@thenomain said in Random links:
@auspice said in Random links:
But the jist of it: it was proven (and thus Apple owned up to it) that Apple was purposefully throttling batteries to "encourage" people to upgrade.
I'm calling bullshit on this one.
Apple's explanation is that rather than let users' phones die because older batteries can't handle the peak performance, they would throttle the processor so that it doesn't over-stress the battery. Apple has long been a company that will do things that it believes are in its users' best interests even if those users would rather choose for themselves.
Even when Apple converted from Motorola-made PPC chips to the more popular Intel chips, they created code to allow people on the newer machines run code from the older architecture, and maintained it for four years, on a version of their OS that was supported via critical patches for another four.
I choose to invoke Occam's Razor for this and believe that Apple screwed up communicating iOS's behavior than forcing anyone to upgrade their phone. As John Gruber, someone at once an Apple critic and apologist, recently said:
And at the engineering level, I’ve heard from multiple Apple sources over the years that even if such a dictate were issued from on high, it would result in a revolt. If some shortsighted senior executive demanded that an iOS software update render older iPhone hardware artificially slow, the engineers tasked with the job would almost certainly object. Even if some unscrupulous engineer were willing to implement such a booby trap, how would they keep other engineers on the team from noticing it, fixing it, and figuring out who was responsible? Something along the lines of “if (deviceAgeInYears > 2) { [self _runFuckingSlow]; }” is going to stick out in code review after being checked into the iOS source code.
Business Insider has recently in tech circles been known for headline-grabbing and poorly researched tech articles. That they have a better reputation from Gawker makes the alarmist claptrap spouted in this article more believable. Apple is an easy target because Apple itself does tend to hold itself in quite high regard, but we don't even blink when Google sells our personal information, or how Microsoft defines double-speak.
No, this is Apple being Apple, and clickbait being clickbait.
It's not going to make me walk from my phone or anything similar. And it's still better than the Android method (which has been: 'your phone is older than 6 months? well you aren't getting anymore software updates at all and might not get any app updates as a result either, depending on the developer!'), but it's still something Apple should have been up front about.
As https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/12/20/16803190/iphone-slowdown-is-needed-but-also-a-problem explains, they could have better mitigated this in other ways. Larger batteries. Allowing people to more easily swap batteries. Making it more obvious, if not, that you can get a replacement battery for "only" $79 rather than an entirely new phone.
It still, ultimately, comes across as somewhat shady in the end. I don't like Google or Microsoft's practices either. While Apple has reason and explanation, they've otherwise been above-board on things (such as the reason for withholding video in the iPhone 3) and this just looks bad on them at a time when they really don't need it.
