Saturday, August 18, 2007

Critics aim their batteries at Apple.★

Just like Alasdair said, we at the MacTake aren't quite impressed with the whole concept of a class-action suit being filed over a battery life issue. So let's get something straight as an Apple and Macintosh community:

300-400 Charges before the battery starts losing capacity. That's a fair bit but even after this magic number is reached, your battery doesn't suddenly stop working. It goes through a graceful process where it slowly dribbles away capacity over a long period of time, and I think people will find their iPhones will greatly outlive that $86 per annum replacement fee prediction.

In truth, most of us in the Apple community are pretty familiar with the battery life we're talking about here as the iPod had this same 'problem'. I've had my iPod for 2 years and it holds as much juice as it did after its first full charge. Most of us will find that the iPhone will perform similarly.

If you think about it, consumer image is extremely important to Apple and if they made a one year cycle battery for their iPhones, consumers would react badly causing a general drop in confidence over the entire Apple product-line. So, designing their iPhone batteries to generate a per annum battery replacement revenue would probably result in a net loss overall. I think this is another example of a sensationalist, over-eager attack on Apple, and I don't believe it holds too much substance.

But we'll wait and see shall we? You never know, it's not beyond Apple to have an off day, but their track record is good enough to suggest that they'll usually correct it well.

Labels: news

★ 2 Comments. | By Skippy, Saturday, August 18, 2007 7:00 PM

Friday, August 17, 2007

Class-action suit filed over iPhone batteries★

I rarely post here but since I do have the ability to do so, I thought I would bring this little nugget of information to your attention.

As you may well know, iPhones, like iPods, do not have user serviceable batteries and thus must be sent off to Apple in order to have batteries replaced should they fail. This fact was not made obvious, or available before purchase, to consumers who managed to nab an iPhone on the day they were released.

A lawsuit, apparently the second of two so far, has been levelled against Apple for failing to inform consumers of this potential expense, on the basis that the iPhone battery will die completely after 300 charges, forcing users to replace it, and pay Apple $86, once a year.

According to official documentation and Apple's response to the first class-action suit, the iPhone battery should last between 300 and 400 charges at full capacity before slowly diminishing. This is pretty much what batteries do.

However, without getting into the legal details and the responses, one thing about this struck me as very odd. Let's do some maths.

iPhone release date: 29 June 2007
Current date*: 17 August 2007
Number of days the iPhone has been available: 50

50 * 24 = 1200 hours since release

Minimum battery capacity on iPhone: 6 hours (while web browsing)
Charges after which the iPhone battery will allegedly fail: 300

300 * 6 = 1800 hours usage time needed


So to summarise, the plaintiffs here would need to have been browsing the web for 1800 hours since the iPhones launch. 1200 hours ago. And that's not even counting the time it would take to charge, or the problems with the case filed in July.

The only possible conclusion here is that these people have been using their iPhones while travelling at a significant fraction of the speed of light. As far as we at the MacTake are aware, this is not a documented feature of the iPhone but it's possible that these people were beta-testing new firmware that adds travel functionality at relativistic speeds. If this is indeed the case we're sure that Apple will have worked out the problems that this causes with the battery by the time they release the "iWarp" app.

You can read more here.



*used for simplicity, since I don't know when the suit was filed

Labels: alasdair, iPhone, news

★ 0 Comments. | By Alasdair Corbett, Friday, August 17, 2007 7:08 PM