Apple’s Message to Customers About iPhone Batteries and Performance

Apple [archived version] (Hacker News, MacRumors, ArsTechnica):

We’ve been hearing feedback from our customers about the way we handle performance for iPhones with older batteries and how we have communicated that process. We know that some of you feel Apple has let you down. We apologize.

[…]

Apple is reducing the price of an out-of-warranty iPhone battery replacement by $50 — from $79 to $29 — for anyone with an iPhone 6 or later whose battery needs to be replaced, starting in late January and available worldwide through December 2018.

Early in 2018, we will issue an iOS software update with new features that give users more visibility into the health of their iPhone’s battery, so they can see for themselves if its condition is affecting performance.

Apple:

In addition, a battery’s ability to provide power quickly may decrease. In order for a phone to function properly, the electronics must be able to draw upon instantaneous power from the battery. One attribute that affects this instantaneous power delivery is the battery’s impedance. A battery with a high impedance is unable to provide power quickly enough to the system that needs it. A battery's impedance can increase if a battery has a higher chemical age. A battery’s impedance will temporarily increase at a low state of charge and in a cold temperature environment. When coupled with a higher chemical age, the impedance increase will be more significant. These are characteristics of battery chemistry which are common to all lithium-ion batteries in the industry.

[…]

This power management works by looking at a combination of the device temperature, battery state of charge, and the battery’s impedance. Only if these variables require it, iOS will dynamically manage the maximum performance of some system components, such as the CPU and GPU in order to prevent unexpected shutdowns.

I think this is a pretty good response. An excellent response would have acknowledged the elephant in the room, which is that although Apple didn’t “do anything to intentionally shorten the life” of the phones, all the design parameters were of Apple’s choosing. iPhone’s desktop-class processors seem to draw power in a more problematic way than processors in competing phones, and Apple could have mitigated the problem by using larger batteries. They didn’t “shorten the life,” but neither did they communicate it to the customer, and they could have designed the phone to have a longer life.

If I were Apple, I’d just make the $29 battery replacement fee permanent, or at least for a certain number of years after the phone was purchased. That would generate a lot of good will.

Some remaining questions:

• Will the $29 fee apply to any customer who wants a new battery? Or does the battery need to fail the diagnostics at the retail store? It think it should be available for any under-performing phone.

• Will the iOS update show information about the health of the battery? Or are they just adding a binary indicator that shows when throttling is happening?

• What is the design life of an iPhone? Apple doesn’t say. Since they’re not doing another recall (or offering free battery replacements after year one), presumably it’s considered normal for an iPhone to need throttling after less than two years. This again makes it more of a design issue than a chemistry issue.

• How many iPhones are affected? It’s interesting that this time Apple did not repeat the “small number of users” language that accompanied the iOS 10.2.1 update.

• There’s still somewhat of a mystery about whether the throttling only comes into play to prevent imminent shutdown.

• What about all the people who bought new iPhones but would have been happy with new batteries, if they’d known? I suppose there’s not much Apple can practically do to make that right.

• What about the iPhone 5s?

• Why is there disagreement in the press about whether there’s any actual news here?

• Why are some pundits so obtuse?

• Are Macs throttled as well? Our 2010 MacBook Pro, whose battery is in decent condition, got (and remained) much slower after installing High Sierra.

a f waller:

Making the price of a battery replacement $29 will destroy the sketchy third party battery market which has a lot of other benefits for both Apple and customers. Quality replacements that don’t break your phone.

Adam Banks:

This will also be useful for used iPhone buyers - a screengrab of the battery health report should become standard in listings (or a “not worse than” commitment for higher-volume resellers)

Jason Snell:

I don’t think Apple’s entirely disingenuous when it says it designs its products to last.

But I do think that Apple has never made any great effort to promote battery replacement over buying a new phone, or ensure iOS performance is acceptable on older models.

Nilay Patel:

I totally believe that they’re being sincere. I also think they want people to buy a new phone every two years. :)

John Gruber:

The funny thing about Apple is that their communication problems tend to happen only when they don’t communicate at all.

Rui Carmo:

I replaced my iPhone 6 battery back in August because it was failing around the 30% mark, and the performance increase was very noticeable indeed–right until iOS 11 came along, that is.

Even if 11.2 is now almost fast enough on this hardware, if I hadn’t replaced the battery the phone would likely be completely unusable by now.

Previously: Apple Confirms That It Throttles iPhones With Degraded Batteries.

Update (2018-01-02): Tim Hardwick:

This morning, French tech blog iGeneration reported that an internal Apple Store memo has been circulated which states that if a customer asks for a battery replacement on an iPhone 6 or later, then the Genius Bar should allow it, even if their phone passes Apple's own diagnostic test.

Joe Rossignol:

Apple also says customers who paid regular price (aka $79 in the U.S.) “may” be (a.k.a. are) eligible for a refund and should contact Apple[…]

Fred McCann:

The needle we’re using to thread this is that Apple slowed down phones to increase the life of older phones, not to provoke users to upgrade. That said, getting users to upgrade was undoubtedly the outcome of this practice, and Apple most certainly made a lot of money because of this.

Is that fraud? I don’t know, but it sounds like something that should be decided by a court. For anyone who spent hundreds of dollars upgrading a phone they didn’t want to, $50 off a future battery replacement is not a great remedy.

Benjamin Mayo:

If Apple wants to consider iPhone batteries as consumable, I don’t want them to profit off of the battery repairs. $29 is a palatable service cost to bear after two years of iPhone ownership, $79 stings. If their aim is to maximise the longevity of their devices, they should not have conflicts in incentives with making money from repairs down the road. I do not want Apple to run a razor and blades business model, even inadvertently.

[…]

I would also like to see Apple release estimated numbers on how long customers should expect to be able to use their iPhone at full performance.

Update (2018-01-03): Pierre Lebeaupin:

Such a thing was obviously documented internally, because it is an important change of behavior that their own QA teams will notice when qualifying the software for release, also because it resolves a support issue, so obviously customer support was in the loop so as to provide feedback on which compromises are acceptable, etc. And yet, at the end of the day, when the fix is about to widely land in people’s phones, the system inside Apple is so completely stuck up on secrecy that not even an extremely expurgated version of this documentation makes it out the door? What is wrong with you people?

Update (2018-01-05): Geoffrey Fowler (via Dan Masters):

When I showed up with an appointment at my closest Apple store on Jan. 3, there were so many others also trying to replace their batteries that I had to join a weeks-long waiting list. Your local shop might have more supply, but battling hordes for repair (rather than a sexy new phone) is an unusual experience at an Apple store.

Update (2018-01-08): Adam C. Engst:

The fact that Apple was doing something to address those shutdowns wasn’t a revelation. The company had said it was looking into the problem and claimed it had implemented a fix in iOS 10.2.1, back in early 2017. There was some dispute as to whether that actually happened since Apple included nothing in the release notes about it at the time (see “Apple Releases macOS Sierra 10.12.3, iOS 10.2.1, tvOS 10.1.1, and watchOS 3.1.1,” 23 January 2017). Subsequently, however, Apple amended iOS 10.2.1’s release notes to say:

It also improves power management during peak workloads to avoid unexpected shutdowns on iPhone.

[…]

Reading between the lines, it sounds like Apple is actually saying, “The batteries in these iPhones are underperforming in ways that we didn’t expect and don’t entirely understand.”

Update (2018-01-09): Joe Rossignol:

While we previously confirmed that Apple is offering $29 battery replacements to any customer with an iPhone 6 or newer regardless of diagnostic result, Apple has indicated that this policy can only be taken advantage of once, according to new fine print on its iPhone service pricing page.

Update (2018-01-11): Joe Rossignol:

Apple says iPhone 6 Plus replacement batteries are in short supply and won’t be available until late March to early April in the United States and other regions, according to an internal document distributed to Apple Stores and Apple Authorized Service Providers this week and later obtained by MacRumors.

Update (2018-01-19): Benjamin Mayo:

Tim Cook was asked for his take on Apple slowing down iPhones with degraded batteries. He revealed that the developer beta including these features will be released next month, with a public release to follow after.

Moreover, he says that this forthcoming update will give users the option to disable the throttling to maintain normal CPU performance, but will be at risk of unexpected shutdowns.

Benjamin Mayo:

I struggle to see the motivation for Apple to go further and make the behaviour optional. The existence of this setting, which will be available in a iOS developer beta released next month, is a contradiction of what Apple said in the public apology letter.

Update (2018-01-30): Bloomberg:

The U.S. Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission are investigating whether Apple Inc. violated securities laws concerning its disclosures about a software update that slowed older iPhone models, according to people familiar with the matter.

Update (2018-02-06): Juli Clover:

Apple vice president for public policy Cynthia Hogan answered Thune’s inquiry today and said that Apple is indeed looking into whether a rebate program can be provided to customers.

Update (2018-05-10): Joe Rossignol:

Apple has confirmed that “service inventory of all iPhone replacement batteries is now available without delay,” in an internal memo distributed to Apple Stores and its network of Apple Authorized Service Providers on April 27.

Update (2018-06-02): Juli Clover:

Apple is providing a $50 credit to all customers who paid for an out-of warranty battery replacement for an iPhone 6 or later between the dates of January 1, 2017 and December 28, 2017, the company announced today.

The $50 credit is an extension of Apple’s $29 battery replacement program, which went into effect in December of 2017 to provide lower-cost battery replacement options to customers potentially affected by performance throttling due to battery degradation.

Update (2019-09-13): ghost_of_ketchup (via Meek Geek):

IMO it was pretty unethical, because Apple themselves designed their A series chips with massive peak voltage requirements. They also designed the iOS CPU scheduler to aggressively and rapidly switch between this massive peak voltage and idle. I refuse to believe that Apple, with all their genius and engineering prowess, did not foresee the stress that this would put on the battery.

Apple knew that the design of their A series chips and CPU scheduler would prematurely degrade batteries and cause problems, but chose keynote bragging rights about CPU performance gains over device longevity. When people started noticing problems with premature shutdowns and random reboots, Apple first tried to claim that only a select few serial numbers were affected when they damn well knew this wasn’t the case. Then they tried secretly under-clocking devices, hoping consumers wouldn’t notice. Only when this was exposed and the whole thing became a scandal did Apple admit the fault affected all iPhones and offered battery replacements at a discounted price. For a limited time only.

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