tati

writer of human & machine words

trans. cyborg. hermit-lite. 30ish. script kitty.


Loves:

-@julez

-fighting games


_tati on discord.


LemmaEOF
@LemmaEOF

some of y'all aren't gonna like hearing this but planned obsolescence as you think of it doesn't exist. there aren't any evil businessmen sitting in a boardroom somewhere twiddling their fingers as they calculate the exact date your phone is gonna stop working

there is no magic line of code that makes your current phone slow down when it gets a new update, it's a mix of confirmation bias and the shareholder demand for every new os version to have new features. cpus also just get worse over time as more of the transistors burn out from the obscene amounts of energy poured through them daily

if anything modern hardware and software is designed for a fuckton of graceful degradation - underclocking means your phone's battery and cpu will last longer and a lot of old smartphones (even dating back to the original iphone) still fucking work even if they can't use modern apps

the problem with smartphones isn't some evil conspiracy to force you to upgrade every year, it's a combination of the limitations of electronics, the second law of thermodynamics, and good old market pressures. grow up and let yourself accept that the world is more complex than you think.


tati
@tati

You can accept that the monopolists are just looking out for your best interests, but there’s nothing wrong with acknowledging that there are other, more traditional, incentives that are factored into their decisions.

also apple did admit to throttling old phones? there sure was a line of code going from one ios release to another that slowed down the cpu of some phones.

i’m sure they have engineering reasons too for why their batteries are a nightmare to repair without an 80lbs proprietary tools kit or why they their hardware is DRM’d but i’m gonna guess those reasons were maybe a little influenced by the profit motive and a desire for easy annual sales.


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in reply to @tati's post:

There was code introduced that slowed down all phones that experienced a certain kind of battery overdraw, which was likely to happen if you wore your battery capacity down past 80% of new, and then did something that caused the CPU to ramp up while you had like 4% remaining. That underclocking would keep that brownout from happening again. It's not like it was targeted at old phones, it was targeted at old batteries which had proven to no longer support the phone properly. If you got your battery replaced at the recommended point this would never impact you, and I believe it even reset if you got a battery replacement, but I'm not in a position to know that for sure.

I do remember experiencing that kind of overdraw shutdown frequently back when I was using Android though. I always complained "why does my battery keep dying at 4% or even 20% sometimes". This is why. Apple just did something to address it. And they were clear at the time in the support documentation that a new battery would improve performance of older phones, just no one took it seriously because they had no way of knowing why that was the case.

It was a reasonable consideration that was made without clearly explaining the decision, and so it looked shadier than it was. But the code still exists in modern iOS, it's just got UI now, you can hit the button to override the slowdown until the next overdraw, and I think it even notifies you when it first happens