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Apple iPhones Appear to Slow Down as Battery Condition Degrades: Planned Obsolescence?

posted by janrinok on Tuesday December 19 2017, @07:45PM   Printer-friendly

takyon writes:

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.

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  • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday December 20 2017, @04:39PM

    by urza9814 (3954) on Wednesday December 20 2017, @04:39PM (#612354) Journal

    When the battery degrades, just leave the phone plugged in to the wall all day, like a landline.

    Or, you know, the phone could, like, slow down, to conserve battery, dude, bro, like, whoa.

    My Android phone has special power saving modes, but they don't hide the settings from me and it doesn't automaticcaly and invisibly activate itself. First off, people might want to enable to power saving feature for other reasons, like if the battery is low and they aren't near a charger. If you're implementing the feature, it makes sense to provide access to it. Secondly, it's nice to know what the hell is going on, instead of just degrading the users' experience without explanation. And keeping the power saving mode on even when plugged in or with power saving settings explicitly disabled is just inexplicable.

    Having a power saving mode is smart. Implementing it the way Apple did is just being an asshole.

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