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Apple: We Would Never Degrade the iPhone Experience To Get Users To Buy New Phones
Apple today responded to reports that the Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission are probing its decision to throttle older iPhones, confirming that the U.S government has asked questions. From a report: Apple said it would never intentionally "degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades." Apple acknowledged in December that it was secretly slowing the speeds of iPhones in an effort to help preserve aging batteries. In response to consumer backlash, the company dropped the price of battery replacements for the iPhone 6, iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus from $79 to $29.
If you don't want to slow down customer phones, then don't release a new OS version every year. Keep a gap of 3 years between major OS changes. As it is, hoggage from new OS versions forces many people to buy new phones. Where's the government investigation for that?
...outside the typical no-so-much-a-conspiracy-theory-anymore side of things, it's quite possible Apple got a HUGE influx of bad batteries that went out into millions of their phone models. I do remember a small window last year about specific models of iPhone 6/6s having recalls for batteries, which caused hardware instability (e.g. unexpected shutdowns, phone reboots, etc.).
If there is anything honest and plausible I'll put my intuition on, it would be that those batteries were FAR reaching outside that. Apple tried a small recall to make it 'look good' but in essence, it was fucking everything on the mobile side. So they tried to cover it up with throttling hacks to preserve the batteries in future iOS releases and got caught by some tech savvy folk on reddit.
"... in order to prevent devices from unintentionally shutting down due to undercurrent conditions."
Here, let me help you with that: "... in order to prevent devices from unintentionally shutting down due to undersized batteries that are degraded by bursts of high current demand."
With Apple, the customer is at the center of their concerns.
So they can fleece him from every angle.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The reason the phone has this problem is the performance of the processors. Most older phones and including almost all android phones won't have this problem cause they are dogs performance wise. Android phones like the Samsung 9 however will likely start exhibiting similar issues if they continue to push performance. It's simply a limitation of what a battery can do compared to what a processor can want.
That said most older phones are fine and there is no reason for people to upgrade them. About half the people I know own iPhones the other half Android, and for the most part they are all happy, the only exceptions are two people who had super junk android phones, but there is some truth to the saying you get what you pay for, and if they had simply bought a decent android phone they would probably be happy.