In a lengthy letter to customers, Apple explained why they were slowing down older model iPhones. This was part of their apology to consumers. But that hasn’t stopped people from suing Apple for not informing them of said slow down. Like I said in another post, it amazes me that more people aren’t jumping ship because of this kind of move by Apple. Those filing lawsuits kind of have a case as Apple didn’t tell anyone what they were doing. What exactly is Apple doing to address these issues?
Well, they’re making battery replacements for out-of-warranty iPhones cheaper. But the procedure itself isn’t free. Rather than paying $79 for a new battery, you’ll only have to pay $29. This price is expected to stay in place until December 2018. On top of that, Apple will release new iOS features that give users more information about the health of their iPhone’s battery. This one is interesting to me. I think it’s a great idea, but it makes you wonder why they haven’t given you this kind of information before now?
This whole thing is kind of annoying from a consumer perspective, isn’t it? Apple never acknowledged that their batteries would become an issue in a new version of iOS. Obviously, consumers are happy that they did this to prevent unexpected shutdowns, but this whole feature is kind of garbage if you ask me. I guess it’s just the idea that Apple wasn’t upfront with people about this feature. I can understand it from a technology perspective, but not to warn consumers is what I think is ridiculous.
Apple has stated something that’s kind of surprising:
Over the course of this fall, we began to receive feedback from some users who were seeing slower performance in certain situations. Based on our experience, we initially thought this was due to a combination of two factors: a normal, temporary performance impact when upgrading the operating system as iPhone installs new software and updates apps, and minor bugs in the initial release which have since been fixed.
We now believe that another contributor to these user experiences is the continued chemical aging of the batteries in older iPhone 6 and iPhone 6s devices, many of which are still running on their original batteries.
So is Apple actually testing iOS before they do the update? Or are they only testing iOS on the new devices? I would guess that Apple engineers are only testing on newer versions of the phone, so how is that helpful to everyone else? My other guess is that there are a lot of people who don’t upgrade every single year. I mean, maybe you have been using a 6, and now you’re upgrading to an 8 or X. But if you just bought a 7 last year, you might not be in the market for an upgrade just yet. That’s just a guess, as there are a lot of people who will upgrade. But I think Apple needs to take this into consideration with their testing.
Not only that, but Apple received user feedback to be notified of the slowdown. A bit selling feature of iOS, from a developer perspective is that major releases for older iPhones and iPads are still available. Which means, their apps will run on these devices that much longer. As I mentioned in my other post, Apple isn’t giving people the ability to opt out of this slow down. Which means you’re either going to have to upgrade your phone, or at least upgrade your battery. Neither one is all that appealing if you don’t actually need a phone.