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Apple Will Soon Send Payments in $500 Million 'Batterygate' iPhone Throttling Lawsuit

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iPhone owners who signed up to receive a payment under Apple's "batterygate" iPhone throttling lawsuit settlement should soon be receiving their payments. As noted by The Mercury News, the judge overseeing the lawsuit has thrown out an appeal from two iPhone owners who were attempting to object to the settlement, clearing the way for the payments to be sent out.

iPhone_6s.jpg

Apple in 2020 agreed to pay $500 million to settle the "batterygate" lawsuit, which accused the company of secretly throttling older iPhone models. The class action lawsuit was open to U.S. customers who had an iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6s, 6s Plus, 7, or 7 Plus running iOS 10.2.1 or iOS 11.2 prior to December 21, 2017.

The lawsuit stemmed from the iOS 10.2.1 update that Apple released in 2017. The software tweaked the performance of older iPhones with degraded batteries to prevent them from shutting down. The processor was effectively throttled down because the battery could not keep up, and some users saw slower performance speeds when this occurred. The only way to restore full performance was to replace the degraded battery.

Apple did not initially tell customers that iOS 10.2.1 introduced performance throttling, which outraged consumers and led to a major headache for Apple, including this class action lawsuit. Apple ultimately apologized for its lack of communication and dropped the price of battery replacements to $29 through the end of 2018.

iPhone owners eligible for a payout would have needed to submit a claim back in 2020, and submissions were open through October 6, 2020. Those who submitted a claim back then will be eligible for a payment, which will be around $65 per claimant.

Article Link: Apple Will Soon Send Payments in $500 Million 'Batterygate' iPhone Throttling Lawsuit
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2023/08/14/apple-batterygate-iphone-lawsuit/
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Reactions: Pinkyyy 💜🍎, danbuter, 2ndStreet and 2 others
Overblown issue. Apple doing the right thing in stabilizing the device by throttling the CPU while Samsung and others say "whelp, your battery is old so it's causing your phone to reboot" and Apple gets the lawsuit while other companies go free.

What a bunch of complainers. 🤦‍♂️

Now, I do agree with the lawsuit that Apple did wrong in failing to notify, but throttling is absolutely the correct course of action which goes above and beyond what other companies fail to do.
 
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Reactions: Pinkyyy 💜🍎, Wowereit, danbuter and 56 others
This is a good case study for those in business leadership positions around the world.

Apple's position before the revelation was basically, "this is on a need to know basis, and you guys don't need to know." Not sure how that logic passed multiple levels of Apple decision making and PR. A key selling point with every new iPhone each year is performance. You can't possibly expect consumers not to be frustrated when they found out.
 
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Yes I remember. Took me months of therapy to recover from the damages incurred by Apple unveiling that after 5 years of intensive use, my battery was no longer up to the tasks and they silently decided to protect my iPhone from completely failing on me by no longer letting it pull the last bits of juice while doing its best to satisfy my hardcore needs. Shocked I was! Thank god the US is blessed with lawyers that volunteer to undo this unforgivable act of ignorance by having Apple bleed while filling their own pockets!
 
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tripsync said:
Overblown issue. Apple doing the right thing in stabilizing the device by throttling the CPU while Samsung and others say "whelp, your battery is old so it's causing your phone to reboot" and Apple gets the lawsuit while other companies go free.

What a bunch of complainers. 🤦‍♂️

Now, I do agree with the lawsuit that Apple did wrong in failing to notify, but throttling is absolutely the correct course of action which goes above and beyond what other companies fail to do.
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The issue is that apple did not tell people and people thought that their phones were broken and thus spent hundreds on new iPhones or battery repair.

Apple not being upfront + benefiting from people buying new iPhones was a very scummy thing of Apple.

Trust is paramount with customers and Apple failed.
 
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Apple in 2020 agreed to pay $500 to settle the "batterygate" lawsuit, which accused the company of secretly throttling older iPhone models. The class action lawsuit was open to U.S. customers who had an iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6s, 6s Plus, 7, or 7 Plus running iOS 10.2.1 or iOS 11.2 prior to December 21, 2017.
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$500.

Isn't that like what Apple makes in 0.0000000036827 seconds?

And that's how many cents each class action member will receive. 🤣
 
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I'm frankly shocked that it was not the typical $50 brand credit type of settlement that seems so common in these cases and ends up being little more than an unscheduled advertising campaign for whatever company was found to have wronged their customers.
 
JPack said:
This is a good case study for those in business leadership positions around the world.

Apple's position before the revelation was basically, "this is on a need to know basis, and you guys don't need to know." Not sure how that logic passed multiple levels of Apple decision making and PR. A key selling point with every new iPhone each year is performance. You can't possibly expect consumers not to be frustrated when they found out.
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There are hundreds of engineering and software tradeoffs made by tech companies each day. Which ones do you need to be notified about? This was only found out by specialists running tests. Very little real world impact and it was the right engineering trade off to avoid failure.

The logic made it though because its absurd to communicate low level battery/processor trade off decisions to consumers.
 
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CIA said:
I submitted for several iPhones. Now I can't even remember how I was going to get the money as I've moved twice since then.
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that’s my worry - for a moment i thought i signed up for a direct payment to my simple bank account which is long gone — but i searched my email and it’s going to my chime account thankfully. i think i have at least three phones worth of payments coming in finally. cheers to us? maybe?
 
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everybodylovesramen said:
that’s my worry - for a moment i thought i signed up for a direct payment to my simple bank account which is long gone — but i searched my email and it’s going to my chime account thankfully. i think i have at least three phones worth of payments coming in finally. cheers to us? maybe?
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What was the email address it came from? I might be able to search my mail as thankfully my email has not changed in over a decade.
 
I still don't get it. Why Apple did not tell upfront what it is trying to do or give option to consumers to let them flip switch in setting if they agree with Apple's proposal to slow speed down to conserve battery.

I would have been happy if Apple distributed $500 millions to investors.
 
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