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Apple has been accused of slowing down old iPhones by tying performance to battery condition. This could cause some users to upgrade to a newer model rather than get the battery replaced:
Apple may be slowing down older iPhones in order to counteract problems with decreased battery capacity, according to Primate Labs founder John Poole. The news could add fuel to the conversation around planned obsolescence—the idea that tech companies purposely slow down older devices to encourage users to buy new models. Claims of planned obsolescence have hit almost all the big firms, and have reached the status of a major conspiracy theory in many tech circles.
In a recent blog post, Poole, whose company created the Geekbench benchmarking system, set out to detail the data behind a particular Reddit post claiming that Apple was slowing down iPhones with low-capacity batteries. The user was getting lower-than-expected scores on Geekbench, which improved after they replaced the battery in their iPhone 6S.
[...] Of course, part of the battery issues have to do with the changes that came with iOS 10.2.1, Poole wrote. Apple introduced the update to combat a bug causing the sudden shutdown of iPhone 6 and 6S models. "I believe (as do others) that Apple introduced a change to limit performance when battery condition decreases past a certain point," Poole wrote in the post.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 19 2017, @08:08PM (3 children)
After suffering "the slows" on a few well used ThinkPad XP laptops, I've often wondered if IBM/Lenovo and/or MS had some planned obsolescence built in. Whatever it is, it doesn't seem to appear in diagnostics I've tried and it doesn't go away even with a complete re-install of the OS (from the hidden partition). Eventually the machine gets so slow that it has to be retired.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by etherscythe on Tuesday December 19 2017, @10:01PM
Try reinstalling to the patch level that it originally shipped with. The default Windows 7 SP1 image has ballooned from ~4GB on original media to twice that or more just with the updates integrated and recaptured. That's a lot of post-sale "value" added!
"Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 20 2017, @12:17AM (1 child)
CPUs do slow down when they start to overheat. Hard drives start failing and slow down as they have to rewrite data to different sectors behind the scenes. Etc... When XP came out people were upgrading computers every couple years. No one would have expected a laptop to be used for 15 years. There was no reason for planned obsolescence because tech advances ensured the next model was a massive improvement which was worth getting. Most of the tech companies weren't addicted to subscriptions yet. Unless the laptop was only a couple years old, there's no reason to jump to conspiracies.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Wednesday December 20 2017, @08:35PM
CPU thermal paste dried up : ( Easy fix on a desktop!
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