As someone who had a Nexus 5X die about a month after the warranty expired I really hope we will see more of these actions. There is a notion of how long something should work for (a toaster should last for at least 5 years for example), and with phones we've reached a point where I don't see a point in switching every two years.
Android has been nearly stagnant for the last 4 years (and maybe more). The newer features are not game changing and a Snapdragon 801 is still pretty good for anything I do on my phone.
What kind of new features one would expect from a smartphone OS?
There are brands other than computer hardware who play the product longevity, hard to understand why it's rarely the case for electronics. Innovation is not a valid excuse.
In my view, the problem stems from software vendors doing agreements with hardware vendors to use obsolescence to put pressure on consumers. The difficulty is about proving that those products are designed like this.
Thanks Mr President for letting us enjoy higher phone prices. We absolutely love paying more for our phones. Why not 4 years? 5 years? What about ten years?
I think the reaction is distrust that the manufacturers will play nice. If it costs them $20/phone average to warranty them for another 12 months, they may charge $50 more per sale.
A similar thing happened in Canada. A few years ago, a law was passed that barred 3-year phone contracts (with a new max of 2 years). In retaliation, nearly all phone subsidies from carriers have stopped. Ie, there’s no such thing as “$0 phone on 3 year term” in Canada anymore.
> nearly all phone subsidies from carriers have stopped.
I find this great. The ability to differentiate on "free" phones was a barrier to competition on the service costs that allowed telecoms to avoid competitive pricing for decades.
My concern with the Spanish law is that it seems to ensure a functional, repairable phone physically but there is not a realistic way to ensure essential security updates across all the software involved.
Not sure what region of Canada you are from, but as far as I can tell they just shifted from a contract model to a balance model where you amortize the cost of your phone using your monthly payments.
In the end what changes if how transparent they are with pricing, before it was 60$/month with a brand new phone and 55$ if you brought your own device, now it's. 55$/month and you can bundle a phone for 5$ more.
You may be thinking of batterygate in which handsets with degraded batteries throttled themselves to prevent brownouts. Replacing the battery returned the handset to full speed. The feature still exists today, except now (in reaction to the controversy) you can turn it off if you prefer random reboots when your battery is old.
If it was only ever about batteries they would have A) been open about it B) consequently not fined for deceptive commercial practices.
I find it astounding how many people believed that the cover story was the unvarnished truth given the lack of transparency exhibited by Apple over the matter, the obvious incentive and the natural proclivity so many similar industries have towards planned obsolescence (lightbulb conspiracy?).
It's a hell of a reality distortion field.
>Replacing the battery returned the handset to full speed.
Talking about distortion fields, let’s try and penetrate one.
You are asserting that Apple slowed down phones in order to sell new ones.
- Why only target specific handsets (with degraded batteries)? Why not entire model lines?
- Why allow users to get their speed back by replacing the battery? Why not keep it slow to encourage the new sale?
- If they got “caught”, why is the exact same feature available on a brand new iPhone 12? The only thing they changed was to allow you to turn throttling off if you prefer reboots. Surely they would remove the feature if it’s only purpose was to slow phones down?
- Android phones suffer the same problems when their batteries degrade. Apple updated phones, some of which were out of warranty at the time. Is preventing reboots of older hardware planned obsolescence? Or the opposite?
The only thing they did wrong was to not alert the users to the fact that the throttling was happening and how to remedy it. Now they do.
I’m all about punishing companies when they do something wrong, but the environmentalist in me hates the fact that so many manufacturers drop support for phones after only a few years and the phones end up in landfill. Apple extended the life of older phones by doing this. People would be more likely to buy a new phone if it randomly rebooted vs ran slower.
Anecdotally, my wife’s phone was throttling at the time and she didn’t even notice because she just used it for calls and texts. If she had encountered reboots she probably would have bought a new phone. Even once she knew it was throttled, she didn’t get the battery replaced because it still did the job until she upgraded last year.
The answer to a lot of these questions is "because they wanted deniability" or to maintain the pretence that they did nothing wrong. It's true that they could have been a lot less covert about it in which case they'd be in even deeper shit legally and reputationally.
One thing that I never really understood is why they degraded performance when the battery was at 30-100% if the random reboots didn't kick in until the battery was at 30%. Perhaps you know.
Or why I can easily replace the battery on my phone but the iPhone battery is sealed in and has to be replaced by apple. Hmmm...
The degraded performance is latching. After a brownout occurs, it will stay on until you get the battery changed or turn it back on. I.e. it’s not based on any fixed percentages. The fact that people can put third-party batteries in and also that different batches of batteries will age differently means that this is probably the best solution.
“This iPhone has experienced an unexpected shutdown because the battery was unable to deliver the necessary peak power. Performance management has been applied to help prevent this from happening again. Disable…”
As for not (easily) allowing third party replacements, as someone who designs products: why should I (or Apple) have to support third party items? Why should I use engineering resources debugging why a third party touchscreen doesn’t work with my new firmware (this happened to Apple)?
Also, as someone who buys second-hand electronics I don’t want a third-party battery in the phone, or at least I want to be able to tell if there is one in order to reject the phone. I like my house in a non-burned-down state thank you very much. And you just know that the average punter with a third-party battery is still going to blame Apple when their phone bursts in to flames from an eBay battery.
Now, I believe there should be laws to dictate reasonable repair costs and, more importantly, number of years of support to ensure electronics live a long life.
The word "hide" implies they intentionally concealed it, beyond just an "omission". To me, this is like games running at lower resolutions on older iPhones. Would that, too, require a disclosure?
Lie? No Apple was fully aware of the power usage profiles of their devices and the power delivery profiles of their batteries and how those degrade over time.
Apple chose, for a variety of reasons (cost savings, weight, size) to use a capacitor and battery combination that as the battery degraded with use over time would not be able to meet the instantaneous power delivery requirements of the phones and result in unreliable behavior.
Instead of admitting their mistake and offering to replace peoples batteries or refund them or some other reasonable solution. They instead decided to sneak in a performance throttling software change to try and mitigate their design mistakes.
Android has been nearly stagnant for the last 4 years (and maybe more). The newer features are not game changing and a Snapdragon 801 is still pretty good for anything I do on my phone.