Apple Sued Over Meltdown and Spectre in U.S. as iPhone Slowdown Lawsuits Now Total 45

[MacRumors]

Apple faces its first legal action over Meltdown and Spectre in the United States, even though the vulnerabilities were found to affect nearly all computers and other devices, according to court documents reviewed by MacRumors.

Meltdown and Spectre are serious hardware-based vulnerabilities that take advantage of the speculative execution mechanism of a CPU, allowing hackers to gain access to sensitive information. All modern Intel, ARM, and AMD processors are affected, with many patches and mitigations already released.

Anthony Bartling and Jacqueline Olson filed a class action complaint against Apple last week in a U.S. district court in San Jose on behalf of anyone who purchased a device with an ARM-based processor designed by Apple, ranging from the A4 to A11 Bionic chips used in iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Apple TV models.

The complaint alleges that Apple has known about the design defects giving rise to the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities since at least June 2017, and could have disclosed details to the public more promptly.

An excerpt from the complaint:

ARM Holdings PLC, the company that licenses the ARM architecture to Apple, admits that it was notified of the Security Vulnerabilities in June 2017 by Google's Project Zero and that it immediately notified its architecture licensees (presumably, including Apple) who create their own processor designs of the Security Vulnerabilities.

The complaint added that it is unlikely Apple would be able to fully and adequately release fixes for Meltdown and Spectre without the performance of its processors decreasing by between five and 30 percent.

Apple addressed Meltdown in macOS High Sierra 10.13.2 and iOS 11.2, while Spectre mitigations were introduced in a macOS 10.13.2 supplemental update and iOS 11.2.2, both of which were released early last week.

Despite one dubious claim that Apple's patch for Spectre resulted in a significant performance decrease on one developer's iPhone 6, Apple said its testing indicated that its mitigations had no measurable impact on its Speedometer and ARES-6 tests and an impact of less than 2.5 percent on the JetStream benchmark.

The complaint expects at least 100 customers to be part of the proposed class, with the combined sum of compensatory and punitive damages expected to exceed $5 million if the case proceeds to trial.

A group of Israelis have filed a request with the Haifa District Court to file a class action lawsuit against Apple, Intel, and ARM over Meltdown and Spectre as well, according to local news publication Hamodia.

iPhone Slowdown Lawsuits Continue to Mount

Apple continues to face an increasing number of lawsuits that either accuse the company of intentionally slowing down older iPhones, or at least of failing to disclose power management changes it made starting in iOS 10.2.1.

In the United States, the iPhone maker now faces at least 39 class action complaints as of January 15, according to court documents compiled by MacRumors. Additional lawsuits have been filed in France, Israel, Russia, Korea, and Vietnam, with another pending in Canada, bringing the total to 45.

Many of the lawsuits demand Apple compensate all iPhone users who have experienced slowdowns, offer free battery replacements, refund customers who purchased brand new iPhones to regain maximum performance, and as Apple has already promised, add more detailed info to iOS about a device's battery health.

We've already answered many frequently asked questions about Apple's power management process, and covered the issue extensively, so read our past coverage for more information about the matter.

Article Link: Apple Sued Over Meltdown and Spectre in U.S. as iPhone Slowdown Lawsuits Now Total 45

 

[826317]

So how is any of this Apple's fault?

 

[jonblatho]

So many lawyers desperate for attention.

Many will enter, none will win.

 

[zorinlynx]

The slowing down due to batteries issue is lawsuit worthy, but not meltdown/spectre. Those aren't Apple's fault at all.

 

[keysofanxiety]

So how is any of this Apple's fault?

Because Apple wilfully and deliberately used processors in their devices.

 

[magicschoolbus]

I hope apple gets what comes to them. No reason for Apple to be throttling hardware I own.

 

[I7guy]

Yeah, we'll see where this goes. Hope all of these lawsuits are thrown out of court.

 

[dannyyankou]

OK I understood the slowdown lawsuits, but this is just frivolous. If anyone should be sued, it should be Intel.

But hey, go after the company with the most money I guess.

 

[velocityg4]

You could have knocked me over with a feather.

 

[SonicSoundVW]

You might want to revise or reword your article. “Our GPUs are immune, they’re not affected by these security issues,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said during a general press Q&A this morning. “What we did is we released driver updates to patch the CPU security vulnerability. We are patching the CPU vulnerability the same way that Amazon , the same way that SAP, the same way that Microsoft, etc are patching, because we have software as well.”

 

[alex00100]

I feel so sorry for all those people who will be murdered in the court by apple's army of lawyers over this. If it was me I'd try to sue a smaller company that doesn't deal with this stuff on a daily basis already.

 

[aaronlionsheep]

Apple slows down phones to prevent shutdowns - gets sued
Apple doesn't slow down phones and implements software fixes - gets sued

 

[ElRojito]

I hope apple gets what comes to them. No reason for Apple to be throttling hardware I own.

Then you clearly don’t understand anything Apple has done previously. If you want to be mad, be mad at them not being transparent. It doesn’t make sense to be mad at them for trying to keep your phone from shutting down.

 

[Jay42]

Another money grab where the constituents of the class action stand to gain a tiny amount and the lawyers walk away with a multi-million dollar settlement! One of the lowest forms of the legal profession.

 

[AustinIllini]

Meltdown/Spectre suit will be thrown out. At least, the one against Apple will be

 

[Wags]

So are they going to sue every manufacturer of any product that uses any Intel, ARM or AMD chip ?

 

[deferredAnon]

Yes, we throttle your phones. Why of course it is a feature!

2018 when people are okay with their phones being throttled.

 

[Alenore]

Well it feels to me they're suing because Apple knew since June, didn't disclose anything and released a phone despite this problem being known.
It has some more basis than "OMGLOLZ SPECTRE" but it will probably go exactly nowhere.

 

[kazmac]

The battery and iOS slow downs yes, I understand the growing lawsuits about this, especially given the way Apple handled the information.

The Meltdown and Specter software related issues, nope not worth a lawsuit. The chipmakers are more at fault with this one.

 

[Bbafett]

This whole thing is just stupid. I am so tired of the ridiculous lawsuits against big companies for reasons that are not really that important. So what if they knew even 6 months ago. It wasn't their fault, and it most likely didn't affect anyone's data. All these lawsuits are about is people wanting a handout from the big companies. There are so much bigger items to deal with in the world today then this mess of lawsuits.

 

[diddl14]

"Despite one claim that Apple's patch for Spectre resulted in a significant performance decrease on one developer's iPhone 6s.."
Can't believe you guys quoted this idiot. He upgraded from 11.1.2 to 12.2.2 on an old iPhone 6 (not "s"!!) so obviously got hit by the CPU Throttling 'feature' introduced in 12.2.

 

[keysofanxiety]

The complaint alleges that Apple has known about the design defects giving rise to the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities since at least June 2017, and could have disclosed details to the public more promptly.

Oh yeah, because that would have been beneficial to everybody. Releasing information about a fundamental issue that affects all processors in all devices before anybody had an opportunity to fix it. I'm sure Jimmy Toiletbrush would have really welcomed that. In fact they would've sued anyway had that been the case, "because Apple prematurely released details on a huge flaw that impacted all manufacturers, increasing the chances that such vulnerabilities had been exploited in practically any device with a processor".

An excerpt from the complaint:The complaint added that it is unlikely Apple would be able to fully and adequately release fixes for Meltdown and Spectre without the performance of its processors decreasing by between five and 30 percent.

More horse-hockey hyperbole with numbers pulled from the latest Wikipedia article on the matter. Certainly not anything they know about. If Ars Technica wrote an article stipulating a 70% performance drop then they'd be saying "up to 70%" instead. Current benchmarks on the latest version of macOS and iOS don't show any hit to benchmarks. Sure, there are still a few more updates to go, but Apple have made it clear they'll do their best to mitigate any performance issues.

These people don't know their arses from their elbows and are just looking to make a quick buck.

 

[MH01]

Silly lawsuit.

 

[DevNull0]

So how is any of this Apple's fault?

Well the iPhone uses Apple's "in house" design so that's apple's responsibility. And Mac customers bought a computer from Apple, they didn't directly buy a chip from Intel so it's up to Apple to bring Intel into the lntel into the litigation and recoup costs from them. But realistically for the A-series and x64-series chips there's so much complexity these things are going to happen from time to time. I don't think Apple or Intel have that much to worry about here.

You can't blame Apple for Intel's chips, but the iPhone fiasco is so bad, that anything that makes Timmy look worse and sweat more is a good thing for the customers in the longer term.

 

[I7guy]

Yes, we throttle your phones. Why of course it is a feature!

2018 when people are okay with their phones being throttled.

It doesn't bother some people, really simple at that.