[HN Gopher] Sometimes it is just a bad battery
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Sometimes it is just a bad battery
Author : wchar_t
Score : 140 points
Date : 2021-08-20 14:18 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rachelbythebay.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (rachelbythebay.com)
| vzaliva wrote:
| Summary in a tweet: "Some guy replaced defective battery in his
| iPhone and it helped."
| Zababa wrote:
| That's not really a good summary I think, since the important
| part is that everyone told the author that this wasn't what
| they thought it was, while it was precisely that. I also think
| that it was a nice read, I like the style and the way the story
| was told.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| I'd much rather read blog posts than tweets. Who knows how many
| Twitter threads would be better in blog form.
| jfoucher wrote:
| My car was behaving strangely recently. Sometimes when I gave it
| the beans it would pop up a flurry of scary error messages about
| the engine, that I had to take it to the mechanic to have it
| checked out and so on.
|
| 500 EUR later and the mechanic could not fix the issue.
|
| Other times, just turning on the engine it would complain that
| some filter was almost full. And once, on a longer than usual
| trip, it gave up on me in a pretty steep incline and I had to
| stop on the side of the road, let it cool down a while, and turn
| it on again and it worked mostly fine if I didn't accelerate too
| much.
|
| Then a few weeks ago it did not start at all. So I measured the
| battery and it turned out it was toast. I had a friend bring me
| to buy a new one and swapped it in.
|
| The car started fine. But incredibly, it never again displayed
| any error messages and seems to be completely fixed!
|
| Not really phone related, but yeah, sometimes it can be
| (surprisingly) just the battery...
| sandworm101 wrote:
| This is why diagnosis equipment always tracks voltage. Most
| sensors rely on voltage tied to some sort of variable resistor.
| If your battery/alternator is sending high/low voltages then
| those sensors will send false readings, leading to any number
| of random error codes. Put a multimeter on your system and
| check for any departure from the 12v standard (actually 13.8v)
| during operation. If so, replacing the battery is a good first
| step.
|
| If your voltage is steadily above 13.8, then your
| regulator/rectifier is fried. Swap it out before it starts
| cooking your battery.
| jandrese wrote:
| The caveat of course is that battery measurements are only
| good if the battery is under load. I had a dead battery that
| was confounding me because every time I measured it the
| battery would show 13.5v but then the car wouldn't crank.
|
| This is why shops have battery testers with a big resistive
| heater on the bottom. The good news is you can diagnose this
| with a pair of jumper cables easily enough.
|
| In general though electrical problems are the hardest to
| track down, especially when it turns out to be a corroded or
| missing ground strap somewhere.
| s0rce wrote:
| When my cars give funny messages, or struggle to start (more
| obvious), if the battery is old (5+ years), I just replace it.
| Its a $100-200 and I can do it myself, better than paying a
| bunch of labor to troubleshoot ghosts and its up for
| replacement anyways. If the battery is new then its a bit
| trickier, but so far its often been just a battery issue.
| gamacodre wrote:
| Sometimes it's the battery (system) even when the battery is
| fine. My son spent something like $1200 chasing the ghosts of
| electrical issues in a Ford Expedition with multiple mechanics.
| And they did in fact replace the battery at some point in
| there, to no avail.
|
| It turned out that one of the battery _cables_ was bad; enough
| corrosion had built up under the insulation that the voltage
| would do all kinds of strange things depending on the exact
| load on the system. $20 for a new cable fixed it all.
| jaclaz wrote:
| Somehow it is missing in the article how the "they" in:
|
| >They looked at the battery status screen which was still
| reporting that everything was fine, and said "it's the logic
| board".
|
| call themselves "Apple Geniuses".
| tootie wrote:
| It's a term of art.
| [deleted]
| CoolGuySteve wrote:
| I had a similar problem with an iPhone 6. The battery page in
| Settings said the battery was healthy but the phone wasn't
| lasting long and was benchmarking at about half the score it
| should have.
|
| Coconut Battery said the battery was around 65% of its design
| capacity.
|
| After replacing the battery the phone went back to normal,
| benchmark scores improved.
|
| It's really scummy that the phone was downclocking itself to
| lighten voltage but not informing me. This was all after the
| iPhone 6 battery scandal and software updates to show battery
| health.
| derefr wrote:
| If it was after the scandal, and you turned the battery-health
| protection OS "feature" off, then I find it extremely unlikely
| for it have been the OS doing that--actively lying about what
| that toggle does would have caused another, even bigger
| scandal.
|
| Instead, it may have just been a direct, low-level interaction
| between the battery and the CPU -- with the CPU saying "I need
| more power!" and the battery replying with "she canna handle
| any more, cap'n, she's gonna blow!"
|
| (Or more literally: the battery being unable to supply the
| spike voltages the processor needs in order to boost, and so
| the CPU's VRMs noticing that the boost "isn't working" [by
| getting browned out] and signalling the CPU to stop trying. Or,
| alternately, the battery _heating up_ when trying to provide
| that power, due to increased internal resistance, to the point
| that the heat so produced, triggers thermal throttling in the
| CPU. Either way, a CPU that couldn't get its highest frequency-
| scaling multipliers going for more than a few milliseconds
| before stalling and dropping back down. Which _would_ tend to
| feel slower, and lead to lower benchmarks.)
| CoolGuySteve wrote:
| Yeah, every time I post about this somebody on here comes and
| tells me the Battery Health monitor can't possibly be lying
| and that my lived experience must be wrong.
|
| The Battery menu didn't even present the togggle in the first
| place because it assessed my battery as healthy. Just like
| with Rachel here, the Battery menu seems to miss a lot of
| fucked up batteries. It's not immaculate.
|
| But if the voltage is not being supplied correctly I would
| consider that to be degraded "Battery Health".
| derefr wrote:
| Please don't conflate "the causal chain I have mentally-
| modelled to be responsible for my lived experience" with
| "my lived experience." I don't doubt that you saw what you
| saw; but that doesn't mean that you're suddenly uniquely
| qualified to judge what particular interaction of hardware
| and software features could have led to you seeing what you
| saw.
|
| > But if the voltage is not being supplied correctly I
| would consider that "Battery Health".
|
| "Battery health" as a feature -- i.e. the thing Apple
| implemented as a response after being sued about not having
| exposed it to users -- only tracks what voltage the battery
| is putting out, compared to what voltage it would be
| expected to put out given its lifetime number of discharge
| cycles and current charge. Which is all the previous,
| hidden algorithm for "battery health" was basing its
| decisions on, and so is all that got exposed for manual
| control.
|
| (As it happens, it's exactly the same algorithm that leads
| to a macOS laptop saying "Battery Needs Servicing.")
|
| This algorithm is meant to detect one thing: whether your
| battery is like a leaky gas tank, where the amount of
| voltage * amperage you get out, is less than the amount you
| put in. Unlike other battery problems that are down to
| _faults_ in the battery, this problem is an _inevitable_
| (100% eventual failure-rate) problem for old, used
| batteries to suffer, so it's important to remediate and
| impractical to offer free replacements for. It's literally
| just "wear and tear", like, say, tyres going bald.
|
| If a battery issue is something that only happens when the
| CPU _boosts_ i.e. if it's _flaky_ in a "sometimes perfect,
| but situationally does the wrong thing" way -- then that's
| not regular wear-and-tear, but is instead an actual _fault_
| in the battery.
|
| The battery health tracking algorithm has no way of
| knowing+ if your battery is faulty. If it could, it would
| probably say "this battery is broken, please contact Apple
| for a free replacement." Because a faulty battery, of
| exactly the type you described, _is_ a warrantee-covered
| problem.
|
| + Really, no software can know/predict how a given power
| source will cope with increased load. This is why we don't
| have OS logic in desktop PCs that can convert "a PSU too
| weak to power your CPU + GPU together at maximum load" into
| "so they down lock" rather than "your computer
| spontaneously powers off."
| dundarious wrote:
| Your comment applies equally to the Apple techs or the
| policy they follow, that says Battery Health indicator is
| a necessary condition for there to be such battery
| problems, leading to the spurious "it's the logic board"
| claim. That's the complaint.
| AlisdairO wrote:
| seems like you could get a reasonable idea by performing
| a brief workload that should reliably trigger boosting,
| and see if boosting occurs?
| derefr wrote:
| A flaky battery is unpredictable; it's likely that it
| will boost "sometimes" but not other times. And that
| "sometimes" will probably not even be able to be locked
| down to a simple model of having precise conditions where
| it works or doesn't.
|
| For example, the battery might be able to boost if the
| phone is cold, but not if the phone is hot-- _or vice-
| versa_. It might work to boost for one long boost (i.e.
| the battery test), but then not be able to do it again
| for three minutes after that. It might take several tries
| (pulses of demand) to get it going, and then work. Etc.
|
| Think of a flaky battery like an engine with a
| bad/clogged carburetor. What pattern of starts does it
| take to get the engine to turn over? Without seeing the
| gunk inside the carburetor and doing a turbulent-flow
| model, you can't really say.
| [deleted]
| sdfsadfjaslj wrote:
| I had a nearly identical issue with an iphone, and it was the
| battery. The apple store employee was sure that the battery was
| fine because the "diagnostic" didn't show any battery problems.
| But after insisting for half an hour that I wouldn't leave with
| anything except a battery replacement, they gave in and swapped
| the battery. Worked perfectly afterwards.
| lamontcg wrote:
| Thought my old NAS was going bad because the cheap power
| transformer I bought off of Amazon went bad (after the old one
| failed completely). Guess it wouldn't put out the wattage.
|
| I actually bought a whole spare diskless NAS off of ebay, and
| wound up only using the transformer that came with it ($150 or so
| for a $15-ish transformer).
| mutagen wrote:
| My singular experience with Best Buy as an Apple partner was
| similar to the experience described. Not much leeeway in handling
| things, no satisfactory resolution.
| mapgrep wrote:
| My experience with Apple store is also similar to the
| experience described (actively making false statements, in my
| case about a laptop logic board).
| hughrr wrote:
| I had an argument at the retard bar at my local Apple store over
| something similar. There was a lighter part of the screen and
| they said I'd damaged it and it wasn't covered by their warranty.
| Basically fuck off or pay up.
|
| I put it flat on their surface screen down and it spins round and
| asked for them to do the same with a display model. It didn't.
| Battery was swollen and screen damaged. They didn't take this
| seriously if I'm honest until I explained the shit they're in if
| it blows up in my pocket.
|
| They tried to replace the battery and screen. The screen
| recalibration failed twice causing two screens and the original
| handset to be written off in the end. After that they gave me a
| completely new handset. My daughter still has the 6s now and the
| battery is fine. So yes sometimes it's just a bad battery.
| emsy wrote:
| > I did this because my friends who were already there advised me
| that the company did not supply phones but did expect you to load
| a crapload of apps on to do your job.
|
| Serious question: what if you don't have a smartphone (I know
| several people) or simply don't want to install work stuff on
| your private phone? Is this a prerequisite, do they fire you or
| how would this be resolved? Also, this sounds like a security
| disaster waiting to happen (I also know people without a passcode
| on their phone)
| toast0 wrote:
| > Also, this sounds like a security disaster waiting to happen
| (I also know people without a passcode on their phone)
|
| Some of the corporate phone stuff will require a passcode of a
| certain length. When I was in this position, I had two phones,
| but the corp phone stayed in my bag, mostly off (would use it
| for tethering for work incidents when out of town, and as a
| backup 2fa device), and I ran corp email on my phone until it
| got too ornerous (outlook for android ate my battery life
| and/or was impossible to auth with); then I only checked from
| the corporate laptop, but outlook for macos would drain my
| battery in standby, so I couldn't leave it running and forgot
| to start it.
|
| OTOH, I was established with seniority, so I could do whatever.
| I'm not sure a new hire could do whatever; especially outside
| of my group where we didn't really accept the corporate norms.
| tetha wrote:
| Since US laws tend to be somewhat bonkers, a european
| perspective.
|
| If you need some applications installed on a smartphone in
| order to perform your jobs duties, the smartphone is a work
| tool. This must be supplied by the employer if requested. In
| practice, our company offers two choices if your position
| requires this.
|
| For one, you can be issued a company owned and managed phone.
| This phone is registered with the MDM and the MDM manages the
| installed software. Additionally, because the MDM can wipe the
| work phone after loss or theft, company data may actually be
| stored on the phone. The drawback is that you now have two
| phones.
|
| Alternatively, there is a small number of use cases authorized
| to be done on personal phones with basic security enabled. For
| example, access to mails with a web browser, an authorized
| messaging client, or a TOTP MFA application, like google
| authenticator. These are fine, because they either don't store
| company data on the phone, or because they are not critical on
| their own. You can have my MFA token generator, because you
| don't have my password, for example.
|
| So for example, personally speaking, I have to have a TOTP app
| around, a messaging app - threema for work - installed due to
| on-call and maybe duo in the near future. I consider those
| reasonable, especially because I have a TOTP app and something
| for oncall anyway. Or used to. RIP Firealert :( However, once
| I'm supposed to install teams, outlook or some of these, I'd
| balk.
| franciscop wrote:
| As wffurr said, you have to pick your battles. I was in a
| similar situation: absolutely didn't want to install work apps
| in my personal phone, so when told to install a crapload of
| software I asked if the company provided phones. When they said
| no I said:
|
| Sure, wait a few days since I am getting a new phone. Spent
| ~$80 in what is probably the crappiest no-brand Android I could
| find in Amazon with questionable preinstalled software. Cleared
| it with IT and that's what I use to test my work-related stuff.
|
| In my location they could not fire me for requiring a phone for
| my job-related work, but didn't want to make trouble for $80,
| specially when I was already fighting for my holidays (a much
| more important thing for me).
| wffurr wrote:
| You insist that you won't do it unless they buy you one. Then
| you get labeled as a troublemaker, and fired for unrelated
| performance reasons.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| That is inspiring me to replace the swollen battery on my first
| generation Surface Book screen.
| slownews45 wrote:
| I never get these articles. The writer always seems to take a
| super long and complicated path to the solution. Who has time for
| all this.
|
| If I think it's the battery, I go into the Apple store, ask for a
| battery replacement, pay and leave. $49 for an iphone 8 or so.
|
| You can set the apt up online, usually takes 2 hours.
|
| What am I missing?
| jatone wrote:
| the fact that is exactly what the writer did.... and they
| refused?
| G3rn0ti wrote:
| If you read the article you would have learned that the Apple
| store staff was trying to convince her into buying a new iPhone
| instead. They told her they would need to swap the iPhone's
| mainboard.
| seaknoll wrote:
| That some people like learning how to fix things themselves?
| slownews45 wrote:
| Then why go on and on about how stupid apple is. Sure, they
| may not give you a free battery etc, but maybe just schedule
| the apt and do the standard replacement if you want to? This
| guy goes to best buy and then apple.
|
| Did they literally turn down his offer to pay the $49 for a
| replacement?
| watt wrote:
| We need kind of consumer protection agency (with teeth) to
| advocate for "right to repair" and generally don't let
| corporations away with designing such lemons. (I mean Apple track
| record with swollen batteries, unworkable keyboards, bendy phones
| and ipads).
| double0jimb0 wrote:
| Australia has a great one.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > I mean Apple track record with swollen batteries...
|
| That's just what LiPo batteries do at end-of-life. Not specific
| to Apple by any means.
| malchow wrote:
| Swelling jelly rolls have a real competitor in the very near
| future:
|
| https://spectrum.ieee.org/how-to-build-a-safer-more-energyde...
| axus wrote:
| Good opportunity to mention this niche subreddit:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/spicypillows/. I'm guessing her old
| battery wasn't spicy enough to merit a picture, the one pictured
| looks fine.
| imglorp wrote:
| How often do swollen batteries lead to ... violent exothermic
| reactions?
| ranger207 wrote:
| If you stop using them they shouldn't. The swelling is to
| reduce the pressure to make a fire less likely. I think that
| if a swollen battery is disconnected, self-discharge should
| eventually drain enough energy that it's safeish
| cgearhart wrote:
| "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained
| by stupidity."
|
| I bought an old BMW some time back. I took it in to the
| dealership for an inspection before purchase and I mentioned that
| the A/C wasn't working before inspection. They charged me what
| you'd expect (plus extra to diagnose _just_ the A/C) but gave the
| car a completely clean bill of health aside from the A/C, which
| they attributed to a bad blower motor.
|
| I asked the seller to have that fixed before sale, and they took
| it to another shop who replaced the blower...and still nothing.
| That shop kept the car for 2 more weeks and came up with nothing
| for answers. They took it to another BMW dealership who inspected
| it for another week and came up with nothing.
|
| So I turned to Google. Found a likely problem, but needed BMW
| dealership to confirm with proprietary tools. The BMW dealership
| had _no idea_ what I was talking about. I had to literally tell
| them "can you plug in the foo widget and go to the bar screen and
| check the baz value shown there? Now can you hit Reset in the
| corner?" Magically, the A /C started working.
|
| I'm not sure how "right to repair" plays into my story. My real
| point is that technicians are human and imperfect;
| troubleshooting is hard. It's not necessarily a conspiracy that
| they make mistakes, nor is it personal that they believe the
| diagnostic data in front of them over some random person
| _convinced_ it's a specific problem--even when it seems
| completely obvious once the problem is fixed.
| ploxiln wrote:
| This kind of thing is what makes some software engineers think
| they can solve problems or have an informed opinion about
| almost any other field :)
|
| Sure there are experts in every field who really know their
| stuff, but 95%+ of the people we run into day-to-day just
| aren't that good at their job and don't pay much attention to
| what they are doing. So with a bit of research,
| experimentation, and logic, we can figure out stuff that should
| be other people's job that they can't seem to do. (... but the
| _average_ software engineer probably isn 't any better ;)
| generalizations wrote:
| It's also what makes doctors|lawyers|physicists|$person_who_s
| urvived_rigorous_schooling think they can "solve problems or
| have an informed opinion about almost any other field." I
| think the reality is, 'smart people are smart'.
|
| Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/793/
| ksec wrote:
| My biggest problem of all is the company aren't updating their
| internal system with these sort of information. If you happen
| to meet a technician who really really knew his craft,
| 99.9999999% it has nothing to do with the training provided by
| the company. But it was his dedication and enthusiasm to
| solving the problem for their customers.
|
| In the very early days Apple Store has a similar internal
| system where Genius gets to report and share these sort things.
| I _think_ it was written by an employees as well. Pretty sure
| now that thing is gone.
| ip26 wrote:
| With cars specifically, shops get paid to replace the blower
| whether or not it fixes the problem, while troubleshooting
| doesn't really pay. As a result there's a significant incentive
| towards scattershot parts replacement as a diagnostic tool.
|
| I'm not saying it's done out of malice, but incentives drive
| behavior. You'd probably only develop solid diagnostic chops in
| the shop if the shop placed "bids" on fixing an undiagnosed
| problem, betting they can figure it out & fix cheaply.
| zeusk wrote:
| With BMW however, you can get the factory tools - so you didn't
| do your research well. They're also available from BMW legit
| www.bmwtis.com aos.bmwgroup.com
|
| Just search for ISTA-P, ISTA-D, INPA, E-SYS and realoem, TIS,
| ETK for parts (you can get them for free* too)
| sixothree wrote:
| I grew up in the Deep South. Stupidity is a weapon of malice.
|
| There is no mutual exclusivity. They are interdependent in many
| ways.
| toss1 wrote:
| Right, as in the naturally occurring stupidity perversely
| sometimes produces good results, thus reinforcing the stupid
| behaviors, which ultimately become weaponized...
| hinoki wrote:
| Hanlon's first corollary: sufficiently advanced stupidity is
| indistinguishable from malice.
| jandrese wrote:
| "Right to Repair" would hopefully mean that instead of that
| diagnostic tool being a BMW proprietary exclusive there would
| be some open source tool with the same functionality that you
| could load on your phone and connect to the $10 ODBII reader
| you bought off of eBay to solve the problem.
|
| Already there are tools that do most of the basic ODBII
| functions, but some brands are bad about hiding away specific
| codes in $50k+ tools as a way to extract money from shops and
| funnel customers to the dealers.
| cgearhart wrote:
| The tool is actually already available (maybe a gray market
| thing though...), but it's windows-only and a little pricey.
| I'm not convinced that "right to repair" will result in
| custom open source software for every smart fridge in
| existence, and I don't really trust average folks to make
| good decisions if everything was open to all anyway.
| jandrese wrote:
| ODBII codes are exactly the sort of thing that a community
| will form around to keep their tools useful though. Already
| the open source tools are pretty good except where the
| manufacturers are deliberately keeping them private. If the
| right to repair meant each car company had to publish a CSV
| or something similar with all of their proprietary codes I
| guarantee that they would be incorporated into all of the
| tools pretty much instantly. That is a textbook Right to
| Repair move.
|
| It also shows why Right to Repair isn't going to happen
| anytime soon. Those codes are worth money to repair shops
| and implementing something like that is a direct threat to
| the revenue stream.
| prova_modena wrote:
| In my experience with tech-heavy luxury vehicles like BMWs,
| dealerships have a relatively small time window from when the
| vehicle is introduced to when their knowledge about that
| vehicle drops off sharply. For example, I would trust a BMW
| dealer right now to work on a 2018 car, but I would take a 2000
| car to an independent specialist.
|
| One reason is turnover in dealer mechanic staff. Independent
| specialists tend to be more stable and have a genuine interest
| in and affection for the older cars of a particular brand.
|
| Another reason is that most new luxury brands are highly
| focused on leasing brand new cars or getting customers to trade
| in on the latest model. They really only want to sell brand new
| cars at the top of the depreciation curve. People who own older
| cars will usually not buy them from the dealer and tend to not
| use dealer mechanics (often because the dealer is the most
| expensive option around). So dealer mechanics see less older
| cars, and service managers largely don't consider owners of
| older cars to be good/profitable customers that they need to
| keep happy.
|
| A related issue that causes poor experiences like you describe
| is the "book time" job scheduling/pay system used by most
| dealer mechanics. This system favors a "parts swapping"
| approach where mechanics try to fix problems by quickly
| installing new components with a minimum of diagnosis time.
| This gets expensive for the customer due to dealer parts costs
| and strongly disincentivizes thoughtful, time-consuming
| diagnostic procedures and research. There is also usually an
| informal seniority system in dealers where the senior mechanics
| will take the easy "gravy" jobs that can be completed quickly
| but cost a lot. Junior mechanics will get stuck with the
| difficult, hard to diagnose jobs that suck up a lot of time and
| reduce a mechanic's earning potential. So you end up getting
| the least qualified mechanics working on tricky, unprofitable
| issues like yours.
|
| To be fair, these issues aren't exclusive to high end vehicles,
| but they are especially noticeable at this market segment.
| cgearhart wrote:
| This is what happened in my case. Not my first older German
| car, nor my first experience with the dealer. I knew what I
| was getting myself into. :-)
|
| I don't hold it against them. In fact, I think it confirms my
| original assertion that there's no malice involved.
| nonbirithm wrote:
| One time I bought a replacement battery for my ThinkPad, only to
| have it "die" after only a few hours of use - on A/C power. It
| wouldn't even turn on anymore. I dismantled the whole thing and
| pored over it for days, before thinking to remove the replacement
| battery and run it on A/C power with nothing in the slot. Then it
| started working again.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| I accidentally discovered a good diagnostic test for swollen
| batteries:
|
| (1) Remove phone from case and place on a very flat, smooth,
| hard, clean surface. (Granite countertop, glass coffee table,
| etc.)
|
| (2) Give the corner of the phone a sideways flick with your
| finger.
|
| (3) Does the phone spin around and around and around like a top?
| If so, it may have a swollen battery.
|
| This probably doesn't work for every model of phone, but on mine,
| I noticed the phone's newfound ability to spin much earlier than
| I could easily see visually that the back of the phone was bowed.
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