Apple slows down old phones to "save battery life"

Why can’t apple just send out a firmware update that is optional to allow the choice?

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iirc that apple software update does not have a “optional” firmware download option

I think he/she/it/helicopter means a firmware update to make the “battery saving” optional :slight_smile:

This was on.the news today lol. 3ghz iphone 6’s running at 600mhz.

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Because Apple is all about money not choice.

I see countless people not knowing how to close apps on their phone. Even android users think the app is closed when they press home button. They have like 20 of them open all the time and are surprised the phone doesn’t last 24h. It makes me cringe.

Do you own the telco dealership? If not then fuck it. Slap them in the face with the truth. People need to stop buying new phone every 2 years. It’s bad for the environment anyway.

If we spent as much money on real science as these companies spend on making the new bling phone we would have a working fusion-reactors by now.

To be fair Android has gotten better in allocating resources (or rather not allocating them) to the active and inactive apps. Also swiping them away on the multi task view doesn’t actually close them either so… yeah.

It at times like this I wonder if I could get by with a dumbphone?

Maybe a dumbphone and an old school PDA.

How about a dumbphone and a notepad and a nice pencil???

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I want a netbook with a 3G card.

I get buy with an old Motorola razer i’ve had for 12/13 years. I’ve tried smart phones over the years, and still own a galaxy s3. They are nice when the battery is nice and charged, and when your doing light duty work but when working with equipment for 12 hours a day they get broken quick.

I have a 6S that’s an absolute slug. It’s behaviour disgusts me and I have to switch away from it regularly to one of my Android rigs, even though I am a fan of iOS. It turns off randomly and is generally just a prick to use for any length of time. All this hoo hah just confirms this to me.

Now that I managed to de-google my S7 edge with LOS I’ll probably just use that permanently anyway.

The iPhone 6S goes have an extended warranty program for unexpected shutdowns caused by batetry nonsense. iPhones with certain serials can get a free replacement battery basically.

https://www.apple.com/support/iphone6s-unexpectedshutdown/

Otherwise, the cause is 100% battery on your device. Its a very common issue for me to deal with.

I read that some Androids do the same thing, they just haven’t been caught so they have no reason to be open about battery life throttling. My phone is noticeably slower. I thought it was all the bloatware crap that keeps getting pushed to my phone without permission.

I found an article that said: It’s super important to calibrate your battery every month. I tried to follow their instructions for my phone, but the menus in my phone were completely different and I couldn’t find the option. So I get instructions from another site and they got the instructions wrong too. If Android is so fragmented that no one knows how to correctly fix it, I’m not gonna screw with it.

I accept my slower fate. But I still wont buy a new phone.

If you have a look at iPhone X, you’ll find out that closing the apps is even further obscured now the home button is gone. The further thing is, devs are encouraged to never write shut-down code in their apps. You don’t “exit(0)” an iOS app, that’s against the guidelines. You are instead being given more and more opportunity to run the apps semi-permanently in the background. I essentially always kill apps, because background tasks are waste of battery, mobile “plan”, some apps are bugged when running in the background, and background running is a significant vector of attack on privacy.

However, from what I’ve seen, most people never close their apps.

I tried that, but mine is not eligible, even though it happens to it regularly.

This is true, but in an Android world you can just reflash it and it goes back to normal, and even more so with a de-googled AOSP variant, the speed gains are incredible. My S7 Edge is way faster than when I got it, lasts longer, boots almost instantly, and I only use about 800MB/month in mobile data without all the update and tracking bullshit installed on it. In Australia we have aggressive mobile data limits so this allows me to go on a super cheap plan without sacrificing anything. 10/10

Neither the cNet article or the linked GeekBench article provide anything even approaching evidence. The Geekbench article shows scores based on iOS version and then asserts that part of the issue is battery life. Based on what? This doesn’t past the first level of sniff test for valid testing if the conclusion drawn is that battery age is the culprit.

I hate Apple as much as the next guy, but this seems pretty lame to me and sure as shit doesn’t help provide any real criticism. Am I missing something included in the articles? They’re citing a freaking Reddit post as evidence!

This is beyond true. I see this daily

generally this stuff is snake oil. Battery percentages take into account what tasks the device is doing at the moment, how much voltage the battery is outputting to the phone, how many charge cycles it has, and probably more. Most of the battery calibration stuff does next to nothing, and the device itself, over time, tends to “learn” how the battery and the user behaves anyways and can intelligently manage it from there on out. Typically batteries only output very basic information, most of which are voltage and amperage readings, and a few statistics. Most of the elctronics in the batteries is protection circuitry, so the battery doesnt blow up.

Most of the time quitting apps, uninstalling useless shit, programmers developing non-shit apps, and having an OS that can properly manage, and kill, background tasks is what saves battery life the most. The slowness that you’ve got is just garbage apps combined with shit android power/performance management.

If Apple didn’t do this, then people would complain (and did) that battery life is killed by system updates and this is planned obsolescence.

Apple is in a position that they can do no right with some people.

That said I personally would like the choice. Give me a switch I can toggle if I decide performance is more important than battery life today.

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Is there, like, proof of this? Like, some segment of code that indicates this? For both Apple and Android it seems that there is no proof that there is some designed correlation between device performance and battery age (number of battery cycles, etc.) other than anecdotal evidence or these tests that are using software OS as the changing factor (and obviously not the battery). Where is the proof?

Apple themselves say they are slowing old devices down. Proof enough?

The company has now said it does slow down some models as they age

Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42438745

This is a different charge than what the GeekBench tests show, though. The accusation in the BBC article is what is being said here: that the iOS slows down certain devices as the battery cycles and replacing the battery will restart the clock, as it were. The GeekBench tests just show that different version of iOS run differently on each device, but there’s no demonstration in their test that battery aging is a factor.

The tests GeekBench did do absolutely nothing to address the question of performance over the lifetime of the battery. To do that it would make sense to run a new version of iOS on a phone with a very old battery, then replace the battery in that phone and run the same test with the same version OS. This comparison isn’t done.

In short, no it isn’t enough. No technical understanding is gained from either of these articles. That’s not to say that something isn’t happening (it likely is, seeing as Apple said it was) but the proper test to demonstrate how it actually impacts everyday use has not been done. It could be a negligible impact on daily use and the hindered performance could be from poor management by the user (literally not knowing how to close apps) or it could be significant on a level playing field.

At this point, we do not know and the discussions regarding the topic lack proper context. There’s a difference between “I suspect this is the case” and “I know this is the case”. Everybody is saying the latter, but they do not.

I would also add that I appreciate your link. I forgot to say so. It does add further context and addresses why this story has validity. It’s just not quite enough to really tell the story of what’s happening.

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