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Slashdot Asks: How Should Apple Have Responded To the Battery Controversy?
Yesterday, Apple officially apologized for slowing down older phones in order to compensate for degrading batteries. In a letter to customers, Apple said, "We apologize," 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 unusual replacement cost. They're also promising to add features to iOS that provide more information about the battery health in early 2018.
Apple's response has left many wondering whether or not it is enough. Even though they are discounting the cost of a battery replacement, for example, they are still profiting from each battery replacement. At the end of the day, "Apple only came clean after independent investigation, giving the whole situation an air of underhanded secrecy," writes Macworld. Should Apple have responded differently to the battery controversy? In the first place, should Apple even issue a software update to older devices to purposefully throttle the CPU and prevent the phones from randomly shutting down when experiencing rapid power draw?
Quinn Nelson via Snazzy Labs explains the controversy and how it is largely exaggerated.
Apple's response has left many wondering whether or not it is enough. Even though they are discounting the cost of a battery replacement, for example, they are still profiting from each battery replacement. At the end of the day, "Apple only came clean after independent investigation, giving the whole situation an air of underhanded secrecy," writes Macworld. Should Apple have responded differently to the battery controversy? In the first place, should Apple even issue a software update to older devices to purposefully throttle the CPU and prevent the phones from randomly shutting down when experiencing rapid power draw?
Quinn Nelson via Snazzy Labs explains the controversy and how it is largely exaggerated.
full communism now
They could have made it an option. Speed or longer battery life.
They should have issued a statement saying the code was written to extend the life of the battery and prevent reboots due to voltage drops.
Then they could have issued a patch that made the behaviour optional, perhaps with a pop up message suggesting enabling it when the battery started failing.
Finally, the battery replacement discount is not a bad PR move.
I think what they did is about right - apologize for not making it clear, make it cheaper to get a new battery than any replaceable would have been, and then (most importantly) add information so people can tell if a battery is wearing out or not.
It's not like it's a manufacturing defect, where Apple would actually replace a part. The whole system is acting as designed, and in fact in the best interests of the users - lots of other companies would have just added an info panel and called it good. The batteries are still working just fine. The cheap battery replacement is beyond what they really had to do, but is good customer service.
I also question between parts and labor if Apple is really making money on the battery replacement at that price. That was just thrown out as a given but who claims that is still a profit?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The first "should" of this mess is: batteries should be user-replaceable.
Circumcision is child abuse.
The reality is that most users have replaced phones over this. I certainly have. Also make sure you don't put any nastiness in a EULA when the user gets their free battery. Nothing shady, you've already done something shady. Now is not the time to try and slip one by your users. They should probably also be handing out coupons for $100 or $200 off your next iPhone. Keep in mind those of use who accepted these phones had a shelf life are still pretty angry. I'd taken all 3 phones I've replaced to Apple and had them reset it and tell me everything was fine now.
Full disclosure, I'm an Android user, the phones in question were my Kid's.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Apple is so large that any decision they make can set the standard. You seriously want them to use cheap parts like everyone else instead of designing their own? They were first with SCSI, USB, DVDs, the mouse... they invent market segments. Methinks you understand very little.
Apple should not have deceived their customers as they did. I 'ac' broke the story here on /., looking forward to the lawsuits. (much munching of popcorn). :)
They responded more or less correctly.
It isn't their response to getting caught, it is doing it in the first place. And if this is about all the other stuff no one has caught them on, I have no useful advice for them except stop it. They don't have to come clean now, but it does look better if when it comes out they stopped 5 years ago without public pressure.
Fat chance they would ever listen to me.
Obviously, they should have used their vaunted "Time Machine" to go into the past and make different choices, like user-replaceable parts and full disclosure on how they were fixing the battery power related crashing issue.
What good is a time machine if you can't use it to fix past mistakes?
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Gotta love the culture of outrage here,
Yes, Apple isn't looking to save every consumer their hard earned pennies, however there was a precise (and non-controversial) reason given for the throttling put in place. Not only was it to prevent devices from chewing through an old battery at an increased rate, it also served as a precaution against damaging components being powered by a worn battery. I don't see Apple twisting their mustache and rubbing their hands together over this.
The real question is, had Apple not done this, would we be seeing an influx of utterly bricked phones? I'd personally rather have a slow phone than a dead one.
Apple doesn't make a battery that can last until the end of time, providing a heavy discount on a brand-new battery is more than I'd expect a company as large as Apple to even offer. People are never satisfied.
If you buy any device, you put yourself into the manufacturer's hands, trusting it with technical decisions. The throttling was such a technical decision: Apple wanted to prevent unexpected shutdowns of their devices and therefore implemented throttling. Of course this makes experience for users worse, but the cause for this is bad batteries. As long as the slowdown is being communicated to the user, there is no issue. If Apple did not communicate it, throttling might motivate users to buy new phones entirely because they might not know the issue is fixable by getting a new battery. That would mean a benefit for Apple at the cost of users and is the main point of the scandal: keeping users in secret, not telling them that a phone is slowed down artificially nor that this slowdown can be fixed by replacing the battery. I think this recent response is handling the issue well, with the exception that Apple could have kept the cost of battery upgrades lower for a longer time.
User serviceability baaaaaadddddd. Proprietary parts goooooooodddddd.
A simple notice telling users that their battery was tired and the phone is being slowed to prevent unexpected shutoffs would have avoided the entire issue.
I don't use iPhone but I want to see some executive responsible for this to step down.
are like the wife that gets slapped around.....and likes it that way.
No they weren't, Xerox invented the mouse. And the GUI.
If they truley wanted to protect the device and give a good user experience they would do a system popup explaining that the battery is about to die and that the phone will work in reduced peformance mode until the problem is fixed. Ie get a new battery.
Just reducing peformance without a notice is a marketing scam to get people to buy a newer device and should be Criminal
I would prefer random crashing instead of potentially slower performance -- especially when I am doing something important, like awaiting an Uber, or taking a work-related phone call.
Furthermore, a discount on a battery is not nearly enough! If Apple is going to make things right, a free upgrade to the phone is the only acceptable response to this nightmare.
a) Not dunnit in the first place (device slowdown as battery degrades). That was a crappy thing to do and serves to highlight the "mandatory 18 month upgrade" that's so much a part of the Apple business model.
b) Build their business model around the battery as a consumable (which they finally admitted in their apology) and make it easier / less expensive to swap out. (Whether this is a user action or something that can be done with a minimum of pain at the apple store is left up to them.)
What the user can do is switch to a product with a user replaceable battery, but Apple fans will probably not do that.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
If your cell phone CPU can't eventually cause this problem, by drawing more current than it's possible for a worn out battery to provide, triggering a shutdown...
You probably own a Nokia "feature phone", and not a smart phone.
Other cell phone vendors have already stated that "Yes, we do the same thing".
Do you know one company with a sealed battery that's going to want a lawsuit against Apple about this to be successful?
That's an automatic precedent against them doing the same thing, as well.
Why do investigators need to to go to great lengths to "prove" Apple's wrongdoing.
We should be able to look it up in the source code history.
Apple uses the BSD kernel and LOTS of other open source code, so they pretend to share: http://opensource.apple.com/ [apple.com]
But, really, that is just a joke. A browser of a bunch of fragmented stuff that nobody actually uses on any actual machine that I am aware of.
FreeBSD and Linux are super secure and dependable, in large part BECAUSE they are open source.
Google's Android is also mostly open-source.
Apple needs to do the same.
If the media wants to find a 'gate, they'll find a 'gate. There's nothing Apple coulda done to prevent it besides BEING PERFECT IN ALL REGARDS AND CREATE PERFECT EVERLASTING PRODUCTS.
Bitten Apples are still better than dirty Windows...
Apple should not have done this in the first place. As far as we know, no other brands has felt a need to push the specs so much that they know the battery will suffer and only last a year or so. This has been an obvious tactic from Apple, giving them the edge in benchmark reviews that are of course all done with brand new phones. It's basically the same tactics as the VW diesel emissions scandal.
I am an Android user and this is clearly yet another example of how people who dont understand technology should just shut up and step aside. This entire non-controversy is a hyped up effort by Google and Microsoft to undermine Apple's position in the market and nothing more.
The kind of people who are pissed off about this, are the kind of people who would never buy an iPhone anyway. This whole thing is a total non-story. However Apple handled it, it wasn't going to change anyone's mind.
I realize you can't really take "hypothetical polls" but for every idea someone has in this thread, image Apple really doing that, and then imagine hypothetical poll results for "Would you buy an iPhone again?" The numbers don't change.
They should've shut the company down, open-sourced their codebase and donated their blood-money to the EFF.
Though I might be biased.
100% refund, no questions asked + contract buy out if you reuped for 2 years to get a new phone.
I think Apple should have given everyone a free battery replacement for the inconvenience cause by slowing down the older iDevices (including mine),
Right, sorry, I forgot that most people buy their iPhones through contracts like that. I keep on thinking the whole world uses unlocked phones.
Maybe they should have responded with... um... hmmm... the truth, perhaps?
free upgrade to the next iphone up would have made sense in this case
This would seem to be the reason why my 4s suffered greatly from slowdown. It was very noticeable around the transition from Skeuomorphism to fugly ui. This transition should have seen a boost in performance due to the lacklustre of effects ‘draining’ the battery should have been with such a flat design compared to the poppy style we all loved.
Xerox did not invent the mouse. Go to Youtube and look for 'The mother of all demos', then watch it and see what modern concepts were already real in 1968.
They should allow customers to prioritize speed or compromise in favour of stability and battery life. But we all know Apple doesn't mess around with allowing consumers to adapter a product for their use. It's all about forcing them to adhere to the Apple way.
Apple should have released an app to allow the user to control battery life versus performance and explain the pros and cons and the alternative of installing a new battery.
Go well
I think ichimunki was fishing for a "Funny" mod, but it's hard to say without looking for the invisible AC comment he's replying to. Moot in my case, since I never see a mod point to give.
Having said that, I'm seriously wondering if this fiasco is my opportunity to learn about the iPhone on the cheap. It would seem that I could now get a secondhand iPhone at the usual low cost, but then replace the battery and make it almost as good as new thanks to Apple's tiny dip into their humongous cash reserves.
Any experts willing to address possible problems and questions with this plan?
(1) What older models are worth considering?
(2) Are the secondhand prices already jumping up?
(3) How do older models compare with using newer iPhones?
(4) Can I just pop my SIM from my Android phone into the iPhone and go?
I can guess a bit on Question (4). I think it should be okay as long as the used iPhone is locked to the same network I am using now. However I'm not sure about the SIM form factors for iPhones...
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Apple sucks cock for coke.
The turn of events is proof of this.
If your cell phone CPU can't eventually cause this problem, by drawing more current than it's possible for a worn out battery to provide, triggering a shutdown...
You probably own a Nokia "feature phone", and not a smart phone.
If your cell phone shuts down while attempting to draw even a fraction of the power that is still used to fast charge these old phones, you've stuffed up the design. It's also quite telling that it only effects a subset of Apple models too.
Other cell phone vendors have already stated that "Yes, we do the same thing".
Except where they haven't, where they have outright denied it (just scroll down the Slashdot front page a bit), and where the whole issue seems to be a uniquely Apple problem.
Do you know one company with a sealed battery that's going to want a lawsuit against Apple about this to be successful?
Yeah let's start with all the companies who don't have a problems with their batteries at end of life.
I also question between parts and labor if Apple is really making money on the battery replacement at that price. That was just thrown out as a given but who claims that is still a profit?
Depends on the capacity of the battery, but I'm pretty sure Apple is losing a little money on this special battery replacement program. However, the company has sufficient cash reserves to survive. Probably with enough cash left over to weather American Civil War II, as well.
I still see this entire fiasco as another symptom of the disease of corporate cancerism. "There is no Gawd but profit, and Apple is Gawd's #1 prophet." The battery replacement is a nice gesture, but it's symbolic. The real problem is that Apple can treat the customers like that without any real penalty.
The REAL punishment that Apple deserves would be loss of customers to a competing company that didn't do such things. Just too bad there is no freedom to choose a company that is actually competing directly against Apple, eh? (At least not yet, though if their financial models continue converging, at some point the google will be directly up against Apple. Right now the google is only around #6 on the prophet list.)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Technical reasons aside, it reminded me a a non-apology, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-apology_apology) "I'm sorry if me whipping out my dick and masterbating in front of you offended you..."
From the perspective of the iPhone user: They should have never implemented the crippling code and when called out, they should have removed the code and restore the iPhone's normal functionality.
From the perspective of Apple: They should have gotten away with it. Old iPhones, yet again slowing down and people buying new phones to overcome it.
From the Apple share holder perspective: They did exactly what they should have done. Acknowledged yet another tempest in a teapot by offering alternatives, but not backing down from crippling the phones. Instead offer an alternative to "make it right" in the form a of a discount. This will generate some battery sale profits from those few that would have suffered with the crippled phones and not bought new. Others will buy new anyway because, 'it's not worth the hassle to send the phone in for battery replacement'. Apple's sales continue to soar; cha-ching. Apple dividend continue to pay cha-ching.
They COULD have handled it by producing a device with a replaceable battery - like every other decent company in history. They chose not to. Now they reveal that it was not so difficult all along and only costs $29 - a simple, critical function they could have provided but chose not to. I was disgusted with them then and I am totally sickened now.
Offer FREE battery replacement within 2 years of purchase date, and apologize for the shitty battery performance that led to this. Then they can claim this was a temporary workaround to keep users operational until they can get a new better battery installed.
There's no way to spin this that's not obvious marketing spin.
Apple slowed devices down before even 2 years of use. Obviously an effort to force upgrades. If you really buy the spin, then it means apple pushes short lived and inferior devices dressed in fancy plastic for $1000.00
At least it made big enough news for even the older folks in my office to hear about it. I bet they buy android next.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
Apple's historic obsession with thin, tiny phones and the resulting sealed batteries is environmentally disastrous as well as creating these battery replacement dramas. The Samsung Galaxy Note and similar phones show that people like big phones. The Galaxy Note 4 has a 3000 mah user replaceable battery and it's still a great phone even in 2017.
Apple shot itself in the foot for years with its 3.5" phones when everyone else had moved to 5". When Apple finally did manage to start shipping decent sized phones (iPhone 6+) they had to do it literally over Steve Jobs' dead body. But they still haven't caught on that people want swappable batteries like back in the day, and Samsung has caught the disease as well.
Maybe this can become a redemption moment for Apple. Put a user replaceable battery in the iPhone 11 or whatever it's called. Then the rest of the industry will follow.
My wife owns an iPhones 5s. The battery is pretty worn, and needs replacement.
I borrowed it the other day to use the GPS to get somewhere; half-way to my destination it shut down, even though it claimed to have 15% battery remaining. I would MUCH rather it had slowed down and stayed running; as I was driving at the time I didn't notice it had turned itself off (as I was driving, I relied on the audio cues), and missed my turn.
If Apple should have done anything different, it's that there should be a notification letting the user know that their battery is failing, needs to be replaced, and was being slowed down to allow the phone to run as long as possible. It's not the throttling code that is at fault -- it's the social conventions that were missed that is the problem.
But then again, even if they had provided a pop-up to warn users, there would be a cabal of Apple-haters claiming it was just some plot by Apple to get people to replace their iPhone batteries before it was necessary to do so. Apple could invent the cure for cancer, and some people would bitch about it.
Yaz
Physics: batteries get tired after a while.
Consequence: the phone can no longer do everything at once without the risk of shutting down.
Options: new battery or new phone, or do less.
Economics: All phone makers like the new phone path.
Apple's first Plan: We are Apple so of course we choose so you don't get ^H^H^H have to. We will not do everything so fast so it won't shut down at random times.
Apples's second plan, we are embarrassed at the lameness of the first plan so we will now provide a really cheap path to a new battery.
Suggested customer friendly plan for the future: Reasonably priced battery replacement is nice, but a functioning aftermarket should have this covered. The phone should provide some clear indication as to the progression of this issue. (Perhaps a new phone should say expect battery issues in N recharges?) Then the phone should empower the user with the option of how the phone should handle the progression. Ignore and shutdown, slow down to milk the battery for all it can provide, or nag to schedule a replacement. Unless Apple provides free batteries, the phone is going to be the messenger for bad battery news. Tim's (he's in charge, so he owns it) plan of trying to hide the physics and then be met with lawyers was not optimal because it put Apple between a rock (physics) and a hard spot (the customers.)
So if you are going to charge $1K for a phone, would it make sense to make wear items like batteries free for 10 years?
The reason to buy a new phone should be the the new phone is so much better, not that the old one is worn out.
They told their followers that it was a feature that no one else had. Offered batteries that were probably rotting in some warehouse somewhere at fire-sale prices, while probably making a profit. Than suggested that said followers get on their knees, pull down their pants, and get ready for a 14 hour x-code update that breaks everything.
What about comparably reducing iPad battery costs? My iPad Air 2 quits apps frequently, and reboots with erratic battery charge values displayed.
They should do what should have been done to begin with. Implement it as a user-enabled feature. Problem solved and reputation preserved. Choice is the issue here, not what the feature does. Let those who want it enable it, and those that do t retain full performance.
1) attempt to contact each iPhone user (chances are good apple has viable contact info). Score: fail. Most non technical users won't hear about this.
2) admit what they did was wrong. Score: meh
3) offer an app or setting that will determine current battery state, and allow the user to chose the trade-off. Score: fail
4) make it super easy to schedule time with a "genius" to replace the battery. Its not easy to schedule time, and just showing up means that you need to reserve 3+ hours of wait time. The $29 to replace the battery is ok. Score: fail on easy, meh on $29
Maybe you missed the story earlier, but every other manufacturer has denied doing it.
The only one that had this issue was Google, and they replaced every affected Nexus 6P for free.
If the battery is properly sized then by the time it becomes an issue the user will have replaced it because 1 hour of use per charge is inadequate. It's the size of the cathode that matters.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The speed reduction is really a great feature and Iâ(TM)m happy about it. My iPhone 6 still has all day battery use with almost minimal slowdown. If this extended battery life isnâ(TM)t a feature I donâ(TM)t know what is. I wish I could turn it on all my battery powered devices.
All they had to do was announce the availability of software to "protect" the phones as the batteries aged and they would have been swamped with downloads of it, getting the same effect without the fraud and subterfuge.
Ones with batteries that can be removed and replaced. Although that would dissappoint the NSA.
This perpetual motion machine Lisa made is a joke, it just keeps getting faster and faster. - Homer
Maybe Apple should hire Lennart P. to deal with scenarios like that and be straight forward and honest about it.
"not a bug, a feature"
1) batteries should be user replaceable
2) phone (or any other product) should be reparable
3) OS should be open sourced to allow scrutiny and avoid misconduct by companies. A battery has a limited lifespan, driven by the laws of physics. An OS should not have a limited lifespan limited by the will of Apple, Google or any other.
Totof
It was deceptive tactics to push people to reach for their wallets and upgrade their phones. What would you do if the phone suddenly ”feels sluggish”, the user experience is no longer the expected one ? It must be from the apps that I installed! But uninstalling apps won't do any good, reseting the whole damn thing won't do any good either... Comparing to the out-of-the-box experience won't work because you upgraded the iOS at least once so the phone is no longer in it's original state. It must be from the new iOS, as the new version must be doing some...err thing super cool in the background, they released a new version, didn't they? Ok, you don't see much difference from the old version but there MUST be a good reason they released a new one, right? Damn, I NEED to upgrade to the new shinny toy Apple just lunched because I'm kind of bored with my life, I have some cash to burn and the pension fund can wait a bit longer. Insted of living a crow's life, go live an eagle's day! Go tiger ! ka-ching!
We've had these complaints since long before iOS 10. My iPhone 4s took a terrible speed and stability hit overnight when I upgraded from iOS 8 -> iOS 9. But Apple's defined the conversation as being about slowing down iPhone 6 and newer with iOS 10. Is this just artful dodging?
Maybe this is coincidental (though suspiciously so), but my older iphones suffered crippling slowdowns after upgrading iOS too. I have a bunch of the lying around, all upto date on OS, but all incredibly slow.
Sudden, unexpected shutdown/crash due to drawing more power than an old battery can provide, or throttling. Take your pick.
Or, alternatively, maybe Apple should stop making the phones ever thinner and provide a larger battery that has more resilience to these sorts of fluctuations and has enough "headroom" to keep on rolling for a few years rather than starting to flake out in a year and a half as it inevitably degrades.
I have an iphone 4 that doesn't do this, and it is years old. The only reason it *has* to be this way is the insane drive to ever thinner devices rather than leaving enough space to have a battery big enough that a little inevitable degradation doesn't matter. If the battery is going to degrade (it will) then leave enough extra capacity in there that it can still handle the demands of the device once it does. As it currently is, this is a hardware flaw that they've papered over with a software fix and they didn't bother to inform people "hey, your phone experience is being degraded, so you might want to replace your battery". They do it on Mac laptops when the battery gets suboptimal ("replace soon").
Apple was faced with the PR problem of convincing people their approach was right--which it totally is-- or accepting blame. If you are going to do the latter, accept fault for something you are wrongly faulted for then your best move is not to do it grudgingly. Do it so everyone feels they got more than they deserved but isn't too painful. Apple is buying some customer loyalty with a write down.
What astonishes me the most is the other companies saying they don't throttle power usage as a battery degrades. How happy are you going to be when you fire up Halo or whatever on your fully charged Moto and in 2 minuted the phone hard shuts down? Or you can't make it through half a day with the phone, used just to send texts and calls?
That's insane. Of course you want the phone to take measures to deal with a weak battery.
People say, well it should be my choice. it should be a setting. Well people without iphones probably don't realize it is (partly) a setting. When your charge gets below 20% IOS asks if you want to use low power mode. So it is a choice now. Apple went a step further and had a second layer of adaptive power management on top of that as well. But they still gave you a choice on that. The Choice was to buy a new battery or not.
Everyone would prefer the option of a battery that lasts forever and never degrades and costs the same and weighs the same. But no phone has that option. Every phone in existence needs a new battery after enough use. For most people, the upgrade cycle is fast enough they never need that new battery. But for some, they do. ANd for those folks they are much better off with a slow thottling of the battery than not. That can buy you a year or more before you need to choose: Buy a new battery or live with noticably slow phone. That year probably converts most of those people to be within their upgrade cycle.
SO this is a feature not a bug. You can if you like fault apple for not touting this up front as a positive benefit. But as you can see from the idiots commenting below me that it's very hard to explain this in a few words and not people think "oh gosh they slow my phone down?". They don't think that it's always preferably to having the battery life be unusably short.
For the crazy people who run super computing calculations on their iphones and demand no degraded speed and don't understand that battery operated devices have considerations, then by all means buy a moto. or buy anew battery. But stop whining.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Interesting comment, perhaps even worth an "Insightful" mod if I ever saw a mod point to give. (In contrast to receiving so many of the trolls', eh?) Still a bit stretched to see how your comment fits as a reply to my questions. It does sound like you might be someone in a position to answer some of them, so let me recap:
I think Apple designs well, but limits my freedom through monopolistic practices. For that reason, I have only purchased one Apple device in my life, a MacBook Pro with Retina display. I do have LOTS of experience with Apple products, from professional programming on a Apple II through some years of teaching university students to work with Macs. My relatively recent experiences with the MacBook Pro have been quite mixed. It has some excellent features and I normally use it every day for certain tasks (though I do most of my work and play on Windows and Ubuntu Linux boxen), but many of my experiences with the MacBook and especially with the Apple websites have been extremely negative. I would say that overall my view of Apple have become much more negative, and right I now regard Apple as the nastiest and most dangerous case of corporate cancer in the world.
And yet I want to learn new things. The iPhone is a significant new thing in the world, but I have no firsthand experience with it. There is much to learn there, and perhaps the current situation allows me a way to learn some of those things with little direct profit to Apple (thereby preventing me from contributing too directly to worsening the problems created by Apple's cancerous ways).
Let me pose my questions more directly from my perspective:
Should I buy a secondhand iPhone?
If so, which models should I consider?
Will a cheap secondhand iPhone with a new battery be almost as good as an expensive new iPhone?
How much of the "iPhone experience" can I really get from an older iPhone?
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
What about the people who - as of this moment - have no issues with battery life? Like me? Apple deliberately pushed out a software update - 100% cognizant of the fact that that it would have a detrimental effect on me regardless of the state of my battery. Class action and major fines please. And new regulations.
> they are still profiting from each battery replacement
At $29 per replacement?
That sounds like break-even to me, at best.
Apple's response is based on the claim that "chemically aging" batteries are the issue and condescendingly explains to us all how batteries work. I had the shutdown problem on my iPhone 6s when it was only a few months old and was still under warranty, so I know that it is not an "aging" battery that is the problem but a defective battery. When I went in to talk to a twit at the "Genius Bar" in my local Apple store, he checked my serial number to see if he could help me, since they only replaced batteries for a sertain range of serial numbers. My number wasn't included so you know what he said to me? And I quote, "Sorry, bud." Apple should have replaced all of the defective batteries as soon as the issue became clear. That's what we have to do in our furniture business.