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from the a-suit-or-a-straightjacket? dept.
Apple is facing a class action lawsuit in California over slowing iPhone speeds as batteries age:
Residents of Los Angeles, Stefan Bogdanovich, and Dakota Speas have been represented by Wilshire Law Firm and both of them filed a lawsuit with the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. The plaintiffs are accusing Apple of slowing down their older iPhone models when newer models are released and this has been happening without their consent or approval.
Another class action lawsuit has been filed in Illinois [Ecmascript required]:
A day after Apple acknowledged that their software updates slow down older iPhone models, five customers have filed a federal lawsuit in Chicago against the tech giant for what they're calling "deceptive, immoral and unethical" practices that violate consumer protection laws.
The suit was filed Thursday by two Illinoisans along with Ohio, Indiana and North Carolina residents, who had a range of models from the iPhone 5 to the iPhone 7. They claim that Apple's iOS updates "were engineered to purposefully slow down or 'throttle down' the performance speeds" of the iPhone 5, iPhone 6 and iPhone 7.
[...] Apple partially confirmed the theory on Wednesday, releasing a statement admitting updates would slow down phones, but only to prevent devices with old batteries "from unexpectedly shutting down."
TechCrunch's defense of Apple. Also at Business Insider.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Saturday December 23 2017, @10:31PM (11 children)
Even for battery issues, this should be an informed choice: "Hey, we notice your battery is getting older, you have a choice here: A) or B), what would YOU like to do with YOUR phone?"
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 5, Informative) by jmorris on Sunday December 24 2017, @01:15AM (10 children)
That is retarded. The internal resistance in the battery was more than expected when they aged so the voltage regulation was failing under heavy CPU load. There isn't a choice here, option a is throttle the CPU and option b is random lockups / shutdowns. This is basic electrical theory, power consumption is V*I and V has to rise with CPU frequency on current CPU tech and since the circuit resistance[1] doesn't change much I will rise with it and that is a square. Ever wondered why a 25% overclock on a PC can often require extreme cooling solutions? If the battery can no longer deliver the power you have to avoid that situation. The only other option is battery replacement and have you looked up how much Apple charges for that? These phones are out of warranty.
I hate on Apple more than the average user here (and have the -1 Troll mods to prove it) but this is a case of a rage mob of the ignorant getting out the torches when Apple did the only sensible thing possible from an engineering standpoint. Accelerated ageing and computer modeling only go so far, these batteries simply didn't hold up as well as expected when they got into the field for a few years. It isn't nearly bad enough to justify yet another battery related recall since there is no safety issue, especially in phones where the battery is not user replaceable. People who bought these phones KNEW they were buying a disposable phone with a non-replaceable battery to get the slim phone and the all important fruit logo. So now they can either suck it up and live with it or be good consumers and get in line for a new phone like they should have a year ago.
[1] Oversimplification. Throw out everything you learned in DC class, in a modern CPU operating at UHF / microwave frequencies there is almost nothing that is a pure resistance, it is all hard as hell to model complex impedance.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Sunday December 24 2017, @02:09AM
Also worth noting the over-current protection circuits are likely insufficient if the batteries degrade to that extent which could lead to leaks, swellings and detonations.
compiling...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 24 2017, @03:37AM (2 children)
Fair enough, pleading ignorance of this _specific_ Apple quality and customer service issue. If it is as you say it is (and I do believe you), then their technical communications and marketing departments should have gotten together and crafted a brief, informative, thoughtful mea-culpa notice to accompany the slowing update and made sure that the message reached the majority of affected users.
Past Apple quality issues I do have specific first hand knowledge of: 2006 MacBookPro exploding battery recall - experienced the puffer first-hand. Same 2006 MacBookPro thermal paste application error to the GPU leading to no display system failures within days after warranty expiration. iPad One - $800 device rendered brick-ish after non-optional OS updates less than 2 years after purchase. Later iPads built with decidely non-brick-like materials, cracking and crumbling screens again within weeks of the warranty expiration (granted: devices were abused by children, but so was the iPad One and Kindle Fire, and they have lasted without a blemish for years and years...)
Other than a later iPad, Apple products in our home have been financed by outsiders (won in contest, provided by work, etc.) and at this point, if I have any choice in the matter at all, we won't even be letting other people's money be spent on Apple products on our behalf.
For recent phone abuse, I go to Google/LG and the Nexus 5 / 5x - they have their own horror stories, but at least they're not priced at a 4x markup over similar devices.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday December 24 2017, @06:38AM (1 child)
I could have gotten a replacement for free but I wanted to save mine for canadas equivalent to the consumer product safety commission
Apple eventually issued a recall
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 24 2017, @02:45PM
Oh, yeah, MacBookPro "MagLock" power cords have been a joke since 2006. Colleague of mine shredded his, so I was EXTREMELY careful in how I used mine, always pulled out by the plug not the wire, laid flat not twisted, etc. to no avail - mine also shredded within about a year, obvious exposed conductor fire hazard.
The only thing that wore out on the iPad One was the 30 pin cable connector. When I took it to the Apple store to buy a replacement, the Genius on staff proceeded to berate me for having an aftermarket cord: "see here how the design is different on the Genuine Apple product?" A) no, other than the fact that the new one is new and not falling apart yet it's basically the same crappy excuse of a strain relief design, B) this is the original equipment that was packed in the box with our iPad when it was new, C) after having told him A) and B) he continued to insist that the broken cable was aftermarket, I didn't even try D) well, the device is 2 years old so if this WAS an aftermarket cable what do you think happened to the OEM one? Come to think of it, that was indeed the last time I set foot in an Apple store... many years ago now.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Sunday December 24 2017, @10:50AM
Since it was Apple's choice to make the battery non-removable, they should be forced to replace them for no more than the actual cost of the replacement battery, independent of warranty.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 24 2017, @02:35PM (1 child)
Hey, what's retarded, I couldn't figure that out.
Is that that Apple opted to not inform the user as to what was happening so that users could decide for themselves how they'd like to proceed with either a repair or degraded performance or rationalize it as a reason to purchase a new phone, or is what is retardted is that Apple put in a helpful feature that had a side effect of selling new phones and that you believe this is OK, because consumers are retarded and their ignorance is bliss?
It could be a brick of bullshit that powered the phone, technical reasons don't really matter as to my question.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Sunday December 24 2017, @04:32PM
Apple tried to quietly deal with a problem and avoid a PR clusterfsck. In the age of the twitter ragemob. They will probably consider that retarded in hindsight. But I don't know what else would have worked in this situation in $current_year. Everybody loves piling onto a rage mob now. The other takeaway is that the Apple reality Distortion Field did die with Steve. Their Gay Diversity Hire lacks the charisma state to generate it, but it is doubtful anyone else could either.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday December 26 2017, @01:51PM (2 children)
Option b is how my Samsung works, and frankly I do think that's the better choice. Yes, sometimes the phone shuts down when it says 40% battery remaining if I'm using it heavily. That's fine, because *at least I know what the problem is*. If I need the battery to last longer, I can go into the settings and enable the power-saving features. If I want to actually fix the issue, I can go buy a new battery. But I'm not being tricked into thinking my processor is running slow and that I need to buy a whole new phone. Ultimately that's the main issue as far as I'm concerned -- they're not informing customers while making modifications to devices that have already been sold that will alter the device behavior.
What they should have done is included this modification as part of the standard power saving features. If they want, they can have it enable itself automatically, along with a pop-up warning explaining that it's been enabled due to poor battery performance. But doing it in a way that cannot be disabled, even when it's not needed, without even informing the customers is absolutely unacceptable.
From what I've read, there's no possible way to disable this "feature", and it's not intelligently applied -- so even if you're plugged in to a charger, you still lose performance. There's no technical reason for that, it's purely about trying to sell newer phones and kill the market for repairs by making it harder for people to know if any kind of repair is even possible.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Tuesday December 26 2017, @05:23PM (1 child)
Should they tell people when the battery is bad? Yes. But throttling IS the right solution to this particular battery fault. Unless iPhones are dumber than Android, it knows when a battery is bad. Try dialing "*#*#INFO#*#*" and pick Battery Info. Bet yours doesn't say "Battery Health: Good" All vendors should be exposing that information better. And yes, Samsung should be throttling yours to keep it from suddenly shutting down. That is called FAILURE and it is always a bad thing. It isn't something that should be in "power saving features" since those are to extend run time, this is a matter of slow down or fail right now because the device can no longer perform at original spec.
And plugging in not a cure all with a phone, they aren't laptops. When running heavy loads most will lose battery charge while connected to the charger. Almost none will even boot with the battery removed, again unlike a laptop. Their peak power demands exceed the charging current available via USB, often by a lot. Thus their power supply is designed so that they are always running from the battery. Batteries are the weak link in current technology, we just have to accept that until tech can advance to solve it. Designing phones with non-replaceable batteries is dumb in the current environment but everyone wants thin and/or water resistant which both tend to mandate sealed cases.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday December 26 2017, @06:37PM
Actually, that would be the responsibility of the devs over at LineageOS, as I wiped the Samsung software years ago. That stuff was trash. And I'm quite glad that LineageOS doesn't feel the need to fuck with my phone without my consent like you suggest they should. If I wanted it to stop shutting down, I know where the power saving features are. I don't enable them because I'd rather tolerate the instability than suffer degraded performance. If you disagree, you can go enable them on your phone, and we'd both be happy. That is an appropriate solution to this problem.
Right, the device can no longer perform at the original spec. That doesn't give the manufacturer permission to retroactively redefine the spec. If the battery degrades, let it degrade. My phone only gets one or two hours of battery life now, but that's fine. 20+ hours per day it's plugged in and it runs fine. If I need it to last all day, I grab an external battery pack. If that got too annoying, I'd replace the battery, but since I'm considering a new one soon I might as well wait. This change belongs under power saving features because that's what it's designed to do and because, frankly, that's the honest way to solve the problem. Maybe you'd rather dim the screen instead of throttling the processor, that's another way to reduce battery demand. Maybe you'd rather have some instability because you just can't do your work with the reduced processor speed. Maybe you're fine being tethered to the wall. These are all valid choices, and it would be great to let the user choose one. Picking one choice and forcing it on all users at all times is just scummy behavior.
True, but that depends on the charger. If I connect my phone to a ~500mA charger, it will lose charge while plugged in. If I connect to a 3A charger, it charges pretty damn quick no matter what I'm doing with it. But that charging-while-discharging issue also means the phone is clearly capable of sourcing power from both the charger and the battery at the same time, so if you're getting extra juice from the charger there's no reason it shouldn't be able to run full speed. Normally it can do that on battery alone, so a reduced battery should be able to make up the difference from the charger. It's not uncommon for me to walk around with my phone charging at 3 amps while the damn thing is stuffed in my pocket and that has always proven to be sufficient power to run it even when the battery shows 0%. But even if you've got an iPhone with a 10 amp battery bank supplying 3 amps of extra power, you're still going to be throttled the same as if you're running fully on battery.
Overall I'm fine with throttling *if it's explained*, and preferably voluntary. In this case they did neither, which leaves the users with no idea why their performance is degrading or how to fix it. In fact, it directly points them towards incorrect conclusions -- when Apple artificially limits the processor to preserve the battery, then of course the users are going to be looking for a problem with the processor rather than the battery, which is going to trick them into buying a new phone when they might be fine with a much cheaper battery replacement.
Personally, I'd rather have my phone crash than throttle, because when it flashes low battery and dies I know what caused it and I know how to throttle or upgrade as required to fix the issue. It's the usual performance vs stability argument, which comes with damn near any technology. But I'm fine with either solution as long as the reasons are transparent and configurable. Apple clearly put a lot of thought into this issue -- more than most manufacturers -- or they wouldn't have written the code to throttle. They clearly would have thought about how this change would impact the user. And they apparently decided they didn't need to inform anyone about those impacts. It's one thing for a company to do nothing and let their devices naturally degrade over time; it's quite another to actively try to obfuscate the true source of the problem. And THAT is the part that pisses me off the most about this.
OK, let's think about that for a minute.
Yes, they should be exposing that info better. Why? So people can be more informed about their devices.
What Apple has done here is going even further in the wrong direction. They're working harder to keep people in the dark, making it harder for the average user to understand their device, making it harder for them to properly maintain the thing and understand how their usage affects it. You're never going to get informed, competent users if you champion actions that are designed to keep those same users in the dark. Sure, there's a lot of people who will click 'ok' and read nothing and never look at the settings and never have a clue. But a few *will* read and understand and try to learn more. And for those who don't, at least the guy they ask to fix it can take a look at the settings and see the throttling enabled and have some hope of figuring out what's going on.
BTW -- I tried *#*#INFO#*#* and there's no battery info provided for my phone. The regular settings menu gives a pretty decent breakdown though.