPhone

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