Hi all.

I’ve had a read about the post about the class action in American re Apple and their throttling iPhone 6 and later models. Here is my post about my experience with my iPhone 6S, and how I see it relates in the NZ context.

From my previous post about my consumer law expectations, (https://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?forumid=37&topicid=225902&page_no=1#1937443)
With my claim re my failed MacBook Pro graphics card it seems like the tide is against me and perhaps I expect a bit too much from consumer electronics.

So instead of ploughing ahead with a consumer law claim, I thought I’d test the waters here first to gauge everyone’s opinions. Since I had success before, the process was quite easy, and I’ve had a bit of an ongoing drama with my iPhone, I’m thinking about taking another claim because of issues with my iPhone 6S.

I bought it from a local retailer which has since gone out of business. I hope to take a claim against Apple as manufacturer / importer of the iPhones which is allowed under the consumer guarantees act.

I’ve had one that had been shutting down, and it was particularly bad only after the phone was a few months old. Especially if the air temperature was 15 degrees or below. If you were outside and it was 10 or 12 degrees or so, an had 70% battery or anything less and launched the camera or something demanding, it was almost guaranteed to turn off. Sometimes warming the phone up in a pocket, and doing a soft reset would allow the phone to be turned back on. Sometimes you could get an hour or two of standby and simple use by doing that, provided you didn’t use the phone for anything demanding.

This is before the recall of batteries on that model. Before the recall, I had contacted Apple about the crashing, they did their diagnostics and do their usual “the battery is fine, it must be a problem with your user profile, you must reset it to factory without restoring from backup and everything will be fine”.

In some way they were partly right, and when I had a completely blank profile and temporarily got used to not using any of the features of the smartphone, there was less battery demand and therefore it didn’t crash, but that was only if I didn’t use the camera or browse the web or do anything demanding. Basically calls and texts were safe and avoided crashing but then I may as well be using my old Nokia 5110 with its two week battery.

Eventually I had my battery replaced by Apple in November 2016, when the phone was about 10 months old when they announced the recall for shutting down issue. The new battery did largely stop the shutting down of the device. From memory it would still happen if the battery was at 20 or 30% on a cold day, but it become very infrequent.

Of course, we know that to solve the problem Apple updated the software and throttled the phone’s processor’s performance markedly. I understand this was to reduce the peak load on the batteries, extend their usage times, and also prevent crashing of the phone.

I never thought to check, but last year I became very frustrated with the phone because the slowness unaware of the throttling. Videos and Live Photos to stutter and not function properly. Launching apps like Instagram or the camera would crash, and I noticed I more frequently would miss a candid moment with the camera because opening it was so buggy and laggy, and the keyboard response time became slow and when typing I would be ahead of it by a word or two - basically my user experience totally changed.

While I had a lot of experience with iOS, I had assume the performance was due to the operating system suddenly becoming very bloated and resource hungry, and I was thinking perhaps I needed to restore to default and set up the phone as new. Only when the throttling of the iPhones became under public spotlight did it occur to me to run a benchmark test.

In December 2017 (with a 13 month old battery with 50% battery charge, in normal power mode)
-992 single core
-1763 multi core.

In December 2017 (with a 13 month old battery 85% battery charge, in normal power mode)
-1009 single core
-1763 multi core

In January 2018 (with a replaced battery with 45% battery charge, in normal power mode
-2532 single core
-4446 multi core

Now I have to add in here - many people have said that the peak performance being throttled won’t really affect most people. I completely disagree. Even for básic operations my iPhone was failing to perform and delaying, which really changed the day to day using of the phone. I stopped using 3D Touch because it was too slow to respond, I had to type more slowly because the keyboard would miss entire words if I got too ahead of it. The change even like being able texting quickly without lag, using the camera without it crashing, even just browsing the web is very different with the new battery and unthrottled performance.

Apple’s diagnostics said my 13 month old battery which was fitted with the two December 2017 tests, after 391 cycles, was operating at 83% of it’s original capacity. However, despite the massive reduction in operating speed of my the battery would last about half a day (more like 2 hours on screen usage - and 8 to 12 hours standby then dead).

Now with my new battery, after 2 to 3 hours display on usage, and 12 hours standby, the phone has between 70 and 80% remaining.

It’s difficult to assimilate Apple’s supposed 83% to my real life experience, as it does not at all relate to my experience of how the battery was performing. I have heard people saying a battery at 80% is more or less a dead battery.

Aside from the standby and usage times I can now get again, the performance is something else. It works how it is meant to, and it’s a great phone again.

So, I guess the questions to ask oneself are

-as manufacture did Apple meet the expected acceptable quality standard (with a $1,599 smartphone)
-that within months will crash frequently within an hour or so after a full charge;
-that phone’s software must be changed within informing the owner so within months of having a new battery it significantly underperforms to prevent the phone from continuing to crash
-that the processor’s speed would be markedly reduced without notice?
-a consumer with a typical relatively non demanding usage need to replace their non user replaceable battery within every 6 months at a cost of $139 to avoid such speed limitations?

Taken from consumer.org.nz website :

Manufacturers (the definition includes importers) in New Zealand guarantee that:
* Spare parts and repair facilities will be available for a reasonable time.
* They will honour any written warranty that comes with their products.
* Goods are of acceptable quality.
* Goods match their description.

Acceptable quality means goods:
* Do what they are made to do.
* Are acceptable in appearance and finish.
* Are free from minor defects.
* Are safe and durable.

What are everyone’s thoughts?