Apple deserves this judgement even though it’s pennies on the dollar of the actual amount it should be. This is a settlement, nothing more, to keep larger damages at bay and even more damning information from coming out. Plus, Apple didn’t stand a chance in defending this. They tried to create a “Reality Distortion Field” without the reality of the thing they were promoting in the first place. Tim Apple has forgotten that lesson from Steve Jobs.
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Apple to Pay $250 Million to Settle Class Action Over Delayed Siri Features
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There wasn’t a chance in hades that Apple could win. Their own marketing and internal memos proved that. The fact that the iPhone 18 is about to arrive with MAYBE the improved Siri is a damning enough piece of actual evidence to convict Apple for false advertising. You don’t write a check for a quarter of a billion dollars if you think you have even a remote chance of winning.
Apple will actually make money since this settlement will be registered as a tax loss and thus a deduction on their 2026 tax bill.
that's not how corp taxes work
if you register $250m loss from settlement, (over simplifying it) it simply subtracts $250m from profit and apple just pays less taxes.
they don't make money, they just maybe pay ~$50m less in taxes. they're still down ~$200m (which Apple will pass this $200m bill onto you the consumer)
whatever makes Apple sound more evil though, right?
Yes, we are psychic. Full stop. You, in fact, mixed coco puffs with Rice Krispies this morning and used skim milk in the cereal for your breakfast. See, in fact, psychic.
So, yes, in fact - for sure - 100%. No price increase.
How can you be so sure the price will increase? Are you psychic?
Uh what? This is a ridiculous take and it's extraordinary how you don't know what the lawsuit process is like. 😂
The discovery phase in a lawsuit involves bringing in all the major relevant engineers working on Apple Intelligence deposing them for hours on the record. This takes time away from the engineers working on Apple Intelligence. Among many other steps like gathering documents, answering written questions, and etc...
MacRumors is 100% right to not pushback their logic because it makes total sense.
🤦♂️
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I7guy
macrumors Westmere
It depends if apple believes the cost of litigation to a win conclusion was more than the quarter of a billion. You and I are not privy to the insider conversations. But yeah I got this is an opinion just like mine.
So where did we get the price increase for the epic games lawsuit? I mean, how many billions was spent litigating that case, and it’s still not really over? Yet the iPhone price has remained steady at $799?
You can make the argument that the iPhone 12 had a $100 price increase. Just 2 months after the trial - even though the 12 mini continued the $699 price point.
But, the prior year iPhone itself has continued that as well. Anyway, point is that in the 6 years it has been since the start of the lawsuit, we’ve seen one price increase that doesn’t strongly correlate with the lawsuit.
Where do you propose this price increase lives?
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Chazak
macrumors 6502a
It will be on a prepaid Visa card which in order to collect you will have to give up every possible shred of personalized data the settlement administration company could possibly sell to any purchaser who wants to buy it.
I haven't left the house since I bought an iPhone 15, was waiting for this essential upgrade. I just asked Siri how much I'm due and apparently it's $39555,00000,0764467.67
Says a lot about how serious you are in this discussion.
Did I represent what I said using the words "in fact"?
If you were "psychic", you wouldn't have needed to ask those ridiculous questions. 😂
yes
essentially people asking apple to be penalized more would essentially be "price me out of apple products eventually"
jonblatho
macrumors 68030
Sorry, it's still PR horse manure.
The discovery phase would largely be handled by legal, with any requests they can't handle going to relevant engineering leadership or product managers, who then handle what they can before involving the rank and file. Apple is an international corporation with hundreds of engineers focused on Siri and Apple Intelligence, and tens of thousands more. Even if several engineers would have been deposed, the productivity impact would be a footnote at best.
More likely, in addition to settling on the cheap, Apple was worried about what discovery would surface. We already know from John Gruber's "Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino" that the WWDC 2024 keynote's demo of advanced Siri functionality was likely, let's be charitable, "aspirational". They conveniently never demoed the advanced Siri functionality to the press following the keynote.
That doesn't mean that there wasn't intent/hope to ship the features on time, and considering how risky this kind of AI functionality can be if they don't nail it, I'm glad they're (ostensibly) taking their time. But we're now a year past the ship date, and at this point, who knows if the demoed functionality will ever materialize or we just get Chatbot Siri out of the whole ordeal?
Color me skeptical that there weren't engineers and probably leadership at Apple who knew in June 2024 that "over the course of the next year" was somewhere between bullish and bull****, only to get overruled by marketing and/or the C-suite. A class-action suit on behalf of U.S. iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16 owners would be the least of Apple's concerns if those receipts saw daylight.
But what do I know?
theinstructor
macrumors 6502
I am definitely getting my .95 cents out of that beotch.
DonInHtown
macrumors member
Apple_Robert
Contributor
Sorry, this doesn't make sense.
First of all, lots of teams at Apple range typically from 5 to 15 engineers or so. MapKit team from 2012 consisted of only 8 engineers for example.
Second, just because there are thousands of engineers doesn't mean that they can realistically take over the deposed engineers work. The ton of overhead in engineers switching dev teams means it doesn't make sense for them to do so, assuming they even have engineers with expertise in AI to move around. And it's not like there's a surplus of AI engineers dying to work for Apple either.
Third, it's not just several hours wasted. You spend at least a week or two (on and off) with back and forth emails with lawyers. Then you spend at least 2-3 full days with a lawyer prepping for a deposition reviewing documents and doing Q&A drills. Then you spend the whole day deposing. Then if it goes to trial, you spend another few days with the lawyers memorizing what you've said during the deposition so that you're consistent. Then at the actual trial, your testimony can last for a couple of days (just this week, Greg from Open AI was on the stand giving testimony for 12 hours across 2 days).
Fourth, puts stress on the AI team. Considering all of the best AI engineers are working at actual AI companies, the ones left around is all that Apple has. Having them work on defending Apple legally (for executive mismanagement) instead of actual AI work just makes them want to leave Apple. Nobody wants to go through their slack channels/emails/meeting notes recalling what happened in the past 1-2 years. That's just **** work.
All in all, that's at least a couple of weeks of lost time from potentially half of the Apple Intelligence team and they're already behind. And WWDC is coming up next month which means they need to finish up their demos this month.
that just proves Apple needs to "focus on its products and services" because they're so half baked instead of fighting a lawsuit. so there's no need for MacRumors to "pushback" on what Apple said because it's true, Apple wants and should focus on its products and services.
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You can play a semantics game of “I literally did not say or use the ‘in-fact’ phrase myself” but, you otherwise are declaring in no uncertain terms that prices will go up. So what’s the difference?
As I said in my other post, in the 6 years it has been since the start of the Epic lawsuit, we’ve seen one price increase for the iPhone that, at best, weakly correlates with the lawsuit. Since the 5G tech and OLED screens were understood to be the reason for the price increase. Not as “retaliation” for the Epic lawsuit.
Yet despite mounting bills from the litigation - no further price adjustments have been made.
