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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.
Actually...other phones suffer the battery issues constantly. I deal with the crap all the time where Android users complain thier phone have weird issues crop up as their phone ages past the 12-18 month stage. They swear it can't be the battery, we wipe the phone, and yet it persists. A new OEM battery later, and their issues are almost always cleared up. When phones required the small amount a Nokia candybar used it was no problem. There's more power in a modern iPhone than desktop computers released a few years ago. Just as when a PC PSU is failing & making for bizzare shit going on, so can a battery make for high speed computations to eat it.
If they remove the slowdown, then they will be admitting that the excuse was a lie in the first place. So providing inexpensive batteries doesn't force them to admit to lying and open themselves up to a lawsuit.
Obviously I don't know if the original excuse was true or not, but this was pretty much the only thing that they could have done in either case.
Does anyone know enough about Li Ion batteries to weigh in on whether or not this makes sense? Does the peak power capability drop enough that its likely it couldn't support the power use?
Did they do it all on purpose for some twisted marketing reason, from slowing it down, to leaking the problem, to giving a solution. The X is not selling well. I was at my carrier's store getting a new phone today (not an apple) and asked about the X. The manager said they had 20 in stock and they were not moving. Worse for them, they own it, can't discount it and can't return unsold inventory back to apple. There could be some very unhappy carriers if the get stuck with a bunch of X's. Could this battery getting headlines actually help sales of the X in some weird way?
Except that we've had modern smart phones for 10-years and the only models that I've heard about with widespread complaints about this issue are the Nexus 6P and the iphone 6. If this were purely physics we would be hearing this for every model yet - heck on the Android side we even have phones using the same processor as the 6P but don't seem to have the issue.