Welcome back to Multicore. This is Instruction Set for the week of Friday, August 18th.
I am writing this from my iPad Pro on an Airbnb balcony somewhere near Banff, Alberta, Canada. I’ve never been a big tablet camera user, but I guess the instant ability to snap a “here is where I’m working” photo without even lifting the iPad is a pretty good use case.
The scenery here is completely out of control. Yesterday we saw a grizzly bear with two cubs right by the road when driving back from an ice field; earlier we were canoeing on water that looked like blue Gatorade.
And yet the tech news cycle continues! Nothing too major this week, but there’s a bunch of fun or notable stuff that’s worth keeping up on.
Let’s start with some iPhone battery drama.
Richard Lawler, The Verge:
Some iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro owners have complaints reminiscent of the bad old days of “batterygate,” reporting that with less than a year of service on the clock, their phones are already reporting more battery degradation than expected. Sam Kohl of AppleTrack tweeted in July that his iPhone 14 Pro had already dropped to a maximum capacity of 90 percent, a much faster dropoff than previous iPhones he’d owned, and the thread shows many other people with the same experience.
I do think something odd is going on here. I also saw Kohl’s tweet back in July, checked my own iPhone 14 Pro Max, saw that it was at 95% and figured that sounded fine. Apple rates its batteries to retain 80% of their original capacity after 500 charge cycles, and I’m a heavy user who bought this phone on day one.
Now, though, my 14 Pro Max is somehow at 90%, just like a lot of other people’s. (I actually wrote that sentence two days ago and now it’s at 89%.) That really is a precipitous drop in capacity over a short period of time.
It’s possible that this is a bug in how Apple measures battery health or power consumption. My battery life definitely hasn’t been great on this trip, so I’ve been relying on low-power mode a lot. These are harsh conditions for any phone, though — bright sun, poor cell connectivity, lots of camera usage and so on.
Apple is yet to comment, unsurprisingly. The next iPhones will land in a matter of weeks.
About those phones, 9to5Mac claims that Apple won’t be releasing leather cases for this year’s lineup. The site is corroborating an earlier tweet from user Duan Rui, who’s plugged into Apple scuttlebutt from China.
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