Do you think Apple slows down Macbook Pros, similar to the recent iPhone battery scandal?

[mcnaggers]

It is now the middle of 2018 - three years after the manufacture date of my mid-2015 MBP. 'Coincidently' the MBP has suddenly begun to decrease in speed and power in the recent weeks. It's also funny that Apple provides a three year AppleCare plan. I wouldn't put it past Apple to apply the same planned obsolescence tactics to their Macs as they do with their phones.

Does anyone here have experience on this subject? If Apple does slow down older MBPs, do you think a battery replacement would fix the issue? I heard that iPhone software updates checked the battery model to determine the age - and therefore speed - of the phone.

Looking forward to hearing you thoughts!

 

[T'hain Esh Kelch]

Try to install the original OS and see if you get the speed you got when you bought it.

 

[robvas]

No, they don't. However if your battery is dead you will get reduced performance.

 

[hawkeye_a]

Yes and No....
Apple(and others) release new operating systems and software which are more complex and can better take advantage of the new chips and hardware components. So I think updating to the latest-and-greatest can make general usage seem slower(on older hardware).

Is it planned? intentional?... or inevitable given the nature of hardware and software?

However, if you suspect Apple throttles/underclocks your hardware to make it feel slower on purpose....I highly doubt it (but wouldn't put it past them after the iPhone fiasco).

 

[lpolarityl]

no.

 

[leman]

If your battery is deteriorated, all laptops with decently modern power management are slowed down/throttled in order to prevent random shutdowns. Check your battery status. Most likely you have some third-party software problem though.

 

[MSastre]

What is the size of your system drive and how full is it? Best practice is to keep 20% free.

 

[Spytap]

It is now the middle of 2018 - three years after the manufacture date of my mid-2015 MBP. 'Coincidently' the MBP has suddenly begun to decrease in speed and power in the recent weeks. It's also funny that Apple provides a three year AppleCare plan. I wouldn't put it past Apple to apply the same planned obsolescence tactics to their Macs as they do with their phones.

Does anyone here have experience on this subject? If Apple does slow down older MBPs, do you think a battery replacement would fix the issue? I heard that iPhone software updates checked the battery model to determine the age - and therefore speed - of the phone.

Looking forward to hearing you thoughts!

My thoughts are that you've fundamentally misunderstood what happened with the iPhone battery issue, and any "planned obsolescence tactics" as you've implied (i.e. "forcing laptops to operate poorly, or even breaking hardware") would obviously be super illegal.

Your laptop slows down over time because of three reasons: 1) every year the OS adds new features which require more resources, 2) over time, operating systems build up some crap, and 3) we're running electricity through rocks to make them think, and that breaks down after a while, working less efficiently and taking more thoughts to accomplish things, which we service as slowness. Your best recourse is to do a full clean install of any OS of the past three years and see whether/how well it performs in comparison to today. My guess is you'll find the conspiracy theories were all in your head as your computer functions much closer to the first day.

[edit] Just saw that this is your first post ever, so my new thoughts are that you're simply bored and looking to see what you can stir up. That said, my advice still stands.

 

[Toutou]

three years after the manufacture date of my mid-2015 MBP … begun to decrease in speed and power … planned obsolescence tactics to their Macs as they do with their phones.

Does anyone here have experience on this subject?

I bought my Late 2013 in 2014, so it's turning 4 soon.
The machine performs exactly like on day one. The battery life has gotten a bit worse, maybe around 80% of what it used to be, but the MacBook is capable of handling the same workload.
So in my opinion, if you're experiencing some kind of noticeable, sudden slowdown, it's a malfunction of some kind. Either a software one (have you installed something new recently that might have caused it?) or a hardware one (e.g. bad cooling -> throttling, or a faulty SSD).

 

[plexfit]

It sounds like your thermal paste just degraded or your dusty fan caused thermal throttling to happen more often. Just open up your Macbook, clean your fan and reapply thermal pastes and you will get back the old performance.

 

[Toutou]

we're running electricity through rocks to make them think, and that breaks down after a while, working less efficiently and taking more thoughts to accomplish things

Man, no. NO. No a hundred times. A CPU isn't a car engine, it doesn't deteriorate in any measurable way. The "thinking" inside the CPU consists of billions of little decisions per second, made by tiny arrangements of transistors that we call "logic gates". Every single transistor and every piece of circuitry inside a modern CPU has its own purpose and none of them are redundant. There are no alternate ways the electrons could take if something went wrong. All the logic inside the CPU is binary — voltage / no voltage, so there is no way for a computation to end like "okay i'm not sure about it, so let's try that again".
Every line a programmer writes gets "compiled" (translated) into a finite, known number of instructions. These instructions are saved as "machine code", a sequence of 1s and 0s. The machine code is read by the CPU and each of the instructions is acted upon by the CPU by issuing a small number of microinstructions. These are executed by different parts of the CPU (the floating point unit, the arithmetic logic unit, the memory management unit …).
If anything goes wrong, and I mean anything of the steps above, if a single transistor fails to switch at the right time, the whole thing goes down. Not only the app, but literally the whole computer.
I can't stress enough how incredibly incorrect is to think that anything that goes on inside a CPU is somehow dependent on the age of the machine.

 

[Anarchy99]

No, thermal throttling is common and as these machines age dust can make it worse, or old thermal paste etc.

 

[aevan]

I wouldn't put it past Apple to apply the same planned obsolescence tactics to their Macs as they do with their phones.

What planned obsolescence on the phones are you reffering to? No planned obsolescence I'm aware of.

If you're reffering to battery related throttling, then: no. iPads and MacBooks have big enough batteries that even when they are worn out, they can still provide enough power to keep the computer running (though for a shorter time).
[doublepost=1527112711][/doublepost]

My thoughts are that you've fundamentally misunderstood what happened with the iPhone battery issue,

Or deliberately misrepresent what they are doing because that view is popular here.

 

[Samuelsan2001]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning

Man, no. NO. No a hundred times. A CPU isn't a car engine, it doesn't deteriorate in any measurable way. The "thinking" inside the CPU consists of billions of little decisions per second, made by tiny arrangements of transistors that we call "logic gates". Every single transistor and every piece of circuitry inside a modern CPU has its own purpose and none of them are redundant. There are no alternate ways the electrons could take if something went wrong. All the logic inside the CPU is binary — voltage / no voltage, so there is no way for a computation to end like "okay i'm not sure about it, so let's try that again".
Every line a programmer writes gets "compiled" (translated) into a finite, known number of instructions. These instructions are saved as "machine code", a sequence of 1s and 0s. The machine code is read by the CPU and each of the instructions is acted upon by the CPU by issuing a small number of microinstructions. These are executed by different parts of the CPU (the floating point unit, the arithmetic logic unit, the memory management unit …).
If anything goes wrong, and I mean anything of the steps above, if a single transistor fails to switch at the right time, the whole thing goes down. Not only the app, but literally the whole computer.
I can't stress enough how incredibly incorrect is to think that anything that goes on inside a CPU is somehow dependent on the age of the machine.

Absolutely wrong there is a lot redundancy in every chip, indeed almost all chips of a certain type are made exactly the same and the defects in the chips determine what classification they are given, this is called binning and is an integral part of chip production.

Please read up on binning, you can start here.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning

 

[Toutou]

Please read up on binning, you can start here.

Don't want to sound rude or something, but I kind of know what I'm talking about. There are redundant or error-correcting parts of circuitry inside modern server-grade CPUs, but those are mostly related to caching or registers, not the actual logic, and don't directly affect the speed of the CPU. A transistor failure (a persistent one, rather than a simple soft error) is a rare occurrence and most of the times marks the end of the CPU.

 

[kwikdeth]

It is now the middle of 2018 - three years after the manufacture date of my mid-2015 MBP. 'Coincidently' the MBP has suddenly begun to decrease in speed and power in the recent weeks. It's also funny that Apple provides a three year AppleCare plan. I wouldn't put it past Apple to apply the same planned obsolescence tactics to their Macs as they do with their phones.

Does anyone here have experience on this subject? If Apple does slow down older MBPs, do you think a battery replacement would fix the issue? I heard that iPhone software updates checked the battery model to determine the age - and therefore speed - of the phone.

Looking forward to hearing you thoughts!

this could be any number of things and isnt indicative of some kind of planned obsolescence in the hardware. how full is your hard drive? have you run any kind of utilties to clear out cache files, preferences, run maintenance scripts? how much use have you put on your SSD, if you have one? is it a third party SSD or an apple-supplied one? was TRIM enabled? what is the condition of your battery? do you run often off a PSU or unplugged? is the machine dirty, or are the fans obstructed in any way?

things like a deliberate slowdown in a modern operating system would be far easier to detect and isolate than they would on a closed system like an iphone. just the fact we have access to system level utilities like the terminal and activity monitor would make something like this almost immediately detectable, traceable, and reproducible on a mass scale.

so to put it simply, no.

 

[Anarchy99]

not to mention thermal paste can dry up and cause thermal throttling, have you opened the MacBook is there more dust then when it was performing better.

its not always a conspiracy

 

[Hieveryone]

MY rMBP FEELS SLOWER TOO RECENTLY!!!!!!

Maybe it's just in my head idk, bc I haven't done anything except updated a few apps.

Very frustrating none the less. I hope it's just imagined on my part and I'm wrong.

 

[ericwn]

MY rMBP FEELS SLOWER TOO RECENTLY!!!!!!

Maybe it's just in my head idk, bc I haven't done anything except updated a few apps.

Very frustrating none the less. I hope it's just imagined on my part and I'm wrong.

FUD
You haven’t done anything, most of all you have no measurable data for your claim, nor have you done any troubleshooting to address it, right. Two places to start.

 

[Hieveryone]

FUD
You haven’t done anything, most of all you have no measurable data for your claim, nor have you done any troubleshooting to address it, right. Two places to start.

How can I fix it assuming it’s a real problem of course.

Or how can I check if it’s a real problem first

 

[ericwn]

How can I fix it assuming it’s a real problem of course.

Or how can I check if it’s a real problem first

Start by talking about data you can measure. Having a feeling about something is not going to get you far in technical troubleshooting. What is slower exactly? How much slower. How can you reproduce the problem.
Then talk to Apple for more troubleshooting. But don’t just sit there and shout around into a forum and rant without knowing what your issue is. Or if you even have an issue.

 

[Miltz]

No.

 

[SHEESH]

Do you talk to people like this in real life? You must be a blast at parties.

My thoughts are that you've fundamentally misunderstood what happened with the iPhone battery issue, and any "planned obsolescence tactics" as you've implied (i.e. "forcing laptops to operate poorly, or even breaking hardware") would obviously be super illegal.

Your laptop slows down over time because of three reasons: 1) every year the OS adds new features which require more resources, 2) over time, operating systems build up some crap, and 3) we're running electricity through rocks to make them think, and that breaks down after a while, working less efficiently and taking more thoughts to accomplish things, which we service as slowness. Your best recourse is to do a full clean install of any OS of the past three years and see whether/how well it performs in comparison to today. My guess is you'll find the conspiracy theories were all in your head as your computer functions much closer to the first day.

[edit] Just saw that this is your first post ever, so my new thoughts are that you're simply bored and looking to see what you can stir up. That said, my advice still stands.

 

[Spytap]

Do you talk to people like this in real life? You must be a blast at parties.

Yes. It's what people pay me for.

 

[MSastre]

Anyone notice the OP's utter lack of participation after starting this thread? Spytap may have got it right.