First post, by 640K!enough
Does anyone have any opinions about the battery situation with modern devices? Quite recently, most of us have probably read about Apple's performance-reduction scandal. The claim was that they had to reduce the clock speed of their older mobile devices to prevent spontaneous reboots and/or shut-downs due to ageing batteries. When challenged, the response seemed to be shut up and accept it, because it will be gradually coming to the rest of the product line (meaning more recent devices).
We are mostly somewhat technical people here, so I'm hoping that logic and objectivity will trump any undying love for all things Apple, and allow a mature discussion. Does anyone actually believe that line? If so, why? It seems more like an arrogant, mostly nonsensical lie to me. Of course, it's impossible to say for certain without partially reverse-engineering iOS and/or the hardware, but it seems like it's caused by a bug that they can't be bothered to fix properly or a hardware design flaw/choice.
Why would I say this? My reasoning is simple: Apple isn't the only one building or selling such devices, so why are they the only ones with this problem to any significant extent? Others sell more devices, both cheaper and similarly-priced, both less and more powerful. Are the people at Apple the only ones malevolent enough to knowingly under-size their batteries for the sake of thinness, or is there something else we're missing?
At this very moment, I'm typing this on a BlackBerry PlayBook that is about 7 years old. In that time, is has been used and charged almost daily, yet with light usage I don't really have to charge it every day. It doesn't crash, unexpectedly power down or reboot, nor is it slower than when new. If lowly BlackBerry could manage that, what is Apple doing wrong, or is it just unbridled, shameless greed taking over?
As another example, I also had old Sony and Compaq laptops. Both had batteries that eventually died, but it took more than a couple of years, and both of those devices would have been more demanding of their batteries than an iPhone. In both cases, even as the batteries were dying, I never had a shut-down without enough warning that I could have done it safely. I ignored the low battery warnings a few times, to the detriment of the work I was doing, but the warnings were still there. With new batteries, both were like new; no software slow-downs necessary.