Anyone replaced an iPhone 6 battery?

[MassiveJim]

I'll be honest I was strongly of the opinion that Apple have only done this to generate more sales prior to reading this thread.
There is some serious food for thought and a lot of what has been posted makes perfect sense, but if it was genuinely to prevent phones shutting down why didn't they advertise this feature.
I think they had this "defense" planned all along ready for when they got found out.

At the end of the day though it is Apple this will likely make little difference to their sales.

 

[Minstadave]

I think they had this "defense" planned all along ready for when they got found out.

Absolutely. Apple sell an “experience” - they’re not going to chop off half the performance of their phones and not think “maybe some will notice, should we tell them?”.

They’re also likely to think “slowing down phones with plausible deniability - that’s the holy grail!”.

 

[Amp34]

Many don't. A google search for "phone switches off at 30% battery" produces many results and when I did that a couple of days ago, the only result on the first two pages mentioning iPhones was the announcement from Apple.

This symptom isn't exclusive to Apple, it's just that they appear to be the only ones we who have addressed it in this way. My problem is the way they've handled it without actually telling anyone what they've done. I understand battery technology and how it works and b0rn2sk8 has described it very well above.

Apple should have announced this previously and iOS should have told people what it was doing.

While I agree, they should have announced it, do you really think it would have made much difference? Most of the same people would be baying for Apples “blood” because they’d done something like that and ‘it’s obviously to force people to upgrade’ etc.

 

[Feek]

It may have helped a bit but as I said in another thread, they would be damned if they did and damned if they didn't. Some people would knock Apple if they invented a cure for death because it's cool to hate Apple.

 

[Deleted member 138126]

Apple has massively ****** up on two fronts:

- They made the batteries too small, with too little headroom for the case when the battery starts degrading over time
- They made the unilateral decision to "manage" the processor speed on these degraded batteries, without bothering to mention it to anyone

My iPhone X has *way* more battery % at the end of the day than my previous 6 and 6S ever had, so I'm hoping issue #1 has already been taken care of, and Apple won't release another phone with a ridiculously tiny battery. As far as issue #2 goes, I'm hoping it will lead to greater transparency overall, and that they will make batteries easier to replace (if only, to reduce their own costs when they get asked to do it).

Jony Ive is an amazing designer, but he needs adult supervision when it comes to making things too thin and too stripped of ports. Now that Apple Park is up and running (this took fully 2+ years of Jony's time), I'm *really* hoping for an Apple revival over the coming years.

As an aside, anybody who is buying £10 replacement iPhone batteries on eBay is playing an extremely dangerous game of roulette (you could burn your house down and people could literally die -- pretty unlikely, but why on earth would you risk it). How anyone can say with a straight face that "all batteries are alike, how hard can it be" is just beyond me. Battery design and manufacturing is incredibly difficult, and many many variables are in play, from the quality of the raw materials, to the quality of the manufacturing plant (e.g. allowing pollutants like dust/air/water to come into contact with materials that need to remain pure), to the strict tolerances (the Samsung fires were caused by the batteries being ever so slightly too wide), proper seals/isolation between layers, connectors, electronics, etc. Not to mention that there are countless ways of making a battery *much* cheaper to manufacture by using lesser quality materials, shadier suppliers, cheaper processes, etc. and because "all batteries are the same" then you may as well make them as cheaply and nastily as possible because nobody will know the difference. Except when it comes to not burning down your house, lasting for a certain number of cycles, etc. So no, all batteries are resoundingly, definitely, NOT the same.

 

[b0rn2sk8]

I take it no one here had one of those dodgy 'hover boards' from china? Didn't they even start stopping those at the ports because they were so dangerous due dodgy batteries catching fire?

 

[asim18]

As an aside, anybody who is buying £10 replacement iPhone batteries on eBay is playing an extremely dangerous game of roulette (you could burn your house down and people could literally die -- pretty unlikely, but why on earth would you risk it). How anyone can say with a straight face that "all batteries are alike, how hard can it be" is just beyond me. Battery design and manufacturing is incredibly difficult, and many many variables are in play, from the quality of the raw materials, to the quality of the manufacturing plant (e.g. allowing pollutants like dust/air/water to come into contact with materials that need to remain pure), to the strict tolerances (the Samsung fires were caused by the batteries being ever so slightly too wide), proper seals/isolation between layers, connectors, electronics, etc. Not to mention that there are countless ways of making a battery *much* cheaper to manufacture by using lesser quality materials, shadier suppliers, cheaper processes, etc. and because "all batteries are the same" then you may as well make them as cheaply and nastily as possible because nobody will know the difference. Except when it comes to not burning down your house, lasting for a certain number of cycles, etc. So no, all batteries are resoundingly, definitely, NOT the same.

We're not talking about batteries made in someone's basement. Were talking about batteries produced in major battery producing plants, plants which produce more batteries than apple batteries, these plants handle batteries for multiple manufacturers and thousands of different types of products (and in some cases may even agree to produce low grade batteries for apple themselves!)

Lets look at ZTE batteries for example. They know more about phone batteries than apple, and have done far more research into battery engineering than apple will ever hope to achieve, and finally my ZTE battery is still working perfectly after a whopping 8 years of abuse, compared with 12-18 months or so for Apple batteries. What you really have to wonder about is the quality of internals of an Apple battery since it's barely able to turn on your iPhone after 24 months.

Yet an original ZTE battery is up to 80% cheaper than an apple one and is engineered to last 10 times longer in its intended application. You'd have thought it'd be the other way round. Also bearing in mind my personal experience: The only battery which has ever gone thermonuclear since my very first phone back in 1999, has been a factory fitted iPhone 4S battery.

 

[MagicBoy]

Give it a rest asim. @Feek .

 

[Deleted member 138126]

We're not talking about batteries made in someone's basement. Were talking about batteries produced in major battery producing plants, plants which produce more batteries than apple batteries, these plants handle batteries for multiple manufacturers and thousands of different types of products (and in some cases may even agree to produce low grade batteries for apple themselves!)

Lets look at ZTE batteries for example. They know more about phone batteries than apple, and have done far more research into battery engineering than apple will ever hope to achieve, and finally my ZTE battery is still working perfectly after a whopping 8 years of abuse, compared with 12-18 months or so for Apple batteries. What you really have to wonder about is the quality of internals of an Apple battery since it's barely able to turn on your iPhone after 24 months.

Yet an original ZTE battery is up to 80% cheaper than an apple one and is engineered to last 10 times longer in its intended application. You'd have thought it'd be the other way round. Also bearing in mind my personal experience: The only battery which has ever gone thermonuclear since my very first phone back in 1999, has been a factory fitted iPhone 4S battery.

Let me rephrase what you are saying: “somewhere on planet Earth there is a factory that makes Ferraris, therefore all cars available to purchase IN THE WORLD, including £10 ones on eBay, are made by Ferrari, and are of the exact same quality as a Ferrari (in fact! they are probably better! because Ferrari has fan boys and therefore it can’t possibly be actually making good cars).”

The simple point is this: I do not want to buy a battery that was made in someone’s basement, and the only way I can be assured of that is to buy off a reputable seller. Someone like, oh I don’t know... Apple? Certainly not eBay.

Was Apple taking the mick charging £79 for a replacement? Yep. They aren’t forcing anyone to buy their products and yet they seem to be doing ok. If this whole scandal makes Apple design their phones so the batteries are easier to replace, we all win. In any case, I don’t think the status will remain quo.

 

[RoyMi6]

Christ, so didn’t realise my thread had taken such a turn...

Anyway, I coughed up the £25 for someone in the Apple store to do it.

In store diagnostic showed the phone to be 87% overall capacity (rather than performance characteristics, I think)

I’d factory reset before the battery got replaced to get a base line as to what expect. Before the battery change it still felt slow, apps would crash or take forever to load (i.e. contacts, and safari - phone was restored to factory settings) but it meant part of me was anxious that it was something in my Apple account contributing to the sluggishness (like an outdated link to some old account or broken iTunes file it’s was trying to sync)

Anyway, two hours later I picked up my new phone and did another factory reset (I’m the type of person that enjoys a good format at the weekend) and low and behold it feels like a new phone!

Safari hasn’t crashed on me yet and I was feeling so excited I actually installed Chrome... and it loaded without issue!

Got a new phone case and glass screen protector to finish it off, totally worth it.

I actually managed to write this entire post from my phone - something that would have fustrated me no end before as even the keyboard was annoyingly unresponsive!

So yeah, go get it done. I was toying with replacing my phone (Pixel 2 XL or S9) but now I think I’ll just get a new battery every 3 years

 

[Journey]

Glad you got it sorted, and it seems that £25 is well spent. It's a shame the rest of Apple repairs aren't such good value these days, but then we all now know they don't want you to fix it, they want you to replace it!