from Hacker News

Forget conspiracies; Why Apple’s reason for slowing your iPhone is hostile

by MRSallee on 12/25/17, 7:09 PM with 9 comments

• by antonyme on 12/26/17, 12:07 AM

  So imagine Apple starts to show warning messages saying "your battery cannot hold sufficient charge and is EOL - you should replace it now".

  We would have a different spin on Batterygate where Apple is greedily telling people to replace their batteries when they allegedly still work just fine, because all they care about is selling more batteries and making more profit.

• by gumby on 12/25/17, 11:49 PM

  I get the feeling the author has never designed hardware, much less shipped any.

• by endemic on 12/26/17, 12:51 AM

  Every year I see hardware folks write breathlessly about how good the performance of Apple's AX chips. In retrospect, seems like Apple is pulling a fast one: amazing performance, but only while the phone is new (coincidentally, when all the benchmarks get run). I'm curious how this will impact future reviews of iDevice performance.

• by mtgx on 12/25/17, 9:05 PM

  Following his own logic, then you could also argue that Apple not recalling its broken iPhones is also a matter of incentive = avoiding negative PR.

  So to be consistent, he should admit that in both cases Apple is in the wrong and user-hostile. Apple could avoid the issue for the majority of users by increasing battery size and quality (Samsung has said that its S8 battery will only drop 5% of its charge after 3 years, for instance).

  Instead, Apple chooses the easy and more profitable way out - degrading users' performance, which coincidentally also happens to get users to buy iPhones more often.

  There is a false dilemma not just between "conspiracy vs not conspiracy", but also between "performance vs battery life", a dilemma manufactured by Apple itself.