I would assume they already do it, for devices with defective / old / failing batteries. Remember the explosive Samsung Note 7 or whatever that was, they initially limited it via firmware to 80% charge.
The industry practice of non-removable, hard to replace batteries is really at fault there.
I’ll leave that here. YMMV
As covered in the other topic…
… maybe they just let the weak batteries fail randomly. A co-worker has a nexus 6p we got him back when that was new (2015?) and he had to carry an external battery around with him at all times circa September 2017 because his phone would randomly turn off and die anytime the battery was 30% or below.
I don’t understand your point? Are you saying that it’s okay to throttle the phone to cover up your weak battery?
Also, isn’t it a coincidence that it seems to happen right as a new line of phones come up? Defend it all you like, but I suspect your ability to be an impartial judge of what Apple does is limited in this matter.
I’m saying it makes sense to deal with a weak battery in software, rather than passing on random shutdowns to customers. If you can’t or won’t understand that, then I dunno what to tell you. Get smarter?
I do agree there should be plenty of diagnostic info available to the customer based on their actual battery state. And some way to sanely replace a bad battery — but the market seems to like ultra slim ultra compact devices that don’t have easily replaceable batteries.
Um, how about fuck you?
Sure, it can make sense to deal with shit batteries in software post sale, but if they can’t design a device and put a battery in it that maintains its advertised performance for it’s effective 2-3 year lifecycle, then they are fucking consumers who pay for that advertised performance. That goes for IOS and Android, btw, if and when it turns out other device manufacturers are doing it too.
You could cut iPhone 7 performance in half and it would still outperform 95% of the Android devices on the market. Literally, not figuratively. Look at the actual graphs of perf as well; the type of throttling discussed is usually much less impactful than 50% of perf.
I’m sorry if that makes you sad or angry, but it is the truth. If you are curious who to blame, it rhymes with Qualcomm.
So that makes it ok to cover design flaws with non-transparent software updates?
It very much depends on how you treat your battery for how long it lasts. Never mind that for every one forum poster claiming their battery went to crap after a new phone was released there are a few thousand who didn’t notice a difference and aren’t posting on forums.
You can claim Apple biased all you want, but the anti-Apple crowd is out in force over this as if their phone has some sort of amazing technology better than Apples.
All of my phone batteries ever have gone to absolute trash, as have all of my dad’s iPhone batteries. battery technology, for all of it’s very impressive advancements to keep pace against the march of other tech, still kinda blows ass.
Making devices without hot-swappable batteries, in light of that, is a serious dick move, no matter who does it. When my Droid 1’s battery was going down the shitter, I bought a new one on Amazon and two days later, popped the back off my phone with a single movement of my thumb, slid the battery out, put the new one in, and was back to 100% performance in under 10 seconds and for less than $20. Anything worse than that is just hot bullshit, no matter who’s manufacturing it.
The 6p’s problems aren’t due to a “weak battery”, but rather to a defect in the 6p that Huawei fucked up.
I guess, but today’s phones are designed to be as small and thin as possible, as well as with a certain amount of water resistance, it’s not as reasonable as it used to be. The last phone I had with a swappable battery (Droid 1) was absolutely huge compared to modern phones.
I think most people just don’t care. In all my years of using portable devices going back to laptops 20 years ago, I can’t remember ever buying a new battery. I would guess most people are like me, and hardware manufacturers realized this years ago.
My experience is more like LeeAbe so I’m puzzled by this. I live on my iphones; I use them, A LOT. Yet they generally do more than fine, battery wise, after the usual 1.5 to 2 years I put on them. I suspect that they’re at like 75-85% of their original life, on average, by the end of their use life. Maybe it’s pure luck or maybe it’s the way I use them, but I’ve never had things go to absolute trash. Because of that, I wouldn’t trade size/weight and waterproofing for the ability to swap out the battery so that I could reclaim that 15-25% battery life near end-of-use.
As to Wumpus’s point, I’d be careful if I were other manufacturers in trumpeting that they don’t slow phones down, if that means that they’re simply letting things crap out on the bottom end of the curve, instead. Now, if their batteries are better than Apple’s and don’t crap out in the first place or at least don’t substantially crap out as much, that’s a different story.
Oh I was not aware of that, link?
I think we can all agree that seeing realistic data on the current state of your battery is something that should be provided by the OS. As for easily replaceable batteries that ship has sailed — the market has voted with their wallets definitively and repeatedly against battery replacement.
As for battery condition throttling, from what I read it is quite situational, depending on battery condition, temperature, and current load. It looks like Apple only started doing this in iOS 11 but I would expect Android to follow suit quickly because it protects users from unexpected device shutdowns. Everyone has the same battery tech using the same manufacturers. There is nothing magical here.
I’d like to remind everyone that the myth that slow = energy efficient is complete BS. Fast means faster finishing the actual work and getting to idle, which is where the real savings are. Now if there is actual data showing under full load fast device X pulls 2 watts while slow device Y pulls 1.5 watts then yes, the odds of device X shutting down while under load with a weak, cold battery are higher. But if device X is faster, then load throttling would be a wash. And if slow device Y happens to get a bad battery too, well then… you are much more fucked with a slow device and a bad battery because there is no performance headroom for battery condition throttling.
In conclusion, Qualcomm still sucks.
I am all for anecdotes, but they are not systematized data on par with a company admitting to throttling. Or in other words:
Practice what you preach. I don’t doubt there’s plenty of actual data on android phone battery deficiencies.
Everyone uses identical battery tech. I could cite hundreds, thousands of cases of devices with worn out or poor batteries shutting down unexpectedly when the battery is low. This is a well known, standard phenomenon that is based on fundamental battery physics.
This article is from mid 2016.
The only Qualcomm-y thing here is whether you have a slow or fast CPU attached to that broken or worn out battery. A faster CPU will allow software throttling opportunities to institute a software fix, if desired. The permanent fix is to replace the battery.
Though as already pointed out an iPhone 7 at half speed (and that is super extreme) would still offer a better experience than most Qualcomm hardware.
Sure, but you have called out anecdotes from others before.
Slower CPUs can be underclocked to reduce power consumption too. CPU speed has nothing to do with it, only power draw matters.
At a more severe cost to the average user experience. The risk goes up the slower the CPU is.
https://www.reddit.com/r/FuckQualcomm/
I made this my homepage and desktop background. Because seriously fuck Qualcomm.