Apple finally fessed up that it has been messing with our older phones:
http://money.cnn.com/2017/12/21/technology/apple-slows-down-old-iphones/index.html
Certainly enough, some consumers are so mad they filed lawsuits.
Have you noticed that cat videos became painfully slow to load on your older model phone?
^ That is evil.
I bet a lot of people bought new phones when theirs slowed down, not realizing that a $70 new battery would juice up their existing phone again. D1 just commented that she upgraded to her 6 because of this. I smell a possible class action lawsuit…
It was for the protection of those older phones, you know, so they did not overload and shut down, they had your best interests in mind 
Your tradeoff is going to be, do you want a faster phone or do you want battery life long enough to get through the day after 2 years? I wonder if they’ll end up putting a software switch in the phone that allows you to decide that yourself. I guess they already have that, it’s called Low Power Mode. But maybe something to determine how degraded your battery is.
Batteries are wear items. This mostly affects people whose batteries are at or near end of life, and Apple was trying to keep people suffering shutdowns until their batteries were replaced and the device could be restored to its original performance.
Apple could have communicated this better, but I don’t see it as evil. The lawsuits that follow will be driven mostly by attorney fees, not user frustration.
^Exactly! I don’t understand the hype. And evil? What evil?
IMO, a consumer has to be given a choice: I want to watch a cat video and drain my old battery OR I want everything running like molasses but keep it powered up longer. I am not buying “the best interest of consumer” defense, especially if Apple publicly denied this until someone finally cornered them.
Well it did explain one thing–after hurricane Irma with so much power out (couldn’t recharge) and humid conditions the number of people with dead phones was overboard. My phone started shutting down as described as did a ton of others. Now it didn’t bother me too much personally because I was WAY overdue for a new phone but I’m sure many people just got new phones when they didn’t actually need one.
By the time battery slows down, usually there are other things that needs upgrades. My phone was 4 years old. I could use a better camera, a better storage as well as a new battery. I recently got a new phone and I know I will keep it another 4-5 years.
That’s horrendous! I’ve been a stockholder for years (since it was under $30 a share) and this is infuriating. Steve Jobs may well be rolling over in his urn. (I say that because I was the rare unhappy stockholder when Tim Cook took over Apple, believing he would never be as good a CEO as Jobs) -
The issue is that Apple didn’t disclose what it was doing, leaving people to think that their phones were not capable of operating using up-to-date software. This would have pushed some people to buy new phones when replacing the battery was a perfectly feasible and much cheaper option. It’s a deceptive practice.
My iPhone6 died few days ago right after a long delayed OS upgrade.
Lots of people just figured it was a combination of the latest OS and their old phones, and upgraded. And Apple made a gob of money off that assumption.
Agree that Apple has declined since Jobs passed away. The debacle of the “air pods” is a perfect example. Needing a dongle to listen & charge – there is nothing elegant about that. Bring back the darned jack.
Honda did this to us a few years ago with our Civic Hybrid. Changed something with the battery software so it didn’t work quite as hard but didn’t give us exactly the mileage it used to. STill good, but not as much as before. It took me a while to realize they’d done this and i was unhappy about it.
OTOH, the car is 11 years old now with tens of thousands more miles than we were told the battery would last, and still getting comparatively great mileage, so overall it has worked out for us.
You mean this Civic hybrid software change? (older Civic hybrids were known for needing hybrid battery replacements)
https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1048230_honda-civic-hybrid-software-upgrade-fixes-battery-issue
Apple is actually being sued because of this, lol.
^^ which they richly deserve. Now if somebody would sue Google for only giving OS updates to phone owners for 2 years…
Were updates promised for a Google phone for longer than they actually were delivered?
Much worse are the non-Google Android phones, where a Google update may or may not cause the device manufacturer to issue an update, and a device manufacturer update may or may not cause the carrier to issue an update. Even if this update sequence occurs, it can be many months before a security bug is fixed in a non-Google Android phone.
@ucbalumnus --probably. The “fix” mean that the battery assist turns off more frequently. (when we took it back to the dealer to examine that, they kept saying they couldn’t replicate it…which means they didn’t really understand…there were never very many HCH’s and I think ours was the only one the dealer we went to for repairs ever saw.)
But on the plus side, the battery is still working fairly well, far beyond the year and mileage expectations.