78 More Customers Sue Apple Over 'Secretly Throttling' Older iPhones in Latest Class Action

[mrzz]

Negative. They still throttle but give you a toggle if you would rather have that wonderful experience of your phone randomly crashing under load.

you clearly know nothing about that

 

[dwaite]

Your statement is ridiculous
I’ve NEVER, EVER had ANY device that shuts down itself because the battery is “old”. I have a PSP that’s 8 years old and it still works like when it was new. It hasn’t slowed down, it just works. If iPhones shutdown because of that it’s a design flaw of their cpu, because I repeat, I’ve never had any other device shutting down because of this.

Have you ever had a car? Because this is why you wind up having to replace car batteries - the battery can no longer handle the peak load of starting the engine, and it refuses to turn over.

 

[TimmeyCook]

Apple was NOT up front and honest. They got caught lying about it

Apple was upfront and honest, they declared it on the release notes for everyone to see, but most people don’t read those and don’t understand anything, and that’s not Apple’s fault they are dumb.

The rest of your post is, of course, invalid.

 

[dwaite]

the point is that the psp never started to lag after 2 years of degradation, like losing FPS in games. why? because sony optimized it in a right way.

In that case, an aged battery would cause the system to lose power mid-game, losing any progress since the last save point. Debatable if that would be better or worse than losing FPS (especially since a developer might not plan on GPU performance to be dynamically throttled).

Those are your only two options for an underperforming battery though - throttle power load to what the battery can handle, or have the system fail as the battery cannot meet its needs.

 

[aimson911]

I now agree that Apple should be sued, at the very least because of how stupid their decision was for their consumers. Like me... Here's why:

My iPhone 6 was originally throttled. It was terrible. I almost leaped to buy a new one because of how incredibly slow it was. Then I saw the scandal. It felt relieving to know that I wasn't the only person with the problem, but I was pretty pissed off as well. Later on however, I stopped feeling angry after Apple released their (supposed) reason for the throttling. I mean, their reason also made sense - I didn't want my phone to die randomly, given that it was years old. I've trusted Apple for decades, so I gave them the benefit of doubt at the time. Then, fast forward a bit... When Apple released the patch that allowed me to take off throttling, I of course turned it off. The app showed my battery life at 85% capacity. Wait... it had throttled my phone at 85%??? Seriously? After turning off that crap, I have had ZERO problems with my phone. None. No random battery life loss. No random shutting off. No problems whatsoever (other than some UI slowness).

I believe Apple lied to the majority of phone users about why they throttled them. Sure, perhaps a small percentage of phones did have the alleged problem they tried to fix with the throttling. Not mine, and not thousands of others I'm sure. Now, I am also not entirely convinced it was a money making scheme, but it certainly could have been. And, I am of course glad the phone still works pretty well. I am willing to support Apple in the future, but their greed and poor mac hardware is starting to wear on my loyalty... I'm ready to start buying their products again, but only tentatively at this point.

 

[dwaite]

The voice of reason... thank God someone in here isn’t drunk on the koolaid.... it is a design flaw and Apple is throttling to hide it, they don’t want to have to be forced to freely repair or replace millions of iPhones.
They have all the consumer or government investigations to conclude in this yet.. I’m hopeful for huge fines. Take them down a peg or two, not like they don’t need it!

In my room now I’ve got 8 devices with the same battery tech as my 6S, not ONE of them shuts down at 20 or 30% or dump 10% battery in under a minute and turn off! My 6S does though!...

I’ve never had ANY device do it EVER and I’ve been using gadgets with rechargeable batteries for 20 years plus!

To be fair, I've had batteries die at 8% all the way up to at 75% once they get old. Batteries just degrade over time in capacity and in peak load - the peak load part becoming more of an issue recently because power improvements in devices have raised the multiplier between idle and peak load by nearly an order of magnitude in the last decade.

I have zero doubts of Apple in terms of whether they throttle older devices to try to sell upgrades. It really is a stupid conspiracy theory, and they would have much better/overt ways to do this (such encouraging apps to support only the latest version of iOS six months after release, and/or cutting off support for older devices in new OS updates much faster)

The much more interesting conspiracy would be whether they instituted software throttling measures because they knew of a design defect in the 6s battery - if they effectively reduced peak performance to prevent having to do a recall. I'm not sure where that line would be drawn, since these devices fundamentally have "rich" power management features and Apple likely considered throttling power draw due to a degraded battery to be in the same bucket as throttling in sub-zero temperatures (since they do so for the same reasons).

Outside the phone/software, I would not be surprised if a lawyer could find an email talking about 'what can we do to solve all these 6s device shutdowns this winter', and for that email to be treated like a smoking gun
[doublepost=1530868477][/doublepost]

When Apple released the patch that allowed me to take off throttling, I of course turned it off.

Just pointing out, the release automatically turned it off. The only way it goes back on is if your phone dies again due to a broken battery.

The app showed my battery life at 85% capacity. Wait... it had throttled my phone at 85%??? Seriously?

I've heard that the 'health' number unfortunately deals more with capacity than peak draw. This may be why so many people reported battery issues which weren't able to be diagnosed by Apple (and thus not covered by Apple warranty)

I believe Apple lied to the majority of phone users about why they throttled them. Sure, perhaps a small percentage of phones did have the alleged problem they tried to fix with the throttling. Not mine, and not thousands of others I'm sure. Now, I am also not entirely convinced it was a money making scheme, but it certainly could have been.

Seems unlikely this was a scam to get people to upgrade phones - since the feature supposedly didn't apply to phones before the 6 or after the 6s. You would likely try to convince users of your oldest phones to upgrade, not the people who bought within the last year.

 

[Tech198]

"Apple's VP of marketing Greg Joswiak recently denied this theory, calling it "about the craziest thinking in the world.""

For once, i would agree.

If people sued Intel this much for under clocking their CPU's everyone would have a field day. *safe overclocking"
..

Next up: Mortal Kombat X game lawsuit because it runs slow on my iPhone 4, despite the developer said its not optimized for such a device. *rolls eyes*.

Dunno if these lawsuits are either good, or bad press for Apple

 

[kaielement]

I still don't understand why they can't fix the underlying problem when Android has.

But Android hasn't fixed the issue. have you ever tried to use a two-year-old plus Android device no thank you. The battery life is so short it's unusable (or is slower then beans lmao). Really the technology just needs to get better. On the one side you have Android manufacturers throwing their hands up saying we don't slow our phones down but yet after 2 to 3 years their phones run like garbage because the battery is having the same issues as Apple. The other hand not saying that Apple what's right in this case. Apple should have been a little more transparent as to why they were slowing the phones down and people just need to get over themselves.

 

[alien3dx]

I thought Apple stopped slowing down iPhones after it became well known they were doing it...?

nope. it will throttle is battery below 10% ..

 

[Radon87000]

But Android hasn't fixed the issue. have you ever tried to use a two-year-old plus Android device no thank you. The battery life is so short it's unusable (or is slower then beans lmao). Really the technology just needs to get better. On the one side you have Android manufacturers throwing their hands up saying we don't slow our phones down but yet after 2 to 3 years their phones run like garbage because the battery is having the same issues as Apple. The other hand not saying that Apple what's right in this case. Apple should have been a little more transparent as to why they were slowing the phones down and people just need to get over themselves.

Yeah and the iPhone battery deteriorates to the point of needing a replacement after 2 years as well. My 7 Plus needing a replacement 2 years after launch. Also no Amdroid throttled or shuts down after 2 year and the news you read on this are isolated instances unlike this throttling. I have devices from 2013 which flat out reject this theory.

Apple lied. Plain and Simple. They tried to hide the throttle under obscure wordings like “power management” and got caught. The cleverness is their strategy was the battery wouldn’t even be detected on their diags unless health was below 80% leaving the owner with the only option of buying a newer phone. My hats off to the guy who caught Apple and their dirty tricks.

 

[The-Rift]

This getting ridiculous

 

[rednirt]

Anyone who has the $75 can file a lawsuit. Another publicity stunt by a lawyer seeking some attention with a worthless lawsuit that will go nowhere. People mistakenly think just because someone files a suit, it has merit or that the plaintiffs will receive anything.

Paying £25 for a replacement battery is much better than squandering $75 on the lawyers. They just take the money and dont fix the battery QED!

 

[dilbert99]

No doubt. Painting it as a negative is ridiculous. It was by design to fix a problem people were having with their phone crashing when the processor requested more power than the battery could safely supply because of degradation. The pretzeled logic of “hey, let’s slow down everyone’s older phones to give them a reason to upgrade” would have been insane. How likely are you to upgrade to another iPhone after just having a very frustrating experience? It is inanity.

Any which way you slice it companies have to be transparent and in this case Apple were not. Do you think it was correct for Apple not to tell its customers what it was doing so that they had the choice of keeping a slow phone or changing the battery?

 

[deckard666]

Nice to see the full force of a legal system used to such life changing effect. First world problems and all that. I wish I had that much life to give away worrying about such trite stuff. I await with eagerness the lawsuits against Tesla for every software update they ever release to do with their cars' battery lives. "My range has gone up / down" , "its not as fast as it used to be" , "why have my batteries lost 10% charge in a year" blah blah blah...

 

[BGPL]

First of all, we have a 95 percent customer satisfaction rate with iOS 11… it's great. We have delivered through the years amazing features, from the App Store to iMessage

Way to avoid the topic at hand. Yeah, you have great software, other than the fact that is slows down older phones. Classic diversion and used car salesman tactics. You took a chance and you got caught, just like you steal other companies ' technologies and roll the dice on how the infringement suit will go. You win some you lose some.

Apple is all about money, and if you don't believe this, you've been fooled. Tim runs around politicking to keep customers thinking the company is about more than money, but it isn't.

 

[wirefire]

Not to go too off topic here, but you’re critique is that of the very basis of our modern consumer oriented economy. It’s applicable to everything you’ve ever purchased in your life other than food.

I’d read “the lightbulb conspiracy” if you’re interested in the origins of this production philosophy, it goes back over 100 years.

Not exactly. It applies primarily to consumer electronics. Things like clothing, bookshelves, houses, ETC may require maintenance, but they have no built in expiration date so to speak. You don't need an OS update to live in your house (yet). For consumer devices the hardware is static, the software is the malleable part of the device, together they create the user experience. Any diminishing of that user experience by the use of software could be considered a form of "bait and switch". Apple doesn't state that your device performance may diminish with the installation of updates. and that in combination with the fact that you cannot install the device's original OS (thanks to apples code signing). means that users are potentially forced into a lesser user experience without notification.

Apple was naughty on this whole battery thing and tried to PR it up.. There is lost productivity out there because of their actions... lost $. And that pisses people off.

 

[LordVic]

This is just a jumbled misunderstanding of the issue.

The batteries themselves are not defective. The issue arises when the battery degraded (which is just how chemistry works, not a flaw) to the point where they couldn’t supply the peak draw of the processor under certain circumstances (it’s not that the batteries can’t deliver, it’s that a naturally degraded battery can’t. This is an important distinction) which resulted in a safety shutdown.

I say safety because all the news stories of vaporizers blowing up are the result of batteries not handling peak loads (which is high with a heating element) but the pens still trying anyway which results in a runaway thermal process.

Now, clearly their testing was not correct as phones were passing while the throttling still occurred. You’re 100% right on that point. But none of this was EVER about defective *batteries* themselves.

I don't think it's defective batteries. it was a design flaw and a failure of engineering that led to this however. I think it's safe an dreasonable for consumers of phones to expect their phones to last 2-5 years without random shutdowns. Apple designed the iPhone with such little overhead and bare minimum batteries that they're experiencing battery degradation issues in some cases within 1 year.

DO i think it was intentional "planned obsolescence". No. But I do think it was oversight and Apple's drive for "thin" (seems to be a pattern) that forced them to make compromises, one of which being a battery solution that was not suitable for the device it was installed to.

 

[GeneralChang]

"I would have much rather had my phone randomly shut down during inconvenient times, particularly when under a heavy load indicating I'm actually using it for something!" -all of these people, apparently.

 

[ConfusedChris]

When Apple reveal the speed increases of their latest iPhones they should show a disclaimer stating “You won’t reliably get these speeds after the first 6 months because our battery technology can’t keep up with our processor improvements.”

That should go down well.

But really, free battery replacements for the lifetime of the phone would be better until the technology improves.

 

[vkd]

"In an apology letter to customers over its lack of communication, Apple emphatically denied that it would ever "do anything to intentionally shorten the life of any Apple product, or degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades." "

Yeah, right. Like squeezing out titbits of tech and then upgrading them and removing support. Like they did with, for instance, the 2011 iMac, GPU not supported by new tech 'Metal', OpenGL not updated either to give extended support, macOS 10.14 Mojave rumoured to not work with non-Metal GPUs. Another is the Thunderbolt port, they put it in this same 2011 iMac with mini-DP fitting, now on v3 with USB-C fitting, nothing been done to support the old port, no adapters, nothing. Not from Apple nor virtually anyone. Yes, options are there, make no mistake, but they are very limited and very few and far between. When they do exist they are price prohibitive, unless, of course you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth or you don't understand the value of money.

"Not everyone believes Apple, however"

No, and I am amongst them.

 

[Radon87000]

"I would have much rather had my phone randomly shut down during inconvenient times, particularly when under a heavy load indicating I'm actually using it for something!" -all of these people, apparently.

No I would rather have my phone not shutdown at all like all other phones.

 

[spinedoc77]

(And directly below that, in his footer...)

I'm sure you'll understand if I'm somewhat skeptical of your assertions.

Just because I think iOS is more simplified, or "dumbified" as I like to put it, doesn't mean I don't actually use it, although I am mainly referring to iOS on an ipad. Privacy is one of my larger concerns, and that keeps me on Apple, as I see the nightmare that Android is regarding privacy. But I do, in fact own an iPhone X.

 

[kdarling]

The batteries themselves are not defective. The issue arises when the battery degraded (which is just how chemistry works, not a flaw) to the point where they couldn’t supply the peak draw of the processor under certain circumstances (it’s not that the batteries can’t deliver, it’s that a naturally degraded battery can’t. This is an important distinction) which resulted in a safety shutdown.

Apple always provides a partial truth narrative for people to repeat, knowing that most will stop questioning after that.

But there are still some unanswered questions, such as:

1. If common battery degradation was the primary reason, why didn't it affect all previous iPhones?
2. If this was all natural, why didn't Apple foresee it, instead of belatedly patching the OS after phones began shutting down?

With Android phones, there's enough open source to see what they do. And if they could foresee and handle battery degradation, why didn't Apple all along? Don't they test for longevity? Do they know nothing about batteries? It's just weird that it took iPhones dropping dead for iOS to suddenly (and secretly) get better power management.

 

[NT1440]

Yeah and the iPhone battery deteriorates to the point of needing a replacement after 2 years as well. My 7 Plus needing a replacement 2 years after launch. Also no Amdroid throttled or shuts down after 2 year and the news you read on this are isolated instances unlike this throttling. I have devices from 2013 which flat out reject this theory.

Uhhh...It's been built into Android for quite a while:

https://android.googlesource.com/ke...mentation/devicetree/bindings/arm/msm/bcl.txt

"This Battery Current Limit(BCL) device, provides an interface to detect and notify
interested applications when the SOC is drawing current in excess of the limits
specified."

You may be unaware of it, or things may have changed, but Android had the same mechanism built into the OS for years.

Apple always provides a partial truth narrative for people to repeat, knowing that most will stop questioning after that.

But there are still some unanswered questions, such as:

1. If common battery degradation was the primary reason, why didn't it affect all previous iPhones?
2. If this was all natural, why didn't Apple foresee it, instead of belatedly patching the OS after phones began shutting down?

Thank you for editing that clearly insulting remark out.

1. Do you think Apple has been using the same batteries for every generation of phone? It's a genuine question, because if not...there's your answer.

2. How the hell am I supposed to know? My theory on the matter simply doesn't matter.


On your other point, Android does have it, as I posted. It's the same logic being used in Apple's OS but it appears to notify individual apps rather than the OS, which would result in some inconsistent behavior I'd imagine. Even with hundreds of thousands of developers looking at the open source OS somehow Android's take on solving the same problem didn't get a peep in the tech media....wonder why that is (facetious, $$$ for clicks)?

 

[kdarling]

1. Do you think Apple has been using the same batteries for every generation of phone? It's a genuine question, because if not...there's your answer.

Are you saying Apple designed a battery that was worse than previous generations?

On your other point, Android does have it, as I posted. It's the same logic being used in Apple's OS

No, it's not the same logic. As manufacturers have noted, and public code confirms, Android phones do not enable throttling based on a battery's age, as Apple apparently does.

but it appears to notify individual apps rather than the OS, which would result in some inconsistent behavior I'd imagine.

No. It notifies "interested parties", which in Android's case, is usually just the OS's battery monitor process.