Consumer Group Sues Apple in Belgium and Spain Over iPhone Throttling

[willyx]

Thanks for not reading what I wrote.

You’re making assumptions about the subjection observations of people you don’t know.

The feature didn’t turn the device into a brick suddenly. Performance was only “throttled” at key moments in time when the battery may not have been able to support a given operation/activity.

In other words, were all these people really doing things on their phone which caused speed to be “throttled” so often and so significantly that they felt they must get a new phone because it wasn‘t “fast enough” anymore?

You have no idea. You’re just jumping on a sloganeering bandwagon because it feels good and righteous (which is a lot of what’s wrong with discourse in society today, actually).

You don’t know, but that’s not a possibility you probably entertain often, from the sound of it. As for me? I don’t know either. But I’m doubtful the infrequently adjusted speed of the devices, for the vast majority of normal, casual phone users, did not make the devices seem unusable to the point of requiring replacement. People look for excuses to drop money on new expensive devices all the time, regardless of whether they truly “need” it. Sadly, in this consumeristic world, this sort of activity is what passes for fulfillment, as we lose sight of the meaningful things in life.

That's because you try to divert the attention from what I was discussing with the person I originally replied to by talking about "perceptions" and number of people affected. That was not what I was discussing.

Is this move by Apple causing anticipated degraded performance and thus obsolescence in their devices? Yes.

Did users know they had alternatives other than replacing the device to mitigate the degraded performance? No.

The move is unethical and apparently illegal too in more and more countries, regardless of how many people were affected.

Batteries go bad. Pretty common knowledge.

Forced throttlings as a result of degraded batteries are not common knowledge.

 

[kc9hzn]

Agreed. Further to this... the throttle wasn't switched on/off pursuant to your battery's capacity. It was switched on (and stayed on) after a software update. It didn't matter how old/new your battery was, or whether you got it replaced. This update maliciously throttled your phone.

IMO Apple's excuse doesn't checkout. It's a retrospective excuse that their lawyers cooked up as a legal defence after they were caught with their pants down.

Apple knows 100% that there's no code saying 'if [battery health] < [value] then [throttle phone'. The algorithm is 'if phone model = [iphone 6...etc] then [throttle phone]'.

If your battery's gone bung within the period of its warranty and Apple's trying to disguise that (so you don't ask them for a new one) then that's a whole new can of worms! Either way, the purpose was never to help customers. It's not like they were sued $$$ for handing out free battery replacements!

The “throttle was always on”, sure, but it wasn’t actively throttling unless you were pulling a voltage peak. It didn’t permanently slow down the device, at best it meant that perhaps your game ran a little slower or that it took a little longer to take a picture. In other words, unless your battery was on its last legs, you weren’t getting throttled in day to day usage.

 

[kc9hzn]

That's because you try to divert the attention from what I was discussing with the person I originally replied to by talking about "perceptions" and number of people affected. That was not what I was discussing.

Is this move by Apple causing anticipated degraded performance and thus obsolescence in their devices? Yes.

Did users know they had alternatives other than replacing the device to mitigate the degraded performance? No.

The move is unethical and apparently illegal too in more and more countries, regardless of how many people were affected.


Forced throttlings as a result of degraded batteries are not common knowledge.

Let’s try a counterfactual.
“Did users know they had alternatives other than replacing the dece to mitigate the unexpected shutdowns? No.”

“Repeated shutdowns as a result of degraded batteries are not common knowledge.”

Both of these statements are true. And, as someone who noticed random shutdowns but wouldn’t have really noticed throttling during peak usage, I’d say that Apple made the better, more customer friendly tradeoff. Could they have been more transparent about it? Sure, but you’d better sing the same tune when Google or Microsoft makes major, unpublicized changes that impact performance on their devices/software, too.

Are you seriously telling me that you’d be less likely to buy a new phone if it randomly shut down when you’d try to take a picture or play an intensive game than if it got a little slower? That’s what your argument hinges on, the idea that performance is somehow sacrosanct and comes before, I dunno, actually being able
to use the advertised features you bought the device for. Are most people, sans conspiracy theory, really going to notice some slight slowdown at peak usage, considering that iPhones are intentionally designed to minimize and cluster peak usage (specifically to reduce hits on the battery and save energy)?

Seriously, you guys are like arguing with conspiracy theorists. You’ve already reached your conclusion, even if the data (anecdotal though it may be) doesn’t really match up. People were talking about perceived slowdowns on the iPhone 5c and 5s, and those never had the peak usage throttling feature.

 

[kc9hzn]

Apple knows 100% that there's no code saying 'if [battery health] < [value] then [throttle phone'. The algorithm is 'if phone model = [iphone 6...etc] then [throttle phone]'.

That’s pure conjecture on your part. You have no more access to iOS’s code than I do. Besides there’s a world of difference between an “always on” throttle that only throttles when it needs to to prevent shutdown and “always on” that continually slows down the phone. You have no evidence that it’s the latter. (IIRC, incidentally, the throttle wasn’t engaged until you had a random shutdown anyway, it’s not like it was engaged the moment you bought the phone.) It’s the difference between an always on speaker that listens to a keyword locally before opening a connection to remote servers and an always on speaker that keeps an audio connection to a remote server alive at all times. You could call both “always on”, but only one of them is constantly recording.

Also, I’m a power user, and I doubt I’d notice occasional or general slowdown (in fact, I don’t think I really did, despite owning an iPhone 6s with a battery that was < 80% health), while I certainly did notice random battery shutdowns at 50% with my iPhone 5s and wondered what was going on.

 

[willyx]

Let’s try a counterfactual.
“Did users know they had alternatives other than replacing the dece to mitigate the unexpected shutdowns? No.”

“Repeated shutdowns as a result of degraded batteries are not common knowledge.”

Both of these statements are true. And, as someone who noticed random shutdowns but wouldn’t have really noticed throttling during peak usage, I’d say that Apple made the better, more customer friendly tradeoff. Could they have been more transparent about it? Sure, but you’d better sing the same tune when Google or Microsoft makes major, unpublicized changes that impact performance on their devices/software, too.

Are you seriously telling me that you’d be less likely to buy a new phone if it randomly shut down when you’d try to take a picture or play an intensive game than if it got a little slower? That’s what your argument hinges on, the idea that performance is somehow sacrosanct and comes before, I dunno, actually being able
to use the advertised features you bought the device for. Are most people, sans conspiracy theory, really going to notice some slight slowdown at peak usage, considering that iPhones are intentionally designed to minimize and cluster peak usage (specifically to reduce hits on the battery and save energy)?

Seriously, you guys are like arguing with conspiracy theorists. You’ve already reached your conclusion, even if the data (anecdotal though it may be) doesn’t really match up. People were talking about perceived slowdowns on the iPhone 5c and 5s, and those never had the peak usage throttling feature.

If you see your phone shutting down while having some battery remaining, first thing you do is get an appointment at the Apple Store, especially after only 2 years (the time a battery usually lasts in good condition). Nobody expects its phone to shut down while having battery, especially that soon.

Conversely, people expect their hardware to eventually slow down as more updates come up. If you see the phone slowing down, you're infinitely more likely to think hardware cannot sustain iOS anymore (as it has happened with previous iPhones) and you will most likely not go to an appointment for repair for that. If you keep waiting, the battery will degrade more and by the end of the third year, the iPhone will be unusably slow, making a stronger case for you to seek a new one.

If you had gone to an appointment for the slowdown, Geniuses would have never told you that a battery swap would solve the problem, because Apple itself was consciously HIDING that very fact.

I would like to know how many people went to the Genius Bar saying their phone was freaking slow and were advised to buy a new device. I guess a few or so.

 

[I7guy]

If you see your phone shutting down while having some battery remaining, first thing you do is get an appointment at the Apple Store, especially after only 2 years (the time a battery usually lasts in good condition). Nobody expects its phone to shut down while having battery, especially that soon.

The signs of a battery dying are fairly easy to spot though, I would think.

Conversely, people expect their hardware to eventually slow down as more updates come up.

This was the expectation with 32 bit devices. However, ios 12, knocked that expectation out of the door. Generally the 6s and above haven't been slowed down by updates.

If you see the phone slowing down, you're infinitely more likely to think hardware cannot sustain iOS anymore (as it has happened with previous iPhones) and you will most likely not go to an appointment for repair for that. If you keep waiting, the battery will degrade more and by the end of the third year, the iPhone will be unusably slow, making a stronger case for you to seek a new one.

If you had gone to an appointment for the slowdown, Geniuses would have never told you that a battery swap would solve the problem, because Apple itself was consciously HIDING that very fact.

I would like to know how many people went to the Genius Bar saying their phone was freaking slow and were advised to buy a new device. I guess a few or so.

Trying to make a leap of what people think with the first sentence. I have an xs max and sometimes it's slow. I don't think it's the battery or the updates, computers slow down for various reasons, including slow wireless. People have posted here, they have been affected by the power management and yet haven't noticed their phones have "slowed".

At any rate, Apple could have been more transparent about, but probably learned a bit about how to manage battery life more effectively.

 

[mi7chy]

Apple was pretty clever. Would've fooled me and I don't fall for scams easily. The proper thing to do was to announce a battery defect recall with free replacement instead of silently masking it.

 

[s66]

No, a phone shutting down randomly and for no comunicated reason is likely to give you a bad reputation as a company and presumably a lot of under warranty claims, as opposed to a phone slowing down its performance.

The timing is off for "under warranty claims": The (limited) warranty was long expired before the batteries degraded.

 

[s66]

Apple was pretty clever. Would've fooled me and I don't fall for scams easily. The proper thing to do was to announce a battery defect recall with free replacement instead of silently masking it.

Batteries wear out, that's normal for ALL of them. Warranties typically exclude them for that reason.

 

[s66]

The signs of a battery dying are fairly easy to spot though, I would think.

I had such an affected iPhone before the software patch that saved it.

No it was NOT easy to spot at all that the cause was the battery:
- The device turned off (like in crashes) without any clear correlation to the status of the battery. It did it on fully charged and nearly empty battery levels.
- It crashed a few times when receiving a phone call and answering that which annoyed me massively as it made it seem I had hung up on the other side and then turned my phone off - "rude".
- When you turned it back on there was still plenty of charge left in the battery, it's just that it could not deliver enough of that remaining charge left fast enough to keep up with the demands of the system anymore.
That's also why the reduction of peak loads onto the battery fixed these problems so beautifully.

While I have an engineering degree and as such really do understand basic electricity, batteries, etc: it never led me to think the battery was the cause in all honesty. I assumed it was a crashing device either due to bad hardware or bad software - strangely enough the software seemed to work well enough for others, so I assumed for a while my phone itself had a hardware problem somewhere. Something like a faulty contact or so - but I didn't want to open it up and from the outside there was nothing to point to the battery at all.
It did not happen often enough to get frustrated enough to go for immediate action, but it did happen enough for me to consider switching phones to a newer model to get rid of the problem.

 

[s66]

If you see your phone shutting down while having some battery remaining, first thing you do is get an appointment at the Apple Store, especially after only 2 years (the time a battery usually lasts in good condition). Nobody expects its phone to shut down while having battery, especially that soon.

So you claim the first thing (your words!) you do is to get an appointment at the Apple Store after your device crashes for unknown reasons especially when it's out of warranty?
Get real.

It's not like it "turned off" and gave you any indication as to why or what was happening. It was like "flick of the switch" / "crash" off what happened. No indication at all that there was something wrong with the battery. I owned one of the affected phones!

As to the so-called slowdown: I never noticed anything of it. I'm pretty sure the only way to notice it was to use speedtest tools, not normal usage as the only times it happens is under peak load.

Apple should be applauded by consumer rights groups instead of being sued over this. They made the phones a lot better, more usable, and last much longer. This at a trade-off of being a tiny bit slower under peak load - unnoticable unless you were testing the speed with tools to measure that speed. Trade-offs such as that are part of making things - phones or other.

 

[steve09090]

No, a phone shutting down randomly and for no comunicated reason is likely to give you a bad reputation as a company and presumably a lot of under warranty claims, as opposed to a phone slowing down its performance.

If that was the case, then Apple why should they be sued? If it's reputations, then that’s Apples problem, not a matter for lawyers, courts and greedy plaintiffs

 

[I7guy]

I had such an affected iPhone before the software patch that saved it.

No it was NOT easy to spot at all that the cause was the battery:
- The device turned off (like in crashes) without any clear correlation to the status of the battery. It did it on fully charged and nearly empty battery levels.
- It crashed a few times when receiving a phone call and answering that which annoyed me massively as it made it seem I had hung up on the other side and then turned my phone off - "rude".
- When you turned it back on there was still plenty of charge left in the battery, it's just that it could not deliver enough of that remaining charge left fast enough to keep up with the demands of the system anymore.
That's also why the reduction of peak loads onto the battery fixed these problems so beautifully.

While I have an engineering degree and as such really do understand basic electricity, batteries, etc: it never led me to think the battery was the cause in all honesty. I assumed it was a crashing device either due to bad hardware or bad software - strangely enough the software seemed to work well enough for others, so I assumed for a while my phone itself had a hardware problem somewhere. Something like a faulty contact or so - but I didn't want to open it up and from the outside there was nothing to point to the battery at all.
It did not happen often enough to get frustrated enough to go for immediate action, but it did happen enough for me to consider switching phones to a newer model to get rid of the problem.

Aren’t the points you mentioned, exactly the signs of a dying battery?

 

[s66]

Aren’t the points you mentioned, exactly the signs of a dying battery?

Not using hindsight for these devices, nor deep experience with lithium based batteries: it was not for me at the time.
It is still not for the general population: They will still just look at the charge remaining as the only indicator they care or know about.

If I look at lead based batteries: The failure modes I knew of at the time didn't include one where the internal impedance increased.
If I look at lithium based batteries in laptops and the like: still not a commonly known failure mode where the internal impedance becomes a problem as such (but swelling, not holding a charge etc: are well-known failure modes)

Looking back in time (using the hindsight experience): yes it was an indication the battery was going bad in these devices.

But even if I look back at research from a few years ago, such as this: http://www.batteries2020.eu/publications/201509EPE15/Ageing.pdf , the degradation and failure modes of modern batteries is not all that well-known, esp. not by the general public.

 

[nitramluap]

no, it’s dependant on how old the battery was. if the battery was extremely old, the iPhone would randomly shut down because background tasks would randomly start, causing a jump in voltages in which a battery couldn’t deliver.

Nope. Then timing of it occurring for me was EXACTLY when it was occurring for everyone else, and not long after that they released an update which fixed it. It was only after lots of complaining that they added the ability for people to SEE the battery's 'health' in Settings.

Honestly... mountain out of a mole hill. But people always like to blame anyone for everything.

 

[farewelwilliams]

Nope. Then timing of it occurring for me was EXACTLY when it was occurring for everyone else, and not long after that they released an update which fixed it. It was only after lots of complaining that they added the ability for people to SEE the battery's 'health' in Settings.

Honestly... mountain out of a mole hill. But people always like to blame anyone for everything.

no. iphone 7 users were not experiencing shutdowns or throttles at the same time as 6 users because the batteries were still new. 6s users were starting to experience it so later apple included 6s as part of the throttling. and then added the 7.

 

[djgamble]

If you see your phone shutting down while having some battery remaining, first thing you do is get an appointment at the Apple Store, especially after only 2 years (the time a battery usually lasts in good condition). Nobody expects its phone to shut down while having battery, especially that soon.

Conversely, people expect their hardware to eventually slow down as more updates come up. If you see the phone slowing down, you're infinitely more likely to think hardware cannot sustain iOS anymore (as it has happened with previous iPhones) and you will most likely not go to an appointment for repair for that. If you keep waiting, the battery will degrade more and by the end of the third year, the iPhone will be unusably slow, making a stronger case for you to seek a new one.

If you had gone to an appointment for the slowdown, Geniuses would have never told you that a battery swap would solve the problem, because Apple itself was consciously HIDING that very fact.

I would like to know how many people went to the Genius Bar saying their phone was freaking slow and were advised to buy a new device. I guess a few or so.

Exactly!!!

Best case scenario Apple tried to hide prematurely failed batteries in an attempt to save $$$ on replacements.

Worst case scenario they purposely throttled phones in order to force users to upgrade.

Take your pick. As the courts have ruled in both the USA and Belgium... Apple were naughty! I'm a fanboy like everybody else. However, This was a clear example of Apple getting caught red handed.

 

[djgamble]

Nope. Then timing of it occurring for me was EXACTLY when it was occurring for everyone else, and not long after that they released an update which fixed it. It was only after lots of complaining that they added the ability for people to SEE the battery's 'health' in Settings.

Honestly... mountain out of a mole hill. But people always like to blame anyone for everything.

Agreed 100%.

I have an iPhone 6 and didn't notice it. BUT... they wronged us and got caught out. It's an obscure trick that they thought nobody would catch out. Some smarty pants did and we're still hearing about it today because it's pretty difficult to detect and prove such things.

It's been tested by courts and Apple can afford the best lawyers money can buy. Their 'we were actually trying to help people' excuse failed. To me this is the bigger sin. They're like 5 year old's getting caught red handed... 'well who put red paint all over my new leather couch then?!? Oh yyou were trying to IMPROVE my couch were you?!?!? Yeah well let me decide what "improvements" are needed for my new couch thanks mate...'

 

[2979382]

Users should change battery in 3-5 years? I never got a notification from Apple about it.

I never said throttling CPU power down is something inherently bad, but as mentioned - transparency about it would make all the difference. Many in the past would have rather decided to just replace battery instead of buying a new phone, had they known battery life affects performance so much.

Just the fact that this whole situation was made aware to consumers years later and the number of succesfull lawsuits makes it obvious, Apple did not choose the right approach here.

If this need for absolute transparency is a such a huge deal, why is it that pretty much no other device, car, washing machine, boiler or whatever you own, gives you these notification about age related "issues", yet somehow nobody complains about it. If anything, Apple actually tries to make those batteries last as long as possible and not make you throw away your phone prematurely. Do you know how many people still use a 6S or an SE? Tons. I wonder how... oh wait, I know, Apple software that keeps the device working instead of making it useless. You as a consumer don't need to know how a company keeps your device working as long as it's effin' working!

 

[2979382]

Conversely, people expect their hardware to eventually slow down as more updates come up. If you see the phone slowing down, you're infinitely more likely to think hardware cannot sustain iOS anymore (as it has happened with previous iPhones) and you will most likely not go to an appointment for repair for that. If you keep waiting, the battery will degrade more and by the end of the third year, the iPhone will be unusably slow, making a stronger case for you to seek a new one.

This is simply just not true. I don't know what y'all do with your phones all day, but my and many other people's first-hand experience shows, iOS runs just fine on 3-4 and even 5 year old devices. A 3 year old device absolutely CAN sustain iOS and does so beautifully. Maybe don't install a trillion crappy games and poorly optimised social media apps built with React Native and the likes, which are low performers even on a brand new device - software engineer here, so I know what I'm talking about.