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

[ronno]

You can't take a company to court over something the user decided to ignore anyway and expect to win..... while they use degraded batteries..

Why didn't they get it replaced ?

Apple often refuses to replace batteries, even when someone is willing to fork over the $79. Thus your options are either live with a comically slow phone, or purchase a new one for $600-$1200.
ALSO, no one in the Apple store says, "You know, replacing the battery would make your phone work just as fast as if it was brand new." Instead they lead you down the road of getting a whole new phone. And under no circumstances did anyone say - we slowed the phone down due to your bad battery. Instead people just think that their phone is "dying" and in need of replacement.
I agree that this is deceiving at best, and probably fraudulent.

Imagine if your car was only going at half speed due to some faulty part. The dealer refuses to fix it even though you are willing to pay. Then the dealer offers to show you some new cars.

 

[firewood]

And the reason that they have to do that is because the iPhone batteries are under specified.

Over-specifying them would be no better. Say industry standard Li-ion batteries normally degrade 20% after 2 years of typical use. So you want a vendor to put in battery 20% bigger so it would be just right at the end of 2 years.

But then every customer would have to carry around a thicker heavier device that provides them with no performance benefit the entire first year. And then someone would find out that the CPU could have been turned up 20% to use that extra battery power when brand new, and try to sue Apple during that first year for a device running too slow given the included heavy thick battery. Rinse and repeat.

In any case, mobile phones with big heavy batteries that last a whole week don't sell in volume any more. Consumers have spoken.
[doublepost=1514070423][/doublepost]

ALSO, no one in the Apple store says, "You know, replacing the battery would make your phone work just as fast as if it was brand new."

That's because maybe it won't. There could be something else making that iPhone (with it's current settings) appear to run slow.

 

[78Bandit]

It is incredible, and most of messages here blame code/programming, commercial strategies. It is a normal behavior on a system based on a battery, CPU and GPU have power drain peaks, which you have only when doing something heavy like gaming. If the battery can’t give enough power it shutdown. Apple just prevents that, ONLY when the battery is old. But users are just complaining.

The statement "ONLY when the battery is old" is going to be for the courts to decide. There are enough complaints by people taking their in-warranty or AppleCare phones to Apple stores with complaints of slowdowns and being told their battery tests fine to lend credence to the allegation Apple is doing this to relatively new devices as well.

To the extent Apple may have covered up a product defect to avoid paying for contractually required repairs, they will need to be held accountable.

The bigger question is why can't the batteries provide sufficient voltage as they degrade? Almost every battery powered device I've had lost runtime but never suffered from random shutdowns with 50% indicated power remaining. One possibility is Apple used a supplier that had poor quality control and shipped batteries that didn't meet specifications. Another is that Apple designed the phone to utilize so much power that batteries at the lower end of spec can't meet peak needs.

In either case Apple needs to do something about those that don't meet the stated performance, compensate those that paid for a replacement battery, and do a better job of design or QC to ensure the phone doesn't need 100% of the battery's output to operate as advertised. They need some margin for error to cover normal degradation over a 500 charge cycle period, fluctuations in output due to cold temperatures, as well as normal production variances.

 

[I7guy]

The Apple in your eye that broke your heart. This Apple doesn't have a worm right through it. It is a snake wrapped around an Apple and that snake is named Tim Cook.

Apple should change their logo to this..

They won’t change their logo. Those who have “had enough” will walk away the rest will be business as usual.

 

[Baymowe335]

They won’t replace the battery. Hence my big problem.
[doublepost=1514069792][/doublepost]
So suddenly now apple processor are so powerful that batteries suddenly can’t power them properly. God lord.

Apple mobile processors ARE the most powerful, by far, in the industry.
[doublepost=1514070640][/doublepost]

So you admit Apple is wrong and can use their money to continue shady dealing. Because they can afford to pay the fines. Smh

A didn’t admit anything because I don’t know what will happen. I’m simply stating that any ruling against them won’t impact the company. At all. I also believe they will appeal and ultimately have a lot less exposure. Further, I believe Apple follows every tax law to the T but people and governments get butthurt when companies are successful and they want a bigger piece.

Welcome to corporate.
[doublepost=1514070693][/doublepost]

So why have the EU ordered Apple to pay 13 billion euros to the Irish government?
Edit: For pedant, that figure may not be fully accurate. Based on memory ;-)

Because they don’t understand existing tax law? Apple followed the rules and now they want to change the rules. Ireland doesn’t even want the money. Tim Cook has addressed this.

 

[Gilligan's last elephant]

Over-specifying them would be no better. Say industry standard Li-ion batteries normally degrade 20% after 2 years of typical use. So you want a vendor to put in battery 20% bigger so it would be just right at the end of 2 years.

But then every customer would have to carry around a thicker heavier device that provides them with no performance benefit the entire first year. And then someone would find out that the CPU could have been turned up 20% to use that extra battery power when brand new, and try to sue Apple during that first year for a device running too slow given the included heavy thick battery. Rinse and repeat.

In any case, mobile phones with big heavy batteries that last a whole week don't sell in volume any more. Consumers have spoken.
[doublepost=1514070423][/doublepost]

That's because maybe it won't. There could be something else making that iPhone (with it's current settings) appear to run slow.

Didn't say "over specify". A larger capacity battery would mean fewer people would need to charge twice per day, and many users could charge every second day. Modern battery fails due to number of charging cycles and instances where battery is regularly allowed to deplete it's charge to almost zero.
Edit: And what is the issue with batteries bring about 1mm thicker?

 

[ronno]

[doublepost=1514070423][/doublepost]

That's because maybe it won't. There could be something else making that iPhone (with it's current settings) appear to run slow.

I am referring to the throttling issue. New battery removes the throttling and phone runs as new.
If the phone is running slow for some other reason then they should figure out the issue and fix it.
*Genius Bar*

 

[Gilligan's last elephant]

Apple mobile processors ARE the most powerful, by far, in the industry.
[doublepost=1514070640][/doublepost]
A didn’t admit anything because I don’t know what will happen. I’m simply stating that any ruling against them won’t impact the company. At all. I also believe they will appeal and ultimately have a lot less exposure. Further, I believe Apple follows every tax law to the T but people and governments get butthurt when companies are successful and they want a bigger piece.

Welcome to corporate.
[doublepost=1514070693][/doublepost]
Because they don’t understand existing tax law? Apple followed the rules and now they want to change the rules. Ireland doesn’t even want the money. Tim Cook has addressed this.

I think the EU understand their own tax laws better than you. Apple arranged a preferential rate of tax with Ireland compared to other companies. Not permitted under EU rules.

 

[firewood]

Didn't say "over specify". A larger capacity battery would mean fewer people would need to charge twice per day, and many users could charge every second day. Modern battery fails due to number of charging cycles and instances where battery is regularly allowed to deplete it's charge to almost zero.
Edit: And what is the issue with batteries bring about 1mm thicker?

Consumer choice.

Note that thicker mobile devices with larger (multi day) or removable batteries don't sell anywhere near as well. I don't think any of them are anywhere near the top-10 is current sales. Way too small a market for Apple.

Plus, if you really want an extra day before recharging, you currently have the choice to buy and carry one of those iPhone cases with an included booster battery. Some customers like them. Many do not.

On long airplane trips I carry one of those tiny USB battery chargers. Does the trick and I don't need to carry it every day, only when needed.

 

[Abazigal]

so you believe Apple has done nothing wrong?

They might be guilty of not telling us what they were doing, and there is clearly some breakdown in communication between their various departments, but I don’t believe that Apple is deliberately slowing down our devices out of some malicious intent to trick us into upgrading our phones, if that is what you are asking.

 

[78Bandit]

And then someone would find out that the CPU could have been turned up 20% to use that extra battery power when brand new, and try to sue Apple during that first year for a device running too slow given the included heavy thick battery. Rinse and repeat.

On what grounds would someone have to sue because Apple didn't utilize every little bit of potential from every component? Plenty of devices are underclocked because of heat, power consumption, and reliability issues. Plenty of cars produce less than maximum potential horsepower to ensure they last for 100,000 miles or more. A company is under no legal obligation to push the performance envelope as much as possible. As long as the product meets advertised specifications everything will be fine. It is when a product falls short of what a company promises that things go off the rails.

Apple does need to make sure its products meet specifications for its promised useful life. In the case of the iPhone that would be a minimum of two years which is what is covered under AppleCare. If that means either compromising on the advertised performance or specing a more powerful battery to give some margin for normal production variances then that is exactly what they need to do.

 

[decafjava]

https://www.macobserver.com/news/battery-scientists-joins-debate-iphone-throttling/

But everyone will ignore this.

 

[baryon]

It's not just this — it's that every subsequent iOS version makes your phone slightly slower. You don't notice when exactly it happened, but eventually your phone has become annoyingly slow over the course of a few years.

My friend has an iPhone 6 and just typing on the keyboard is painfully laggy. It wasn't like that when it was brand new, I'm sure. I have an iPad Air that is now super laggy and slow, it wasn't that way when I bought it a few years ago. A friend of mine has an iPhone 4S, it's slow as hell. It was super fast when it was new. I have an iPhone 4S which still runs iOS 7, and it's super fast. There is no question about this, newer iOS versions are more demanding and therefore run slower.

But Apple is aggressively pushing people to upgrade. If you don't, you will be unable to install most apps from the app store, even though they did have versions for older iOS versions just a few months ago. What happened to those? If you do upgrade iOS, you cannot downgrade, ever. Why not? What is Apple's explanation for not allowing people to downgrade? It makes no sense at all.

I have heard many people say "my phone is so slow, I need to buy a new one". Do they realize that when they bought it, it was not that slow at all? The truth is that it's in Apple's interest for old devices to become unusably slow over time, so that people upgrade.

Some people just want a good phone that works well but without all the new features. Why can't they just have an older iPhone that lacks new features but still responds well to basic things like typing on the keyboard and scrolling?

All that Apple would need to do is to let people downgrade back to whatever iOS version they preferred. That's all.

 

[firewood]

If the phone is running slow for some other reason then they should figure out the issue and fix it.
*Genius Bar*

Reports are that they are trying to do just that: asking for diagnostic logs and multi-day Battery Usage reports from some customers.

That's how I discovered what was slowing down a friend's older iPhone. The Settings:Battery:Battery Usage report showed that her recently updated iPhone was spending a ton of time downloading unread old emails and iMessages in the background. Mass cleaning out of old photos, videos, emails and messages plus a reboot, and her iPhone started acting with normal speed again. Nothing to do with the battery (in that one particular case).

But there could be lots of other weird things that could be causing an iPhone to run slow.

 

[Baymowe335]

I think the EU understand their own tax laws better than you. Apple arranged a preferential rate of tax with Ireland compared to other companies. Not permitted under EU rules.

You are so wrong. Do a little more reading and you’ll understand Apple’s position and why it’s not so cut and dry. If it were, Apple would be paying it without appeal. Apple broke no laws. You think the biggest company in the world doesn’t understand EU tax law? Lol...

Apple has a team working on it and believe the money will be returned when they win the appeal. The money is going to sit in an escrow account while they fight it out. For what it’s worth, the US government is siding with Apple.

 

[DevNull0]

So don’t update. Problem solved.

They should be sued for how hard they push the damn updates. My 7 plus is still on iOS 10 (because of all the bugs in 11) and it's constantly demanding to update with no way to disable it. Of course the update is taking up gigs of precious storage space too.

 

[grkm3]

Apple used cheap batteries that could not hold there rated current after a while of being used.

It' not the voltage it' the c rating of the cell.in the rc car world we pay a lot for higher c rating batteries.

All of my Samsung phones would also degrade over time and not last as long but all of them made it down to 1% before shutting off due to voltage and not current draw.

Apple fixed this with software to not have to pay for a huge recall and is getting what they deserved.

Here is a car analogy for you.lets say you buy a 707hp hell cat and after a year the fuel pumps cant supply enough pressure and the car leans out.

Now dodge flashes a new firmware to your ECU to lower the boost of the car 5psi and losses 200 horse power to stop from the car stalling or running lean and melting a piston.

This is exactly what apple is doing.

 

[blackdogaudio]

Uh oh,

Battery scientist intervened with facts:

https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/7lorpo/battery_scientist_weighing_in_on_this_issue_of/

Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

EDIT: Some good news though for those Wounded By Apple. Droid might have beat Apple to throttling 4 years ago:

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

 

[Gilligan's last elephant]

Consumer choice.

Note that thicker mobile devices with larger (multi day) or removable batteries don't sell anywhere near as well. I don't think any of them are anywhere near the top-10 is current sales. Way too small a market for Apple.

Plus, if you really want an extra day before recharging, you currently have the choice to buy and carry one of those iPhone cases with an included booster battery. Some customers like them. Many do not.

On long airplane trips I carry one of those tiny USB battery chargers. Does the trick and I don't need to carry it every day, only when needed.

The Apple battery case is ridiculously unweildy. A 1mm increase in thickness of batteries would not be discerned by vast majority of users, I am sure. Apple are not only company guilty of this but Apple have much smaller capacities than other OEMs and this is now coming back to bite them. I personally purchased a Lenovo P2 after using a Sony Xperia due to its 5000maH battery as I regularly cycle for a full day and most phones cannot last the ride when using Strava with GPS and Bluetooth on all time with Google navigatation when required. And it costs less than half the price of other Android flagships. Camera poorer than top phones but I have an excellent compact camera which I can carry very easily.

 

[Baymowe335]

https://www.macobserver.com/news/battery-scientists-joins-debate-iphone-throttling/

But everyone will ignore this.

Battery scientists have nothing on pitchforkers at Macrumors who consistently think everything negative at Apple will be their demise after overblowing every negative story.

Where did the swelling battery story for iPhone 8 go after people were calling for Note 7 implications?

This is a minor speed bump and I think Apple ultimately is trying to help their customers.

 

[Gilligan's last elephant]

Uh oh,

Battery scientist intervened with facts:

https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/7lorpo/battery_scientist_weighing_in_on_this_issue_of/

Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

EDIT: Some good news though. Droid might have beat Apple to throttling 4 years ago:

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

All this indicated was that having a larger capacity battery would mitigate the issue.

 

[albebaubles]

They might be guilty of not telling us what they were doing, and there is clearly some breakdown in communication between their various departments, but I don’t believe that Apple is deliberately slowing down our devices out of some malicious intent to trick us into upgrading our phones, if that is what you are asking.

I agreed but a lack of transparency implies maliciousness, no?

 

[blackdogaudio]

All this indicated was that having a larger capacity battery would mitigate the issue.

Well, in the spirit of the holidays at least, I'd think you could pretend Android was evil.

 

[Baymowe335]

Apple often refuses to replace batteries, even when someone is willing to fork over the $79. Thus your options are either live with a comically slow phone, or purchase a new one for $600-$1200.
ALSO, no one in the Apple store says, "You know, replacing the battery would make your phone work just as fast as if it was brand new." Instead they lead you down the road of getting a whole new phone. And under no circumstances did anyone say - we slowed the phone down due to your bad battery. Instead people just think that their phone is "dying" and in need of replacement.
I agree that this is deceiving at best, and probably fraudulent.

Imagine if your car was only going at half speed due to some faulty part. The dealer refuses to fix it even though you are willing to pay. Then the dealer offers to show you some new cars.

You’re just upset with the soulution.

Post your facts that show the iPhone meaningfully slows down when not in a benchmark situation. Day to day tasks. The benchmarks purposely (notice how I used the correct world unlike the title of this thread) overtax the cpu and battery to trigger the throttling.

I doubt it matters much for daily use, but get your pitchfork sharpened.

 

[78Bandit]

Uh oh,

Battery scientist intervened with facts:

https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/7lorpo/battery_scientist_weighing_in_on_this_issue_of/

Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

EDIT: Some good news though. Droid might have beat Apple to throttling 4 years ago:

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

While what he says is true, it is largely irrelevant to the lawsuit. The lawsuit is about Apple throttling devices that haven't reached their end of life. If the battery degrades to 80% capacity in 200 charge cycles it may be EOL but it certainly didn't meet specs and should be replaced under warranty.

Also, if the battery hasn't degraded to 80% capacity then there is no reason for Apple to throttle my device, yet it appears they did just that.

Throttling should not be implemented without user notification that the battery has degraded to the point where the phone won't function as advertised. At that point the consumer can take it back to Apple for a fix if it is still under a service contract. By hiding the fact that the battery was determined to be not functioning according to specifications Apple may have deliberately avoided legitimate warranty claims. That is what the court is going to be looking at in this particular case.