← Back to context

Comment by florakel

21 hours ago

Can you provide evidence for your claim? Most people take this statement at face value and I don’t understand why. I do some volunteer work supporting elderly people that have issues adapting to a digital only world and I am always pleasantly surprised by the performance of their old iPhones all the way down to the 8 (old phones they get from their kids)

Also the coming iOS 27 release supposedly has some big performance improvements for all supported models that people have verified in the beta releases even with the iPhone 11: https://www.macworld.com/article/3160623/apple-finally-figur...

13 comments

florakel

Reply
elictronic  18 hours ago

Apple is still paying out the 500 million dollars they lost in a lawsuit about this exact practice.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67911517

  • ashdksnndck  15 hours ago

    Apple admitted to slowing down iPhones to keep the batteries from failing, and agreed to stop doing it and created a new battery replacement plan. I’ve personally experienced the benefit of getting the battery on Apple devices replaced which made them behave like new again. There’s a reason old Apple devices hold their value a lot better than competing manufacturers.

    • Grombobulous  14 hours ago

      It was a pretty terrible controversy at the time but I think the battery health settings pane we got out of it was a good compromise and a net positive. What would be even better would be fully user-replaceable batteries.

      To be more precise, the phones weren’t slowed down to keep the batteries from failing, they were slowed down to maintain stability and stop random crashes. As batteries age they lose their peak voltage capability, so you’re basically undervolting your components unless you slow them down.

preg_match  19 hours ago

Every time I upgrade iOS past a few major versions there is significant slow down. I don’t think it’s done on purpose, it’s just that software grows more demanding over time.

  • josephg  17 hours ago

    > software grows more demanding over time.

    Nah. Adding more features to software doesn’t make software run slower. The problem is that software developers only optimise enough to make it run fast on our own computers. Because we keep getting new computers, we get lazier over time and software gets slower.

    Electron is the most obvious example of this sort of thing, but examples are everywhere once you start looking.

    • BobbyTables2  12 hours ago

      That may be true but it did get slower. Maybe new fancy UI effects, etc.

      Apple also seems hellbent on fully utilizing all available space on the low end model. IOS+ System Data is about 30GB.

      The original iPhone had a 4GB model and had space left over for the user to use!

      2 replies →

    • preg_match  12 hours ago

      I agree, it’s not a natural phenomenon per-se and it is getting worse. I think this consumer hardware problem will actually help get us back on track, to a degree.

mvdtnz  21 hours ago

Apple is known to slow older devices intentionally. They have admitted it.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67911517

  • robin_reala  21 hours ago

    That’s the literal truth, but the subtlety behind it was that CPU spikes combined with low voltage batteries were causing phones to shut off. Apple’s slowing down the phone down was nominally because customers prefer slightly slower phones to phones that shut off unexpectedly. Should they have announced this as a feature and had a toggle switch to allow users that preferred the option to disable it? Of course. But I don’t necessarily think they did the wrong thing.

  • jagenabler2  19 hours ago

    The devices were slowed because aging batteries creates unstable performance. It wasn't done to intentionally make them obsolete.