this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Well for one thing Apple rather famously slows down its old phones and lost a lawsuit over it. Apple has plenty of merits but longevity is definitely not one of them.
This keeps getting repeated and it gets further from the truth every time. Apple was throttling phones whose batteries were so bad the phone would shut off when trying to draw peak power. They should have had a message saying, “Replace your Fuckin battery dude”, rather than just throttling the phones, and that’s exactly what the lawsuit made them do. It’s not the case that apple went, “oh this phone is old, slow it down.” At all.
What’s more, they then gave discounted battery replacements to phones of the most-effected generations. As in, for like $50 or something the phone went back to working essentially like new (and had better battery life again to boot).
If their goal with the battery health throttling was to make money by forcing people to buy new phones, they sure went about it in a weird way. 😆
They only offered that cheap battery replacement after the lawsuit was filed.
Thats not an act of kindness, thats ass covering. They then settled the class action about the secret throttling for $300+ millon.
Not exactly just an "opps, we forget to mention what we were doing for your phones health for years, really guys" situation. In every possible way, they were silently hobbling the performance of old phones, which directly helped their sales of new phones.
The right thing to do was very simple : alert people and offer inexpensive battery replacements. We know it was very simple because they did it immediately when their duplicity was revealed in a court of law. Now ask youself why they didnt do it for years.
Iirc they offered battery replacement as part of a settlement, and had an os update out that gave detailed battery health information before that went down and outside of it.
This is so false, and has been debunked so many times that anyone still repeating it is simply a liar.
Batteries are consumable items. A great analogy anyone can relate to is car batteries. Anyone with a car knows the battery goes bad. Batteries wear out. A car battery that works fine in the summer may have a lot of trouble cranking over in the winter under the conditions and extra load of a cold engine full of sludgy oil.
The phone battery is no different. Overtime it starts to go bad. What Apple did, was determine through software when a phone battery could no longer support a phone running at full blast. They INCREASED LONGEVITY of the device, by throttling the speed. By making it run slower, it was less demanding and still would work - where it otherwise would have been prone to random shutdowns and crashes because of the degraded battery. This was a much better user experience. They could have skipped this altogether, and people would have just bought a new device. Instead this software throttling made the device last even longer. In fact, laptops have been doing this for decades. Should Apple have told folks? Sure. But anyone presenting this as a profit motive or forced obsolescence is deluded.