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Yesterday, Apple confirmed the accusations that it was intentionally slowing down the performance of its iPhones in order to combat the repercussions of battery degradation. This does mostly fix the problems of spontaneous shutdowns, but was it really Apple’s only solution?
Speaking with The Verge, battery experts Marca Doeff of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Venkat Srinivasan of Argonne National Laboratory explain how the process works and why Apple chose this course of action.
Batteries are more or less similar to that of water pipes according to Doeff, in that over time natural reactions caused by the battery’s chemicals and cold weather create partial blockages, making it so that the amount of energy traveling from the battery and to the process is greatly hindered. Although the battery delivers less power to the source, it is still expending the same amount of power it would ordinarily.
Apple’s solution is to reduce the amount of water being forced against the blockage, making the battery last longer but taking a hit on performance to do so. This is to avoid spontaneous shutdowns at “peak current demands,” categorised by Srinivasan as going into “the app store and hit ‘update’ all on the apps, then you clicked on a few unopened apps and opened them, then the system is pulling a lot of juice to do all this.”
Professor of materials science at UC Berkeley, Gerbrand Ceder stated that this could have actually been avoided, as battery degradation due to time and temperature is entirely predictable and can apparently be tested before release.
Ceder explains that the need for greater capacity, which causes faster degradation, is “highly desirable from a commercial perspective as this is when critics review the phones, and when users calibrate their experience, but this clearly came with intolerable performance decay.”
This fix wouldn’t be as much of an issue if Apple had simply provided a better way to change the battery without charging its customers $79-a-go. That being said, the decision to keep the battery confined is often made to prevent the dangers of cheap, third party batteries that customers might unsuspectingly purchase into without realising the danger it poses. Do you agree with Apple’s fix?
BS, it is expected to have battery aging, but this is completely stupid, you don’t age the whole phone just because you can’t be helpful to your customers by offering battery changing at a non premium charge.
You paid a lot of money in the first place for this phone and you keep paying with getting apps or seen ads, but yet they can’t help their customers with the battery?
How much does a batter cost anyway?
We replaced the battery in a galaxy s3 mini recently and it went like 30 euros. OK let’s say since it is sealed and need a tech guy to do it maybe it is going to cost a bit more money but since it was the company’s decision to have the battery non-user replaceable why should the user pay for this and not the company? And anyway how much does 1 battery cost for apple? 10 euros including the tech guy?
Give it for free ffs, it is a premium phone, you charge a lot and you make more on the way…
it is when you intentionally design your phone to be impossible to repair on the end users side. making the battery replaceable would have completely avoided this issue, but of course apple would only choose the anti consumer rout to force more and more upgrades.
bullshitt you phone makers better start making phones that we can easy replace the batterys like have a snap on battery that you can buy anywhere this is so people can keep buying new phones every 2 years
the government needs to force the phone makers to have removable battery’s