• laxe@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    While Apple has many issues, their support of older phones is really good. You can replace the battery once and still use the same phone for at least 5-6 years.

    My current phone is 4.5 years old and still going strong, with latest software versions.

    • umbrella@lemmy.ml
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      8 months ago

      we shoudnt depend on the goodwill of a corporation tho.

      phones should be as standardized and open as computers so it doesnt really depend on them.

        • BorgDrone@lemmy.one
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          8 months ago

          That was not to get you to buy another phone, in fact the opposite. It was to keep your phone functional even though it had a worn out battery.

          In phones there is this concept called a ‘race to idle’. Basically, you want your phone to do nothing, because doing nothing uses very little energy. So when you do something on your phone, the goal is to do it as quickly as possible so it can go back to doing nothing and save battery. Your phone will be in this low-power idle state 99.999% of the time. You still want your phone to be responsive though, when you click on something you want it to respond without delay. That means that when you tell it to do something it has to go from this low power state back to a high speed state.

          Now, iOS is really aggressive in this, it ramps up the CPU speed really fast. As a result, the power draw of the CPU goes from almost nothing to a high power draw very quickly. This causes problems with old batteries. As a battery ages it not only loses capacity, but it also becomes slower to respond to changes in power draw. If the CPU needs a lot of power quickly and the battery can’t keep up you get a brownout (drop in voltage) and the phone basically crashes and reboots.

          So what Apple has done is that when iOS detects this happening (i.e. a crash due to the battery being unable to keep up), it will ramp up the CPU a little slower. Or to use a car analogy: they don’t change the top speed, but are less aggressive on the gas so it takes a little longer to get to that top speed. If you replace the battery it goes back to the original behavior.

          This is basically a good thing, the alternative is that your phone keeps crashing. Where they screwed up is that they failed to inform users of this.

            • BorgDrone@lemmy.one
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              8 months ago

              Walk into Apple store, hand over phone, pick it up an hour later. Couldn’t be easier. Looking at prices, 3rd party repair services using non-original parts charge the same or more as Apple does.

                • BorgDrone@lemmy.one
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                  8 months ago

                  It doesn’t get progressively slower over time, it’s either in degraded mode or it isn’t.

                  If you want to use a car analogy, it’s comparable to limp mode. When your car detects an engine problem it goes into limp mode in which you don’t have full performance but you can at least get home. You’d rather have your car not do this and risk damaging the engine, or would you prefer it to simply stop working and leave you stranded?

                  Batteries wear out, it’s an unfortunate property of our current battery tech. You can either let your phone get unstable (risking data loss), have it refuse to work at all, or let its run in reduced performance mode so it at least stays usable. Those are your options. Pick one.

      • TK420@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        It’s been like this for a very long time, but you gotta hate somewhere I guess