It takes a day or 2 and you are used to the lower resolution again. It's not that the visible pixels would hinder readability. It's all psychological: Those who feel that nice looking fonts are important will be hard to convince. Probably also a status symbol for some. I prefer longer battery life and generally hate products and vendors wasting resources. I got HiDPI on my work laptop, but would switch back to a lower resolution any day. Use it regularly in other setups.
That's not a solution from Apple support. That's the solution that the USER came up with, after support was satisfied with "nuke your DNS zone" as a solution and closed the case.
This all can be fixed with a simple regex, once the right person gets involved.
But it seems a week is not long enough to get someone who knows how to use `dig`, and can create a bug report for the appropriate engineering team.
It is amazing, that a company with the amount of resources that Apples has, can screw up support for basic services, such as email, so badly.
It appears that it's not possible for a normal person to report actual problems, or get in touch with people who actually support the iCloud side of the house.
The desktop and app support works great, but if Apple is going to play in the "premium email provider" space, they need to make some improvements.
Despite Apple's anti-competitive ways, I am often impressed with their attention to details such as these. Glad there is still sanity out there in the world of "always listening" devices.
I'm not an Apple hater or a fanboy. I've owned a number of Apple devices in the past. However, they have their issues just like any other tech company, but their devoted following does seem to be more cultish than that of, say, Microsoft or Google.
I know the intricacies of what they did. To summarise: some phones with older batteries would suffer brownouts because the internal resistance of the battery was too high. They updated the OS to detect the brownout and throttle the CPU to prevent it happening again.
So they didn’t slow down all old phones, only ones that had the problem. They actually attempted to fix older models. To me this is the opposite of planned obsolescence and appeals to my environmental view that all manufacturers should be supporting their hardware as least as long as Apple currently does.
Now they didn’t communicate, and were fined. I think that is fair enough, but I feel the size of the fine was quite excessive given they were trying to extend the life of their customers hardware.
Note that the other phone manufacturers that have exactly the same problems did nothing and are actually better off because of it.
Your "summary" curiously omits one of the most important details — That the battery could be replaced and the phone would perform like new. If not, the ever deteriorating battery would result in a never ending arms race of throttling. Inevitably, that phone and battery would be in the landfill instead of just the latter.
Whether or not the whole thing was intentionally nefarious I'm not convinced. But the episode looks way worse than your comment suggests.
Man - almost every other phone brand ends in the the trash MUCH MUCH sooner than Apple, so this is funny to read.
Seriously - can you tell me how long you received updates on your android phone?
Apple is the absolute leader in getting longer life out of their phones, they have much higher resale as a result as well.
Apple not only allows older devices to installer newer software (with bug fixes / security fixes / and supportable features) but they have been backporting stuff to a one step earlier iOS as well in terms of basic fixes. It's actually crazy especially in comparison to their competitors (that get no flak on HN) who literally ship with an old version of android AND DO NOT UPDATE IT!
The statement wasn't about how Apple's phones compare with other phones. It was (pretty clearly I thought) about how long Apple phones with new batteries last against those without new batteries (and throttling applied).
>Seriously - can you tell me how long you received updates on your android phone?
I've used Apple computers exclusively since about 2005 and phones since around 2009. So no, I've never owned an Android phone. In fact, my small apartment has no less than 8 Apple devices in use between my partner and I.
Why do you assume I'm not an Apple user? Because I said something mildly critical of them?
My understanding of the change they made was that it was expressly to deal with a condition with failing batteries where, as they were nearing the end of their life, they would just shut off abruptly when they still claimed to have 40% or more charge left -- the problem was that they could no longer deliver peak power, and if the phone tried to draw what was now too much power for something, it'd fail. The solution to that was to limit how much power the phone could draw.
I don't think it was intentionally nefarious -- this is a real problem with this kind of battery and I've experienced it, and it's not unique to Apple devices. In theory, their solution is actually pretty good! The problem was the way they communicated this to end users, namely, that they didn't. They just did it. And didn't even have iOS tell you it had enabled this "battery management" mode when it was turned on.
This wasn't an engineering fiasco, it was a PR fiasco. Apple has always been guilty of what we could diplomatically call "under-communicating," but this is the sort of change someone -- many someones, arguably -- internally should have flagged and said, "No, look, this isn't something we should just do silently, in part because it's going to create a suboptimal user experience and in part because if we don't communicate what we're doing and why we're doing it, it's going to come across as us just slowing old phones down to make you buy new ones."
A short-lived consumable that can't be field-replaced is always an engineering fiasco. I used to keep a spare battery in my backpack; an external USB battery is not a reliable substitute when (not if) the internal battery gets bad enough.
Are you suggesting it wasn’t known that battery replacements were available for iPhones? I know I personally replaced several batteries over the years in iPhones, I don’t think that was a big secret. There were shops you could drop your phone off at and have anew battery put in for fifty bucks in an hour overseas at least.
> There were shops you could drop your phone off at and have anew battery put in for fifty bucks in an hour overseas at least.
Actually I bought my iPhone 6S in Australia and had the battery replaced for free in Vienna under their battery replacement program. It was done in 45 minutes.
>Are you suggesting it wasn’t known that battery replacements were available for iPhones?
I'm asserting as fact that Apple retail and support employees were kept in the dark about throttling. So, even if you had Applecare, your "genius" would tell you that your phone wasn't slowing down (you were imagining it) or that the slow down was an inevitable result of ever more complex OS upgrades. The end result is that you were told nothing could be done.
So no one was told the simple truth. That poor performance was related to poor battery health and could be rectified by a simple battery replacement.
Are you sure about that? I thought it was pretty much common knowledge that your battery going bad would degrade performance and it was time to get a new battery.
What I believe mthoms is saying that the "battery management" software was the secret thing, because it was. We all have a basic idea that when your battery is going bad you should replace it, I imagine, but the software fix Apple silently pushed out arguably prolonged battery life at the expense of making the phone run slower. But if the Apple Geniuses weren't told this was happening, they wouldn't be able to say, "Oh, yeah, your phone's turned on battery management because your battery isn't doing well."
The phrasing you've chosen ("degraded performance") is purposefully vague in order to move the goal posts. Please don't do that.
We're specifically talking about lower CPU clocking. Now, are you claiming to have known that Apple was throttling Phones with aging batteries before the rest of the world? Because well, that's a pretty amazing feat.
You made two very snarky comments above that implied people should have known about the throttling:
>Are you suggesting it wasn’t known that battery replacements were available for iPhones? I know I personally replaced several batteries over the years in iPhones, I don’t think that was a big secret.
>I thought it was pretty much common knowledge that your battery going bad would degrade performance and it was time to get a new battery
You're now walking that claim back it seems.
>The accusation is that Apple downclocked the phone in order to degrade the phone's performance and make people buy new phones.
No it isn't. Re-read my comments. The accusation is that Apple purposefully hid the throttling from its customers denying them of the choice to replace the battery and bring the phone back to 100%. As I said - whether this act was nefarious is not clear.
Look, you're just not being intellectually honest, nor do you seem to be carefully reading the thread so I've no more interest in debating you.
No, I didn't "imply people should have known about the throttling", I said that pretending people didn't know a bad battery would cause the phone to perform badly was silly.
The exact nature of that bad performance isn't even really important. You're arguing trivialities, that people might have known exactly why their phone went bad. To most people, a phone is a black box, it works or doesn't. Apple allowed the phone to keep working even when the battery had degraded to the point where the phone would randomly crash if they did not address that problem. Apple made the choice to degrade performance in order to keep the phone in service -- that's against their bottom line (they'd have likely sold another phone if they didn't do that), and it gives the customer the ability to keep using a phone without replacing the battery even when it needs a battery replacement.
Wait, what? I'm precisely on topic. The topic of this particular comments chain being throttling of iPhones without notifying the user [0]. It's also the topic of a several hundred million dollar class action suit to which Apple settled[1], after admitting it was a failure to not properly inform consumers[2].
You keep trying to derail it from the topic. No-one is arguing whether the throttling is a valid technological solution to a problem beyond Apple's control. It's a great solution, and it works well to this day — What's being debated is wether or not it was ethical to hide the throttling.
And no, throttling of computer devices based on battery capacity certainly was not, in any way, something to be expected. No manufacturer had ever done it before in a portable computing device (laptop, PDA, smartphone). At least to my knowledge.
Sure, it makes sense now that we understand it. But to somehow imply that it should have been anticipated or just blindly accepted is being grossly dishonest.
I've used Apple computers exclusively since 2005 and phones since around 2009. I'm a very satisfied customer. But I'm not so fanatical that I can't look at them objectively. I certainly couldn't imagine defending something that courts around the world, the vast majority of their customers, the technical press, and Apple themselves have admitted was wrong. I just can't understand the logic.
But they did, though? I got an email telling me my battery was part of a replacement program before this throttling "scandal" broke. I had it replaced for free in Vienna (phone was bought in Australia) in 45 minutes. I had noticed the throttling taking place but it wasn't until the email that I knew about the fault.
Besides your singular anecdote, do you have any evidence that frontline staff were notified of throttling? Everything that's come out so far says otherwise. It's a key part of the class action lawsuit to which Apple agreed to settle.
It's possible that some staff deduced that replacing the battery would help, based on personal observations, but they were never advised by corporate to do this as policy. As such, the vast majority of them were not recommending battery replacements.
But they did, though? I got an email telling me my battery was part of a replacement program before this throttling "scandal" broke. I had it replaced for free in Vienna (phone was bought in Australia) in 45 minutes. I had noticed the throttling taking place but it wasn't until the email that I knew about the fault.
Not sure how neglecting to inform users of throttling is some kind of improvement.
They have an article about hardware microphone disconnects, prolonging battery life, etc. yet they neglected to write an article about hardware throttling.
It's almost as if they had a hardware problem and instead of issuing a recall, they quietly pushed a software fix. No, that can't be it.
I didn’t leave it out on purpose. In my eyes it was a “limp home” mode so you would expect it to return to full performance. If it didn’t then that definitely would be a scandal.
Yes, they definitely should have communicated better. 100%. It was non obvious to any users that the phone had been throttled and that it needed a new battery. I think the fine they got will remind them to be more explicit in the future.
The feature still exists today, just explained better.
It wasn't non-obvious. It was covert. People had to root phones and observe CPU frequencies to uncover it. I see absolutely no indication that the intent was for the batteries to get replaced.
You seem pretty certain about their intent. The truth is Apple added battery throttling in iPhone 6 and up not in their older phones even though their older devices were capable of CPU throttling as well. For example, the iPhone 5S would throttle if it got hot enough to protect itself, yet it didn't receive the same throttling feature for the battery.
Supposedly, Apple didn't "implement" battery throttling on the iPhone 5S - Apple's discount battery replacement program only applied to the iPhone 6 and up. This suggests that Apple switched to a flawed battery technology in hardware starting in the iPhone 6 that wasn't realized until years later. And, instead of issuing a recall or repair program, they pushed a silent cover up in the software. Whatever the motive, they should have been more open about it.
I had an iPhone 5S that ran ok until I upgraded to iOS 13, IIRC. After that, the frames started skipping and it became frustrating to use.
You could ask any non-Apple industry personnel about what happens to batteries after years of constant usage and all of them will agree that eventually you eventually won't be able to pull the power you need to keep the phone running fast. Getting a new battery always fixed this, Apple just was performing this power management without telling the user before ios 12.1.
But if I'm an average user and my phone is slow, my first thought isn't "hey I should get the battery replaced". It's perfectly reasonable to assume the phone would still be slow, so why not just buy a newer model?
It's a lie of omission, which you could reasonably interpret as a trick to get people to upgrade.
If Apple had done nothing, then that same user's phone would randomly start switching off at non-0 battery levels (the un-throttled behavior) when brownouts occurred. Wouldn't the same user still come to the same conclusion, that their phone has some problem and needs to be replaced?
In general, the mobile phone industry has done a pretty good job encouraging their userbase to forget that their batteries are replaceable, so I don't think that most users would consider that as a remediation step off the top of their head.
I think it's plain that the best solution would be informing the user of the problem and letting them choose between behaviors (or, you know, replace the battery), but between slow usage and random shutdowns, I would personally choose the former.
I wonder if there have been any studies on how many users, once the toggle had been added, switched it from the (default) throttling behavior to the shutdown behavior? I'd be curious to see if I'm in the minority there.
> If Apple had done nothing, then that same user's phone would randomly start switching off at non-0 battery levels (the un-throttled behavior) when brownouts occurred. Wouldn't the same user still come to the same conclusion, that their phone has some problem and needs to be replaced?
No I actually think then the average person would assume it's a battery issue, or at least be able to google it. I'm not saying that this is actually better behavior (I would also choose slow mode over random shutoff mode), but it doesn't obfuscate the fact that the phone has a faulty battery.
The reason I suspect that Apple did this maliciously is that "service battery" notifications are pretty standard behavior (including on their own laptops). It just seems like an intentional omission.
If the battery is dying at <5% I think it's pretty obvious. But I think the real solution is the throttling behavior PLUS a "service battery" notification.
I got an email well before the throttling "scandal" broke out telling me my battery could be replaced for free. It was, 16,000KMs away from home, for free.
I didn't know about this email, but it still seems like a pretty bad way to communicate this no? How about a notification from the OS like in Apple's laptops?
A big point of this is how user-hostile replacing a battery on a phone has become for flagship mobile devices, which makes this situation a bit worse IMO.
> their devoted following does seem to be more cultish
I don't know about that. I seem to see a lot of irrational Apple hate, but not that much irrational Apple love.
I think they are far from perfect in many, many ways. But so much criticism of them appears overblown, short-sighted, irrelevant to me, or just plain wrong.
I look at it like this: all things considered, balancing various concerns, what's the best option for me for my given needs? Following that philosophy I've ended up with a lot of Apple gear. Am I a fanboy because a better alternative doesn't exist?
Exactly this. In fact, I’d suggest it’s a massive circular argument. A lot of the vehement ‘defence’ of Apple I see is usually in response to some outlandish claim being made against them, which is often made in response to a gushing anecdote of how great Apple are. It has been ever thus.
> I wish people would qualify their “Apple Hate” every time they mention it.
Sure, let me do that: Apple is a corporation and it is stupid to believe that they care more about you than making profits.
This applies to any corporation. I've particularly noticed that the US citizens are increasingly buying into this propaganda that corporations can better protect their rights than a democratically elected government. And that is just sad and dangerous. We should be campaigning for our privacy rights directly with the government, and not just hope that some corporation will act benevolent towards us.
(And it is not a coincidence that this "news" came up in the social media feeds when the [news about exploits that granted unauthorised access to your camera through Safari is going around](https://www.ryanpickren.com/webcam-hacking-overview).)
The issue here is that instead of adding a physical switch to disable the microphone and camera, Apple is again asking its users to blindly trust it. We just have to take their word for it that it will work. They can always blame a bug in the firmware if somebody finds a way to exploit it tomorrow ...
(Note: I mentioned the Safari exploit only to point out that there is some negative news which obviously a corporation would like to bury with some positive publicity. It is commendable that Apple paid the discoverer a nice bounty and will be fixing it soon.)
Edit: And, ofcourse, the downvotes begin as the social media management team steps in.
I don't think caring about the user and making profits are mutually exclusive. A company that is interested in delivering what the user wants and needs will often make profit. It's not a case of 'with the user' or 'against the user'.
I think the OP is trying to say that there is no evidence that apple cares about the user, only its own image in the eyes of users.
There is always an antagonistic relationship between buyers and sellers. Buyers want more money for less features, Sellers want more features for less money.
There is no such thing as "with the user", unless the users are shareholders in the company.
I see opinions like this and then see corporations like Costco that you’d have to try hard to find a reason to hate. Ultimately you’re not going to align the interests of different groups perfectly, but profits and competion align value with consumer value we’ll most of the time. And I think it’s fair taking Apple at its word for now— you can bet a lot of tear down people want to test this.
Apple is easy to hate if you want stuff that you can trust to work over time. Anything that locks you in as much as they do is not a friend of mine (anymore).
They aren't the worst player, or even close really however. It's just there's a lot of power and influence in that company, so you hear a lot about it.
> I wish people would qualify their “Apple Hate” every time they mention it.
Apple hate? I'm a Mac convert, and I admire most of their hardware and design. But it's no secret they purposely refuse to interoperate with other vendors, and purposely develop proprietary technologies to keep you within their ecosystem. The recent acquisition, and subsequent planned shutdown of Dark Sky is just one recent example.
Part of it is just the business model, I guess. For example, Google's apps are widely available across a variety of devices, since it gives Google the juicy data that they're after. For Apple, which is not an ad company, the incentive might not be there for opening their apps up to a wider audience.
Since I cannot justify a $1k+ phone for myself and my family members (I am content with my $500 S10e), and I have a mix of Mac, Linux, and Windows devices, the Apple applications (however well designed) are sadly out.
Apple will always make the right choice—until it messes with their business model. There are uncountable examples of ways in which they have intentionally crippled their own hardware and software to prevent users from using their own purchase.
I think we do. The problem is that people often believe things based on perception and snap judgement, which are often wrong. And once somebody has some "knowledge" even if gained through unreliable means, displacing that "knowledge" is rather difficult.
It's an artifact from evolving in a world where snap judgments were often the difference between life and death, and the person who assumed the rustle in bushes was just the wind, but it was actually a tiger, did not live to propagate. However, the paranoid person who thought it was a tiger every time the wind rustled the bushes, did survive to propagate.
Our current political system is pretty good evidence of people believing strongly enough in ideology to destroy the lives of others. I think they really do believe the stuff, and that's why it's so dangerous.
Certainly some people do that, but I would imagine it's a very small subset that are either trolls or consequentialists who feel the end justifies the means who originate it. Most who spread it are useful idiots (I use the word idiot very lightly. It's easy for anyone who is human to get suckered by a fake news story here or there).
I have quite a few family and friends that unintentionally spread fake news because they really thought the story was real. One in particular is extremely hateful toward fake news but made a conclusion based on a headline that turned out wrong (we don't all have time to read every story we see, as much as we'd want to).
I don't hate them, but I find their hardware is typically not as good as the competition, and for a higher price. I also think most people that buy Apple devices don't know this, or just refuse to believe it.
For example, I can't tell you how many times I've heard "I tried a Moto g and it's horrible! My old iPhone was better", or "this $300 Dell laptop is way worse than my MacBook". Of course a $1000 phone is better than a $200 phone, and likewise for the laptops.
But when you start looking at high-end laptops like the surface series, or phones like oppo/Huawei, it's usually in favor of the non-apple.
People don’t buy specs, they buy experiences. If the Android has 12GB ram and some super fast processor, but runs in a GC’d runtime that stutters when collecting and unloads background apps with high frequency, it’s not actually better than whatever’s in the iPhone.
Plenty of videos out there comparing opening a bunch of apps in a cycle on iPhone vs Android. Android wins the first open, iPhone destroys on the second. (iPhone is able to keep all apps in suspense, whereas android unloads them)
Don't make the mistake of assuming 'experience' is synonymous with 'performance' either.
Side-by-side comparisons aren't really of any real-world significance. Very few people do that when forming their opinions. For the average person, performance either detracts from the experience, or it doesn't.
There are many other factors that are more important to experience than performance. Does the interface conflict with their expectations? Does the user find the features to be self-explanatory? Does the device enable the user to conform to social expectation?
> People don’t buy specs, they buy experiences.
More specifically, people don't buy actual experiences, they buy expectations of experience. 99%+ of people who buy a phone haven't had more than a couple of moments of experience with it. They buy it because they expect it to be good based on their first impressions and/or preconceived notions.
I think you will need to be more specific. I have never seen a difference in high-end phones with Apple versus Samsung or any of the other Android phones with the latest Snapdragon.
I suggest you:
A) Take a look at the price difference between the phones you just said, and re-read my original point.
B) Don't cherry-pick a phone. Try this one from your same reviewer:
You said: I have never seen a difference (in high-end phones with Apple versus Samsung) OR (any of the other Android phones with the latest Snapdragon). I showed you a difference. I'm not going to keep going with this because at the end of the day, I really don't care. Good day :)
> iPhone is able to keep all apps in suspense, whereas android unloads them
Android also saves activity state for fast resume and keeps activities running until there is memory pressure. I've heard people complain about iOS devices in this regard because they do the same thing but don't have enough memory to do it effectively.
There is a lot of great hardware out there, no doubt. But the question isn't that simple. Another big component is the software. For the desktop, I find MacOS difficult to beat. I like and use Linux a lot, but there are commercial applications, I can't run on Linux. And I want to avoid Windows if possible.
And once you stepped in the Apple universe, you will find a large number of devices working together. The Mac, the phone, the tablet.
So there are many reasons to choose an Apple product, beyond its specs per dollar. Also, while I think that Apple prices are high, and upgrade prices even outrageously high, if I spec a high quality competitor coparatively, I often am not that far away from the Apple prices.
I don't agree with that. With the advent of WSL on Windows you can happily run Linux whenever you want and have all the normal ubuntu pieces available to you without starting a VM. You also get the windows application catalog, which is essentially every piece of major software ever written. With WSL now in the picture, I don't see how a BSD-based OS could beat it given that many applications that an apt install can give you aren't available as easily or at all there.
As I wrote, I don't like Windows much and are happier not having to use it. I still don't like the overly flat UI style and well, it is still Windows with all its oddities over the ages. I also get the impression, that Windows handles HiDPI way worse than MacOS, which is an important criterium.
WSL certainly has the potential to be a game changer and this has made Windows potentially interesting to me. What would really be a huge step, if Microsoft would built a Wayland server into the Windows UI. Having Linux GUI apps running on the native Windows UI with all acceleration, could make it a premier desktop for running Linux applications.
Well the BSD-based OS OP's talking about doesn't run loads of questionable telemetry (just judging by CPU usage) and does not turn on at night to install an update that will reset whatever telemetry settings the user hacked to disable.
Well, with Oppo and Huawei in particular, its pretty easy to beat the competition with state sponsored industrial espionage subsidizing their R&D costs.
Don't a nontrivial amount of people use their macbooks closed in a vertical docking stand? This will require them to use an external microphone.
That said, my experience with similar laptops (XPS 15) has been that closing it just exacerbates the shitty thermal limitations so it's not really practical. Not sure whether this mode of usage is viable on newer macbooks.
Don't a nontrivial amount of people use their macbooks closed in a vertical docking stand? This will require them to use an external microphone.
Wouldn't they have to use an external microphone anyway, since in clamshell mode, the microphone is facing directly into the closed display? AFAIK, MacBooks of any flavor don't have external microphones.
> as non-US, I would always choose such a wonderful and welcoming country and great people over police state of US these days
The US certainly has many issues, but I find calling it a "Police State", while praising the Islamic Republic of Iran in the same sentence quite ironic.
Then educate thyself. Besides all the anedotal evidence of police militirazation, violence, the USA has THE largest prison population in the world and almost the highest % of population in prison, #2 (after seychelles) with 693 per 100k. Iran is way down list at #37 with 287.
> The US certainly has many issues, but I find calling it a "Police State", while praising the Islamic Republic of Iran in the same sentence quite ironic.
you mean, praising it as a tourist destination? How's that even controversial? Iran is an absolutely enchanting place to visit.
Now, agreed that calling the US a "police state .. these days" is still quite an exaggeration, but notice the context - the absolutely shocking, police-state-like US visa policy, mentioned in the prior sentence!
You only have to weaken the premise a bit to make it a perfectly sensible claim (and perhaps a bit of rethorical hyperbole is excusable?) : If the authoritarian behavior of the US government forces one to chose between visiting a place as beautiful as Iran, and visiting the US, surely that's an easy choice!
This is not true. Modern top loaders, such as Samsung High Efficiency top loaders don't waste water like the old mechanical top loaders. They weigh the clothing, adjusting the water levels accordingly. They also don't have agitators, and wear fabrics less than the spinning action of a rotating drum. For a 2nd story laundry, they are a no-brainer, because the spin cycle (which is much faster than an old-school top loader) results in significantly less vibration than a front loader.
Source: owned a front-loader, several cheap "old school" top loaders, and a modern, High Efficiency top loader. The last one, is the best by far.
The rest of the laptop does look great for the price.