Apple Investigated By France For 'Planned Obsolescence' (bbc.com) 313
AmiMoJo shares a report from the BBC: French prosecutors have launched a probe over allegations of "planned obsolescence" in Apple's iPhone. Under French law it is a crime to intentionally shorten the lifespan of a product with the aim of making customers replace it. In December, Apple admitted that older iPhone models were deliberately slowed down through software updates. It follows a legal complaint filed in December by pro-consumer group Stop Planned Obsolescence (Hop). Hop said France was the third country to investigate Apple after Israel and the U.S., but the only one in which the alleged offense was a crime. Penalties could include up to 5% of annual turnover or even a jail term.
samsung (Score:5, Interesting)
Every time I updated my samsung s3 (i still use it) it got slower and slower.. until i just gave up.
Everybody I talked to said the same thing, about other manufacturers too.
I gave up updating my phone. I don't have anything I cannot live without on it (it's a phone people).. I don't install apps on it except maybe 2-3 apps such as Chrome, Guitar Tuner and LINE Messanger.
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Also 100% not ontopic but related to op.
You said you "don't install apps on it except maybe 2-3 apps such as Chrome, Guitar Tuner and LINE Messanger". If so, you could just backup your app data, factory reset and reinstall those apps. It doesn't tell us why your s3 got slower but it can make your phone faster.
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But no fixes like for security and bugs. I wished they did those old support. Frak the new features.
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There's a difference between getting slower due to bogged down bloated software, and getting slower due to limiting CPU speed. While I agree with the sentiment the updates have over time added features too which basically makes it a trade-off.
Phones are only now getting to the Windows 7 era of computing, a point where they are baseline enough that there's little to add in the core OS to bloat it down. I expect the trend of getting slower not to continue (by accident, I'm sure there are nefarious reasons for
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Lose the bloat.
Every Android device I've owned back to an HTC One S has run faster with better battery life once I gave up on vendor updates and switched to CM/LineageOS.
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What Apple was doing was opposite, going longer (Score:2, Insightful)
Apple implemented a technical solution that kept phones usable for LONGER than other phone makers. By not shutting down randomly as the battery aged, by trying to maintain a day of battery life in the phone for a longer period of time, Apple was delaying the time when a user might have to repair or replace a phone.
Re:What Apple was doing was opposite, going longer (Score:5, Interesting)
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The alternative behavior is random shutdowns or restarts, and a battery that lasts a very short time. If Apple had done nothing, don't you think people would assume their phone was broken and needed replacement?
Bottom line is that Apple allowed the devices to function for longer, without the user having to do anything. It might have been nice to explain, but should it be criminal not to?
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No, the alternative behaviour is that they recall and give your a fixed phone. That's what Google did.
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How is this a plausible solution to batery life? Should all tech companies be required to constantly repair their devices for problems that arent actually faults (And its not a fault, because the battery is functioning as designed). Techniology would become ridiculously expensive. No battery on earth lasts forever, and as a result pretty much all countries with legislatively guaranteed life (of machine) war
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Yes, if they designed in an unsuitable battery then they should redesign the phone to correct the problem and then offer free repairs/replacements.
If the phone was 0.02mm thicker they could use a battery with a bigger cathode, and avoid this issue entirely. Alternatively they could talk to battery manufactures and find a clever way to increase the cathode size without altering the phone. It might be possible with newer chemistry or something.
Again, the only other manufacturer that had this issue was Google
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Re:What Apple was doing was opposite, going longer (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, right. Not really. (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple totally did the right thing here (Score:3)
Everything I've ever owned with lithium batteries has this problem. Eg: My first netbook got cooked in the sun with the power off ... it would vanish from 50% after that.
I don't own a single Apple product, but maybe I should start buying ...
Re:What Apple was doing was opposite, going longer (Score:5, Interesting)
They implemented a technical solution that saved them money. As I have explained before, it's a design flaw caused by specifying an inadequate battery and then not doing a full life cycle test on it.
This issue is well understood. The datasheet for the battery will give you the current delivery capability over its lifetime, specifying the worst case. You can also buy rather expensive battery simulators to test your hardware with an aged battery.
Other manufacturers did that. Apple either did it or got lucky on older phones. With the 6 they screwed up. In Europe design flaws have to be resolved in the customer's favour, and if found to be deliberate they can be a crime.
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specifying an inadequate battery
Source? I haven't heard that Apple's batteries were somehow inferior to those used by the rest of the industry. Do the batteries used by other manufacturers last longer than 1-2 years, or do their phones reboot at random once they start under-volting the CPU?
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LiPo batteries come in various shapes and sizes. One of the main differences is the size of the cathode. The larger it is the more current that the battery can supply. Apple selected a battery design with a smaller cathode than required, presumably to save space and make their phones a fraction of a millimetre thinner.
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And there is no reason to at least TELL the people? Instead just degrade their phone's performance, but of course not to convince them they have to buy a new one.
C'mon. If you believe that, I have a nice bridge for sale with a clear view of the San Francisco skyline.
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I'd agree if Apple didn't try to make it impossible for users to change their battery!
Making the thing hard to open, gluing everything inside, charging $90 for swapping and putting too small batteries in their phone is ground to sue alone.
Apple is going out of their way to try to get people to buy a new phone instead of fixing the one they already own, and they are known for it, so this is just the straw that broke the camel's back.
Since people are too stupid to vote with their wallet, someone has got to do
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Apple implemented a technical solution that kept phones usable for LONGER than other phone makers. By not shutting down randomly as the battery aged, by trying to maintain a day of battery life in the phone for a longer period of time, Apple was delaying the time when a user might have to repair or replace a phone.
No, what Apple did was force a "feature" down on consumers without telling them, or giving them the option themselves to enable or disable it. THAT is the real issue here. Had they simply done that, and explained the reasoning being the "feature" as you have, it would have probably played out a LOT differently for Apple. Now, they appear sneaky and nefarious for doing this, even if they were ultimately trying to help.
Being honest and upfront still matters to consumers. Go figure.
That should be the USER choice (Score:3)
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Funny how no other phone makers have problems with their phones shutting down. Apple gimped their device to cover up their fucked up power system design. Nothing more nothing less.
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Yes. About 4 years ago. Funny enough the battery is replaceable and still in good shape.
Ok, it's neither a Samsung nor an Apple product, it's some cheap model I never heard about before, but when cheap crap offers better service than brand names, it's time to reconsider.
Except Apple actually prolonged the life of the de (Score:2, Insightful)
I've worked in this industry for over a decade (never for Apple) What people don't realize is that batteries age, and so do chips especially when pushed to a limit. Ever wonder why military or even automotive grade chips are running so much slower and cooler? It's because they are rated for much longer lifetime than consumer grade devices - they are limited so they last the required number of years. Consumers want top performance, but they trade lifetime due to stress on the hardware. What Apple did here is
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If you had worked in the industry you would know that you design your hardware to only work over the lifetime of the battery. Every battery datasheet has graphs and tables giving you the performance over its lifetime.
Keep in mind this started well within the warranty period. Apple did it to avoid millions of warranty battery replacements.
Re: Except Apple actually prolonged the life of th (Score:2)
First, battery and chip wear are independent. You can possibly replace the battery, but less likely to replace the main SoC. If the slowdowns began during the warranty period, that means that either Apple pushed the chip and/or the battery harder to get good benchmarks on new devices, or their modeling of typical usage is too conservative, with people hitting the throttle threshold earlier than expected. Usually throttling will kick in based on battery age, temperature, open circuit voltage, source resistan
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In the EU the minimum warranty period is 2 years, although some countries go even further.
Obviously batteries are consumable items, but the way the law usually looks at this is that if the battery is cheap it's okay for the consumer to replace it regularly. If it's really expensive like iPhone batteries are, requiring a special service appointment and considerable cost to get replaced, it needs to last a reasonably long time, like considerably more than the warranty period which is the absolute minimum.
So e
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If you were a just and honest person, you'd know that suicide is the only proper course for you.
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I've worked in this industry for over a decade (never for Apple) What people don't realize is that batteries age, and so do chips especially when pushed to a limit. Ever wonder why military or even automotive grade chips are running so much slower and cooler? It's because they are rated for much longer lifetime than consumer grade devices - they are limited so they last the required number of years. Consumers want top performance, but they trade lifetime due to stress on the hardware. What Apple did here is cap the device performance increasing the device reliability and potential lifespan.
Unless you're one to beat the living shit out of your device physically, the main component going "bad" is the battery, which used to be a component that was replaceable and even upgradable by the end user.
Phones come with a 1-year warranty usually tied to a 2-year contract (where they often finance the cost of the phone with it). Due to the cellular contract length, consumer expectations are two years, plain and simple. Vendors need to stop being so damn greedy and offer a two-year warranty. If they can
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Ever wonder why military or even automotive grade chips are running so much slower and cooler? It's because they are rated for much longer lifetime than consumer grade devices - they are limited so they last the required number of years.
No you haven't worked in the industry for a decade. With a line like that I will wager that you haven't worked in the industry for even a day. There are very big differences between the automotive / military grade chips and they go miles beyond life expectancy (something that is usually handled through derrating).
In any case it's quite telling that Apple seem to feel a need to derate their 2 year old phones. (Posted from a non-derated 4 year old phone that has suffered dearly at my hands).
Re: Except Apple actually prolonged the life of th (Score:2)
So your argument here is that I used the word "limited" instead of "derated"?
If you don't believe that all high end chips get slowed down, go build your favorite high end PC hardware (gamer PC built for performance). Image the hard drive, run your favorite CPU and GPU benchmarks. After a couple of years of gaming use, restore the imaged drive and re-run the benchmarks - I bet you would expect your benchmarks to be the same, but they won't be - even though the software will be identical, the hardware will ha
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Ever wonder why military or even automotive grade chips are running so much slower and cooler?
They use slower parts because they are cheaper. They use no more hardware than is necessary to do a job, because when Bosch makes a run of a couple million ECUs that will go into various different VWs, Audis, and Lamborghinis, they want to avoid unnecessarily spending tens of thousands of dollars. If a hotter part were necessary to do the job, they would add a fat heat sink to it and fin the case, and in fact automotive manufacturers have done this in the past.
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That is actually incorrect - military grade chips are not from the discount bin. Are the they the fastest bin of parks coming off the line, of course not, but that's not because of cost, but purely because that is not what the spec calls for (and in some processes slower parts are more power efficient, hence less heat). A heat-sink is not going to solve a problem of wear either - it would help, but not. That said, I cannot say any more on the topic, so if you still think so, we'll just have to agree to dis
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They run cooler because they support a wider operating temperature range.
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I think you flipped the cause and effect. If they run cooler, they may operate at a more narrow temperature range simply because they don't heat up as much. That said, often military or automotive spec parts actually support a wider range of temperatures. Go to ti.com or other chip manufacturers and lookup temperatures for higher grade/more expensive chips, sometimes called "enhanced".
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Not everyone throws stuff away after first use.
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Stop criminal scum! (Score:2)
...or even a jail term.
LOCK 'EM UP! Throw away the keys!
Feature, not bug (Score:5, Informative)
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All Apple had to do was advertise this from the start as a feature and let you turn it off if you wanted to;
If they let you turn it off, you'll either set your phone on fire or it will be shutting itself off periodically when you use too much CPU. Either one of these things makes Apple look bad, so no, your solution is not a solution. Thanks for imagining that you're smarter than Apple engineers, though!
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There is no excuse for not informing the user that the phone is being throttled. None.
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"Thanks for imagining that you're smarter than Apple engineers, though!"
Have you not been warned about using daddy's /. account?
Not just Apple. (Score:2)
Many companies do this too. :( Maybe companies can make users pay to keep support of old stuff going.
A Weinstein Moment for Consumer Electronics (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, consider laptop/netbook computers, which arrive with major components such as CPUs, batteries, RAM and storage all soldered and/or glued in place. All of this makes it much harder to upgrade or use these products in a versatile way.
The same is true for almost all class of tablet, although I'd note that some Android devices [phones and tablets] do come with micro-SD card slots, which do allow for storage upgrades and flexibility.
On the desktop we are moving away from the "assembled" style of computer offered by Dell or Gateway from the 90s and 00s and now we seem to be trending towards all-in-one systems where, once again, everything is soldered or glued down and the potential for upgrades of individual components is virtually non-existent.
Or in the software business, where the latest editions of software are no explicitly programmed so that they cannot be operated on older generations of processors [which, ironically, may not have some of the vulnerabilities found with more modern chips] but with the net effect of forcing people to upgrade what might have been perfectly reasonable hardware just if they want to run modern software. Nor is this limited to Operating Systems - the same deadly embrace includes things like graphics cards and driver stacks and the compatibility demanded by "modern" games... all of which force upgrades to new GPUs, which in turn force upgrades to new OS editions... which force upgrades in hardware.
The hard part about this - for consumers at least - is that this sort of change is a "self-fulfilling prophecy" from the perspective of a tech company. This is because the companies that follow the trend will make more sales, be more profitable and thus displace those companies who had been willing to put the customer first. In other words, we have a situation in which market forces [profits for manufacturers] actually induce and encourage them to adopt practices which will be harmful to consumers in the long run.
Our society anticipated that situations like this might come to be from time to time, setting up regulatory institutions of government to ensure that consumer rights were protected and that facilities such as "right to repair" and "right to upgrade" were included. Unfortunately we are slowly but surely seeing these protections eroded, either by cuts to those agencies and/or [witness the recent actions of the FCC dumping telecoms disputes on the FTC] woefully overloaded.
We are told that in a capitalist environment, market forces win out and thus the consumer is protected because the market demands that only the best companies survive to offer the best products or services to people. Unfortunately, as we've seen with consumer electronics, the consumer now has virtually no worthwhile protection from any of these questionable practices.
We should applaud what France are trying to do here, and we should hope that this drives positive change.
The Consumer Electronics Industry has been sorely in need of a "Weinstein Moment" for a while now. Forced Upgrades, inability to repair and built-in-obsolescence have been spreading like cancer throughout the modern technology world, making a few companies super-rich at the expense of millions or billions of consumers' pockets.
That needs to change.
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Products being glued or soldered up won't change as a result of this. This is only about products that perform less of their original function over time (as the iphones did). It's about products that stop working at some arbitrary time in the future, arguably like HP printers that suddenly won't accept non-HP ink.
Your ability to upgrade and/or replace components has nothing to do with 'planned obsolescence'. If you buy the fastest computer on earth today, but in a years time a new faster computer comes out
This is kind of where my fallout with BLU (Score:2)
I currently run the DirtyCow TWRP LineageOS 13.x Rom, and I am concerned about future BLU Devices such as the BLU Life One X3. I don't want to go back to the BLU Stock Rom under any circumstances. I don't even run GApps. I can't run the LineageOS 14.x Rom because of the Requirement the camera work and I have a Bluetooth headset.
I got lucky and picked up refurbished R1 HD. to Replace my Studio 5.x. It had not been updated and used the older Rom that could be unlocked to load LineageOS... More than 6 months h
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This needs to be investigated. BLU needs to put up a thing that says: Running a Custom Rom? Need Camera Drivers? Install this APK. And stop locking bootloaders on devices we buy outright! If I can do fastboot oem unlock, it should work.
Since they aren't doing that, why are you talking so much about which BLU phone you should buy? Did you receive consideration for your promotion?
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No, they are in a price range I can afford.
Does anybody actually read up on this stuff? (Score:2)
The update doesn't "slow down" the phone as such - it limits peak power draws when the battery is down on overall capacity and the spike would cause a reset (which happens in many other manufacturers' phones - FFS google this, people). Most operations of the phone will remain utterly unchanged, just heavy workloads will be slower than previously.
Say what you like about non-replaceable batteries (hardly specific to Apple) or a badly communicated
Re: $$S (Score:5, Informative)
*Planned* obsolescence is a crime in France, not obsolescence per se. Thus, your comment is moot.
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By gad you're right, it's criminal law. [bbc.co.uk]
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By dropping it.
Re:$$S (Score:5, Insightful)
Very nice, are you ready to pay for a smartphone like you pay for a durable product like a car? A decade of usable life can be arranged as long as you are willing to accept tradeoffs such as price, weight, form factor and features. Not interested? Than STFU. Market delivers what customers are asking for.
Methinks that when I shell out $1000 for an I-phone, it is a durable product. You may have a point with el cheapo $50 smartphones, but then they break. They do not suffer from planned obsolesence.
Having an almost 10 year old Huawei U8150... (Score:2, Informative)
I can say that the 'el cheapo' (well it was 180 when it came out, and ~50-80 when it was discontinued) has lasted me far longer than basically everyone I knew with a 600+ dollar contract phone. Basically all of them replaced it before the 2 year replacement period due to physical damage, failed batteries, or drops in the toilet.
While my phone wouldn't have survived that last one, it survived the former for years and is still running to this day. It won't be replaced until 2G GSM is turned off for good.
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The fact that people think it is normal that old hardware runs slower for some reason as if there is some mechanical deteriation, like with a car engine where you will lose some power over time, is an issue of and by itself.
The problem with older hardware, when it is able to run new software, is that the newer software is usually more powerful, less efficient, larger, so the older hardware will struggle with it. Other than that, you're right. The mechanical stuff will inevitably break at some point but until that it will ususally work fine. I have a Nokia 6310i at home. Not only does it still work (after 15 years), it also turns on with almost a full charge of battery after I haven't used it in over a year. And snake runs as f
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Well, I wish I had fallen off the update bandwagon before it made my iPhone and iPad unusable. The only iDevices that perform the same as the day I bought them are my iPods. Which do not get updates (they are not iPod Touch versions).
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Re:Nor do iPhones (Score:4, Informative)
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Re: Nor do iPhones (Score:3)
Yes, Some Reasonable Regulation Please (Score:3)
Maybe. Cars have never been better, so "more like a car" is quite appealing, actually. I know I don't want my smartphone (or the other airline passenger's smartphone) to behave like a Samsung Galaxy Note 7. It shouldn't electrocute anybody, it should be secure (and not only when the manufacturer first shipped it), and it should fully honor my privacy requirements. It should be repairable and not more fragile than a snowflake in Bangkok. I should be able to use it to summon an ambulance or police officer rel
Old versus new (Score:3)
So yeah, unless you care about handling, feel, or visibility, new cars are better.
Visibility depends on the particular car. There have always been cars with good and with bad visibility. The 1976 Chevy Impala I drove in high school definitely did not have good visibility (or handling, or fuel economy, or acceleration, or comfort). The safety features of newer cars are a consideration but visibility and safety are not mutually exclusive and never have been. Not to mention that new cars have cameras, sensors and other safety features to provide situational awareness not dreamed of by c
Disagreement != Misunderstanding (Score:3)
That's because you didn't understand the argument.
Disagreeing does not mean I didn't understand the argument but thanks for the condescension.
The cars themselves from 20 years ago were mechanically the equal of cars today, power output aside.
I'm an automotive engineer with 20 years in the industry and run a company that makes parts for car companies. That argument is simply not true. Pick any measure you want and any automotive engineer worth their salary can show you how cars today have overall improved on cars from 20 years ago. Reliability, performance, power, traction, safety, durability, handling, materials, etc. It doesn't matter - cars today h
Re:$$S (Score:5, Insightful)
That's such BS and Apple users pay a premium as it is. "Durable" has nothing to do with "obsolete". I own a "durable" iPhone 4S - arguably the most "durable" phone they ever made - hell, it feels heavy in your hand - it's perfectly functional yet it has been rendered obsolete by Apple which quit releasing updates for it without warning. The day I bought it I had no idea how long it would be supported because Apple doesn't publish this information. That sounds like planned obsolescence to me. When you buy a Mac or iPhone you have no idea how long it will be supported once the warranty expires. Contrast that with Microsoft which publishes that e.g. Windows 7 will be supported until 1/14/2020: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/13853/windows-lifecycle-fact-sheet [microsoft.com] and they publish this shit like 10 years in advance.
Not obsolete (Score:2, Insightful)
it's perfectly functional yet it has been rendered obsolete by Apple which quit releasing updates for it without warning.
How is it obsolete?
You can still download apps for it (any apps that originally supported the 4s).
You can still browse the web, or use it for maps/GPS.
You can still email with it.
You can still make calls with it.
Again, it's not obsolete - it just lacks features that newer devices have. But just because newer devices have more or better features does not render a device "obsolete".
My wife
Re:Not obsolete (Score:4, Insightful)
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You're posting on Slashdot and you don't consider a network connected device that no longer receives security fixes to be obsolete?
Odd.
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There is a quite a difference between say browsing the internet fine and the stuff being dog slow that a person can find it unusable.
Yes, you can say that this works or that works. But working very very slow, and stuff being unresponsive most of the time is not something I call normal or desirable. It is simply obsolete. And if I could downgrade my ipad 2 to whatever iOS was at the time I would do it without delay. It is just unusable.
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So Apple is lying, because the 4S had its production halted in February of 2016. So why the fuck is the 4S no longer getting updates?
Re:$$S (Score:5, Interesting)
you don't really get it do you? they made it run slower on purpose.
but they will use their excuse that it was to save battery life and money for the customer.
never mind dude that.. it's made on purpose to not be repairable and you cannot change the battery and the battery fails after 2 years as per spec to the level where they started slowing them down on purpose, without telling the customer.
and yeah most people would accept such tradeoffs. but you can't buy a high end internals phone with a removable cover and battery nowadays.
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They didn't make it run slower in general, they limited the top speed of the CPU. The reason is not to save battery life, it's because the battery could already not support that top speed. All they did was make it not shut down. It's like a car that had a top speed of 120 Mph, but because of age it can no longer safely do that, so it tops out at 10
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Yay for car analogies. Especially if they fall flat on the face because any car that can for some odd reason due to its manufacturer's decision no longer reach the top speed would be subject to recalls...
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Especially if they fall flat on the face because any car that can for some odd reason due to its manufacturer's decision no longer reach the top speed would be subject to recalls...
No, no it would not. It is perfectly normal for horses to escape the motor over its lifespan. Some modern engines achieve a horsepower target through tuning, and can re-tune themselves to hit that power level consistently as they age and the motor degrades, but nobody is suing GM because a couple of ponies are missing from the paddock on a twenty-year-old Corvette.
Now, if your car suffered a loss of power during the warranty period, you'd have a claim, and the manufacturer would have to fix it. But you didn
It's the fact they didn't tell anyone (Score:2)
If you have a complaint, complain that the battery wasn't designed to last longer.
That's not the problem. The problem was that they didn't tell anyone they were doing it. Had they been up front about this behavior, people could have evaluated whether they cared or not (most probably wouldn't care) and made their purchasing decision accordingly. But instead Apple tried to pull a fast one and now that is biting them in the ass.
Them slowing down the device for a reasonable technical problem is fine. Not telling anyone they are doing it and pretending it doesn't happen is not fine.
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but they will use their excuse that it was to save battery life and money for the customer.
That's not quite what they said. They said as the battery got older and didn't work as well, a surge of activity could cause the phone to draw more power than the battery could deliver, which caused the phone to turn itself off. They already had functionality to throttle the CPU in order to save battery life, so they adjusted the way that functionality worked to prevent the phones from crashing.
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Shouldn't the fix have been to reduce the instances where it would surge but not slow it down otherwise? Instead, they applied the throttle to everything.
Re:$$S (Score:5, Insightful)
Market delivers what customers are asking for.
Could you please point to the market that thinks that thinner and thinner phones are more important than stability and battery life?
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Your argument is weakened by the fact the newest iPhones actually have LESS battery capacity than the prior model (iPhone 7.)
And it is further weakened by the fact that my phone (Kyocera Duraforce PRO) is thicker, with a bigger battery. It is also a tank that has withstood rock slides and a minor mining cave-in.
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Everyone but Slashdot users.
Seriously, go back and listen to tech reviewers gushing about how *thin and beautiful* any given new smartphone is.
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Let's for a moment imagine that tech reviewers find nothing worth mentioning with the new phones and know that if they don't find anything to praise, they will not be among the select few next time that get a preview model to review...
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Nice conspiracy theory, but it's not just reviewers. It's the general public as well. Many Slashdot geeks simply can't fathom why average people actually like Apple products. Almost every geek I know turns their nose up at it. The walled garden, the lack of customization, inability to root, and on and on and on. We buy Android for those particular features, and so we can trick out our phones however we want.
And every normal smartphone user I run across enjoys their iPhone. Seriously, they don't care a
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Here you go (1st link from 2012):
https://www.cnet.com/news/its-... [cnet.com]
http://www.businessinsider.com... [businessinsider.com]
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No, markets often do not deliver what the customer is asking for.
There is no such thing as an unregulated market. There may be over-regulated markets, or under-regulated markets. Markets, by their very nature, come about thanks to regulation.
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Very nice, are you ready to pay for a smartphone like you pay for a durable product like a car? A decade of usable life can be arranged as long as you are willing to accept tradeoffs such as price, weight, form factor and features. Not interested? Than STFU. Market delivers what customers are asking for.
Oh, so customers asked for phones to be made entirely of highly breakable glass? Non-removable batteries? Indiscernible display resolution upgrades? Removing the headphone jack? No memory expansion option? Software behind a walled garden? No ability to install 3rd party OS? Massive amounts of telemetry? So thin it bends and breaks in your pocket? Proprietary physical connectors requiring dongles?
Vendors have been following the manufacturing mantra that caters to one thing and one thing only; Profit
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Oh, so customers asked for phones to be made entirely of highly breakable glass? Non-removable batteries? Indiscernible display resolution upgrades? Removing the headphone jack? No memory expansion option? Software behind a walled garden? No ability to install 3rd party OS? Massive amounts of telemetry? So thin it bends and breaks in your pocket? Proprietary physical connectors requiring dongles?
Some of these things are what make modern smartphones thin and attractive and easy to use. Others are things average users don't care much about. While many geeks are happy with durable bricks and lots of options for hacking, the average consume wants a sleek and stylish phone that's also a status symbol and fashion statement, while being simple and safe to use. They don't care about user replaceable batteries or SD card expansions. They certainly don't care about rooting their phones, and I guaranteed
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Very nice, are you ready to pay for a smartphone like you pay for a durable product like a car?
At just a little shy of $1000 I already pay for it like a car. Hell I pay for it more than most laptops. Why do most laptops seem to last longer?
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Market delivers what customers are asking for.
Yeah?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel [wikipedia.org]
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I would suspect that it would generally be better all around for some kind of discounted exchange, especially if we start putting forth measures to increase the salvage from recycling electronics.
As for CPU performance drops due to inherent security flaws, that's a bit of a tougher question. I think that the only example we have right now is too muddled by a monopolistic control on the market to have a satisfactory solution.
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I think the first rule should be that there is a clear 'map of obsolescence', that the communication should be clear, and that there are decent warranties. You can't rely on the PR for that. There are a lot of factors involved, some avoidable, some deliberate, some unavoidable. Making it hard to replace a battery is a form of intentional obsolescence so it should be made very clear.
Durability is another area. It is 'optimized' everywhere now and it is hard to measure but it can be covered by warranties.
Obs
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As the behavior of the device would have been worse if Apple did nothing, it takes a special kind of shit to suggest Apple was doing this to drive sales.
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What about a phone that only provides communications on a radio protocol that is going obsolete and would cost the carrier (and the customer) much more to support it? (In Canada, CDMA service ended on May 31st - would it have been so bad for customers to get new product before the shut off date?)
Most cell providers offered low-cost phones as replacements, or even free replacements for low-income individuals. Wind was doing that 6mo ago, Bell has had an "upgrade in place" plan for a few years.
On the other hand, my parents have a 2013 Terrain which was hit with the CDMA upgrade, GM sold millions of vehicles with technology that was being phased out. Then there's cases like Samsung that directly designed their refrigerators to fail after a particular period of time. There's multiple class action la
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"They didn't drop the operating performance. They limited the top speed."
When the fuck is speed not considered part of operating performance? What are you smoking?