This is a plea to my followers.
Stop buying Apple products. I know you’ve used them for most of your life, and I know it’s inconvenient to move to a new brand because in most cases, you cannot take your contacts with you on various chat apps.
I know this is inconvenient. I truly do.
But Apple is not the company it was before. There is now no difference between an Apple computer and a Windows computer in terms of graphic design. I know this for a fact. I had to use both in college 20 years ago, and non-apple computers are now generally better for design work than Apple computers.
Most non-apple companies encourage self-repair of your own devices, while Apple refuses it. I also know this for a fact, as I watched Apple computers become slowly less reparable through the late 90s and early 2000s. Where I was once able to do the repairs on our office computers, we had to start sending out our Apple devices because they started gluing things down on their logic boards. Notably the glue they used was not heat-resistant and led to device damage should the heat sink system fail. But they did this because they wanted to dig more money out of their customers.
Apple software is also designed to fail. I cannot believe people are still buying new devices after the scandal where Apple was slowing their phones in order to force people to purchase new versions.
Apple hardware is designed to become obsolete. Motherboards and logic boards are designed to hold exactly what comes attached to them and will fail if upgrade attempts are made.
Apple refuses to work with software developers despite promises of cross-compatibility. One of the very first coding problems I discovered was to discover a gigantic hole in a software program that made a plotter (giant printer) compatible with iOS. This caused a memory leak, leading to necessary resets of the computer after every 2 feet of printing.
I know that it’s not possible for most of you to just throw your devices away and buy a new one. I wouldn’t be able to do that, either. But eventually there will come a time when you have to upgrade, and I encourage you to take the plunge and purchase a non-apple device. I don’t even have a recommendation for you because literally anything is better than Apple. A rock that you write on is better than an Apple phone.
Unfortunately I expect to be shadow-banned on Apple devices because of this, and I’ll try to report on decreased activity as much as I can.
It’s time to stop trying to beg Apple to change. They won’t. It’s time now to just stop supporting Apple.
Stop wasting your money on easily broken garbage!
I have a perfectly working iPhone 6. I got it because the iphone 7 no longer has a headphone jack and requires you to buy Apple’s shitty bluetooth headphones.
Last month Apple decided they will not be updating the iphone 6 to the new iOS… for no real reason. They wil still release bug fixes but are not releasing version 13 for iphone 6.ALL apps in the istore now require you to be on version 13 of the iOS to download the app. HOWEVER apps I’ve already installed and downloaded work perfectly.
There is literally no reason for this other to encourage consumerism and to put my perfectly working phone into a landfill.
I’m upgrading to Android as soon as I have the money.
I’ve already switched from mac to windows after Apple wanted to charge me $2000 for a macbook with only 100gigs of RAM. That’s less than a fucking PS3.
Apple Products are inherently awful, and there is literally no benefit to buying them whatsoever. Other than to look like a complete tool.
Fuck Apple.
This is not hearsay. This is not rumour. Apple settles iphone slowdown case.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51706635
They really did deliberately sabotage their products to make people buy the latest ones.
All of this. Please read this and act accordingly. You will BENEFIT greatly from switching to other devices. It may not be possible right away, but as soon as you can buy something new, or would have to anyway, or can make a switch (e.g. with your phone provider), DO. You’ll have something better, more durable, more compatible, and definitely tons cheaper.
Ok I am 100% against apple (I just got a Nord which uses android but supposedly has a lot of hacking self modification capabilities)
but PLEASE do not take “settles a civil case” for admission of guilt. That’s not how the law works here. They decided that paying the person was cheaper than paying the lawyers (and any related PR management).
That being said, there are known issues with upgrade compatibility.
That’s not really an accurate description of that case, though.
They (eventually) admitted that they slowed down the phones. Their official explanation was that it was done to prevent shutdowns in certain circumstances because of aging batteries. And just for a second, we’ll believe that it was just a wild coincidence that this update right around the time that the next model hit the market.
There’s still some serious ethical missteps.
First of all, they initially lied about it. First they said they weren’t doing it all, you silly users, you’re just misremembering how fast it was before, or maybe you’ve loaded down the phone with crap so it’s your fault.
Second of all, assuming that explanation isn’t complete bullshit, which I do not, the fact remains that they reduced the performance of the phones to cover up for the fact that the non-replacable battery has a shit shelf-life.
And I still find it really convenient that their statement was “Oh, no, we weren’t slowing down these phones to trick people into upgrading before they really needed to, it’s just that we were using it to compensate for…. <checks notes> an actual reason to upgrade your phone.”
This is the same company that solders hard drives to motherboards so that if your hard drive dies, you have to replace an incredibly overpriced laptop, and if you want to upgrade to a larger size, you have to buy an even more overpriced laptop.
Apple is not blameless in this.
HOWEVER: If anyone would actually spend five seconds of googling you’d find out that the explanation isn’t bullshit:
Li-ion batteries change as they get older:
https://batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-808-how-to-prolong-lithium-based-batteries
Increasing the cycle depth also raises the internal resistance of the Li-ion cell. Figure 4 illustrates a sharp rise at a cycle depth of 61 percent measured with the DC resistance method
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery#Performance
The open-circuit voltage is higher than in aqueous batteries (such as lead–acid, nickel–metal hydride and nickel-cadmium).[135][failed verification]Internal resistance increases with both cycling and age,[136] although this depends strongly on the voltage and temperature the batteries are stored at.[137]
Rising internal resistance causes the voltage at the terminals to drop
under load, which reduces the maximum current draw. Eventually,
increasing resistance will leave the battery in a state such that it can
no longer support the normal discharge currents requested of it without
unacceptable voltage drop or overheating.
The older lithium batteries get by both wall clock age and cycle time, the less overall capacity they have and the higher their internal resistance gets, which according to Ohm’s law, normally expressed as V = IR, but in in this case I = V/R because battery voltage is constant, internal resistance is constant over the short term and its *current* draw that changes in response to system demand; this means that the battery can supply less peak power.
This, BTW, is why sometimes things with older Li batteries just sorta ‘shut off’– there’s no graceful degradation when a digital circuit needs more energy than its power supply can provide.
The timing isn’t even suspect either. Apple’s release cadence has been one new iPhone a year for literally FOREVER. The 3G was released approximately 1 year (2008) after the original iPhone (2007), if you’re generally almost fully discharging your phone about once every day, you get very close to the 300-400 cycles where you reach the 80% of the rated battery capacity. Cycles are *additive*: if you discharge the battery to 20%, then charge it back up to 100%, then discharge it to 50% before charging it again, thats 1.3 cycles.
Anyway that’s the short lecture on all of the engineering restrictions you have with a lithium ion battery. (And yet, they’re STILL better in energy density and weight that any other battery. Can’t wait until I can buy UPSes with Li-ion batter)
(As an aside: Yeah I can’t replace the battery easily but we’ve gotten to the charge densities where I want to be in a controlled situation when handling these things. The charge density has gotten to the point where fires start. Thermal runaway is a thing, yo.)
So, despite all of that: Apple handled the situation badly. It wasn’t the first time either. Antennagate was was thing. There should have been some better way of informing the user. The current way they implemented things is a lot better, though I wont say its perfect.
(Its also pretty obvious that its not planned obsolesce because the iPhone 6+/7 is still getting iOS updates, and the iPhone 6 is still getting security updates)
That’s the thing though: Corporate behavior can be changed. Apple got pressured away from the CSAM scanning they wanted to implement. Enough pressure can get them to fix a lot of other stuff.
We’re all beholden to physics.