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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."
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.
Other users and Apple disagree with you.
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.
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".
Some people have had problems. Others have not.
...for a replacement battery?
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
My outlook does not look good.
I use Gmail, myself...
The cake is a lie.
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.
Really? Apple's saying they've found software issues causing a problem and are beta testing a fix right now. Sure you wanna argue with that?
And although I'm happy with the 4S, and it's not dying on me before I get home from work, it's most certainly worse than the iPhone 4 I had. I can't wait for the update.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Just carry a second (or third) charged battery and switch it when the battery is drained.
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.
Because it's nothing more than a minor inconvenience for a small number of users? Great, your battery drains before the day's over. So what? Charge your phone more frequently for a couple of weeks while Apple looks into the issue. Come back and make your RIM comparison when half the iPhones in the world stop working for three days straight.
Jesus wept.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It is obvious that your case is not problematic. My iPhone 4S wastes battery at a 1%/hour rate if left on standby, which I find quite good. The complaints, however, are coming from people whose iPhones are sometimes wasting as much as 15%/hour on standby. I would complain about that myself if that was the case here, but it isn't.
I can, however, imagine that figuring out the conditions in which this happens is no easy task, which to me justifies the delay.
Something happened. I had a 4 and upgraded to a 4S. I noticed that by lunch, my 4S was down to 66% battery when before the 4 had been in the 80s or low 90s still, depending on how much I had used it for voice/data and how good my signal was (buildings that limit the signal seem to increase battery drain).
I turned off a bunch of apps in notification center and disabled some of the system location services and that seemed to reduce the drain about 75% -- I'm still 5-10% lower than I would have been on the 4, but its much better. The notification center changes seemed to help the most, I'm not sure that the location bug was affecting me, or the improvement is just too small to notice.
I assume based on my experience that maybe apps were being allowed too much or too frequent execution time for notifications, maybe coupled with some kind of location services bug.
There you go, proof that everyone else is just using 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?"
Well, the Samsung S2 is that "feature phone" that managed to switch my 11 years daughter from "I want an iPhone" to "What, this phone is way cooler than an iPhone". And concerning battery life, not even my daughter manages to drain the S2, despite her "instinctive" understanding of battery saving, e.g. using a 3D animated background or watching youtube videos for hours.
So, as hard as it might seem, Apple just lost most if not all it's technological superiority (arguable that this has happened earlier as in some ways even a T-Mobile G1 has been superior to the Apple phone of the day), so I guess Apple fanboys should start to concentrate on it's ugly^H^H^H^Hbeautiful design.
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.
The coolest thing you own is probably your ice maker.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
There you go, proof that everyone else is just using wrong!
Denial as a business model?!?
It's just crazy enough, it might work!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Well as long as I'm modded troll for that comment I might as well add that that fix, the 2.3.4 update for the Samsung Galaxy S2 which hasn't been released for belgian users for months now, includes a fix for poor battery life for a small number of users. Yet no uproar for that on Slashdot.
"Battery life: some users let us know that their batteries didn’t seem to be lasting as long; battery life should be improved for these folks."
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
"Siri, tell me if my battery is about to die!"
You can't actually ask Siri that. (Yes, I know it's a joke.)
It's still kind of a weird thing for "the voice interface" to the phone to completely leave out. You really can't ask questions about anything that the phone is doing. If you ask about battery life, Siri offers to search the web for it.
Also, while I was typing this, Siri went down. (I had some other questions about things like storage space left that I wanted to try.) So that's cool too.
I have a feeling that at some point the ability to ask about battery charge left will be added, but right now, you can't ask Siri that.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Have you disabled "raise to speak" in Siri settings? That was reported on day one (or two) and solved my problem immediately.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Jeez, get your non-accusations straight! It was in 1991!
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Some people have had problems. Others have not.
Given the level of cognitive dissonance that surrounds Apple products, this could simply mean some people ignored the problem because they didn't want to acknowledge that they might have a problem.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.