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HTC, Motorola Say They Don't Slow Old Phones Like Apple Does (theverge.com)
After Apple confirmed last week that it reduces the performance of older iPhones to improve battery life, it has left many wondering whether or not other smartphone manufacturers do the same. HTC and Motorola are the two most recent OEMs to say they don't throttle their phones' processor speeds as their batteries age. The Verge reports: In emails to The Verge, both companies said they do not employ similar practices with their smartphones. An HTC spokesperson said that designing phones to slow down their processor as their battery ages "is not something we do." A Motorola spokesperson said, "We do not throttle CPU performance based on older batteries." The Verge also reached out to Google, Samsung, LG, and Sony for comment on whether their phone processors are throttled in response to aging batteries. A Sony spokesperson said a response would be delayed by the holidays, and a Samsung spokesperson said the company was looking into it. The responses begin to clarify whether or not throttling processor speeds is typical behavior in smartphones -- as of last week, we knew that Apple was doing it, but not whether it was common practice among competitors. HTC and Motorola's responses start to suggest that it's not.
So while the vendor may not be slowing your old phone down to encourage you to buy a new one, any hacker with the right exploit can compromise your device via SMS and make all sorts of trouble.
Thanks, HTC, Motorola.
You want the latest Android? You should buy a new phone from us. Your HTC M7 with purple camera is old. Why would you want new software on it?
It's hard to slow down old hardware if you stop supporting it the second I buy it.
So what if Apple throttles the phone. From a technical standpoint, it makes sense.
All they had to do was inform the user of it, and/or allow it to be disabled.
If this was any other maker, it wouldn't be nearly as big of a story.
They slow their phones different... slow from the beginning.
Only Apple has the courage to throttle older phones like that.
When someone says, "Any fool can see
I own a Motorola phone that was first released this year, and I'm still waiting on the Nov patch for KRACK.
Apple does this by creating new firmware which then activates this for phone models that are approx. 2 years old at the time of the firmware release. They obviously know that after ~2 years, batteries are beginning to go bad.
After two years, neither HTC nor Lenovo (a Motorola that sells phones hasn't existed for years, bought out ages ago) don't support phones that long typically, so when there are no updates, there obviously is no artificial downclocking either.
As an aside: whenever we pointed out that a built in battery on phones is moronically stupid and ensures planned obsolescence after a few years (batteries are the main wear part by far), then various people, among them Apple users but also Android users point out how it's not true and how they are using their phone 4 years now or whatever and it still keeps a charge over a full day. Guess it's easier to hold a charge when the CPU doesn't actually run at its rated clockspeed.
The whole reason Apple does what they do, is because as a battery ages they want people to get as much phone on time as possible in a day.
I guess what this means is if you want your phone to still last a solid day in a year or two, better not buy Motorola!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The big problem with Apple is that they take decisions on behalf of users because most of them don't know any better.
However, what they should be doing is giving us options and making their decision be the default setting.
Example:
When your battery becomes older, it will not hold a charge as long as when the phone is new. When that happens, would you like to:
[x] Keep using the phone for the same amount of time as much as possible to the detriment of processor speed and screen brightness
[_] Keep using the phone at the same processor speed and screen brightness with a shorter daily battery life
That's a bit verbose, but you get the idea.
Another example: in the older OS X versions, Preview was able to save files in SGI, SGI, TGA and other older formats. In the most recent versions (at least 10.9 and above), those older formats are no longer listed when trying to save an image. However, if you hold the [Option] key, you get them back. But you have to know that holding this key will magically give you the list of all formats supported by Preview. Why can't they display "(Hold [option] for more formats)" next to the pull-down menu?
#DeleteFacebook
Ford just announced that the software for all 1964 Mustangs are at the latest level.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
The issue two-fold, and many vendor are guilty of the first one:
1) They aren't sizing the batteries in such a way so that the peak voltage can be sustained more than two years from release under normal use.
2) They didn't provide details of WHY the phones were slowing down, so people would understand that a cheaper battery replacement would restore performance.
The fact that they slowed it down without detailing why tells me it was a play to get more sales AND to prevent warranty work. The Nexus 6p had a similar issue where after the battery wore down, it was causing the phone to turn off due to low voltage. Google usually replaced the phone, often with a new Pixel phone as well. Apple was trying to make sure this didn't happen with this change, and by the way, once it got slower, people would tend to BUY the upgrade, not send it in for repairs.
This is incorrect. It has nothing to do with battery life, and nothing to do with older iPhones per se. Put a new battery into an old iPhone and the slowing will go away. It's a matter of the battery degrading over time (which they do), and limiting the maximum power drawn from it. This means that the phone can't operate at top performance, since it can't get the power. The alternative was to risk the phone crashing at such times, not to let the battery drain faster.
Apple had the choice between limiting current draw, allowing the phone to crash, or changing the laws of physics.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
What a nice shill you play. It would be much more honest to say, inform the user that the battery life is degraded rather than just pain them into buying a new phone. And certainly, it was technically honest, but deliberately, grossly misleading when Apple claimed last two years ago that they don't slow down old phones. It's not old phones they slow, just phones with old batteries.
They throttled the headphone jack too. And they throttled the icons until they were flat and ugly as lack of sin. And they throttled the very idea of storage cards and replaceable batteries. And you know, since they didn't give anyone FM radio anyway, losing that headphone jack wasn't quite the blow it would have otherwise been. Because they'd already landed on us once.
And with the mac, they turned the Mac Pro into trash. Er, can. And they lamed up the mini.
They have a lot of courage. Respeeeec.
That's why I have a Samsumg S7. With a headphone jack. And a memory card. and FM radio.
Although they did follow Apple most ill-advisedly down the frustrated interior designer rabbit-hole with the flat icons, sigh. On the plus side, I was allowed to replace the desk(phone)top manager and I no longer care what they did to the icons, since I'm not using most of them any longer anyway.
You can have too much courage, that's my take.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
No you don't want to have an option for every damn thing on the phone. I want a senible set of well tested choices made for me then present me with the most useful ones.
not having my batttery run out or having it make it to the next upgrade cycle is great priority over the absolutely fastest iphone. if I need fast computing I'll use a computer or replace my battery.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
which I'm sure also comes with a lawsuit waiver. As someone who's replaced 3 iPhones over the years due to degraded performance I'd like to get back about $700, which is what my carrier charged me to 'swap' those phones...
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IME, my phones are always fast enough. But, after a couple of years the battery life gets annoying. All phones should be offering features that let you input a level of performance versus battery tradeoff, not just an on/off battery saving mode. Locking the battery life to the length it had when it was new sounds like an awesome feature to me.
that rules out most of the /.'s audience.
TLDR: apologies, update with battery state coming, next year, battery change is $29 (instead of $79) https://www.apple.com/iphone-battery-and-performance/
because of engineers who think the right solution to every problem is to pop up a non-intuitive message and ask non-technical users to make a confusing choice.
In this case Apple erred in the other direction. The right compromise is to add some non-invasive info in the Settings->Battery section about the diminished battery capacity and its effect on performance.
nt
If you are non-technical, you simply go to an Apple Store. I've only had to do this once, for a three year old phone. It doesn't cost much more than a standalone battery and lasts longer (in all respects).
If you are technical you can simply buy a replacement battery and enjoy many more years of service than I ever got from the replaceable batteries I had to buy quite often for my old flip phones. I hate replaceable batteries, as they represent space wasted on casing that could have held a larger battery.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Of course Samsung, Motorola, and HTC don't do it. Their phones are usually dead due to stale software or manufacturing defects long before the battery starts to degrade.
I'd love to see if a class action comes out from this.
What apple is doing is pushing the limits of the battery tech beyond what is reasonable to try to milk every last bit of performance out of their setup.
This would kinda be akin to buying a car with an underpowered engine that was always reved really high to give you decent performance, and then as the car aged the redline on the engine was slowly backed down, so maybe the car could rev to 10krpm when it was new, then each year as the engine wore more due to always being reved really high the redline was backed down to 9krpm, then a year later 8kprm
Apple still has not fully come out about how their throttling works, only confirming that they do in fact do it. If you have a 2 year old phone and replace the battery, does this in fact restore 100% of the performance, or are they just throttling based on how old the phone is with no regard to the battery being new or not? Can they even detect that a new battery has been installed? the batteries are just bare lithium cells with no intelligence, not like removable laptop batteries which usually keep a serial number, date of manufacture, and the number of charge cycles in an eerpom inside the battery. Your laptop immediately knows a new battery is installed when the serial number changes and it can read the charge cycle count and age to determine the health of the battery.
Aside from monitoring the voltage curve on the battery as it discharges, which seems it would be very unreliable with the major changes in power load on the cell based on how the user is using their phone, I don't see how they could determine that. The best way to look at a voltage curve like that would be some kind of diagnostic mode where you can fully charge the battery, then have a known constant load on the battery till it was depleted and monitor the voltage curve.
Another option is that there is a charge counter, that can detect power loss when a battery has been removed for replacement and then reset the charge counter to zero. This could be faked by simply disconnecting a used battery and then reconnecting it and reseting the count.
Apple really need to come forward with more info on how they are determining the battery health to determine the throttling, until then my only assumption is that it just based on how old the phone is which means a new battery is going to make no difference in your performance.
This is a sizing issue of the original battery, where it can sustain voltage after a reasonable amount of use in the lifetime of the product. It is a DEFECT they were covering up.
Incorrect.
The issue is current draw, not the size/capacity of the battery.
In many cases, the battery has the same capacity as before. But if you are mining Bitcoin on your iPhone, or running badly written software, then it will be CPU intensive enough to draw more current than the battery can sustainably supply.
This issue is that the peak current demand by the CPU utilization for some apps is no longer sustainable.
Note that Apple throttles the CPU down all the time. What the change does is cause the CPU not to throttle up all the way, when it would draw too much current.
There's actually no reason -- other than bad programming -- that you would need that much CPU power on a cell phone -- even one as nifty as an iPhone.
Sure they do. They "recycle" them. "nt"
telling people up front they were slowing the phone down. My kid took her phones to Apple several times over the years and all they ever did was reboot/reset it. Never once was a battery replacement mentioned even though their engineers knew this was a problem and their customer service reps would have tracked everyone that came in complaining about the problem.
Apple didn't care until they got caught. But it's Apple so it's Ok. Imagine the shit storm if Microsoft had done this with the Lumina.
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what about those of use who've spent upwards to $1400 replacing phones over the years because of this? Sure, I'm an Android user, but my Kid's got an iPhone, and I've replaced it ever 2 years like clockwork. Now I know why...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I was saying that sealed batteries are larger than replaceable ones in the same space, which is in fact why Android makers are also mostly using them. I said nothing about Apple's batteries being larger than other Android batteries, or indeed anything about Android batteries at all. But you Fandroids do like to make everything about yourselves.
P.S. Apple doesn't need to have quite as large a battery as an Android phone as Apple actually can handle power management without setting fire to things.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
12/29/17. My paranoid theory is it has something to do with the "fat battery" syndrome, where the iphone's battery gets big and pushes out the screen, or the back of the phone. I've had three iphones that did that, and rather than fix the hardware, perhaps Apple sidesteps via software?
No Android-based phone manufacturer provides OS updates past two years.
So, yeah, it'd be pretty hard for them to slow older phones when older phones don't receive updates.
It takes time, but it's lethal in the end.
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