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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow2851:

Apple's $500 million iPhone settlement, briefly explained:

Apple has agreed to pay up to $500 million to settle a class action lawsuit over its phone batteries — and you might get a (small) cut of that.

According to Reuters, Apple will pay qualified iPhone owners $25 per phone, although this amount could be adjusted depending on how many claims are filed. (Think of that Equifax settlement that was supposed to give us $125 each, except so many people submitted a claim that it was significantly reduced). Nevertheless, the minimum amount that Apple must pay out will be at least $310 million.

The settlement will cover models 6, 6 Plus, 6s, 6s Plus, 7, 7 Plus, and SE devices that installed the software updates before December 21, 2017. If that's you, don't spend that $25 yet — the settlement still has to be approved by a federal judge.

The settlement puts a punctuation mark on what became known as "Batterygate." In 2016, iPhone 6s owners began complaining that their phones suddenly shut down despite having plenty of battery life remaining. Apple eventually responded by admitting that a "very small number" of the iPhone 6s had an issue with their batteries and offering free battery replacements to those models. Then, owners of other iPhone models claimed that their devices were having similar shutdown issues and that the problem was more widespread than Apple would admit. Apple responded with a software update that reduced the number of shutdowns significantly.

But by December 2017, Apple was forced to admit that the update had fixed the problem by throttling the phone's performance. Apple said it was merely trying to compensate for the degradation that naturally comes with aging batteries. Many customers, however, believed the company was really trying to force them to purchase new phones by making their old ones that much harder to use. Apple's lack of transparency — that is, its only acknowledging problems after a preponderance of evidence made them impossible to deny and not telling users that the software updates would slow their phones down — didn't help its case.

In response to a growing outcry, Apple apologized and offered to replace batteries in certain phones for $29 — cheaper than the usual $79 price tag, but not free. It also released another software update that allowed users to turn off the throttling feature.

Customers were not placated by this. Multiple class action lawsuits were filed in the US and were later consolidated into this one lawsuit, which Apple is now settling. Countries including France and Italy fined Apple millions of dollars over this issue, but those fines pale in comparison to the $500 million Apple will now pay out. Then again, according to its latest earnings report, Apple has over $207 billion in cash on hand, so half a billion bucks might not seem like a big deal to the company.

Original Submission