Apple Replaced 11 Million iPhone Batteries in Its $29 Program (cnet.com)

Apple's $29 battery replacement program may have seriously dinged sales of its 2018 iPhone models. From a report: The company replaced 11 million iPhone batteries under the program, John Gruber of tech-focused blog DaringFireball reported Monday, citing Apple CEO Tim Cook at an all-hands meeting. Typically, the company replaces 1 million to 2 million batteries each year, DaringFireball noted. Cook cited the program's negative impact on Apple's revenue in a Jan. 2 sales warning to investors but didn't offer specific numbers.

Comments

Re:Cheaper than the alternative

[edwdig]

It's not a hardware design defect, it's a basic fact of how electronics work. It wasn't an issue of *just* CPU usage. As phones got more complex, the difference in power draw between "idle" and "everything in use" became bigger over time. The other big factor is batteries don't work as well in cold weather. The big problem people were seeing was if they used their phones outdoors in winter weather with a bunch of things going at once, the battery couldn't keep up. Stress the phone hard in conditions when the battery won't work well and you get problems.

And they didn't lie about it, they've had a note about it on their support site ever since they launched the fix.

And the fix wasn't a big deal. My 6S used to shut down often in the winter months, even when it was brand new. I haven't had it happen since they issued the fix, and there's been no noticeable impact on performance.

Totally false, here's the real deal

[SuperKendall]

It's clear the iPhone 6-series has a hardware design defect that caused shutdowns when its CPU hit heavy loads when running on batteries with reduced capacity.

Hey buddy - ALL PHONES have this issue. Just try searching for "Android sudden shutdown battery".

What Apple did was say, hey lets make it so the phone only shuts down when it's truly out of power, by throttling back performance a little bit, rather than just suddenly die at 10 or 20% left just because you played a game or something, or the battery was getting old.

Instead of being lauded for helping phone users get the thing they treasure most above all else - battery life - Apple was pummeled for helping out users, and even though this criticism was utterly unfair, Apple took the high road and said "well how about cheap replacement batteries all around that restore full performance!".

Now you can choose which path you want phone to take battery wise -but of course because people are not utter morons they 99% choose to use the method Apple added that got them in such trouble, and which Android phone makers have added over time hoping you wouldn't notice and also ask for cheap replacement batteries.