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.

Comments

Start from the top.

[Known Nutter]

Saying all of that in the beginning would have saved them a lot of grief. It's not like they solved a mystery today. So, why did they not simply disclose this? They could have buried it in a KB article and been done with it.

Re:Start from the top.

[SharpFang]

Only because Apple made the procedure hard in the first place.

Replacement batteries for other phones are often $5, and easy enough to replace that there's no chance to damage the phone.

"These are not bullshit excuses, these are genuine problems!" is an old Apple bullshit mantra - these are "genuine problems" which Apple deliberately chose to create artificially in the first place.

Re:Start from the top.

[SharpFang]

Somehow none of these "miracles" happen to any other brands... Only Apple. How is it that every company in the world can get this right, only where it comes to Apple suddenly you're faced with insurmountable mountain of problems?

Finally doing what they should have done

[SuperKendall]

From the article on the $29 battery replacement:

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

I'm more happy about that than anything, it will be great to have something concrete to point to if someones phone seems slow and I want to rule out an old battery being part of the issue.

Re: Finally doing what they should have done

[Brockmire]

So an Android user is able to figure out its defective battery and not software so they can replace it and get full functionality again. What the fuck point were you trying to make in Apple's favour?

Comsumable component

[Anonymous Coward]

That's inside a phone SEALED SHUT with **GLUE**.

Sorry, not sorry

[PopeRatzo]

These are my favorite types of corporate apologies:

"We at Apple want to apologize to any of our snowflake consumers who misunderstood our intent to force them into our new models. We did not mean to offend these little pricks who expect our products to work more than a couple of years. Now send us some money and we'll totally fix the problem we created."

Re:Sorry, not sorry

[PopeRatzo]

Maybe Apple started slowing down phones with diminished batteries because they realized that their customers, on average, prefer a phone that lasts 20 hours with diminished performance

So why not say that to customers? Why not make it a setting so customers can decide whether they want their phones slowed down? Why not make it a setting and give customers a choice? Remember, the fact that Apple was slowing down older devices was only revealed after an independent study proved it. That's what it took, to make Apple admit what they had done.

One should always assume a corporation is complete corporate assholes until there is ample evidence to the contrary. If someone buys a product, the owner has something of a right to know when the company that made that product is remotely slowing down their device.

Re:Sorry, not sorry

[omnichad]

They should have been transparent about it from the get go, but I do not think they were acting in a nefarious way or with poor intentions.

Not even with the glaringly obvious reason that they wouldn't be transparent? The fact that they can let consumers assume it's because their phone is "old" or "behind the times" without having to lie to them directly. They had a huge profit motive in not stopping or slowing customers from buying new phones.

Re:$79 is typical Apple: overpriced.

[phalse phace]

A battery pack costs Apple about $5: https://technology.ihs.com/api/binary/595761

Which means they are only making a $24 profit instead of $74.

Where is Apple getting the free labor from?

Not good enough

[Anonymous Coward]

Scaling back performance "because of the battery".... lmao. Yea right. They were scaling back performance to push new device sales.

$29 Battery replacement is not a good solution. They are most likely still profiting from this because batteries aren't that expensive anyway. Telling someone they can have a $10 battery installed for $29, onsale from the normal $99 price, is still helping people who've you've scammed into buying newer devices.

Completely unacceptable. They should have some sort of compensation for the damages, not just a cut in profits.

Oh, you caught us (tee hee!)

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Oh, goodness gracious- you caught us. We're so embarrassed that we'll use this opportunity to sell you something else, like an overpriced battery. Aren't we just a bunch of naughty little rascals?

Hey, look over there- it's the iPhoneXs! The "s" is for "suckers", but you knew that, and we know you'll STILL buy it!

Apple: Caught red-handed. AGAIN.

[fyngyrz]

It's about intent.

It certainly is.

It looks like either they did a really poor job of power supply design (other phones don't "suddenly shut down" and they don't have this "feature"), or that they're just throttling for the obvious reason: they want you to buy a new phone.

As for their protest, quoted verbatim here from their letter:

First and foremost, we have never — and would never — do anything to intentionally shorten the life of any Apple product, or degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades.

...this is utter bullshit. They constantly stop allowing their OS upgrades to run on hardware that is perfectly capable of running those upgrades. They've been caught at this multiple times. My 3 GHz, 12/24 core, 64 GB Mac Pro "can't" be upgraded to MacOS 10.13, so says Apple. But in fact, if you flash the bios to say that it's a machine made one year later, it'll upgrade perfectly. And why shouldn't it? It's little, if any, different than that machine. Even if it was slightly different (other than the date flashed into the hardware), this is a company with many, many billions of dollars in the bank that made a decision to obsolete this hardware for only one reason: So that it would go long in the tooth before its time and put buying pressure on the owner. There's no other possible reason.

They threw the PPC emulation out the window for just as little reason (no, probably less.) They let all those user's software suddenly go obsolete for a reason that boils down to "weren't going to pay for the emulation any longer", again, when they had tons of cash to maintain the tech and users had tons of PPC software. I still support PPC software running on (very) old machines, specifically because there is no reasonable in-OS upgrade path that lets that stuff keep running. The irony is that the massive power of the machines we have now would make those apps run very well indeed — and we know Apple did this as a choice, not a need.

I have more examples. From apps they took out of the store because they had integrated the tech into a new phone, thereby removing the possibility of users of an older phone having the tech unless they upgraded — to severe bugs they leave mouldering in old versions of the OS while not allowing upgrades to the new version of the OS, Apple is a known serial offender of the "let's pressure the customer."

Apple is lying here. Flat-out lying. And caught at it.