While this isn’t our normal fare here, the Internet is abuzz today over the admission from Apple Inc. that they purposely slowed down older iPhones, and I have something VERY interesting to add. Business insider has this headline:
I’ll say, here’s the gist of it:
Apple has long inspired an almost religious devotion among customers and tech aficionados — but it just seriously undermined its fans’ faith and loyalty.
The company on Wednesday acknowledged what some people have long suspected: that it has been secretly stifling the performance of older iPhones.
Critics have accused the company in the past, based on anecdotal evidence, of purposely slowing phones to compel users to upgrade to the latest model. While Apple admitted to the practice on Wednesday, it sought to underscore that it had done so for a purely altruistic reason: to prevent older phones from shutting down unexpectedly.
The justification hasn’t mollified Apple’s outraged fans. If anything, the company’s statement has stoked the conspiracy theories, and for good reason.
…
By the company’s own admission, it’s been throttling the performance of iPhones since last year.
Apple hasn’t explained why it didn’t disclose the practice until now, after GeekBench released charts based on its data that showed how older iPhones were not performing as quickly as they had when they launched.
More here
Now here’s something very interesting, and very damning. This is a graph from Google Trends, which tracks how words are used in Internet searches on Google. I’ve done a search on the phrase “iPhone slow” which is what users that were frustrated with phone performance would likely search for looking for solutions. I’ve also added via annotations, the release dates of all iPhone models, and for comparison, the Google Trends results for the phrase “Android slow”.
The correlation is quite compelling:
Source for graph: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2006-12-31%202017-12-21&q=iphone%20slow,android%20slow
Source for dates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_iPhone
And, I’m not the first to make this correlation.
Around the time of each new iPhone release, searches about “slow iPhones” peaked. There doesn’t seem to be any similar spike pattern for Android based phones. (h/t to Jeremy James on Facebook for the idea)
That’s gonna leave a mark, as the quote in the Business Insider article said:
“For years, we’ve reassured people that no, Apple doesn’t secretly slow down their older iPhones to make them buy new ones,” the blogger and iPhone developer Marco Arment said in a tweet Wednesday. He added in a follow-up Twitter post: “The reputation damage from secretly slowing down old iPhones, regardless of the reason, will likely linger for a decade.”
We can hate Apple, but what about Samsung’s exploding phones? At least Apple didn’t try to kill me.
Oh yes, Samsung is pretty much second on my hate list. They do good phones though, but they also play the decieve and cash. Fairphone? Too expensive. Jolla? Sank and sailed to where fish live.
I suspect overheating lithium batteries like that was down to makers like Samsung pushing the envelope with the difficult tradeoffs between capacity, charge rate and longevity, the very same problems the EV and batteries for unreliables fans are coming to grips with. There have been some iphones go up in smoke and clearly makers have to be cautious and make them idiot proof for a range of consumers that don’t necessarily read the safe use instructions.
As for mobile phone platforms, Apple provide a mainstream user experience as does Windows mobile perfectly well now although MS came late to the party and suffers from app availability as a consequence. Android allows infinite customisation (rooting?) as well as comparable Apple app availability but realistically most don’t have the time or inclination to mess around with infinite wallpapers, ring tones, yada, yada and increasingly opt for the Google umbrella similar to Apple anyway. These things are like the old telly remote where most of us used a fraction of their functionality but it was there if you could be bothered.
But then again you have to remember that it’s always the complainers who go to then internet. If your phone works fine, you don’t go to the internet proclaiming how it works fine. Same reason why news stories always report house fires but never mention the houses that didn’t burn. I have had a Samsung phone for over a year and I had no problems with it. I don’t know why people always assume that if 1 Samsung malfunctions then EVERY SINGLE Samsung everywhere MUST always do the same. And obviously it has to be a conspiracy by the company to kill you even though that doesn’t make any sense logically.
They were too busy setting fire to someone else. There is virtually no difference in the failure rate between firms products and battery fails and only in the reporting of it.
I think there was one product that was a new release that caught on fire a bunch of times…maybe several dozen out of who knows how many sold?
They took them back and fixed the problem pretty quick, and I think it was only one model of one device…the Note 7 phablet.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lithium-battery-fire-risk-samsung-galaxy-note-7/
An apple a day keeps the docter away. What happened to it?
Please guys let’s try to be rational. One of the reasons I like this website so much is that in a sea of climate irrationality it offers a space for rational, evidence based discourse. A few points about this unfortunate – and inaccurate – story about Apple slowing older iPhones.
First – please lets drop the Mac versus Windows stuff. That debate leads nowhere but it already clogs up so many tech sites. Its like arguing about which is better The Beatles or Bach. Its a waste of time.
Second – Apple has not been slowing down older iPhones. What is has done is introduce a throttling system used in very specific and episodic situations where iPhones with older partially worn out batteries encounter peak system utilisation (a relatively rare event) which without the episodic throttling could cause the iPhone to suddenly shut down due to lack of power. Once the peak usage passes the throttling is turned off. Most of the time the throttling isn’t implemented because most of the time older iPhones with worn out batteries are not being used at full system capacity. Obviously the more worn out a battery is the more like it is likely to encounter an event that requires throttling but even a very worn out battery is highly unlikely to require permanent throttling.
Third – this episodic throttling will almost always show up in benchmarking exercises as benchmarking software is intended to test the maximum system performance and will thus almost certainly trigger precisely the circumstances which trigger the throttling. The benchmarking software does not replicate normal everyday usage.
Fourth – over time each new iteration of iOS (which adds new functionality and possibly new complexity) may well cause older phones to feel slower. The same as with PCs. However with recent iPhones (i.e those using the last few versions of the A series CPUs) such slow downs if they occur are almost undetectable.
Fifth – all ‘Version One’ editions of iOS updates will contain bugs that are corrected by later point releases. Those bugs could mean system slowdowns and/or show stopping crashes. Later point release iterations of the OS will progressively squash those performance sapping bugs until the next numbered release restarts the cycle. This is pretty much the same for all software.
Sixth – the reason Google returns different hit rates regarding the effects of system upgrades in the iOS world compared to the Android world is largely a function of the fact that in the Android world system upgrades are a relatively rare event whereas in the iOS world they are ubiquitous and older hardware can and does almost always get its OS upgraded for several years after its release.
Seventh – based on purely anecdotal evidence (which is quite a bit more robust than the evidentiary basis of some of the more hysterical comments in this thread) my iPhone 6 which is three and half years old, and which has the latest system software installed along with a ton of apps, shows battery wear at 9% (there is a free app called Battery Life which measures it) and it runs at the same speed it always has, which is pretty fast.
Let’s get back to talking about a real issue which is the ongoing intellectual scandal which is climate alarmism
+1000
Thanks Tony. I would expect that if you are one who does not use your phone for gaming or streaming videos you will not notice any difference in performance.
Tony Swash. I certainly agree with your criticism of this post as going off on a useless tangent. Apple vs Android vs Microsoft vs Compaq etc. is a waste of time on which more “ink” has been spilled than on Donald Trump. Can’t we reserve this blog for more serious things?
Having Anthony go off on Apple is his prerogative, clearly, and it’ll certainly generate clicks and comments. But the resulting comments amount to a millennials’ game. Any minute we may be treated to how one’s smart phone can fly a drone or change your thermostat or “like” yourself on facebook.
I’d rather hear about how climate change will increase volcanoes.
The battery excuse is pure rectal synthesis. Voltage depression doesn’t slow data transmission. And decrease of data rate doesn’t save any energy..in fact, the longer one waits for data, the more power the backlight consumes.
Now they might have connected Steve Jobs’ corpse to a generator and are cashing in on free power.
If say Ford or Chevrolet or GM had throttled previous years cars to say 45MPH when newer models came out, how long before they would be charged with a crime? What makes what Apple did any different?
Because Apple has not generically throttled older iPhones – read my longer comment above.
WP only displays images if the URL ends in a recognized image extension. You should have dropped the “?dl=0”, see the WUWT test page, link in the top nav bar, for more details.
Here’s a good article, with empirical data to back up the battery issue:
https://ifixit.org/blog/9472/ios-update-slows-iphone/
This is also a reason to dispense with electric cars. If you want to replace the battery there several years after, you have more financial problems. The hype about the battery technology advances shows in this example of Apple as a real hype and not justified by the technology. There is currently no battery technology without tremendous performance loss over time.
Exactly, and this is very well known.
Lithium ion batteries can stand up to more charge discharge cycles than previous types of batteries, but since many people run them down every day if not several times a day, after a few years they have been severely degraded.
Any reasonably handy person can replace the battery themselves, and if this is not for you, just have it done my an expert.
Or get a new device.
What I heard, is yes, they throttled performance, but there is a possible fire issue with a failing battery as the volts drop, the amps rise, and hence the possibility of a serious fire with a L-ion battery, but I suspect there is also a little bit of truth to the rest of it here. Batteries wear out, and issues begin to develop. But if you want to sort of regain original performance, just do a factory re-set or re-install the OS and start from scratch as if it is a new computer or phone. And put in an SSD in an old desktop. This will all extend and enhance performance.
I have had a fair number of both Windows and Apple computers/phones, and tried an Android phone. Apple definitely is the easiest to use out of the box. But you pay thru the nose for a fairly nice product too compared to the competition. Part of the problem like the reported story today with Apple fiddling with the OS and cranking it down to save some demand on the battery, is that at some point they also quit supporting the OS completely and no updates. Then you are totally outright outta luck. Most of the apps on my old 3GS iPhone don’t even work anymore… mail works, but iMessage doesn’t. I don’t think Apple even provides updates for it now. I’ll save it for a museum piece and will be worth money some day.
Windows quit updating XP, but NASA need it for its legacy applications, and cut a deal with MS to provide them with updates. A lot of the world still works on XP, and is a shame that MS tried to abandon it, since that was one of their best OS ever. You think they would have worked on expanding that market and enhancing it into a more robust OS so as to make even more money. But that cannibalizes current products.
I tried to get a new iPhone today since my contract ran out last year. The Telco’s, especially on the retail side, make it so difficult to do so if you are an existing customer, that after the Loyality dept. screwed me around for a few hours and said I couldn’t keep my old grandfathered plan if I got a new phone, that I just walked out of the store and lo and behold, there was a repair kiosk in the mall right our their door. I got a new battery for a iPhone 6 Plus, installed for $44 USD at the kiosk and now I really don’t need to upgrade at all. Unless of course, they really are throttling performance. Have had it 3 years and other than the battery issues, is absolutely running as well as the day I got it 3 years ago now. If I get another 2 years out of it, will be the best $44 I ever spent. Does everything an 8 or X does…I don’t need the latest gadget, just a decent battery. Make the battery accessible to easy replacement, otherwise the critics are right.
In case somebody wants to do some research:
https://www.futuremark.com/pressreleases/is-it-true-that-iphones-get-slower-over-time
When androids come out with free Skype with other androids, I will switch back. Right now I get free FaceTime with my kids.
You can install skype on any Android phone, or use Google voice, which unless I am mistaken will connect with skype.
They have had this for years now.
https://support.skype.com/en/faq/FA10653/how-do-i-get-skype-on-my-android-device
So how do they accomplish the slowdown ? Do u have to do their software upgrades ? I’ve had my 6S at least a couple years, but I have refused the constant requests for software updates.
And what is the slowdown ? How do you know if it’s the phone or the network ?
And here is the reason I still use a Samsung Galaxy Edge (Note 4+) – I can change the battery. Before they released the Galaxy 8 Note I had set aside some money to purchase one but they still haven’t learned, they still have an embedded battery. I have HAM portable radios that are waterproof with removable batteries but phone manufactures want us to pay them $$ every 2 years.
This is why I want to be able to replace my battery: https://goo.gl/g8xHCy How to prolong your battery
My brother left his phone in his truck one day and had to replace it, Samsung 7.
You tube is your friend…type in your device and pick any of dozens of videos walking you through the replacement.
The only difference is it takes a little work…this is so they can make them waterproof and also thinner and lighter:
I’m in publishing, as in typesetting, where I often deal with special characters and even foreign languages. In that market, Apple OS UI has the best interface for that work, hands down. Windows™ doesn’t come close. Linux has the option of emulating the Mac interface (keyboard), but it’s somewhat clunky and it emulates the Mac OS9 interface instead of the latest OS-X, but it’s close enough for most work. Android is brain dead like Windows™.
IOS when accessed through a keyboard can access all the special characters as does Mac OS-X.
For my work, Mac OS-X and IOS give the best results, Linux comes in second, Windows™ and Android are out of the competition. Windows™ and Android are for non-essential activities. I have at least one of each.
That’s my 2¢ on this issue.
Sigh. Yet Another “Windoze” vs. Apple monkey-fight. Never mind that the NT platform was designed by one of the guys who developed VAX VMS, or that OS X is based on BSD Unix. They both suck, right?
Then we have people who want to sue Apple over a business decision and a marketing decision. Apple screwed up by pretending the slowdown didn’t happen. Now we have uninformed people making all sorts of claims about the company and are almost literally spitting mad.
It’s not that hard to understand that the iPhone has always been positioned as a higher-end phone, which includes how much the thing weighs. Apple did everything it could to make the device lighter, including using a non-replaceable (in terms of warranty) battery. Customers knew this when they bought the phone. The only problem now is so many people having hysterics over an engineering decision. All the wrasslin’ about operating systems, marketing philosophies, and the evils of profit seeking* are irrelevant. Apple slowed down older phones to avoid system damage. If you can’t believe that I can’t help you. Buy a cheap Nokia or something, but please stop with the hysterics. As for Anthony’s chart, all I say is “correlation is not causation.” That is, it doesn’t prove that Apple deliberately throttles old phones to motivate you to buy a new phone.
A more likely scenario is that they had a good idea of how long the effective lifetime of the battery was and planned to introduce a new generation at that time, since the previous generation was becoming less useful. True, this doesn’t allow for conspiracist thinking, but you can’t have everything. Not to mention I would love to hear about a small but powerful battery capable of driving a modern smartphone which never wears out. Good luck on that.
I don’t have a political dog in this fight. I buy Android phones because I can’t afford an iPhone, and it’s easy to get a decent ‘droid cheap, if you don’t demand state of the art hardware. I use Wintel stuff at home (and I use {gasp} Windows 7) because for a long time Apple was stuck in its own little ecosystem. These days their hardware is indistinguishable from Wintel hardware, but it still costs more. Both systems have strengths & weaknesses. My special interest in college was technical writing, including user interface. That’s one thing Steve Jobs excelled at. MS finally started catching up, so we can say that Apple (via OS X) won the interface war which MS copied, but Wintel (actually Intel & AMD) won the hardware war after Apple started using Intel processors, PCI & USB busses, and other hardware standards.
Arguing about this is as silly as arguing which is cooler, Kirk or Picard. (It’s Kirk,BTW) There were several intelligent comments explaining the technical reasons Apple did what they did, but haters gotta hate. Most folks ignored them so they could have another gang war.
*I may have missed it but I think the Apple haters missed mentioning the “Apple uses slave labor” bit.
Yes you missed it above.
I have an iPhone 7 only be cause my Samsung Galaxy S5 went bonkers one day and the iPhone was free from my wife. I gave the Sammy to my mother in law lol. My wife is an Apple fangirl though, MacBook Pros (Which I will admit is rather nice), iPhones and iPods.
With the iPhone 7 and IIRC a 1.3Gb initial update to iOS 11 and then 3 further updates of about 400Mb each and one or two more smaller updates to iOS 11.2.1 the battery does seem to drain very quickly.
I am seriously thinking of something like the old Nokia 3210 which stayed charged for over a week. I have to charge the iPhone 7 every day. I can manage without any “smart” device that is used 99% of the time as a phone. My wife on the other hand could not manager her life, work and business without hers. So I guess it’s horses for courses.
http://www.news.com.au/technology/gadgets/mobile-phones/apple-facing-legal-dilemma-over-updates-that-slowed-down-older-model-iphones/news-story/84d3faf35cf544f515463bfdb7e64159
“Plaintiff Kirk Pedelty, of North Carolina, contacted Apple as his frustration grew. However, the lawsuit says: “Nobody from Apple customer support suggested that he replace his battery to improve the performance of his iPhone. … Frustrated by slowdowns and intermittent shutdowns of his iPhone 7, Pedelty purchased an iPhone 8.”
I think some people really do need to get a life.
[snip – fake email address – policy violation -mod]
First, I’m a long time reader of WUWT, and a big admirer of Anthony. That’s why I’m disappointed in this post. It’s pretty sloppy.
The Google Trends graph is called “damning,” but it’s a nine-year graph, when everyone knows that this battery software throttling only goes back about a year. So the 9-year spike pattern must be related to some other phenomenon. That’s just the start.
And there’s no regard for correlation vs. causation (troubling for a WUWT Post). Lots of people are thinking about their old phones’ failings when the shiny new phone model beckons. This could be another driver for the spikes.
The direct comparison to Android is extremely flawed because the Android upgrade cycle is completely different. Various manufacturers’ new models come out year round, and aren’t necessarily tied to Android OS updates.
And Android updates roll out much, much more gradually than iOS, so one can’t expect spikes like the ones that happen when (literally) tens of millions of iPhones upgrade over the course of a month.
In any case, the throttling software that was revealed doesn’t trigger based on date. The new graph’s x-axis is performance. It’s a multi-modal distribution unrelated to time. Thus, although both graphs have spikes, the spikes have completely different meanings. The new graph shows that many or most users aren’t even affected.
Finally, the performance values are derived from synthetic benchmark tests. These tests typically generate the largest possible CPU load for sustained periods. This creates a large, sustained current draw- coincidentally the exact parameter that triggers Apple’s throttle. Transient current spikes found in real-world use may not trigger the throttling in the same way.
That’s a long post, but when I go to WUWT, I expect rigor. 😉
A word of advice to those with SSD’s. Make sure you have a backup. You CANNOT recover any data from a failed SSD. Well, I will say I have not seen any successful results. You can, most times, restore from a failed HD, even a head crash. Costly? Sure!
To me this constitutes a breach of contract between Apple and everyone who has purchased Apple’s smart phone prpducts. Apple should provide all Apple smart phone owners with brand new, latest model smart phones, updated so that Apple cannot in the future at any time reduce the speed of their smart phones. Apple should also pay the cost of the inconvenience and of transfering data and applications from the old smart phones to the new smart phones. Apple should also pay punative damages to each smart phone owner.
Apple have admitted that it installed a software throttle to slow down old phones.
It then said it did it to ‘help’ consumers.
If it was done in secret, then it is a simple marketing ploy.
They should have done the sensible thing and announced a ‘new feature’, that was switchable, that ‘assisted’ legacy phone users battery life, until they upgraded. Thereby earning brownie points and happier customers.
@Steve Richards
Android and Windows call it Power Management… I can adjust everything including the fans, I’ve done a week without a charge or updates (Android Airplane mode)
All the angst! The weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth! Cast into outer darkness by what is nothing more than a con game played on those devoted to Apple (like my sister). The announced price for the newest model was, I think, somewhere around $1,000.00. I fail to understand the greed that impels a company to market something that is a glass-fronted membrane keyboard that costs about $15.00 to manufacture, but people who groove on this stuff are the suckers at the door to the carnival sideshow tent.
I have two Katana flip phones from Sprint. They’re very tough. I’ve had one for at least 12 years, never had a problem with it until I dropped it and cracked the hinge because it was open. Still works fine, though, but I asked Sprint for a newer one and I use both. Never had any issues with either beyond my own clumsiness in dropping my first flip phone.
It seems to me that the difference between the Apple products and my two flip phones is that I view them as phones – telecommunications devices – instead of electronic toys, and nothing else.
Anything else is just empty silliness, and iPhone owners fell for the con. Who was it said ‘There’s one born every day?’
Well, I used to love my flip phone as well, but then again i used to have to have a separate navigator for each car/truck, and had to have a camera, and blah blah blah.
I use my phone now for everything from web browsing and trading stocks, taking pictures (and there are a hundred uses for instant pictures…like looking at details of stuff I am fixing that I used to need a mechanics mirror for), navigation, flashlight, alarm clock, calendar reminders, light meter, decibel meter, plumb bob and level, star finder, emails on several different accounts, wifi hotspot for my laptop or tablet…
More things than I could ever remember of the top of my head, and I am sure I am only using a small fraction of what it is good for.
Oh, yeah…and phone calls.
I know people who only use their garage for parking their car too.
I don’t own any Apple products either. Let me explain. From the very start of Apple, they have been at Shady bunch. And I’m talking about their early computers. First it was our customer service. If something happened to your Apple computer you could best rely that you wouldn’t get any help from them although the big rumor was always how great Apple service was. Next it was the capabilities of the computers were so much better than the Windows computers The resolution was better, the chips were faster, everything was better on an Apple computer blah, blah, blah. I actually believed a lot of that until I looked a little closer. Turns out that the majority of that turned out to be complete BS as well and Apple built their considerable reputation on all of it. More recently Apple laptops that had problems weren’t delalt with in a transparent, upfront way by Apple. Again they hadn’t learned their lesson. Seems that Apple is big on deception and greed, exactly the opposite image they push out there.
Not owning any Apple and proud of it.
Quit Sony a few years back for the shady practice of ditching customer support for the technologies greedily owned by Sony. Say MiniDisc. A company that throws customers under bus does not need my money.
Absolutely disgusted I still have 3 iPhones that I’ve up graded every year , because of performance problems and now I know the reason why. I don’t think I’ll be getting another upgrade again with Apple .
Observations:
1. Apple is a cult. A dumb one with a decent industrial design team and authoritarian tendencies.
2. Wow. So many calls for lawsuits from people who would normally be screaming “Don’t get the government involved! Let the free market take care of Apple!”
2A. You can’t sue Apple over this anyway. Silly, naive idea. When you power on your expensive new shiny toy, you agree to a long and comprehensive User Agreement that insulates Apple from annoyances like consumers and the court system.
Why are you all so anti-business around here? Big Tech knows what’s best. Sheesh!
(poke, poke, poke)