this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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Sadly, very few people seem to understand this. I'm all for seeing a big company have to take responsibility, but the way people just blindly follow this is very disheartening. You can't have true accountability without accuracy. They hear "throttling old phones" and assume the rest. The supreme irony is, throttling was the only way to keep older devices running longer. When I was doing kernel development on the Note2 and Note4, people constantly reported sudden reboots or otherwise rapidly depleting battery while using the camera. The old batteries just couldn't handle the sudden spike in demand for near 100% CPU/GPU utilization + full display brightness + camera hardware powered on + heavy RAM/IO use, all at once. So the voltage would drop, even for just a few milliseconds, then the CPU would starve, and the device would reboot. Just like pressing the reset button on a PC. Limiting the CPU was the easiest solution for everyone. Do I think they should have done it silently? No. Do I think they did it to avoid being thrust into the spotlight when more and more of their users were reporting reboots? Yes. I think modern devices handle this much better because they learned from the past. Manufacturers didn't realize back then what the degradation curve would be years into the future against acute spikes in battery demands.
I agree, and did not mean to imply they had any good intentions. Just that it wasn't pure malicious, evil on their part. They should have been transparent, and offered better solutions to users. They certainly could afford to do so.
That is invaluable insight into random reboots. I have a question: Why does the device have to reboot instead of automatically lowering CPU frequencies? Why do you have to set up throttling instead of the hardware handling this by itself?
Thank you for appreciating my contribution. :) And to answer your question, because it happens too fast. Everything powers on, the voltage drops below a critical point, the CPU forgets who it is or where it is, and the reboot begins. I'm sure nowadays they make efforts to anticipate this. But back then, the industry was busy cramming increasingly powerful hardware into devices, and no one had really given any thought to how the batteries would react after years of use. Then environmental factors could make everything worse - coldness can suck dozens of percent off even a healthy battery.