Apple Being Sued for 'Purposefully Slowing Down Older iPhone Models' [Updated]

[trustn01]

It is up to us to do something about this and stay informed. Apple does not care about the consumer. Apple cares only about profit and what makes them profit is new phones not replacing batteries. Yes, Apple has control over your technology whether you accept it or not. Research all methods possible before upgrading an OS or replacing a battery or a screen. Apple is not the only solution and blaming them or expecting them to do the right thing is ridiculous. It is our responsibility to take care of our technology. We own it. We fix it. We are the solution.

 

[GuruZac]

Have they slowed the 7 Plus yet?

My iPhone 7 Plus is basically 1 year old. My wife bought it for me last Christmas. My battery so far is normal and I posted a geekbench score last night-performance for me has not changed. It’s super zippy...knock on wood. If it drops noticeably over the next several months, I will not be buying another iPhone next year. What Apple has done is inexcusable. If this was such a great feature to benefit user experience, why was this feature only disclosed after Apple was called out? Apple knows what they’re doing. I have lost a tremndous amount of respect for the company. They still make great products but I’m open to moving to a Pixel if my iPhone drops significant or noticeable performance. And I will be doing geekbench tests every couple of weeks to check performance.

If you have one with really old batteries, then it will either shut down randomly, or it will run slower. Same with iPhone 8 and iPhone X. There is just no iPhone 8 or iPhone X with old batteries around yet.

Really old? Good lord, the iPhone 7 Plus has been out less than 16 months. How is that really old?

 

[Glideslope]

What competent law firm would take on these knucklehead clients? They should get laughed out of court.

Never assume. Lot's of sympathetic Judiciaries out there these days.

 

[ani4ani]

so you rather have your iPhone restart 10x a day? Awesome.

Also, if you don't want your iPhone to slow down, pay the $70 for a new battery install.... its like saying... "I drove my car 100K miles and now my transmission just stopped working. PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE!! They just want me to buy a new car. Instead, my car should last forever."

...actually, I would like my phone to neither slowdown or shutdown! That is what I purchased, I didn't buy into a choice of failure mode [not that Apple even gives you that!]. This is absolute BS! you should reasonably expect your phone to last many years without issue. The only thing that is acceptable and can be anticipcated is that the frequency of connecting it to the mains might increase as the battery loses its charge over time.

Not that your analogy makes any sense at all but if it did, folks are having the phones throttled in 20K miles and only the first 2 gears are available after that!. Think of any other walk of life if you were buying something and salesman asked you what failure mode should we supply it with?....oh and by the way we wont tell you which one you got!

 

[curtvaughan]

One of the ways Jobs created a company that could grow towards a trillion dollar valuation was by having them *NOT* waste effort always looking back and keep supporting legacy stuff (Apple II/III,Lisa,Newton,68k,PPC,floppy drives, etc.), but always have the team look forward.

IMHO, trying hard to maintain a legacy code base is a major reason why MS is out of the mobile phone business and ends up with so many more exploits discovered in Windows. At some point you have to dump old code, or the returns become negative (unless, like some open source, a lot of the labor is free).

In spite of that, the latest iOS still runs on an iPhone 5s, and macOS on 6+ year old MacBooks.

One of the reasons Apple got its spiffy reputation is because they made great hardware - which would last much longer than most competing PCs - and supported the long lasting hardware with needed software updates. This rep. was largely developed with Macs while Jobs was running things. I have an 11 year old MBP that still runs quite well, but isn't secure with OSX anymore for the internet, as Apple stopped supplying security updates soon after SJ died. Now I double boot it with Linux so I can get on the internet securely. Yes, it requires extra effort to support "legacy" hardware, but Apple customers have always paid extra in order to make that happen. Now Apple customers pay premium prices for pretty and thin at the expense of performance and practicality - less ports, no phone jacks, weaker batteries, more fragile hardware. Apple can correct this and has the resources to do so, but likely not the leadership to make it happen. This will eventually cost them their customers, though they have such a stellar reputation from days of old that it might take a while. We'll see.

 

[barfo]

There really needs to be a “feature” that notifies you showing how much % of battery life is remaining and that they (Apple) will be throttling your phone when you reach that magical number.

 

[USAFA2008]

In my opinion, any of you complaining about Apple (re: your older phones) have no case. Once you agreed to the terms and conditions and installed the software, you gave up your right to complain about future actions like this.

Read the iOS 10 agreement.

Where in the iOS 10 agreement does it say Apple will slow down your phone?

Apple made a choice when designing their phone to have the total power draw exceed the battery’s ability to provide that power once the battery degrades 20%. They used an iOS update to deliver this “feature” yet never advertised exactly what this feature would do, so we haven’t give up any right to complain. Maybe we have to arbitrate and maybe can’t sue using the courts, but we absolutely have a right to a legal remedy, and I hope this turns out in consumers’ favor.

I never saw in any software agreement where Apple will slow down my phone. If it is in the agreement then I think Apple will be okay in the lawsuit.

 

[macdave91]

Is it just me or is the biggest issue here that a phone should not just shut off no matter how bad the battery life is? Like I would expect the battery indicator simply to drop down faster so i know when i have to charge my phone. Thats what it is for right? To sort of know when i can expect my iPhone to turn off. Not have it die on me around the 20% mark???

So Apple being like „lol we will just slow it down so it doesnt die on you too soon“ doesnt really seem to fix the core of the problem

I don’t think anyone’s even brought this very important point up. This is the world’s largest company saying that they took the lesser of two still bad evils so we wouldn’t experience the result of their poor design.

 

[JM]

This is a perfect example of why I stick with android. It's my device. I paid for it so I can do what I want, when I want, where I want with it. You can't tell me what I can and can't do. It's like buying a car and the dealership tells you you can't drive it on dirt roads cause it will put more stress on the suspension. So what?

Okay, but the thing that worries me about Android is that it's owned by Google and they do everything they can to collect data about me. (For advertising, no problem, but it seems more nefarious to me for a for-profit company to collect my information).

Are you not worried about Google practices and if not, why?

 

[japanime]

Why do you even have a 5S still? Welcome to 2017.

It's attitudes like that which are the problem. You only expect your products to last a couple of years, so that's all the companies that build them will strive for.

 

[JM]

I now suspect that some of the reports of really slow processor clock speeds reported here on MacRumors are bogus.

I just re-tested two iPhone 5s's, one iPhone 6, and one iPhone 6s (family hand-me-downs) with my own benchmark code (tight single threaded arithmetic routines written in Objective C), and none of these iPhones showed any signs of processor slow downs or performance variations beyond my usual measurement error (well within +-5%) from the exact same benchmark code run when these iPhones were new. Camera app launched in 2 seconds or less on all. The iPhone 6 had an old original battery, and was charged to less than 50%, no slow down. All these iPhones were freshly rebooted and in Airplane mode during testing.

So I suspect that either (1) many of the complaints here are fake, (2) the CPU clock speed reporting tools being used are broken or misleading, or (3) lots of people here have some other serious problems with their iPhones causing them to slow down so much.

Perhaps the code has an error in it, or the batteries aren't below the 80%?

Not aggravating on purpose... but there's too much reporting of slowed phones to think everyone is lying.

 

[MarcusCarpenter]

Apple should simply implement “replace soon” from the Mac and warn device performance may be effected. Sorted!

 

[macdave91]

If Apple loses, the lawyers will get more money from Apple than the customers will. This is total B.S. Apple explained why they are doing this, and I think it was a good explanation. These same customers would be whining if their iPhones shut off during peak processor usage, and they would accuse Apple of plotting to get them to buy a new iPhone. I hope Apple wins this.

Why is their phone designed to have to shut off when it still has 80% of its charge cycles left to begin with? This is an Apple problem and I hope consumers win.

 

[JM]

Guess Samsung is too dumb to use this revolutionary and innovative method - S3 works the same as the day I've bought it.

Terribly?

AhahahahhaahahahahhHahahahahaa.

Sorry couldn't resist. I'm sure it's great.

 

[curtvaughan]

Why do you even have a 5S still? Welcome to 2017.

Why? Because Apple hardware in the past was reliable and meant to last. That someone with an old iPhone or Mac is still getting decent use out of it is testament to a good product. So you turn around and castigate the customer for not replacing it because of the current date? You see, that is a good argument for planned obsolescence. Apple is apparently trying to make that happen.

 

[macdave91]

They can’t ask those questions, because macrumors writers, no matter their opinions, are not journalists. They’re simpy information regurgitationists that count on ad revenues. Think of them as a homeless person giving away “news tabloids,” and asking for money, but in website form.

Not untrue

 

[teknikal90]

I am not sure why your comment has 43 upvotes (maybe they want removable batteries or maybe they misunderstood your point?), but to my knowledge, higher charging cycle count isn't an indicator of better battery quality. It just means that the Apple Watch battery is designed to be charged at a lower voltage, which is enough to power the watch but likely insufficient to run an iPhone properly.

Simply put, if I took an Apple Watch battery, expanded it to the size of the iPhone battery and wanted the same 1000-cycle, it would have to charge way slower, and only up to 85-90% max capacity. It really makes no difference in the long run.

That’s not true. MacBook batteries used to be rated at 300 cycles. They upgraded them to now 1000 cycles, I believe back in 2010. iPads are rated at 1000 cycles. Samsung just did this for the S8. After the note 7 debacle.
Better cells exist

 

[kasiopio]

About time. What they are doing is highly unethical. Their involvement with my property stops after payment.

Their invovlement with the device continues so long as you are installing operating system updates / new versions of the operating system, and blindly agreeing to the terms and conditions outlined therein.

 

[ke-iron]

This is not the same thing at all... Don't be dense.

“Don’t be dense.” Are you kidding me? First of all, I willfully admitted it isn’t the same scenario, so don’t insult me because of your lack of understanding.

However it is a type of throttle if your computer determines when to use a low or high performance core, or the turbo boost feature. The point is, you are not getting full performance at all times, performance is held back by the system to conserve battery amongst other things.

Even brand new iPhones don’t always run at max speed, they have low and high performance cores too and the system uses the appropriate one based on what you’re doing.

The only difference here is Apple is throttling your iPhone performance further once the battery has degraded past a certain level. Even on a brand new computer that may be listed as a “3ghz dual or quad core.” It doesn’t run all cores at max speed, all the time. The point is you do not get max speed at all the time.


For starters you don’t get max speed on your phone, computer or internet all the time, for various reasons all are throttled one way or the other. This is not hard to understand, even with my quick explanation. Imagine what Apple geniuses gonna put on paper and say to a judge why this is done. This is an easy win for Apple in court whether you or anyone else like it or not.

 

[GoodWheaties]

at 100% utilization, the iPhone 6 hardware uses more power than iPhone 5S.

I also have to wonder if the CPU clock speed doesn’t have something to do with it. The A8 was clocked at 1.4Ghz with previous processors at 1.3Ghz, 1.2Ghz, etc. Since jumping to 1.85Ghz and higher from the 6S and up, I have to wonder if peak CPU power draw isn’t substantially higher.

 

[psac]

Unethical?

I think Unethical is a perfect word for it. It may or may not be illegal, the courts will decide that. But slowing down my phone instead of fixing the actual issue with the battery? That's unethical.

 

[barfo]

It's attitudes like that which are the problem. You only expect your products to last a couple of years, so that's all the companies that build them will strive for.

Exactly! And on top of that, service providers (I assume Apple does, too?) offer a 30-month payment option, which I unfortunately have, dangit!, but was the only way for me to get the needed upgrade. So now, 2 years down the road with 6 months left to pay, if I continue this method of payment, I’m paying for a device in which it’s capabilities are being diminished? Woohoo!!

 

[macdave91]

Apple doesn't come to your house and force you to enable automatic OS updates, or hit the Update Now button. Lot of people don't update immediately, but wait for the reports and the x.1 or x.2 fixes.

They do if you try to get your phone serviced at an Apple store. They require you to update your phone before they’ll attempt to fix your issue by other means.

 

[DEMinSoCAL]

Here's what's going to happen: It will settle out of court. The lawyers will get a crapton of cash. The plaintiffs will get a discount coupon for an upgrade to a new phone.

Hardly. Apple will opt for the free option...simply remove the "power management" code from iOS or give the user an option to enable/disable it. They're not going to give discounts to phones. Is anyone claiming the phones are defective?

 

[macdave91]

It doesn’t matter if we know or not. The result is the same. If you are having performance issues, it is insanely easy to have a diagnostic ran. You can do that in your pajamas watching tv. If the battery is bad, they will schedule an appt to have it replaced. How is this complex?
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There is no design flaw here. Period.

Because ending a sentence with a the word period spelled out definitely shows that you know what you’re talking about