O: Apple admits deliberately slowing phones and devices

[CunegoFan]

Originally Posted by saab2000

This is true. The software updates mostly don't improve the user experience. They make it more complex.

I'm a big podcast guy and the podcast format that was included a few updates ago stinks.

And no this isn't a conspiracy with tin foil hats. It's easily documented and Apple even admits they are doing it. I think their excuse is total and complete BS.

My 5S is old and I'll be the first to admit it but it should be my choice to upgrade to a new model, not something forced upon me because Apple thinks it's time.

This is worse than planned obsolescence.

How would (will?) owners react if Tesla decides it's time for the owners to get a new car so they reduce functionality via a software update? That's exactly what Apple is doing.

Get a grip and a clue.

As explained by TechCrunch's Matthew Panzarino:
Basically, iPhones were hitting peaks of processor power that the battery was unable to power and the phones were shutting off. Apple then added power management to all iPhones at the time that would 'smooth out' those peaks by either capping the power available from the battery or by spreading power requests over several cycles.
When an iPhone's battery ages, there may come a point when it can't provide the processor with enough power to reach a peak of power, and thus it spreads the requests out "over a few cycles," resulting in the peaks and perceived lower scores on benchmarking tests. As Panzarino points out, benchmarking tests are not reflective of real world usage and will artificially trigger the power management features in the iPhone.

"In other words, you're always going to be triggering this when you run a benchmark, but you definitely will not always trigger this effect when you're using your iPhone like normal," writes Panzarino.

The slowdown of older models is due to limited RAM, which Apple has always been stingy with, the addition of features to new versions of the OS, and Apple designing new OS versions for its current halo model rather than models that are three generations old. App size bloat over time exacerbates the problem; you may think you are doing the same thing you always were with that Facebook app, but the app has grown immensely and now strains the resources of your phone. Not everything is a conspiracy by The Man.

[saab2000]

Originally Posted by CunegoFan

Get a grip and a clue.....

Not everything is a conspiracy by The Man.

Dude, chill. I get that there are things going on with RAM and app size. And I also get that my phone is old.

But when Apple admits throttling speed it's not really a conspiracy.

There is no doubt that my phone has slowed down to a nearly unusable crawl with the past couple software updates.

[shovelhd]

Originally Posted by saab2000

My 5S is old and I'll be the first to admit it but it should be my choice to upgrade to a new model, not something forced upon me because Apple thinks it's time.

This is worse than planned obsolescence.

How would (will?) owners react if Tesla decides it's time for the owners to get a new car so they reduce functionality via a software update? That's exactly what Apple is doing.

Kinda like what Shimano did with 6770 Di2. It's 11 speed compatible, then it's not.

[staggerwing]

I'm not going to try and apologize for Apple, but this whole issue would become a non-issue if batteries were more readily replaceable by mere mortals, and consumers were instructed to expect some slowdown correlating with battery age and cycle count. Might slow down the purchase of shiny new phones though.

It would also be nice if the consumer could decide whether they preferred conservative power management, with a longer run time, or the inverse. In the Apple universe, the Mothership decides what is best for the end user.

[commonguy001]

The change in my 6 was super noticeable after the update they are talking about. We decided it was time after 3 years and did new iPhone 8 Plus phones. This one is water resistant so I'm pretty happy about that.

I figured they did it on purpose when they stopped signing (whatever that means) the old iOS certificate so you couldn't roll it back.

[Mikej]

Oh yeah, now I remember- Apple had like a trillion in the bank...that’s why we need to slow down 2year old phones, so they can have 2trillion in the bank-

[benb]

There are all kinds of different issues going on here everyone should chill.

Apple is likely way less guilty of a lot of this stuff than other manufacturers.

- First they actually do try and tailor/eliminate some of the new features for the old phones to try and mediate performance issues on old phones. So does Google.

- A lot of android phones never even get the updates. You can't complain about your 2-3 year old android phone being slow with the latest software because chances are you are not even being given the choice to upgrade it.

- Don't discount the battery issue vs CPU Speed. Apple usually doesn't advertise the CPU Speeds but you can usually find them if you look at some of the more technical hardware centric websites that cover this stuff. Apple phones usually have VERY conservative maximum clock speeds compared to Android designs. Apple does this partly to get good battery life and partly because they spend more time customizing their CPU cores for their needs, and partly because iOS + it's apps are forced into a more efficient design. Android phones were advertising 2Ghz+ maximum CPU clock speeds years ago, I'm not sure but I don't think even these latest iPhones do 1.5Ghz. Some iPads do have higher clock speeds because the iPad has a huge battery compared to a phone.

- All these devices almost never run at their full clock speed. If you have an app that locks in the phone at 100% maximum rated CPU Clock speed and keeps the phone wide awake with constant network access (a video game would be the most likely candidate) you can drain the batteries incredibly quickly, even on a brand new phone. To keep this from happening the phones all aggressively slow their CPU speeds down and turn off bits of the system every chance they can get. And both Google & Apple have reams of documentation and recommendations for you if you're programming an application to make sure your application doesn't have bad behaviors that kill batteries. I haven't written an iOS app but I have written an Android app that did background network activity and there is a lot going on with battery stuff, very interesting. Because of some of the factors mentioned above Apple phones actually run at a higher % of their maximum more often than Androids usually do. The Android designs often have higher temporary "turbo" functionality that is great for marketing/advertising, but they might not be able to sustain it long due to heating and/or battery factors.

- Add up the above and now you've got a 2 year old battery. It's got 50-60% capacity of a new phone. The choice on the manufacturer + software side is do you want that user to be complaining about the battery life (the phone keeps running everything like it's brand new) or the CPU speed (the phone changes it's performance profile to try and preserve a longer battery life).

All that is going on here is Apple has been fiddling around with the balance. Certainly in the past I think iPhones had much worse battery performance after a year or two.

You can get the Apple support app and request they run a battery diagnostic on your phone.. I did so yesterday, I have a 6S that is getting older. The speed is not really getting on my nerves yet. They said I had about 400 charge cycles on my battery but the battery health was still about 90%. My understanding is there is a threshold where the health starts dropping faster in the 500-600 cycle range. I'm going to keep waiting on mine.

If you use your phone incessantly it's going to hit these problems faster as you'll go through more charge cycles per time period.

[bobswire]

No wonder my Strava/MapMyRide times have gotten slower and here I thought it was me.

[Tickdoc]

Originally Posted by saab2000

There is no doubt that my phone has slowed down to a nearly unusable crawl with the past couple software updates.

My point is that it just so happens to coincide with the fall launch of a new phone.....about a month before the new phone launches.

I'm not a conspirist but that is just too damn coincidental.

[jlwdm]

Seems like a good thing to me.

Jeff

[benb]

It coincides with the new software release which added the functionality to balance battery life vs speed with old/unhealthy batteries.

The only way they could probably keep people happy would be to offer free new batteries. (Yah right)

They could also give you a slider to balance out the behavior of battery life vs speed. That's not really the apple way though. I'd expect Samsung to do that though if they implement a similar feature.

[paredown]

Originally Posted by benb

There are all kinds of different issues going on here everyone should chill.

Apple is likely way less guilty of a lot of this stuff than other manufacturers.

- First they actually do try and tailor/eliminate some of the new features for the old phones to try and mediate performance issues on old phones. So does Google.

- A lot of android phones never even get the updates. You can't complain about your 2-3 year old android phone being slow with the latest software because chances are you are not even being given the choice to upgrade it.

- Don't discount the battery issue vs CPU Speed. Apple usually doesn't advertise the CPU Speeds but you can usually find them if you look at some of the more technical hardware centric websites that cover this stuff. Apple phones usually have VERY conservative maximum clock speeds compared to Android designs. Apple does this partly to get good battery life and partly because they spend more time customizing their CPU cores for their needs, and partly because iOS + it's apps are forced into a more efficient design. Android phones were advertising 2Ghz+ maximum CPU clock speeds years ago, I'm not sure but I don't think even these latest iPhones do 1.5Ghz. Some iPads do have higher clock speeds because the iPad has a huge battery compared to a phone.

- All these devices almost never run at their full clock speed. If you have an app that locks in the phone at 100% maximum rated CPU Clock speed and keeps the phone wide awake with constant network access (a video game would be the most likely candidate) you can drain the batteries incredibly quickly, even on a brand new phone. To keep this from happening the phones all aggressively slow their CPU speeds down and turn off bits of the system every chance they can get. And both Google & Apple have reams of documentation and recommendations for you if you're programming an application to make sure your application doesn't have bad behaviors that kill batteries. I haven't written an iOS app but I have written an Android app that did background network activity and there is a lot going on with battery stuff, very interesting. Because of some of the factors mentioned above Apple phones actually run at a higher % of their maximum more often than Androids usually do. The Android designs often have higher temporary "turbo" functionality that is great for marketing/advertising, but they might not be able to sustain it long due to heating and/or battery factors.

- Add up the above and now you've got a 2 year old battery. It's got 50-60% capacity of a new phone. The choice on the manufacturer + software side is do you want that user to be complaining about the battery life (the phone keeps running everything like it's brand new) or the CPU speed (the phone changes it's performance profile to try and preserve a longer battery life).

All that is going on here is Apple has been fiddling around with the balance. Certainly in the past I think iPhones had much worse battery performance after a year or two.

You can get the Apple support app and request they run a battery diagnostic on your phone.. I did so yesterday, I have a 6S that is getting older. The speed is not really getting on my nerves yet. They said I had about 400 charge cycles on my battery but the battery health was still about 90%. My understanding is there is a threshold where the health starts dropping faster in the 500-600 cycle range. I'm going to keep waiting on mine.

If you use your phone incessantly it's going to hit these problems faster as you'll go through more charge cycles per time period.

Good points all--but I would add that my old Android phone was crippled, not so much by OS updates, as by Google-pushed application updates, often for applications that I did not use but were bundled with the phone and not removable.

I do think that the new business model is obsolescence and replacement--well, that was probably the old business model too--but the cycle is running so much faster now, especially with the phone market.

I'm currently helping to clean up an estate's old Mac computers--we sold the very old/antique stuff to collectors--and I've got a series of Macs starting with a Powerbook 500c, and ending with a Mac Pro tower ~2008 that I need to wipe and donate or resell. What strikes me is how antique the old Powerbook is (even though it sold for a whopping $5k + in 1994), and the slow development of models (the next one I have is a 5400c) and features. It's not until the G4 tower that we're at something that looks fairly 'modern' with ethernet capability etc--5 or 6 years later.

Now a new model of a phone can be developed, prototyped and marketed in an 18 month cycle...

[benb]

Those old Macs were not really consumer products the same way that phones are.

Apple has still been super bad with obsoleting Macs from time to time too.

I have not bought a Mac in years, partly because I bought a Mac Pro in 2006... great machine, got great use of it.

Apple prematurely dropped support for those machines in late 2011. Mine was still more powerful than brand new machines that they were selling in 2013-2014.

That was a really expensive machine. I had about $3k in mine including upgrades but some people probably had $5k in them. Of course the people who put $5k into them were probably also the type who "had to" buy another $5k one 2 years later.

We were still using it somewhat till pretty recently when the hard drive died.. if I put a new hard drive in it we could probably get some additional good use out of it with Linux or something. It's still a pretty powerful machine. 1GB video card, 12GB ram, terabytes of disc space, 2.66Ghz Xeon machine with 4 cores.

[zap]

edit

Originally Posted by benb

- A lot of android phones never even get the updates. You can't complain about your 2-3 year old android phone being slow with the latest software because chances are you are not even being given the choice to upgrade it.

Samsung/Verizon have updates for my S7 every 2 weeks or so ........mostly security updates. Ignoring most app updates.

[tylercheung]

Granted...the Android contemporaries from the iPhone 5s to 6 era are not even eligible for Android Oreo, so the fact that Apple is bending over backwards to support phones several generations old is something. This when mobile phone processors are doubling in speed every generation... The S7 gets updates but the S6 and Nexus lines from that time period have been sunsetted...