Slashdot Mirror
Tim Cook Says Power Management Feature In Older iPhones Will Be Able To Be Turned Off In Future Update (macrumors.com)
In an interview with Rebecca Jarvis of ABC News, Apple CEO Tim Cook touched on the ongoing controversy over power management features in older iPhones. He says that a future update will allow customers to turn off the power management feature that has caused older iPhones to slow down. Mac Rumors reports: According to Cook, when the power management features were first introduced in iOS 10.2.1, Apple did explain what was going on, but following the controversy, he believes Apple should have been clearer. The company did indeed mention that the shutdown issue was caused by uneven power delivery and explained that its power management system had been tweaked, but there was no clear notice that it could cause devices to operate more slowly at times. Cook says Apple "deeply apologizes" to customers who thought the company had other motivations. Apple is introducing better battery monitoring features in a future iOS update, and Cook says Apple will also allow customers to turn off the power management feature, which is new information that the company has not previously shared. The majority of the interview was focused on the announcements that Apple made today. The company plans to contribute $350 billion in the U.S. economy over the next five years, as well as issue employees a bonus of $2,500 of restricted stock units following the introduction of the new U.S. tax law.
Tim Cook says...
Frosty Piss says he doesn't give a shit about this tempest in a tea pot spun up by Apple haters, lawyers looking for a buck, and people that get OUTRAGED at any and everything. Folks, step back from the Internet. But I will be taking my iPhone 5s in to have an Amazing Genius(TM) replace the battery for cheap...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
All this time Apple has been gaslighting us....yes, boys and girls, the update DOES slow down your igadger....
This is something that could be solved if the phone was made marginally thicker to support a slightly higher voltage battery.
Where is the outrage over something that is literally "defective by design"? Cell phone manufactures fucked up big time here. Apple is getting away with this because they're pushing it as some unavoidable thing, and their software patches are here to save the day. This is 100% irrelevant and they know it. There should have been a recall over all the handhelds sold in this state. They knew what would happen, and they chose to ignore it because "OMG MAH THIN DEEEVICES". You can't tell me that a company with > $200B in the bank didn't know how their batteries would react with age and how this would cause the CPU to brown out and automatically reset itself.
They're scrambling now to produce a software patch because it's clear this is a huge PR issue for them **AND** they know users are falling for the whole "it's a software issue, sorry" thing when the actual hardware design is borked. Yes, this can be mitigated by software. Doesn't change the fact that the design is bad, and Apple willingly sold these devices knowing full well what would happen to them as they aged.
That's what people should be outraged about. Buying a premium device for a premium price and getting something that Apple knew would fail in N years and would require silicon throttling just to prevent the issue from rebooting the phone. It may not have been willful planned obsolescence, but Apple damned well knew what they were doing when they sold these devices and continued to sell them without a full recall.
And that is exactly what Apple has done; provided a toggle so people can turn this off if they like phones that do not last as long on battery when the batteries age.
Why would anyone flip that switch? I'm personally not sure, but that's how every other phone in the world works today so...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The real issue is that the computing and display hardware of modern smartphones have a much longer serviceable lifespan than the battery. Many users could easily use the same phone for 3 - 5 years before feeling there's value in upgrading. But the battery is nearly always the first component to go (unless you break the display).
So, the decision to make the phone virtually impossible for the average user to open, to make the battery as difficult as possible to replace, cannot be seen as anything but an attempt to force users to upgrade more frequently and increase revenue. And this is where the problem really lies--the planned obsolescence propped up by the myth that these devices get slower or perform poorly after a few years.
If Apple and other smartphone manufacturers were truly sincere about doing the right thing, they would make models with user replaceable batteries. Rather than shaving off another 0.5 mm from an already thin device (after all, has anyone actually complained that their device is too thick?); rather than fucking around with software that tells you when your battery is failing (you don't need the phone to tell you what you already figured out from using it); rather than offering discounted battery replacements, which only serves to deflect from the truth--they just need to give the user the ability to do what they used to be able to do with mobile phones.
To those manufacturers who do offer smartphones with user replaceable batteries, kudos. Sadly, you are at a competitive disadvantage for your customer-friendly decision.