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astrange parent
Because of how aged batteries work, if you don't purposely slow down the phone sometimes it'll shut off, which is worse.
throwaway14452
Maybe Apple should use their proverbial ingenuity and inventiveness to invent a smartphone design that lets you open its back shell without screws to allow the user to replace their own battery, though I'm not sure if the technology for it is quite there yet.
xp84
Sure, 100%, though that's a separate topic to the ridiculous urban legend that came out of that story. Something still must be done when a user has a degraded battery that can't handle the full draw of the CPU.
vbezhenar
It was literally court decision that led to the Apple implementing switch allowing users to switch their smartphones to unsafe mode.

I still think that Apple was right there by not implementing this switch, and judge was an idiot. But that's just me.

astrange OP
Batteries last years and are already easily replaceable.

They're not even the only consumable part anyway.

throwaway14452
Last as in "works" is a very low bar, they are going to have severely reduced capacity, which also affects performance.

>Batteries ... are already easily replaceable

Is this[1] what easy looks like?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0fUmW-2swg

astrange OP
> Last as in "works" is a very low bar, they are going to have severely reduced capacity, which also affects performance.

Batteries tend to degrade to about 85% quickly and then spend a long time at that capacity. Couldn't tell you why.

A USB battery is a more useful thing to have, for instance because you don't have to turn off the phone to use it.

> Is this[1] what easy looks like?

For something you'd do every 2-3 years, sure. He's put in some extra steps in that video I think.

greenpresident
Ifixit score of 7 plus best parts availability of any phone makes for a great combination in my mind.
xp84
On the other hand, before the iPhone, literally every phone had a back cover that could be removed with bare hands and batteries held in by friction. After iPhone, all phones are sealed and require tiny screws to be removed, special adhesives to be defeated (god help you if you break off the stretchy adhesive strips), and of course seals to be replaced. And all this was done from the 2007 iPhone, over a decade before Apple did any IP67 rating of any kind, so none of it was done for waterproofing.

So, "Apple killed battery swappability" is a fair thing to say.

mrtksn
It's pretty easy for something you do every 2 years and you can get it done by someone else at reasonable price.

iPhones being hard to repair, let alone change the battery is such a ridiculous meme.

whywhywhywhy
The issue was they lied about it and said they were not slowing phones down until someone figure out they were in fact slowing down phones.

Now the reason is valid and should have been a toggle from the get go but they still told us they were not doing it when they were.

leptons
Instead of offering to replace the batteries, or making a phone with an easy to replace battery, Apple chose the shady move and hid their "solution" from the public and just slowed down older phones.

>"In March, Apple agreed to pay up to $500 million to settle claims of intentionally slowing down older phones."

They got slapped on the wrist. This resulted in them making the batteries slightly easier to replace, but their batteries are still impossible to replace by the average iPhone owner.

sixothree
I don’t buy this excuse. I experienced it first hand with my iPhone 4. When moving from iOS 6 to 7 my phone became unusable. As did everyone’s. And there was no going back to iOS 6. It wasn’t the battery in any way. The upgrade basically made the phone unusable.
astrange OP
Those are called performance bugs. That was a long time and a lot of software development cycle changes ago.

If it helps I believe the EU just made it illegal two days ago to release updates that make battery life worse. But I could've confused some of the details there.

vbezhenar
It was not a bug. I have similar story with my iPhone 4S became unusable with iOS 7. It was never fixed. One day I managed to jailbreak it, rolling back to iOS 6 and was astonished how fast and smooth it is.

They just implemented iOS 7 with much more compute requirements, so only newer phones were able to run it smoothly. The progress of mobile CPUs these old days was crazy, so I don't really complain about it, it was inevitable.

astrange OP
> They just implemented iOS 7 with much more compute requirements, so only newer phones were able to run it smoothly.

Yeah, that's a bug. Any regression on any supported device is a bug.

That was a very, very rushed release.

xp84
Those are separate issues. No one ever proved Apple set out to do that. Sure, they do care as little as the next company how their older hardware runs a new OS, but it's silly to believe it's a conspiracy. Tell me, do you believe Apple (A) adds in a bunch of conditional code to trigger just older phones to infinitely loop to kill your performance? Or (B) that they deliberately add a bunch of poorly-performing code, but it's code that everyone has to run and only the newest phones can manage?

It seems like A would have been whistleblown by now, and B would be idiotic for them to do on purpose since it would make their new devices unnecessarily slow too.

My opinion is basically B but without malice, it's just that they're obsessed with tons of animation and other eye candy, and added a lot of bloat in those years in general, rushing code out the door out of a desire to hit iOS release dates and the synchronized iPhone release dates they used to have.

leptons
> No one ever proved Apple set out to do that.

Yes, they did in fact prove that. That's why Apple had to pay $500 million dollars to settle, because they got caught doing shady shit.

xp84
They settled without admitting any wrongdoing of course, but what they "got caught doing" was simply not disclosing what was happening -- and that's the only thing they changed afterward.

It was still the correct course of action, and obviously not done maliciously -- a phone that was so slow it was annoying to use, and a phone that reboots 10x a day are equally 'incentive' to buy a new phone, so I fail to see how the throttling benefited Apple one bit.

In fact, I'd say the unreliable rebooting one would have provided stronger incentive to replace it vs. a slow one.

leptons
The right thing to do is to offer a battery replacement program. Instead they went for the e-waste option.

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