hbutz New York wrote:
NO, it plays music fine and I don't need more updates.

This news comes at a good time before I updated my older iPod as well.  I am no longer an Apple fan.

Methinks this is a trend -- successful companies trying to drain their consumers dry (as opposed to providing them true incentives to stay with the company.  Instead of providing customers something better, it's 'way easier to make them uncomfortable with that which was otherwise satisfactory & sufficient.

Here's another example:  I've been a Quicken user for decades -- I was an early adopter, I did beta testing for them, and I was even on a panel of users providing suggestions & feedback to them.  For years, Quicken came out with a new version every year, but I found that the incremental changes & improvements did not justify the updating expense & effort, so I updated every 2-3 years, and we were all happy.

Then Quicken was spun off from Intuit, and now Quicken no longer offers updates -- they've become 100% subscription based.  So, for the price of an old update, I get "free" and "automatic" updates -- but instead of spending the $$$ every 2-3 years, I now have to get charged the same amount every year.  On top of that, I want to be in control of when I update (typically after a big milestone like paying taxes or completing my year-end business activities, proceeded by a full backup & copying those backup files onto ~4 different disk drives).  No thank you, Quicken -- I'll stay on my current version for as long as I can.

aPeaceOfAdam wrote:
There is really no way to offer users the "option" you're interested in.

They are faced with the reality of an unstable and degrading energy source...there are really only 3 options in this situation:

1) Crash the system when the battery becomes unstable (think "Microsoft in the 90s solution")
2) Pop up a message when the battery becomes unstable saying "replace your battery" then shut down the system (think "Microsoft in the 00s solution")
3) Adapt the system to cope with the unstable source until the battery source gets upgraded - so that it's still mostly functional, but a bit slower (remember, most people don't replace phone batteries, they just buy new phones).

Now option (3) is everything that Apple is famous for - making things "just work" without a lot of complex interactions from the user.  Users and reporters are screaming "let the user decide" but really, seriously, would any non technical people have understood that popup - "It appears you're battery is getting old, we know you're not going to replace it so you have the choice of having your phone die randomly losing data, or have it run a bit slow, until you replace your battery, which you're probably not going to do, you'll just buy a new phone - so, umm, yeah, what do you want to do, run slow or crash?" - imagine how someone like your parents would have dealt with a popup like that?

Well put.

It doesn't take much critical thinking to sort this out. Unless you're a big spender, you're going to have the phone at least two years. It will be recharged almost every night, and even more if you're a power user or rely on it for entertainment. By the time your contract is up, that battery is guaranteed to be running at lower efficiency. If you're a power user, it might be running at a low efficiency before you're even out of your contract.

The only thing that surprised me about this news was learning that Apple specifically wrote a piece of software to make it happen. I always just assumed that it was baked in to the design of all phones.

hbutz New York wrote:
This news comes at a good time before I updated my older iPod as well.  I am no longer an Apple fan.

Glad to see you have been freed from the Collective
What should we call the other escapees ?
The De-assimilated ?