<story><title>Apple to pay up to $500M to settle U.S. lawsuit over slow iPhones</title><url>https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-pay-500-million-settle-154848278.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>avalys</author><text>I’ve always thought the coverage of this issue got things completely backwards.&lt;p&gt;Apple had an issue with old phones unexpectedly shutting down. They determined this happened because aged batteries were not capable of delivering peak current anymore and the CPU was “browning out” under heavy load.&lt;p&gt;They added a software feature in an iOS update that throttled the CPU in this condition to prevent a crash, at the expense of lower peak CPU performance.&lt;p&gt;From my perspective, this demonstrated real dedication to customer care and old device support from Apple. A phone that is moderately slower is still more valuable than one that randomly crashes. Intuitively, I’d expect that this would decrease sales of replacement iPhones, not increase them.&lt;p&gt;People latched onto the fact that Apple did this “secretly” - but Apple has never exposed this sort of implementation detail, and they’ve never wanted battery replacement to be part of the normal user experience for their devices. If Apple had shipped an iOS update that started telling people “Your battery is degraded, pay us to replace it to stop the crashes!” they obviously would’ve been raked over the coals also. There is no magic solution here.&lt;p&gt;So I never saw any indication that this was malicious on Apple’s part.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bgentry</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s shocking to me that even in a technical audience like HN, so many people don&amp;#x27;t understand the fairly simple story that you&amp;#x27;ve outlined here. Look around this thread and see how many people spread the narrative like &amp;quot;Apple intentionally slowed phones down&amp;quot; or even &amp;quot;Apple tried to extend battery life at the cost of performance&amp;quot;. Reiterating the summary:&lt;p&gt;- Some iPhones in this generation began randomly shutting down as their batteries aged.&lt;p&gt;- While looking into this, Apple determined it happened because certain aged batteries could no longer deliver enough current to sustain peak workloads (computers use more current when performing more intensive tasks). This is probably due to Apple underprovisioning the battery capacity in this generation, but that&amp;#x27;s not something they could fix in existing devices.&lt;p&gt;- Apple added a mechanism to detect when these random shutdowns occurred &lt;i&gt;on a specific device&lt;/i&gt; due to insufficient power from the battery.&lt;p&gt;- Once the random shutdown had been detected &lt;i&gt;on a specific device&lt;/i&gt;, that specific phone would instead throttle its CPU when the system was under heavy load to prevent the random shutdown from occurring.&lt;p&gt;In short, your phone was not affected unless your battery had already degraded and was experiencing power-related random shutdowns. The changes Apple made to deal with this were an unequivocally user-friendly change to work around a hardware shortcoming and keep peoples&amp;#x27; phones working well for longer than they otherwise would have.&lt;p&gt;The mistakes Apple made were:&lt;p&gt;- Designing the phone hardware with barely enough battery capacity, such that some moderately old phones might not be able to keep working properly when the batteries decayed.&lt;p&gt;- Not being transparent with the hardware design flaw above, such as proactively replacing any customer whose device was being affected by this flaw while still under warranty.&lt;p&gt;- Not going far enough with the software changes to initially add something like the battery health info they later added in response to this PR fiasco.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s about it, I think?</text></comment>
<story><title>Apple to pay up to $500M to settle U.S. lawsuit over slow iPhones</title><url>https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-pay-500-million-settle-154848278.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>avalys</author><text>I’ve always thought the coverage of this issue got things completely backwards.&lt;p&gt;Apple had an issue with old phones unexpectedly shutting down. They determined this happened because aged batteries were not capable of delivering peak current anymore and the CPU was “browning out” under heavy load.&lt;p&gt;They added a software feature in an iOS update that throttled the CPU in this condition to prevent a crash, at the expense of lower peak CPU performance.&lt;p&gt;From my perspective, this demonstrated real dedication to customer care and old device support from Apple. A phone that is moderately slower is still more valuable than one that randomly crashes. Intuitively, I’d expect that this would decrease sales of replacement iPhones, not increase them.&lt;p&gt;People latched onto the fact that Apple did this “secretly” - but Apple has never exposed this sort of implementation detail, and they’ve never wanted battery replacement to be part of the normal user experience for their devices. If Apple had shipped an iOS update that started telling people “Your battery is degraded, pay us to replace it to stop the crashes!” they obviously would’ve been raked over the coals also. There is no magic solution here.&lt;p&gt;So I never saw any indication that this was malicious on Apple’s part.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dirkdigles</author><text>They didn’t tell retail.  They also didn’t tell customers why their phones were slow. Customers called&amp;#x2F;came in complaining of slow phones, and often times assumed it was because their phone was “old.”  Many new iPhones were likely sold as the result, as retail&amp;#x2F;customer service couldn’t give an explanation for slowness.&lt;p&gt;Malicious or not, they profited, likely heavily, from the lack of communication&amp;#x2F;transparency.</text></comment>