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Apple Apologizes For iPhone Slowdown Drama, Will Offer $29 Battery Replacements (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Apple just published a letter to customers apologizing for the "misunderstanding" around older iPhones being slowed down, following its recent admission that it was, in fact, slowing down older phones in order to compensate for degrading batteries. "We know that some of you feel Apple has let you down," says the company. "We apologize." Apple says in its letter that batteries are "consumable components," and is offering anyone with an iPhone 6 or later a battery replacement for $29 starting in late January through December 2018 -- a discount of $50 from the usual replacement cost. Apple's also promising to add features to iOS that provide more information about the battery health in early 2018, so that users are aware of when their batteries are no longer capable of supporting maximum phone performance.
And those are likely to be dismissed - no evidence yet shows any correlation between iOS version and performance scores that's not actually due to a poor battery.
FWIW, I replaced the battery in my 3yo iPhone 6 a few months ago, and it despite heavy use it hadn't dropped enough to trigger the slowdown. It had degraded noticeably from a battery life standpoint though, so well worth replacing regardless.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
It's not as much bullshit as you think. When Lithium ion batteries age, they are no longer able to handle peak loads while maintaining the rated voltage. Apple was not lying about old batteries causing phones to mysteriously shut down for no apparent reason.
I've seen the same thing happen in other phones -- the battery indicator says you have adequate charge, then you do something computationally intense and your phone shuts down without warning.
Having an indication that your battery is in this condition is very useful. Otherwise, it's not clear what's wrong with your phone.
If you're working the repair lines then you'll know if you tear apart a clone and compare to the genuine and you'll see there's notable differences. The protection/controller board attaching to the cell on those $4 batteries is a random hackjob at best. The cell quality too is different, cheap replacements have poor internal resistance compared to the genuine.
The $4~$12 replacements are a crap shoot, sometimes you get a decent quality unit, other times not so much. The resellers of replacement batteries give you grading options, cheap = 'zeroed' cycle count, non-original board, then you can get a "pulled from existing phone" batteries and their markings rubbed out, and then you can also get "Genuine zero cycles, high quality" packs but even if you ask for those, usually someone up the supply chain at some point pulls a swifty and starts sending you dodgy packs.
While Apple might pay $4 for theirs, the "3rd party" ones are probably $1 and it shows.
Apple has had some dud events like the iPhone 5 puffer fiasco but overall their packs definitely are of higher quality/consistency than the 3rd party replacements.
Couple of hundred batteries a year and it's averaging about 50% duds within 3 months.