> Malicious or not, they profited, likely heavily, from the lack of communication/transparency.
How so? If Apple didn't mitigate lower battery voltage than customers' phones would have been unusable. A customer with a phone crashing so often it's unusable is more likely to replace it than one that is slowed down. How does extending the usable life of the phone result in more sales?
Consumers could have replaced the battery, a practice that has been universal in consumer electronics for, well, the entire history of battery-powered consumer electronics.
If consumers were aware that their phones were actually suffering from degraded performance due to a design failure by Apple, instead of being gaslighted into believing that their phones simply seemed slower because they were older, they might have switched away from Apple.
All of this chicanery is really about getting consumers comfortable with the idea of disposable gadgets that must be replaced every year. When you expose the fact that a LIPO powered phone is probably going to need a new battery after 1-2 years, consumers start to wonder why they are charged an exorbitant fee to replace the battery in the first place.
Can you show me where Apple denied that battery age affected the iPhone's performance? I see this allegation repeatedly in this thread, but so far it goes unsubstantiated.
Can you show me where I claimed Apple made such a denial?
Or maybe explain why you think such a denial is in any way relevant?
They saw that battery life was causing problems in their phones, and they quietly band-aided the problem without informing users. If I kill someone and bury them in the back yard, and then get caught years later, I hope you'll jump to my defense with the line "Can you show me where he denied killing that guy?!"
Obviously silently masking battery life issues without telling anyone is... well... masking the fact that your product suffers from battery life issues.
> Can you show me where I claimed Apple made such a denial?
Here you write that gaslighted (denied) customers regarding the battery's impact on performance.
> If consumers were aware that their phones were actually suffering from degraded performance due to a design failure by Apple, instead of being gaslighted into believing that their phones simply seemed slower because they were older, they might have switched away from Apple.
> Or maybe explain why you think such a denial is in any way relevant?
Because such a claim is counterfactual.
> They saw that battery life was causing problems in their phones, and they quietly band-aided the problem without informing users. If I kill someone and bury them in the back yard, and then get caught years later, I hope you'll jump to my defense with the line "Can you show me where he denied killing that guy?!"
This is a comparison so far fetched that I'm dubious it's even made in good faith. Throttling clock speeds when voltages are insufficient is something that many, perhaps even most, electronics do. Because the alternative a device that crashes. Slow is strictly better than non-functional.
> Obviously silently masking battery life issues without telling anyone is... well... masking the fact that your product suffers from battery life issues.
Yes, in the same way that literally every car company "silently masks" that their cars' power will degrade over time. The same way that realtors "silently mask" that a house's paint will fade or that its pipes will rust. Products degrade over time. Obviously, companies don't deliberately advertise this fact. But unless they're actually denying that this degradation will happen, they're not masking anything.
> Apple attributed the problems mainly to temperature changes, high usage and other issues, and said its engineers worked quickly and successfully to address them. Analysts sometimes refer to the slowing of iPhones as "throttling."
Not only does your quote not say what was alleged (that Apple denied that battery usage was a factor in slowdown), it actually says that Apple placed high usage as one of the factors.
According to Apple the slowing of the phones were mainly due to:
* Temperature changes
* High usage
* Other issues
How are customers supposed to decipher that the problem is the battery from that statement? This is straight up denying the actual problem.
Not to mention that when I took my old 6s to the store to see what was the slowing down about they told me it was perfectly fine and was running at the same speed as new.
How is it "straight up denying the actual problem" when high usage is listed as one of the points? You use your phone a lot, the battery life degrades, and your CPU is throttled because the battery cannot produce sufficient charge to run it at the highest clock rate.
I don't deny your individual experiences at the Apple store, but the claim that Apple denied that battery life can cause phones to slow down remains unsubstantiated.
> you should read the actual article Apple wrote rather than Tech Crunch's summarization. It is not an apology. It's explaining battery chemistry: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208387
I'll do one better, I'll dig Apple post before they changed to a non-apology one:
> We’ve been hearing feedback from our customers about the way we handle performance for iPhones with older batteries and how we have communicated that process. We know that some of you feel Apple has let you down. We apologize.
Show me where Apple said "battery life does not cause your phone to slow down". This is what was alleged - that Apple denied battery life causes phones to slow down.
Apple wrote this letter to appease customers, because they don't understand battery chemistry and the canard that Apple was slowing down phones was proliferating and they needed to make some gesture.
> We’ve been hearing feedback from our customers about the way we handle performance for iPhones with older batteries and how we have communicated that process. We know that some of you feel Apple has let you down.
This is a far cry from what was initially alleged: that Apple denied that battery life caused phones to slow down. This "apology" essentially amounts to "we're sorry you don't understand battery chemistry".
How so? If Apple didn't mitigate lower battery voltage than customers' phones would have been unusable. A customer with a phone crashing so often it's unusable is more likely to replace it than one that is slowed down. How does extending the usable life of the phone result in more sales?