Things get settled all the time when it's less costly than a court case.
Innocent people plead guilty all the time.
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Apple Shells Out $3.4 Million to Chileans to Settle Planned Obsolescence Lawsuit
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Innocent people plead guilty all the time.
You should really be more enraged that the US doesn't give a damn about consumer protections.
Apple is known for its aggressiveness on lawsuits. How long has Apple and Samsung lawsuit took?
To me, when Apple choose to settle, they are admit guilt.
Would haven better just to replace the battery.
That is not point for class action lawsuit. It is to tell Apple screwing customer with subpar quality component is not OK when you charging 1K for a phone.
They're doing the same with Intel MacBooks by slowing MacOS down and removing hardware acceleration to make it them run hotter to coerce consumers to buy the M1. People are finding out that if they bootcamp into Windows hardware acceleration is restored and it runs fine.
Apple doesn’t have to operate inside China, Russia or Chile or whatever. It is their choice and they got have to follow the law.
Like in when Apple announced users were experiencing unexpected shutdowns when battery read 30% (or higher), that they were investigating it, and that they were working "to improve algorithms for managing battery performance and shutdown operations" in future versions and that 10.2.1 would address this to "improves power management during peak workloads to avoid unexpected shutdowns on iPhone." announcing two months later that 10.2.1 had reduced unexpected shutdowns on iPhone 6S by "more than 80%".
Given the amount of communication that actually centered around this before, during, and after breaking, it is not a case of trying to sabotage people's phones as a "planned obsolesce" strategy to juice sales previously happy users as much as simple hubris of not wanting to bother customers with the details of the exact tradeoff which they made. It just isn't in Apple's culture to expose any more switches or technical feedback than absolutely necessary, which is a choice that most of the time has born out as making a more user-friendly ecosystem. The phrase "until they got caught" is loading the narrative by implying a disingenuous motive that is not supported by the evidence.
Does it count when apple puts out a statement that it is a problem? Keep in mind when a company says "a small number of customers" about their own product, it probably isn't very small.
"Outside the affected batch, a small number of customers reported an unexpected shutdown. Some of these shutdowns may be normal, because the iPhone will shut down to protect its electronic components. To gather more information, we will add an additional diagnostic feature to the iOS software update that is released next week. This feature collects a variety of information in the coming weeks that may help us improve algorithms for managing battery performance and shutdown operations. If such improvements can be achieved, we will deliver them through further software updates." And this was all before they would have implemented the 10.2.1 change.
People don't always blog about every time their phone cuts off, but I had more than one friend say their phone would just die despite appearing to have a 30% charge. They just gripe for a couple of minutes and boot it back up to move on. If you only see it happen every few days, you probably won't be fuming yet still greatly annoyed at your "junky" old phone. Apple would have lots of detailed diagnostics tracking the frequency auto-reported to them even if the users themselves do not call their local paper.
They already offered replacement batteries for affected devices @ $29 (not sure if that was globally)Would haven better just to replace the battery.
Huh ? Are you talking about turbo or graphics acceleration? None of that makes any sense.
Ok. Show me where iOS ever gave the user any indication that the CPU was being throttled, due to a battery with limited peak capacity, BEFORE Apple was called out publicly over it.
I'll wait.
3.4million is the equivalent of the lunch costs of Apple v Samsung.
If it were planned obsolesce don't you think would have screwed over IP5 users as well while they were at it ?.... its 2021 and those phones are still receiving updates.
Sure they screwed up, they did not disclose what was happening behind the scenes in the update as a means to fix another issue that was plaguing IP6 customers. I'd guess they did not know the impact would be SO apparent.
So they screwed up - they paid in the press, they reduced the replacement battery costs by 66%, and they are paying in court.
"improve algorithms to manage battery performance" doesn't imply "we're going to slow your phone down" to the average nontechnical user. being an electrical engineer i might extrapolate from "improving power management" to "reduce clock speed" and thus "make the phone slow down" but the average person has no idea what this means.
they were deliberately opaque about this because they were trying to pull a fast one. the iphone 6 was the first one that was so good that people didn't feel the need to upgrade to the next phone. they knew they had to do something to keep the iphone parade going. is it any wonder that at some point they stopped reporting iphone unit sales? if they could have gotten away with that in the iphone6 timeframe, they would have.
in this day and age if there were a widespread problem with iphones randomly shutting down you bet your *** that people would have been blogging about it. bendhgazi and antennagate were WAY overblown and we heard about that stuff nonstop for weeks when they happened.
edit: i will also say that in the months before all this blew up i tried to get my battery replaced on my iphone6 because of crappy performance and apple just *would* *not* *do* *it*. i had to go back to the store 3 times and the last time i asked to talk to a supervisor and finally got them to do it. *they wanted me to buy a new phone instead* so this should tell you all you need to know about their corporate strategy at the time.
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So many apple zealots hating on your comment. You are 100% correct. It absolutely kills me how people defend corporations that couldn't give a rip about them.
Darth Tulhu
macrumors 68020
Actually, 2020 profit was $59.7B ... 3.4M$ of that is the equivalent of 0.596 cents...
There were ALOT of users that came forward and said the same. Battery passes check, sorry we won't replace the battery, even if you pay for it.
iOS 10.2 shenanigans strike back again. I wonder if the genius who came up with the idea got fired
"Since the big Jony Ive led redesign, the iPhone OS is really processor inefficient and graphically demanding to the point where it makes huge draws on the battery in order to do even simple things. That draw on the battery is so strong that it could actually cause the device to crash when the battery gets a bit old. What shall we do? Rewrite our OS to simplify it and make it more robust and dependable?"
"Nah, it'd be cheaper just to artificially slow down old phones after they start crashing."
"Okay!"
"Nah, it'd be cheaper just to artificially slow down old phones after they start crashing."
"Okay!"
right, what i had to impress upon them is that even though the battery checked "ok", it had almost 800 cycles on it and in my opinion that was too many. they finally relented.
but you really got to ask yourself - why would this be their policy? i wasn't asking for a free battery, i was asking to pay for one. but they wanted me to give up in frustration and buy a new phone.
edit: also we had 5 iphone6 in the family and not one of them ever shut down at random. not a big enough sample to be statistically significant but still...
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He probably got a nice bonus. The profit they made from this still far outweigh the fines.
They don’t think it be like it is, but it do.
To add to that, you best believe Apple will inflict an economic punishment equivalent or more than the value of this penalty in some other manner. Be it a withholding of investment or lack of sponsorship of a local cause.