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Apple defrauded iPhone users by slowing devices without warning to compensate for poor battery performance, according to eight lawsuits filed in various US federal courts in the week since the company opened up about the year-old software change. The tweak may have led iPhone owners to misguided attempts to resolve issues over the last year, the lawsuits contend.
All of the lawsuits — filed in US District Courts in California, New York and Illinois — seek class-action to represent potentially millions of iPhone owners nationwide. A similar case was lodged in an Israeli court on Monday, the newspaper Haaretz reported.
Apple did not respond to an email seeking comment on the filings.
The company acknowledged last week for the first time in detail that operating system updates released since "last year" for the iPhone 6, iPhone 6s, iPhone SE and iPhone 7 included a feature "to smooth out" power supply from batteries that are cold, old or low on charge. Phones without the adjustment would shut down abruptly because of a precaution designed to prevent components from getting fried, Apple said.
The disclosure followed a December 18 analysis by Primate Labs, which develops an iPhone performance measuring app, that identified blips in processing speed and concluded that a software change had to be behind them.
[...] The problem now seen is that users over the last year could have blamed an ageing computer processor for app crashes and sluggish performance — and chose to buy a new phone — when the true cause may have been a weak battery that could have been replaced for a fraction of the cost, some of the lawsuits state. "If it turns out that consumers would have replaced their battery instead of buying new iPhones had they known the true nature of Apple's upgrades, you might start to have a better case for some sort of misrepresentation or fraud," Boston University professor Rory Van Loo, who specialises in consumer technology law, said.
[...] The lawsuits seek unspecified damages in addition to, in some cases, reimbursement. A couple of the complaints seek court orders barring Apple from throttling iPhone computer speeds or requiring notification in future instances.
Previously: Two Class Action Lawsuits Filed After Apple Admits Slowing Down iPhones
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 29 2017, @09:43AM (4 children)
Looks like they made a reasonable technical decision. Fine that it's not the one you would make but what's with the lawsuit? Have people got nothing better to do?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by fyngyrz on Friday December 29 2017, @11:24AM (2 children)
No, it really doesn't look like that.
It looks like either they did a *really* poor job of power supply design (other phones don't "suddenly shut down" and they don't have this "feature"), or that they're just throttling for the obvious reason: they want you to buy a new phone.
As for their protest, quoted verbatim here from their letter:
...this is utter bullshit. The constantly stop allowing their OS upgrades to run on hardware that is perfectly capable of running those upgrades. They've been caught at this multiple times. My 3 GHz, 12/24 core, 64 GB Mac Pro "can't" be upgraded to MacOS 10.13, so says Apple. But in fact, if you flash the bios to say that it's a machine made one year later, it'll upgrade perfectly. And why shouldn't it? It's little, if any, different than that machine. Even if it was slightly different (other than the date flashed into the hardware), this is a company with many, many billions of dollars in the bank that made a decision to obsolete this hardware for only one reason: So that it would go long in the tooth before its time and put buying pressure on the owner. There's no other possible reason.
They threw the PPC emulation out the window for just as little reason (no, probably less.) They let all those user's software suddenly go obsolete for a reason that boils down to "weren't going to pay for the emulation any longer", again, when they had tons of cash to maintain the tech and users had tons of PPC software. I still have PPC software running on (very) old machines, specifically because there is no reasonable in-OS upgrade path that lets that stuff keep running. The irony is that the massive power of the machines we have now would make those apps run very well indeed.
I have more examples. From apps they took out of the store because they had integrated the tech into a new phone, thereby removing the possibility of users of an older phone having the tech unless they upgraded — to severe bugs they leave mouldering in old versions of the OS while not allowing upgrades to the new version of the OS, Apple is a known serial offender of the "let's pressure the customer."
Apple is lying here. Flat-out lying. And caught at it.
(Score: 2) by terrab0t on Friday December 29 2017, @04:22PM (1 child)
Other phones do suddenly shut down without this feature. The Google Nexus 6 phones suffered from the same issue [extremetech.com].
The throttling is a shutdown fix. On its own, it’s a good feature. It keeps your phone from shutting off completely in cold weather, or when the battery is old.
The questionable thing Apple did was not make knowledge of this feature available to regular users. Even a warning on some kind of battery status screen would have been enough.
It’s hard to say if not publicizing the feature was an oversight, or a sneaky way of making users dissatisfied with their older phones. Many people assume it was malicious because they assume the worst of Apple. That alone won’t win a lawsuit though.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Friday December 29 2017, @10:26PM
You're not getting my point. I'm sure it's my fault for not being clear. I wasn't saying it wasn't possible to design such a lousy power supply that a phone would not collapse under load; I was saying there are phones out there that don't do this, so this clearly demonstrates the opposite (to the non-engineers... we engineering types already know very well it's possible to make sure adequate power is available if the battery isn't on its very last legs): It's possible to design a power supply that won't collapse under load."
Either it is, in which case Apple put an under-par power supply in their very-expensive-phone and tried to hide it, or it's propaganda to cover up the fact that they were trying to drive customers to a new phone, or it is both.
Yes, that's a
questionabledeceptive thing Apple did. But it's not the only thing. It does demonstrate their corporate character very well, though. Their feet are being held to the fire a little bit, and that's a good thing.No it isn't. Here, look: Apple has a known history of driving people to more recent hardware with purely policy-based limits they impose. This event fits in very well, even seamlessly, with that behavior.
Looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, has duck feathers, found in ponds, webbed feet, yellow bill, lovely ducky coloring, other ducks all around it, many ducks have been found here before...
I'm saying "It's a duck."
Even if I were wrong about this (protip, I'm not), it's not my fault. It's Apple's fault for constantly populating the pond with ducks and then throwing in a perfect duck look-alike.
And as opposed to Apple's claim:
"That right there is a very fine example of a rabbit. Would you like a rabbit? It's a very courageous rabbit..."
We assume it's malicious because Apple has a history of being malicious in precisely this manner. If we are making assumptions, they are assumptions Apple has earned, and in spades.
I'm pretty sure that a company with this kind of money in the bank doesn't really care a lot about such lawsuits. But they don't like their reputation being dragged through the mud. And when they are caught red-handed in deceptive anti-consumer behavior, as they certainly have been here, that happens. They may – mind you I'm only saying may – remediate their behavior. That's the only worthwhile outcome of this I can see.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday December 29 2017, @02:15PM
Define "reasonable". Your definition won't include "serving the paying customer". It will include "maximizing profit".