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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: 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.