Before they got caught Geniuses weren't recommending $100 battery replacements. They were recommending new phones because the old one was "too slow". And that "nearby" Apple store can literally be hours away.
And the problem is that Apple was considerably undersizing the battery compared to rivals and then compensating by throttling the CPU once it aged.
It's disingenuous on Apple's part to slow down the phone without notifying the user. So instead of a user knowing the battery is degrading and can be replaced for just $79, the user is led to think the phone performance is degrading and probably needs to upgrade the whole thing.
Yeah, they didn't tell Apple Geniuses either IIRC so when users came into the store complaining about a slow phone they weren't recommending a $99 battery replacement but a $699 iPhone 7.
Apple did not communicate to users they were slowing down the phone to prevent issues. They did it silently so users would upgrade rather than replace the battery.
> apple offered replacement batteries almost at cost.
Only after they were caught slowing down phones without informing users.
Depends on how you look at it. One alternative solution to the old battery problem would be to send it to a repair shop to install a new battery.
But Apple doesn't want people to have the right to repair their own devices, so that's not even seen as an option. Throttling to extend battery life is a convenient explanation that both solves the problem and avoids hurting their extremely profitable repair program (where they'd charge maybe $50 less than the cost of a new phone for a battery replacement).
Part of the issue was that replacing the phones was not needed,
getting new batteries was enough (that was initially a 85$ replacement I think, that got down to 29$ after the issue was made public if my memory is correct. Don't quote me on this)
Case in point, when Apple explained the issue and their hack, people got way more interested in checking the state of their battery (wether they were affected or not), and there was a rush to replace used up batteries.
I tried to replace mine 2 months after the announcement, there was still a 3 weeks backlog of replacements.
Also to note: those phones were still turning off in some circumstances. It wasn't like Apple's hack completely removed the need to replace the faulty battery.
Apple hid the cause (an ageing battery), and purposely slowed down peoples phones without warning.
If your phone randomly shuts downs, or it last less time between charges, you know it must be a battery issue. You go to Apple or whatever, and fix it paying no more than 79$ (maybe even free if it still has warranty!)
If you hide it and degrade performance, people don't know its a battery issue, leaving them to suffer a slow phone, or spending 700+$ on a new phone.
No matter the good intentions, and the "good solution" they implemented, they fucked up.
Consumers could have replaced the battery, a practice that has been universal in consumer electronics for, well, the entire history of battery-powered consumer electronics.
If consumers were aware that their phones were actually suffering from degraded performance due to a design failure by Apple, instead of being gaslighted into believing that their phones simply seemed slower because they were older, they might have switched away from Apple.
All of this chicanery is really about getting consumers comfortable with the idea of disposable gadgets that must be replaced every year. When you expose the fact that a LIPO powered phone is probably going to need a new battery after 1-2 years, consumers start to wonder why they are charged an exorbitant fee to replace the battery in the first place.
It's a pretty tiny fine (0.04% of Apple's yearly revenue) for a pretty major offense: quietly slowing down old phones without telling customers that they could replace the battery to make it fast again. We can have a conversation as to whether this rises to the level of planned obsolescence, but this was absolutely not the correct way for Apple to handle this.
Thats a very cynical perspective. There's two ways to look at this:
(A) Apple's terrible because they should have released the device with a "better" battery. One that's not "defective". One that could allow the CPU to run at full-throttle all the time for the usable life of the device. They slowed the device secretly to match the capabilities of the battery because they're trying to cover up a manufacturing defect, and they dont want to foot the bill for repairing everyone's phones.
(B) Apple was trying to get the most performance possible out of the physical capabilities of the battery. Unfortunately, it turned out that as the battery aged, due to physical changes, the battery couldn't keep up with the demands of the CPU running as fast as they thought it could over time. To prevent devices from shutting down and forcing users to replace the battery/phone earlier, they scaled CPU performance with battery age and therefore capabilities. Because batteries are consumable and their performance characteristics change over time. This means that the phone always give you just as much performance as physically possible at any given age.
Apple does some funny CPU throttling when your battery gets old. Instead of just telling you "your battery needs to be replaced", they scale down your CPU's frequency to the point where the phone becomes completely unusable. It's not great. Most people don't realize that they could get their battery replaced in a matter of minutes, at a cost of about $50. I've done it with an old iPhone, and it worked like-new again.
The slowing down was necessary to not overload the batteries (very obviously necessary since phones were resetting otherwise), and apple offered replacement batteries almost at cost. What more do you want??
Non-replaceable battery has got to be one of the most profitable examples of planned obsolescence. Your average consumer is going to notice that their phone is lagging more frequently and attribute that to their phone being old… when in reality it’s just that their battery has degraded [1]. So, what could’ve been a <$100 replacement becomes a $1000 upgrade.
The right thing is to be honest with users about the state of their equipment. Many, many people shelled out to replace their "dying" phone when all they really needed was a new battery. I don't believe that Apple didn't intend that.
They found a way to cover up an ongoing design flaw in the phone/battery capacity combination. The phones are too powerful for the batteries that Apple uses.
Almost no other line of phones has this issue.
It is amazing how people twist this situation to make Apple the hero for saving "old" phones.
The alternative is that Apple could tell the user the phone battery was going bad, so they'd buy a new battery rather than a new iPhone. The other alternative is that Apple could test the battery and apply the throttling only when appropriate (rather than generically over entire models). Weirdly, both decisions contributed to Apple's bottom line. What an odd coincidence.
Worth mentioning here is that this wasn't just about the "sneaky" fix for battery degradation, it was about doing this without notice, and having internal tooling that would deny a replacement (even at full retail price) if the battery was above an arbitrary health threshold (but still low enough to cause throttling).
Before Apple changed their tune, if you read about this, and went into an Apple store for a replacement, they absolutely would not give you one, even if you paid full retail for it.
This left people in a no-win situation. The only way you could get a working device was to have a third party replacement done (and kill your warranty) or shell out for a new phone.
And the problem is that Apple was considerably undersizing the battery compared to rivals and then compensating by throttling the CPU once it aged.
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