Kitz Forum
Announcements => News Articles => Topic started by: Weaver on January 05, 2018, 07:26:19 PM
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http://www.which.co.uk/news/2018/01/apple-facing-lawsuits-for-slowing-down-older-iphones/
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Oh well, Apple can afford it ;) :P
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There’s always somebody trying to get famous by suing Apple.
And there’s always a media organisation trying to get publicity by reporting it.
:)
Personally, I know, and I thought everybody else knew, that all lithium batteries degrade, and that iPhone battery replacement is not a trivial process. Why is it bad then if Apple should adapt the OS for best performance compromise vs battery life, thus deferring costly replacement?
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Because they didn't tell anyone!
So whether they had good intentions or not it, it will be the latter people believe.
PS. They also made the batteries hard to change, now whether that is because the market is flooded with dodgy fake batteries for phones with changeable batteries, and they are therefore protecting their customers or it's simply for profit we'll never know.
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... and then there's the perfectly fine i-pad 2's which worked OK up until an iOS update.
It killed my ipad and why I ended up getting rid of all my Apple kit and moving over to Samsung.
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I do think that Apple should have helped to give people the opportunity to swap out the battery by warning them about the battery's age or lowered performance.
I'm surprised that lowering clock speeds, if that's what they did, worked to extend lifetime on battery. The cpu has a certain number of clock cycles of work to get through and that's it, unless it is wasting time by going round in loops, polling or some such nonsense. Thirty three years ago when I worked in the first handheld that was very much true, you got the job done more quickly or more slowly and if anything the quicker you got it done, the faster you could go back to sleep. Things have changed beyond all recognition since then, but the logic of feeling that you need to be reducing clock rates simply says to me that you are spending your time in the software on wasteful activity.
(Makes me think of the so-called "pause" instruction on x86, which is a hint and is backwards compatible because it shares the same encoding as "rep; nop". When you're doing this you're just burning up the Cpu for no good reason which is why they invented this. Hyperthreading made that kind of code a major pain and piece of true insanity because one half of the processor was trying to run round as fast as possible doing absolutely nothing useful apart from fighting the other half for resources while it was trying to get real work done.)
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I experimented with that weaver on my phone in the past.
I tested the effect on battery if I capped the cpu speed.
When the screen was on (so active use) I found battery drained no differently with higher max clock speeds, what caused higher drain was when making the cpu ramp up its speeds faster, or forcing idle clocks higher.
With the screen off capping clock speeds has had mixed results.
On my oldest android phone capping clock speeds when screen is off definitely helped battery life but on the S7 it hindered it probably for the reason you stated.
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I'm surprised that lowering clock speeds, if that's what they did, worked to extend lifetime on battery.
Faster clock speeds, all other things being equal, do lead to increased power consumption.
One way to look at it is, faster switching involves greater reactive and inductive loads, which resist the current flow, thus generating heat. The heat represents the increased consumption.
My own 5C is apparently excluded from Apple’s endeavour to mitigate battery degradation but, now over 3 years old, the battery still gets through a day, but I need to be more wary. Other half has a 6S, two years old, and battery still lasts 2 or 3 days on just one charge, same as new. No noticeable performance hit, but she only uses it for basic stuff, email, texts and as a camera. I knew there must be some magic involved, full creds to Apple as far as I am concerned. :)
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Because they didn't tell anyone!
So whether they had good intentions or not it, it will be the latter people believe.
PS. They also made the batteries hard to change, now whether that is because the market is flooded with dodgy fake batteries for phones with changeable batteries, and they are therefore protecting their customers or it's simply for profit we'll never know.
The iPhone, as far as I know, was always intended to be a step change from the old 1990s flip-phones and the likes. I owned a few, Nokia’s Siemens, Motorolas. These old phones had replaceable batteries, but I never once managed to extend the life of a phone by replacing the battery. My Siemens battery did appear to die but a new one made no difference, there was some other fault.
The obvious comparison now is Android phones. Manufacturers like Samsung have clung to the old 1990s model of replaceable batteries, with the higher manufacturing costs that obviously entails.
But I wonder, what percentage of ordinary Android Samsung owners have ever replaced a battery, rather than just upgrading to a new phone when the battery degraded?
I do emphasise ‘percentage of ordinary users’, indidvidual anecdotal accounts from geeks like ourselves (me certainly) on Kitz’s forums would not be representative of normal people in the outside world. :D
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I suspect that sevenlayermuddle and I are at cross purposes. I'm talking only about a certain class of system where the processor has a certain fixed job of work to be done, and it gets it done in a fixed n clock cycles, which takes some unknown but variable amount of real time time as we can change the clock rate. When the cpu has done its work the clock gets turned off, goes to dc. This is how those old machines that I worked on worked, power was higher if clock speeds were higher but cpu_power * time = cpu_energy was a constant in the case where there was a fixed job of work. The model was that you move a certain amount of charge from one charge cell to another at each transition.
(As for inductance, thinking back across forty years, higher slew rate means greater back emf and greater change-opposing currents through resistive wires but slew rate isn't so easily associated with clock speed as after all these are approx square waves were talking about, very far from sine waves. Higher slew rate then means greater joule heating power but for a shorter time as the voltage swing is constant. But again we don't just automatically get slew rate from clock speeds, so we have no help; a slew rate could be very high even for a low clock speed for all I know. My ignorance of electronics is almost boundless.)
That is not to say that real modern machines or real workloads work like this, and there are of course the constant current draws such as the screen, NIC, other i/o that has to remain awake and so on, but the latter work in favour of my argument of getting things done faster so you can switch everything off sooner, but it's only relevant if you actually do that.
Anyway, I defer to sevenlayermuddle who cannot possibly be as fuzzy and foggy as me.
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Anyway, I defer to sevenlayermuddle who cannot possibly be as fuzzy and foggy as me.
Don’t bank on it, there is a reason my name is ‘muddle’ . :D
I do take your points about work/energy vs power, and I would be out my depth in responding. ;)
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Other companies use non-removable batteries - I'm not aware any have done something similar. I also believe there is "battery condition" software that can warn users about battery performance, Apple could have provided warnings rather than slowed the phone.
As for non-removable batteries I think they're a con. Watch a mobile phone teardown video on YouTube, the space saving of a non-removable battery is minimal(and people tend to put large protective cases on phones anyway). My own phone is an LG G3 which has a removable battery and is still very compact.
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new samsung phones no longer can replace batteries with s6 and newer, i replaced original batteries in my galaxy ace and s3 phones and in all phones made use of spare batteries in pocket when away from home for long periods
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We find the main benefit of removable batteries being able to replace them whilst out and about, at one point my wife would have three batteries for when she was out doing Duke of Edinburgh stuff, much easier than carrying a battery pack and having to have it plugged in.
My current phone (Elephone P9000) doesn't have a replaceable battery, but I need to change it and I have a new one coming Monday as it has swollen battery syndrome, so much so it popped the back off the phone which simply clips on and has a sticky pad in the middle. This battery could have very easily been user changeable.
As I hinted above, whenever we've bought a battery you never know if it's an original and some have been as bad as the one that's come out, but if manufactures sold them at a reasonable price I would buy direct.
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Not being an Apple guy, or up with the latest phone incarnations, I was going to say why not just change the battery.
I was unaware that the trend is now to use non-removable batteries? Why have they decided to take that direction? Purely to force people to buy a new phone rather than just replace the battery? Or is there some other technical advantage of using a non-removable battery?
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I suspect but I may be wrong, that it's to do with shipping Lithium batteries, you not supposed to send these as a separate unit via post :'( , but you can send them if they are part of a sealed unit :fingers: , also it's probably all about forcing people to upgrade to new more power hungry hardware, and Apple aren't the only ones doing this.......
@Weaver I think you're on the money for the CPU wait cycles, a nice simple way of slowing down a device after a firmware upgrade.
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I'm wondering if a non-removable battery has an advantage in better thermal contact, better heat transfer has a number of benefits. Secondly, the connector could perhaps get gungy or worse. I also wonder about whether there is some means of dissuading repairers from fitting non-genuine batteries, which is a giant safety nightmare these days, what with the amount of energy that these things store, and the associated potential for disaster.
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The 2 most likely reasons.
1 - Samsung have now decided to follow apple in making devices "look premium" glass bodies etc. this in turn stops them applying flexible removable covers.
2 - Planned obsolescence, with a dead non removable battery one may be persuaded to replace the phone.
My hauwei Y7, cover can be removed but ironically the battery is fixed in place non removable still.
Its not to do with water resistance, because my S5 had a removable back cover and was water/dust resistant certified.
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What Chrys said. There was me thinking like a designer.
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I’d have guessed that non user-replaceable batteries were motivated by reduced manufacturing cost, enhanced reliability, and competitive market forces for lightest/thinnest phones.
A removable battery means a battery ‘door’ and compartment, which would add to costs of plastics & mouldings.
It also encurages people to do as has been suggested earlier in thread, and swap in/out spare batteries on a regular basis, to extend time between charges. This means the connectors must be robust enough for maybe several hundreds or even thousands of operations, instead of just once or twice at manufacture, or professional repair. More robust connectors will add to cost. Same effect means the battery door must be designed to withstand multiple open/close sequences, further emphasising point of previous paragraph. And no matter how well designed, accidental damage to doors or terminals is a risk each time the battery is removed/replaced.
Lastly, the bulk of additional mouldings for battery door, and of the more robust connectors to sustain frequent operations, may not seem like a lot but will be at odds with the manufacturer’s competitive goal of weight saving and space saving.
...just guessing though. :)