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.

Comments

Option

[Anonymous Coward]

They could have made it an option. Speed or longer battery life.

Re:Option

[Sneeka2]

*crashing phones or no crashing phones, FTFY.

Exactly as they did

[SuperKendall]

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?

Re:Exactly as they did

[SuperKendall]

Do *you* think ti's better for the users that the phone shuts off randomly, or over time does not last nearly as long? That would ACTUALLY force a user to buy a phone sooner than if it is just getting a bit slower.

Why are you advocating an approach that leads to users replacing phones more often than they do already? Cruel man.

Re:Exactly as they did

[david_thornley]

I'm going to suggest that a battery that cost $6 on eBay might not in fact be the same battery Apple uses, and likely has quality issues. If it works for you, great. If it catches fire, well, it's your decision to use that battery.

The first "should" of this whole mess...

[Stormwatch]

The first "should" of this mess is: batteries should be user-replaceable.

Re:The first "should" of this whole mess...

[JohnFen]

They are.

Unless you are not a very technically competent user.

There are a lot of decent defenses for getting rid of user-replaceable batteries (I disagree with them all, but they are reasonable arguments).

This, however, is just a stupid thing to say. The only reason I'm replying to it now is that I'm seeing it more and more often, and someone has to pipe up about it.

Everyone (including you) knows what people mean by "user replaceable battery": a battery than an ordinary user can replace. If you need spudgers, soldering irons, and skill to do it, then it's not user replaceable.

Re:The first "should" of this whole mess...

[tlambert]

Everyone (including you) knows what people mean by "user replaceable battery": a battery than an ordinary user can replace. If you need spudgers, soldering irons, and skill to do it, then it's not user replaceable.

Yes, I understand.

You long for the days when you can charge more than one battery, and carry around more than one battery, and swap it out, so that you can go 15 days without a recharge, or you can watch 9 hours worth of movies on your flight to another country, without paying the extra $15 for them to turn on the plane's power jack at your seat.

Battery degradation in sealed battery devices is not an issue, unless you are frequently letting them run all the way down, or they are doing so because you are running badly behaved applications which constantly use power.

For yourself, and the tiny fractions of users like you, there are solutions available.

You are just unhappy with them, the same way that people who want to add storage to a cheaper device with less default storage are unhappy that, in order to use an SD card, you have to by a "camera adapter" cable-and-dongle kit.

If you want more battery life without having to pay to recharge, or where you are away from the power grid: buy yourself some battery bricks.

If you want to not run out your battery, quit running the badly behaved applications.

If you refuse to do either, then pay the airline the $15 and get the power wart-to-device cable for $35.

3%-5% of users will have "needs" ... -- those are "finger quotes" ... that aren't met by the devices on the market.

Bitching about that is not going to make the manufacturers make a design change to serve a tiny minority of the market, while making the user experience worse for everyone else.

If you want to be able to have your minority market device, get a manufacturer to build it, on the promise that you'll buy it at an higher price, because the volume sales are going to be 33x to 20x smaller than the majority of the market devices.

I hear both Blackberry and Nokia have relatively idle assembly lines, because the majority of the market doesn't want the devices they are building. So they are already in a position to build devices for a market minority, and pay the extra costs that happen when you can't get the big quantity price breaks on parts that you get from selling actually useful and popular devices instead.

I'm kind of tired of vocal people who obviously represent a tiny minority of market desire to put their money where their mouth is, spouting off as if everyone wants what they want.

"If you need a machine and don't buy it, you will ultimately find that you have paid for it and don't have it." -- Henry Ford

Or who subscribe to the idea that asking consumers what they want is the way to build products.

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” -- Henry Ford

Re:The first "should" of this whole mess...

[JohnFen]

I would say the threshold is that if any random person can do it without special training and/or special tools, it's user-replaceable. An ordinary screwdriver? Sure, pretty much everybody has one of those.

Informing the users

[JohnFen]

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.

If your cell phone CPU can't eventually cause this

[tlambert]

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.

This year's "gate"

[Sneeka2]

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.

It's a major gift.

[goombah99]

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.