Comment on Why can computers, like even very old laptops can seemingly get OS updates forever, while mobile devices hardly get a few years of updates before getting stuck out of date?

• givesomefucks@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Apple aggressively throttled CPUs when new models came out.

  They claimed it was due to age of batteries and to prevent overheating. But then Samsungs started exploding and I think people just let it go.

  Not sure if they still do it or not.

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  • ch00f@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Not so much overheating as dropout. Batteries lose both energy capacity and power capacity over time. If you draw too much current from an older battery, its voltage will drop significantly and possibly prematurely shut down the phone.

    Lowering peak current (by slowing down the phone), can prevent your phone from shutting off while it still has like 20% capacity left.

    Considering Apple was doing battery replacements for like $60 (before bumping to $100), and this was a setting that could be turned off, I think the only real crime was enabling it by default and not properly informing users.

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  • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Everyone dunks on Apple for throttling older batteries but the fact is this was super pro-consumer move. It prevents the phone from randomly powering off because the SOC tries to pull a burst of energy that the battery is too tired to output, and resets following a battery replacement, plus nobody notices the throttling except under synthetic benchmarks where you actually have performance numbers to see the handful of percentage points of performance difference. AND after this kerfuffle they added a toggle switch where if you so prefer random instability on an aging battery over 2% slower turbo performance you can choose to have that.

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  • lurch@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    the exploding has nothing to do with this throttling tho.

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• TachyonTele@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  That was Apple

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  • bobs_monkey@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    “Battery degradation”

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    • Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I mean… that’s a true thing that happens and must be compensated for unless you want your phone to randomly die at 20%. Android phones do it, too. I’d rather my phone slow down at 10% than have it just cut out and die.

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      • bobs_monkey@lemm.ee ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        It wasn’t slowing down the phones at different battery percentages, they were essentially derating the hardware under the premise of battery management, and iirc they got called out and said “you’re right, but buy new phones anyway, yours are old.”

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