This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this folio. Terms of use.

Apple isn't having a very skillful month. Earlier Christmas, the company acknowledged that it deliberately lowers the functioning of older iPhones to keep them from over-drawing their batteries and powering down at bad times. Now, the visitor's stock has dropped following reports that demand for its flagship iPhone X may be softening.

Bloomberg reports multiple analysts cutting projected demand for the iPhone 10 by 10-xv million units. Apple is too supposed to take cut its own internal orders for the telephone, and Hon Hai Precision Industry, aka Foxconn, has reportedly quit hiring workers.

The overall bear upon for Apple tree's production lines are unclear, and the potential affect of the company's battery life bug could exist pregnant. The trouble is this: Everyone knows that battery life in a smartphone decreases with age, menses. No matter how careful you are with your charge/discharge cycles, and no affair how good the manufacturing process used for the battery, yous will see some degree of accuse loss over time. We can't predict how much or how quickly without a great deal more information that Apple and other manufacturers never provide (bombardment chemical science and wear handling are secret sauce) merely nosotros know the long-term trend. So long as battery life / health were decoupled from performance, this was a fair residual. Except now they aren't, and Apple is going to push button ahead with keeping them that manner.

Another facet to the problem is this: While we now know the iPhone seven is showing signs of the same performance drops as the iPhone 6s, the two phones appear to be dropping by different rates over time. This could be related to the iPhone 6s' battery issues that Apple appear over a yr agone, but information technology could besides be a sign that Apple is using dissimilar performance curves for each device.

iPhone 6s - 11.2.0

Here's the iPhone 6s' performance as the battery ages. This graph implies that this iPhone'southward functioning drib-off is regular, with 12-16% stair-steps at each point.

iPhone 7 - 11.2.0

Hither's the iPhone vii. It doesn't follow the same gradient at all. The drop between full functioning and the first tier is ~25%, significantly larger than the iPhone 6s. It could be that this is related to the iPhone 6s' battery problem, or evidence that Apple tweaks the algorithm on a device-past-device ground, or proof that a change in bombardment chemistry produced meaningfully dissimilar performance autumn-offs and results.

Apply this concept to the iPhone X and information technology's easy to see the problem. What's a $1000 telephone worth if you know information technology'll perform similar an iPhone 8 within 18 months or less? What's the appropriate examination model for a phone like that? How should potential Apple customers retrieve most the implications for overall value and device longevity? Apple would conspicuously rather you didn't think about these things at all, and while I'1000 mildly sympathetic to the company'due south technical explanation for why information technology took these measures, its failure to communicate them, explain the rationale, or acknowledge that its own relentless drive to build thinner products created this trouble don't sit down well with me.

The iPhone Ten and iPhone 8 family are, objectively speaking, good phones — but I can't arraign anyone who avoids them while waiting to see how this battery mess shakes out. Nobody wants to purchase a new phone and be roped into a bombardment buy several years later simply because Apple tree's performance-constraining phones (some reports indicate this rating is quite conservative) decided to reduce SoC operation without alarm and exterior of user control. Lawsuits are already piling up, though it'due south not clear Apple volition revise its approach even in the face of such opposition.