During a visit to the Apple data center in Reno Nevada on Wednesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook did a quick interview with Rebecca Jarvis of ABC News, wherein he touched on the ongoing controversy over power management features in older iPhones.
According to Cook, when the power management features were first introduced in iOS 10.2.1, Apple did explain what was going on, but following the controversy, he believes Apple should have been clearer.
Cook offered the following comments:
The company did indeed mention that the shutdown issue was caused by uneven power delivery and explained that its power management system had been tweaked, but there was no clear notice that it could cause devices to operate more slowly at times.
About a year ago, we released some code that essentially what it does… is all batteries age over time and they become unhealthy at a point in time and an unhealthy battery has a probability that it will create an unexpected restart.
And so you can imagine if you’re making an emergency call or you’re making an important call that’s important to you or a message that you’re waiting for, or you want to capture that moment that’s fleeting with your camera… we always focus on the user experience. So at the heart of any decision that we make is the user. We felt it would be better to take something off of the performance to prevent that from happening.
When we did put it out, we did say what it was, but I don’t think a lot of people were paying attention and maybe we should have been clearer as well. And so we deeply apologize for anybody that thinks we had some other kind of motivation. Our motivation is always the user. The user is at the center of everything that we do.
Apple previously apologized for the misunderstanding over the iOS 10.2.1 update and has since implemented a battery replacement program that allows all customers with an iPhone 6, 6s, 7, 6 Plus, 6s Plus, 7 Plus, and SE to replace their batteries for a reduced $29 fee through the end of 2018.
Cook went on to state that Apple will be introducing improved battery monitoring features in a future iOS update that will allow customers to turn off the power management feature, as noted in the following comments:
We’re also going to… first in a developer release that happens next month, we’re going to give people the visibility of the health of their battery. So it’s very, very transparent. This hasn’t been done before, but we’ve thought through this whole thing and learned everything we can learn from it.
So we want to do that, and in the situation… and we will tell someone we’re reducing your performance by some amount in order to not have an unexpected restart. And if you don’t want it, you can turn it off. Now we don’t recommend it, because we think people’s iPhones are really important to them, and you never can tell when something is so urgent. Our actions were all in service of the user. I can’t stress that enough.
Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.