Apple quite literally had a scandal where it was exposed in court that they deli... (2024)

I'm pretty sure this is not true. They slow down the device when battery can't provide enough current to sustain unthrottled CPU. Its happening in the latest iOS. It happened with my 5 year phone few months ago which suddenly turned off. I don't even feel this throttling but it doesn't turn off anymore.

On an unrelated note, my Google Pixel 7 just hanged up. It didn't happen to me since windows XP I think. It's the worst phone I've ever owned.

It's 100% true, beyond a shadow of a doubt. Not only did it go to court, Apple admitted doing it and paid over $100M in damages.

https://www.npr.org/2020/11/18/936268845/apple-agrees-to-pay...

They LITERALLY lost a court verdict that said they did it to screw customers.

I don't care what Apple's PR said, the court found that the AG complaint of "Many consumers decided that the only way to get improved performance was to purchase a newer-model iPhone from Apple, ... Apple, of course, fully understood such effects on sales." was correct and that Apple had to pay up.

This is an incredibly disingenuous argument.

Apple decided to underclock CPUs when the battery had aged to the point where consistent voltage couldn't be applied at maximum power. They did this so users wouldn't complain about their phone randomly crashing. Really, they were damned if they did and damned if they didn't.

What you can criticize is that they did it without informing users or allowing an option — the lawsuit and backlash reversed that course and they now have a setting for it. You can argue they should have had that all along. You can argue they were doing it purposely for planned obsolescence, but the evidence isn't really there to support it.

Apple provides major software upgrades for years longer than most Android devices do. There are some exceptions for Android, but the rule is that you're lucky to get more than two years of software updates for your phone. Apple, on the other hand, supports for 4-6 years. That should earn them kudos compared to most Android manufacturers.

>You can argue they were doing it purposely for planned obsolescence, but evidence isn't really there to support it.

This is not a court of law and I am quite comfortable believing this was planned obsolescence for the simple that behaving in this way was advantageous to their profits. Otherwise it would not have taken lies (they initially denied the existence of the throttling!), outrage and lawsuits to do the right thing.

The alternative explanation is mass ignorance and/or incompetence on a level that would be hard to accept coming from Apple. Am I expected to seriously believe that nobody at Apple tested this throttle down behavior and saw (and likely measured) the impact on day-to-day performance?

Aren’t they still doing it? My Macbook 2013 runs at lightening speeds, while my iMac 2020 is slow as hell because I upgrade it.

One may say it’s the layers of transparency and other services, but I don’t care about those, my Macbook 2013 was the pinnacle of perfection.

Apple is still definitely slowing down Macs with every single little release.

"Apple is still definitely slowing down Macs with every single little release."

This was true for Intel Macs 2014-2020. I bought a 14' M1 Macbook Pro with 32GB of memory / 1TB storage and it absolutely flies. Best machine I've owned in almost a decade (2014 15' MBP).

I think it's simpler: there's general arrogance that Apple knows what's best for their customers. Their entire philosophy isn't about giving customers what they want, it's giving customers what Apple thinks they need. So, when you uncover phones crashing because batteries age and folks don't get their batteries serviced, you throttle the CPU in software to avoid the issue. It's pure arrogance.

We also know that Apple is stubborn (see the removal of the headphone jack), so of course it's going to take a lawsuit for them to reverse course on something like this.

Their reasoning behind this debacle wasn't entirely braindead (maintaining battery life at the expense of processing power on a degraded battery).

What was braindead was not giving customers information and control over if the slowdown was enabled.

> that they deliberately slow older devices down to prematurely make them appear obsolete so that users will discard them sooner

Not an Apple apologist but I think you're leaving out a detail. Apples reasoning was due to older batteries[0]. You can see from the linked tweet the phones speed went back up when the battery was replaced. It may very well still be nefarious on their part.

[0] https://www.techradar.com/news/apple-might-be-slowing-down-y...

It was a battery life mitigation solution, that almost all major manufacturers did as well.

One which I think is sensible.

That's not true at all.

What was happening is that the CPU was, at peak, pulling more power than an older battery was capable of delivering and it was causing a brownout.

Their solution was to restrict CPU performance as battery condition deteriorated to ensure that your phone was always giving you the maximum level of performance available to you.

Batteries are consumables and their performance degrades over time.

The whole thing was spun into "Apple is reducing performance of my old phone to make me buy a new one" - when the narrative could have just as easily been "Apple gets the most possible out a battery at all times." Note that competitors might have just used the lower performance level the whole time.

After the furor they gave you a 'set my performance to 100% at all times and let my phone take a dirt nap if it can't handle it' toggle switch in settings.

> Batteries are consumables and their performance degrades over time.

I can accept that for removable batteries. But if you have to essentially dismantle the device to replace the battery, it's part of the device and should be treated as such: the battery being a consumable means the entire device is a consumable.

Well no, you can just get the battery replaced.

But that doesn't change anything - the point is, they could have just limited the CPU power draw to below the minimum threshold at all times so performance was constant, but low. That would in my opinion be strictly worse.

[edit] To be clear, I also want replaceable batteries but that conversation is totally orthogonal.