One of the biggest mobile stories of the month has been Apple’s acknowledgement that it deliberately throttles the performance of its recent phones as their battery life decreases. While the company argues this is a helpful feature that extends the useable time of their devices between charges, the announcement has sparked public outcry and multiple lawsuits due to the company’s failure to alert users when throttling was activated or to let them know that if they just replaced their battery their phone would immediately and significantly speed right back up. What does this story reveal about our modern digital rights to the devices we buy?
What makes the Apple story so interesting is that users have long suspected that their devices were being deliberately slowed down over time, but the idea that Apple would knowingly throttle their products as they age was largely relegated to the realm of paranoid conspiracy theories. It was only after fairly robust evidence demonstrating that the slowdown directly corresponded to battery state that the company finally formally acknowledged the practice this month. Yet, in its formal announcement, the company says it simply did not realize that its throttling was to blame for user concern, suggesting that it was not adequately analyzing available telemetry and diagnostic data.
To its credit, the company has long noted the rapid decline of its device’s battery health, posting a notice to this effect since at least 2014 and advising users that they could send their devices in to have the battery replaced for a fee.
The problem in this case is not that the company was actively throttling users’ devices, but rather that it was doing so without their knowledge or consent. It is unclear why the company did not notify users when throttling was engaged or offer them a way of disabling it in return for shortened battery life and the company did not respond to a request for comment. Such a warning could also have easily included a notice of the company’s battery replacement service.
Apple’s actions stand as a stark reminder that the devices we purchase today are never truly ours and can be upgraded, downgraded or even completely disabled at will remotely by their manufacturers without our knowledge and without informed consent. Similarly, the logic that powers them is no longer an immutable physical circuit that will perform its task for us until it fails, but rather software that is licensed, rather than owned and can be removed or disabled at any moment. That software, in turn, typically relies on remote cloud services that can similarly be changed or shut down at any instant.
In short, we no longer control any aspect of the machines that surround and pervade our lives.
As more and more of our home functions are taken over by “smart devices,” who knows whether a burned out “smart” light bulb of tomorrow is actually a remote disable by its manufacturer because we used it more than its approved number of daily hours or whether our smart fridge shuts down because we have opened the door more than the licensed number of daily openings. While such concerns might be laughable today, so too would most have laughed with derision a few years ago that our phone could be remotely modified with an update to throttle its performance as it aged without our knowledge.
However, perhaps the biggest untold story here is the commentary Apple’s decision offers on our modern consumptive waste society. Today we purchase new cellphones on an aggressive yearly or two-year upgrade cycle, discarding the old phone to the trash. Televisions, stereos, computers, tablets, phones, toasters – at the first sign of trouble, we just toss it in the trash and buy a new one. The locally owned friendly electronics repair store has largely been relegated to the dustbin of history. While in an earlier era it was cheaper to take the toaster in to get it fixed, today its cheaper to just toss and replace.
Accelerating this trend, more and more devices come with built-in batteries that are impossible to field service without specialized tools or expertise. For the first 15 years of my cellphone-owning life, every device I owned had an externally-accessible battery that could be instantly swapped and I typically kept several on my desk to swap out throughout the day. Today I have to keep my phone tethered to a desk or mobile charger to keep it alive – no more popping in a fresh battery with an extra spare in my bag to ensure an uninterrupted afternoon of meetings.
Of course, it’s not just cellphones – most battery-powered rechargeable portable electronic devices today feature non-swappable batteries. Even laptops have largely eschewed the old hot-swappable battery bays that offered a full day’s worth of heavy computing without a plug.
Hot-swappable batteries emphasized the battery as the consumable it is, with many devices providing health indicators and encouraging users to replace them as they reached end of life while keeping the same device, greatly reducing waste. Today the life of the device has been largely tied to the life of the battery, which is great for manufacturers, but terrible for both consumers and the environment.
In the end, Apple’s saga will hopefully lead to more aggressive external policing of the formerly secret changes made by hardware manufactures to their devices, with a focus on open data benchmarking and quantitative evaluation that could at least partially curtail the current legacy of changes without user consent and encourage companies to be more forthcoming about their design decisions and how their devices are expected to perform and age. Perhaps someday we might even begin to care about the incredible environmental impact our obsession with having the latest greatest gadgets is having on the planet on which we live.
