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Apple Acknowledges iPhone 4S Battery Problems
bdking writes "After more than two weeks of complaints from frustrated iPhone 4S owners, Apple finally has admitted problems with fast-draining batteries in the new devices. The company blames it on bugs in iOS 5 and promises a fix 'in a few weeks.' But Apple should have spoken up sooner, if only to acknowledge the issue."
I don't think there are any issues. iPhone is designed to be used. I use mine so much during the day that I have to recharge it anyway while I'm sleeping. And it's great. I understand why owners of other phones don't really use them, but I love playing while on the move, and listen to music. When it's time for me to unwind, it's time for my iPhone to unwind too, and I put it recharging right next to me on bed.
But Apple should have spoken up sooner, if only to acknowledge the issue.
It's been pretty quick by corporate standards and Apple don't exactly have a reputation for owning up to mistakes. I think this is a good response by them.
With Apple's reality distortion field totally disabled, this can no longer be turned into a feature for the end user.
My outlook does not look good.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Can we keep the blatant opinions out of the articles, and save them for the comments?
My experience from working for completely different companies is that the standard approach to product flaws is to ignore them completely or at least stay quiet until your people in-house have verified the problem and are halfway done with a fix or workaround (or the lawyers have concluded that the company isn't liable in which case it is somehow not a problem anyway no matter what the customers claim).
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
From the summary:
"But Apple should have spoken up sooner, if only to acknowledge the issue."
What a load of shit. The device has been out for about three weeks at this point. How many other companies actually work this quickly to actually determine whether or not a problem exists, determine what the problem actually is, and then start working on a fix? I wish the companies that I regularly deal with were remotely as responsive to issues.
Had this been an issues with a new blackberry, you know they would be crucified. The media loves to let apple getaway with stuff like this all the time, but any mistakemade by RIM and it means the end of the company. If this is a software bug, why are we waiting weeks for a fix? Because apple knows they can do as they please, and these devices will still fly off the shelves faster then they can build them.
-EL
Apple has been asking users for assistance in narrowing down this issue. There is no "finally". They generally don't talk about things that they don't have information on. If they had spoken up sooner, they would have simply been able to say nothing other than, "hey, people, don't buy our phone, wait for some indeterminate amount of time until we can solve an issue that may or may not even exist, and my only affect a small fraction of our customers".
probably just holding it wrong
...for a replacement battery?
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Have they pattented having a fast-draining battery yet?
My old Nokia from the 90's used to drain the battery fast- perhaps they can retro-actively sue Nokia.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
It's a fact of life that faster chips consume more power, and Apple may have taken a bite the battery can't chew. Faster didn't equate to better in this revision I think.
Just carry a second (or third) charged battery and switch it when the battery is drained.
How else is the device supposed to record your every move?
You have to say something inflammatory about someone or something.
What problem? You're probably just using the phone wrong.
" With Apples new iCloud it's never been easier to carry a backup iPhone! "
Has iOS5 really been that much of a battery killer? I didn't notice a different on my ipad, though I'd only been using it a few days prior to the update.
You are charging it wrong.
I generally find that Apple gets crucified over the smallest issue because a headline with "Apple" in it will get read.
This is why you had some Android phones literally falling apart being reported on a couple tech sites, but rare iPhone screen cracking was worthy of the Washington Post.
At least Apple went directly for the "we can fix it in software" rather than trying the "you're holding it wrong" ploy...
Now this? Is apple even testing these before they go?
For those who seek perfection there can be no rest on this side of the grave.
it has problems with time-travel and mind-reading.
Good people go to bed earlier.
If there is one thing I have learned, nowadays no company will admit that their product has a problem. It opens them up to liability. Due to the litigation-happy society we live in, companies now find it wiser and safer to deny their product has an issue.
Personally, I would much rather a company come out and say, "Yeah, there is an issue we've uncovered and we are working on the fix." I can live with that. If it is an issue they can't fix in a timely manner, of course I would want to return the product and get my money back until they have it fixed. But, to have the company duck the issue when it is obvious? I find that insulting. I would rather bring my hard-earned money to a company that is being fair and honest with me than one that is being evasive and lying.
As much as I am satisfied with the Apple products I own, I usually warn people to never buy the latest and greatest from Apple right off the bat. Often, there is such a glitch in the item. It is best to wait a few months so the bugs can be worked out and then buy the new toy. (Admittedly, I don't always follow this advice, myself.)
Whew! This water sure is cold!
Holy fuck people. Smarten up.
If you're in charge of a big company & reports start coming in that your new product might have a bug in it, you don't immediately run to Twitter / Facebook / Slashdot and scream at the top of your lungs "THERE'S A PROBLEM IN THE IPHONE 4S! RUN! RUNNNNNNNNNN!"
You collect data, analyze it, and then make an announcement.
I'm sure there are more than a few sysadmins that read Slashdot. And sysadmins: how many times is the user right, versus how many times does the user fuck something up / not understand the situation & start placing blame where it doesn't belong.
Yeah. Exactly. So the smart thing to do when something crops up like this is to investigate, analyze and then act. That's what Apple did, and they should be commended for it.
Yes. I'm a pissed off grumpy sysadmin. No, I don't love Apple. But I do appreciate common fucking sense - which many of you seem to lack. You're just out to burn/bitch/complain about Apple. Sad.
I was holding it wrong
When should Apple acknowledge the issue? When some users are saying they have a problem, when others are saying they don't? (Many people, myself included, have not encountered this issue). Such problems can be very difficult to track down. How does Apple know if it is a real issue? Maybe the people who are complaining have unrealistic expectations, or are using their phones in a different way. After all, the iPhone 4s has new features, which might cause some people to place a heavier demand on the battery. How many people are encountering the problem? is it 10%? 1%? 0.001% (which would still be quite a few phones). Is it a manufacturing defect, or a software problem? Is there any point in acknowledging the issue if all that you are able to honestly say is something noncommittal like, "Well, we've had some reports, but we haven't yet been able to reproduce them, and we really have no idea at all what's going on or how many people are having this problem, but we're investigating the issue"? Or is it better to wait until there is something substantive to say?
I actually had the same problem with my first-generation iPhone. I didn't even bother reporting it to Apple until I had it figured out, because a bug report that just says "Sometimes my battery runs down really fast" is virtually useless. I eventually figured out that the battery died if I left the Clock application in the foreground while the phone was asleep. I filed a bug report with Apple, and after the next system update, I got an email message that said, "We believe that the bug that you reported has been fixed. Can you verify?"
I found the antenna problem on the iPhone 4 quite hard to reproduce. I had to clutch it uncomfortably hard to see anything, and I saw about the same degree of attenuation if I clutched my 3gs tightly near the bottom. My suspicion is the iPhone 4 didn't actually have unusually bad attenuation, and that the true problem was that the visible antenna gave people an idea of exactly where to clutch it to kill the reception.
I'm waiting for some guy from Apple to tell people that they are holding the phone wrong or something.....
Huh?
Problem: My Apple product does not appear to be the coolest thing I own. It does not seem to be revolutionizing my daily workflow, shifting the paradigms of my life philosophy or allowing me to think outside the box. Women in bars do not come up to me and coo "Ooh, that's amazing; can I touch it?" Men do not give me jealous looks when I walk down the street. Friends and neighbors do not appear to think I am more interesting than I was before purchasing this product.
Solution: Examine Apple stock price. Watch mainstream media. Indisputably, Apple products are the coolest and the best. Adjust mindset until user is functioning correctly.
But didn't you get the memo? This is slashdot. Here, you spread your legs and let Apple fuck you in the ass while constantly moaning thank you in their general direction. At the same time, if Google does something right, you are immediately supposed to ignore it, find a shill article and post it right away where "samzenpus" is waiting to accept it and post promptly.
Fuck samzenpus, and fuck the editors.
Put all the sneering and hate right into the headlines and summaries -- and the comments suddenly start to be reasonable... Who would have thought that?
Really, iOS 5 and the 4S have been out for about three weeks now, some people started to notice problems, Apple had to reproduce the problems and track down the bugs and fix the code and now there's 5.01 beta out. In my book that is just perfectly quick, nothing to complain about.
People are once again getting fucked over with shoddy Apple products, be it defective batteries (you can get ones that work for just $100 extra), defective antennas (you must be holding your phone wrong) or now, either defective batteries again OR defective software. But appletards just bend over and yell "Oh yeah, I want that apple deep in my ass! Give me more! Please raise the prices so I can feel even better about myself!"
The coolest thing you own is probably your ice maker.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
If it's using too much power when it's not supposed to be doing anything, it's probably doing something it shouldn't be doing when it's not supposed to be doing anything.
The question is, what?
Exactly.
Which is why I still carry a 5 year old Nokia phone that is just a phone (well, OK it has a crappy camera). It may look boring... but it does what I need it to do.. Ring when someone calls me.
I hope that when it finally does I will be able to find another simple phone only phone, without having to be forced into buying a 'smartphone'....
Huh?
my new iPhone 4S out of the box had a fast draining battery. After messing with it in a completely non-scientific and non-systematic way and switching off some services (e.g., Ping) battery life is "normal" now. So it probably is a software issue.
NO CARRIER
Oh, and the battery still works.
Huh?
This is where whatevr thinkign went into sealing down the battery comes a cropper - there has to be absolutely no chance whatsoever of there being problems with it, such as draining so quickly a spare becomes essential. Whoops!
Keep in mind that with the advent of the interweb and social media, people can be a lot more vocal a lot easier. Suppose Apple sells a million iPhones in the first couple weeks worldwide, and half a percent of people are having an issue with something. That's 5000 angry people, whom a good proportion of which are going to jump on internet forums and such. The end result is that you get a couple of very busy forums and tech sites with angry customers, but the reality is it might not be a very big issue, or an issue at all.
I do think Apple is pretty responsive, though. Yes, they're a big corporate giant, but yes, I do sincerely believe someone at Apple gives a shit. That's partly what makes Apple... Apple. Look at Antennagate - they admitted to this issue fairly promptly (within a month), and ultimately ponied up to make a reasonble resolution. Short of a class action lawsuit, they're not really obligated to do much at all. Caveat emptor. There's no law that says you can't sell a shitty product.
...where it connects for 17-20 seconds, then disconnects, waits for a while (anywhere from ~20 seconds to 3 minutes) then connects again, then disconnects, and keeps doing this repeatedly, over and over, incessantly. The WiFi access point is only about 30 feet away, the RF signal is strong and the logfile of the AP is full of nothing but the iPhone 4S's endless stream of connects and disconnects. Does this same behavior both on a Cisco Aironet commercial access point and a D-Link consumer-grade wifi router.
Surely this cannot be good for the 4S's battery either.
Two weeks after initial reports of poor battery life Apple has found that the problem was cased by the IOS 5 update. A beta of IOS 5.0.1 which should resolve the issue is already available for developers.
iOS 5.0.1 beta contains improvements and other bug fixes including:
Fixes bugs affecting battery life
Adds Multitasking Gestures for original iPad
Resolves bugs with Documents in the Cloud
Improves voice recognition for Australian users using dictation
Contains security improvements
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I was afraid that the lower battery life was an attempt to try and copy the bad battery life of the top-end Android smart phones...
Blackberry has frequent network issues, iphone battery issues. Let's see what Android issues pop up the next few weeks...
Must Every.Single.Article. relating to Apple get trolled by Android fanbois and vice versa? Is this really worth your time, to argue inane points about some preferred phone OS you use? 90% of the comments on this article are worthless drivel. Sometimes I think the quality of /. commenting is going down hill in a big way, but then I see other sites forums with the same issues on the iOS/Android flame war. Are your lives really that shallow?
/. should do away with AC commenting. Sure you could still do it with a throwaway account but that effort would cut a lot of noise out of the system.
Perhaps
The coolest thing you own is probably your ice maker.
The ice it produces may be cold, but such machinery typically gets fairly hot.
I don't understand.. how.. the.. fuck... this is even possible. The hardware is APPLE'S. The software is APPLE'S. How is it possible that a product that's probably been in development for over a year could be released with a problem like this? Maybe this is harder for non-software types to understand, but this is incomprehensible. It'd be like Ford shipping thousands of vehicles and forgetting to put steering wheels in them. WHAT THE FUCK.
There's GOT to be some kind of subtext. Something weird is going on. You don't make a mistake like this. You just don't.
You keep the same form factor (and thus, the same (or nearly the same) battery) but you change a few chips
- more powerful 3D accelerator... which means more electricity hungry
- dual core processor instead of single core
And some other hardware increase which are electricity hungry. Even when you're on standby, the battery (which didn't change as it would have required a bigger case) will empty faster... and when you're actually USING these new performances, the battery will drain very fast.
In software, Apple can make the phone spend more time in "sleep" mode, with processor speed lowered and some subsystems turned off, but you can't bring it down to what iPhone 4 was. And when you're using the phone for 3D games and such, you'll probably be back to 1/2 day of battery expectancy.
Go to Settings->Location Services->System Services and turning off Setting TimeZone.
The battery is draining from GPS running almost constantly trying to determine your Timezone and is most likely to occur more when you are in a location with poor GPS signal, poor cellular service or both for an extended period of time. Turning off that feature fixes the drain for most people.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
They try not to implement something they know is going to screw things up, like battery-sucking free-for-all multitasking in a smartphone. They wait until they have a workable solution. Same for copy/paste. That's not to say Apple can't occasionally accidently do something that screws things up, like this.
Finally, like since Oct 28th
28 Oct 2011
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/oct/28/iphone-4s-battery-apple-engineers?INTCMP=SRCH
Looks like somebody's late for Hate Week
don't be a spelling loser
Had this been an issues with a new blackberry, you know they would be crucified.
Research In Motion HAS had plenty of issues lately and they have been crucified for them. Their stock price has taken an enormous beating, their phone offerings are mediocre at best, their strategy is muddled and they have had outages in their email service which is the single reason anyone still even cares about Blackberry devices.
The media loves to let apple getaway with stuff like this all the time, but any mistakemade by RIM and it means the end of the company
Blackberry has made a huge string of mistakes, most of them worse than Apple's missteps and yet they are still around. There is nothing wrong with RIM that a genuinely good phone won't fix. But they haven't produced such a device and don't appear to be in any danger of producing a good phone any time soon. Until they do, Android and Apple will continue to put RIM in the hurt locker.
If this is a software bug, why are we waiting weeks for a fix?
Quite possible because it takes that long to identify and fix the bug. Not to mention you need to actually test the fix before rolling it out to millions of phones. Of course we don't know for certain but it's not exactly difficult to figure out why it might take some time. Furthermore it appears to be something that isn't a showstopper and affects only a small percentage of users. Plus it seems pretty clear that some sort of fix is on the way soon. It's just not that big a deal.
Because apple knows they can do as they please, and these devices will still fly off the shelves faster then they can build them.
Even if true you only get that privilege by building a quality product that people like and trust. RIM has produced crappy phones that nobody really wants. People are buying Android and iPhones because they are quite simply better. While I'm sure they exist, I'm not personally aware of anyone who has purchased a Blackberry for personal use. Literally everyone I know has either an iPhone or some sort of Android device if they have a smartphone that was not provided by their company.
Apples recent* habit of blaming what seem to be hardware issues on the software makes me a little nervous about taking the plunge into what otherwise looks like a cool product. *If it goes back further I just haven't been paying attention.
She's got an eating disorder and she's gobbling down the battery like so many Twinkies. To fix it you'll have to hack into the core and disconnect her brain. She may put up a bit of a fight, but you've got a squishy human meat-brain on your side! Good luck!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Comments against /. on every post. Argument selection, opinions... Go reading something else, something fairly polite, if you like so!
Battery life on my 3GS was cut in anywhere from 1/2 to 1/3 when I went to iOS5.
And, of course, Apple doesn't let you downgrade.
You're holding it the wrong way!
Oh, they should have "acknowledged the problem sooner". So, basically rather than confirm what is going on, simply shoot from the hip and hope for the best, eh?
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I was having this problem with my iPhone 4 when I upgraded to iOS 5 - very sluggish performance and battery barely lasting 8 hours. I searched Google and found this - http://tinyurl.com/43z7rnd . Go to settings->Notifications->Calendar->Notification Center OFF. It completely fixed my battery drain problem without even restarting the phone! I'm predict that the "fix" will be related to the calendar notifications.
..compared to the reaction to the iPhone 4 antenna problem by Steve 'You're holding it wrong' Jobs.
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
Imagine an ideal product (e.g. a phone) that is advertised as having virtually no bugs. Suddenly a bug emerges and the company's share value drops 1%. What do you think the company should do in the future?
a. Do extensive and intensive beta testing and bug hunting for at least a year before the release of a new model, in order to avoid a future 1% drop (or more) in share value and possible firm reputation damages, or
b. Let the occasional bug leak in a controlled way every few months so that clients and the market get used to it ("oh, it's just a bug, it will be fixed in two-three weeks") and void the risk of share value drop?
Bear in mind that (a) is much more risky than (b), because when the next bug appears (the damned things tend to do that) the drop might be 2%. With (b) shareholders and clients get used to it, just say "oh well, shit happens" and get on with their lives.
To me it's not a bug, it's a strategy.
As someone who is not a fan of Apple - I take my hat off to the new Apple. Admiting there is a fault is a BIG change for Apple. After antenna-gate, I had to wonder ... now there's a new man at the helm, let me be the first to say "well done for being big enough to admit you have a problem".
AC
Apple has had quite a long history of denial about everything from product defects to the conditions under which its products are made. When I buy a product that carries a 150% (and often much, much higher) brand premium, I expect the brand to stand behind its products. And that is why I do not buy Apple products.
I wish my HTC android's battery lasted the 24 hours these users are complaining.
I have to change my phone 2,3 times a day and often and left out of power.
Got a new battery, new charger and still have the problem.
Can HTC/google do something about it?
Can HTC/google do something about it?
No, but you certainly can.
Root your HTC and install Cyanogenmod as a replacement O/S for HTC Sense and your battery life will probably double. Mine did. I can now go all day long on a single recharge.
Denial as a business model?!?
It's just crazy enough, it might work!
No, it would never work...
Poor battery life? Compared to what? With wifi hotspot and all other networking on, the test 4S I have for work runs 2 days of average use compared to one day from my 22 month old 3G. Clear the apps out of memory you're not currently using. Turn off all wifi and bluetooth unless you want to use it, shorten your screen-off timer and turn your screen off manually every time you finish using the phone and you'll get days out of the battery. Seriously, people, use your phones properly.