OnePlus performance throttling is barking at the wrong tree

[mahrez26]

OnePlus seems to have an obsession with battery life and power efficiency. For the longest time, it held off implementing a rather common Always-on Display feature for those reasons and only moved the needle forward when its community voted for it.

Even so, OnePlus has เว็บทดลองเล่นสล็อต always cautioned users about the consequences of such features and gave them the freedom to do what they want at their own expense. With the latest drama surrounding the OnePlus 9 and OnePlus 9 Pro, however, the company is making the exact same arguments, but this time isn’t giving users the option to opt out of its throttling mechanism.

Too hot to handle
In its official statement on the discovery of its throttling shenanigans, OnePlus does come clean that it is indeed “optimizing” device performance when using some popular apps. It cites user feedback as the reason for such a strategy, pointing out concerns about battery life and heat management. It turns out that there might indeed be some reason for concern, at least for the latter.

Searching the Web will yield anecdotes of how the Snapdragon 888, Qualcomm’s flagship chipset this year, is producing higher temperatures than normal on phones that use them. Xiaomi’s Mi 11 Ultra seems to be the most common victim, but the Galaxy S21 Ultra 5G is sometimes mentioned as well. Still, none have reached the serious overheating issues that the Snapdragon 810 produced in 2015.

Overheating is definitely a big no-no for smartphones, especially the pricier ones. It leads to a risk of damage and injury, for one, but can also degrade battery life faster than normal. The issue, however, can have different causes, but OnePlus seems to have decided to use a band-aid fix to address it.

Does it matter?
Some might be scandalized on hearing OnePlus once again sneaking such performance tweaks behind everyone’s backs. It is, however, more surprising that no one noticed it until now. The fact of the matter is that few OnePlus 9 owners noticed that apps ran slower on their phone until they compared it with other Snapdragon 888 phones.

OnePlus may have been banking on that when it decided not to disclose its changes to the public. It almost sounds like they didn’t expect people would notice a difference in performance anyway or would chalk it up to other random factors that make benchmarking difficult. In truth, there might not be a critical deficiency in the way the OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro operate, and they are still fine phones. The problem is that OnePlus is going down a rather slippery slope.

Fool me twice
OnePlus has been accused of benchmark cheating in the past, but this time it’s actually doing the reverse. Instead of boosting performance to get higher scores, it’s actually degrading performance, supposedly in the name of longer battery life and thermal management. What’s similar in both cases is that OnePlus is cheating users and app developers.

It’s probably unfair to imagine OnePlus as some scheming villain rubbing his hands in near darkness. Somewhere along the way, however, someone in the company decided that it’s OK to hide such “trivial matters” from the public, perhaps because it deems the issue outside of public interest. It is, however, still questionable whether it’s a moral decision to make, even if it’s legal.

More pressing than conspiracy theories is the fact that users and developers are getting something they didn’t sign up for. Or rather, they are being penalized for something they didn’t do. Of course, we can give OnePlus the benefit of the doubt that it made a decision on behalf of users to protect their smartphone investment and offer the best experience. It also decided not to inform them that this “best” actually means compromising on what others like Samsung, ASUS, Xiaomi, OPPO, Vivo, and others haven’t.