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.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Finally doing what they should have done

[JohnFen]

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.

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.