• kirklennon@kbin.social
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    10 months ago

    No, it will never go away because it’s a legitimately good feature that was introduced in order to extend the useful life of older devices with degraded batteries. Old batteries can’t always consistently deliver the same power as newer batteries. Before “Batterygate” your phone would just shut itself off in the middle of whatever you were doing. That’s the baseline experience. To prevent this, Apple developed a software update to, when and to the extend needed, dynamically throttle power demand in order to stay within the limits of the battery. On a full charge at room temperature, even a degraded battery may still be able to support full unthrottled performance, but if it gets too hot, or if your battery is low, it might not. Even then you may still be able to do stuff without any throttling, but if you do something that requires a spike in power consumption, it might need to be temporarily throttled then, through some combination of slightly slower performance (often not even noticeable) or a slightly dimmed screen. The more degraded your battery gets, the more it will need to throttle.

    There are no scenarios where a sudden shutdown is actually preferable to throttling. This was a pro-consumer move that make old iPhones more usefull. It’s a shame that Apple was bullied into adding the ability to disable the throttling feature.

    • Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz
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      10 months ago

      As someone else mentioned, while there are legitimate reasons for this, Apple didn’t tell users about it or give people any option over it. If they had been open about doing it or gave some option in the battery menu to disable it there would be nothing to complain about. But secretly slowing down older devices was obviously going to be controversial when people figured it out.

      There’s also the fact that apple makes replacing their batteries difficult. If their motivation was purely to keep people from the negatives of older batteries, a logical step would be to make battery replacement cheaper and easier. Instead slowing the devices feels like an extra push to sell new iphones or at least make money on battery replacements.