iPhone Slowdown Lawsuits Ordered to Be Centralized in Northern California District Court

[Royksöpp]

Define ‘optimise’. Apple’s earlier move could well be considered to have optimised older iPhones with aged batteries to perform more reliably ie. Optimised.

Case closed!

Don't play dumb. I'm not talking about batteries. The software needs to be optimized for each individual device. IOS 11 on the iPhone 8 will not run the same on say a 6s or a even a 7. They each need little tweaks to run at optimal performance. Like I mentioned before, one size (software) does not fit all. I know, dare to dream, but that would be the perfect solution.
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14th in education and 37th in health care. The US is nowhere near the best country in the world.

Oh jeez, don't even start with that crap. He was clearly joking. I thought it was funny.

 

[Smartass]

Except this has to do with batteries, not processors.

No it doesnt. My iPhone, after the new 11.3 update, works like a charm. Before that, it ran slower than my 2012 Android phone, and only because apple DECIDED that my battery somehow isn't good enough anymore so they should just throttle my CPU speed by 50%. Well guess what, my battery is still fine (82%) and this just shows how Apple only wanted to force people to buy a new phone. Hope they lose this lawsuit, and they probably will.

 

[Lancer]

Next someone will sue Apple over iOS 11.3 shutting down their iPhone like it now will if over loaded.

 

[Nicksd84]

Lawsuits over this?

This is why we can't have nice things.

Mmmm... no. If you weren’t using a phone that was slowed down, you can’t really speak to it. My 6S was basically unusable. All the while I was thinking it’s time to upgrade. But no, a simple battery swap would fix it. Had they disclosed that. Wouldn’t have been a problem.

 

[I7guy]

Mmmm... no. If you weren’t using a phone that was slowed down, you can’t really speak to it. My 6S was basically unusable. All the while I was thinking it’s time to upgrade. But no, a simple battery swap would fix it. Had they disclosed that. Wouldn’t have been a problem.

I’m pretty sure my phone was throttled because the battery was bad. It was far from unusable, however and at no time did I think of upgrading for that reason.

 

[H2SO4]

The bad publicity already took care of that and is way more effective than a lawsuit.

I’m not sure it did though. They still I’d like to bet still had an eye on profit when pricing that battery at $29.
They still have that nagging software update model that’s actually pretty easy to choose the wrong option. Lots of other stuff they won’t change either.

 

[SoGood]

Mmmm... no. If you weren’t using a phone that was slowed down, you can’t really speak to it. My 6S was basically unusable. All the while I was thinking it’s time to upgrade. But no, a simple battery swap would fix it. Had they disclosed that. Wouldn’t have been a problem.

Unusable? I think that’ll require some legal definition.

 

[Zaft]

They did. Additionally no one reads the bug notes for the iOS release. Literally everyone knows an old battery in old hardware is not as powerful as a brand new battery and brand new hardware. What Apple did was standard practice across multiple industries to prevent shutdowns and explosions...and other unfortunate battery behavior.
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Ummm.... *facepalm* You just negated your original argument.

If a computer slowdown is a function of battery health then there is no point to this lawsuit because that is the nature of computers to begin with. The power surges will degrade device faster if Apple didn't slow them down to the level of speed they could handle for the particular task at hand. That's the reason they implemented this fix.

I’m saying they took to long, Apple only admitted this when they were caught. Also, I did not know that an old battery effects performance. So no it’s not “literally everyone”.

 

[tcgjeukens]

Except this has to do with batteries, not processors.

Over the past months we've seen various corporate statements and many conspiracy theories on the reasons for slowing down your equipment. We might not find the objective "truth", but hard fact is that Apple has the ability and resolve to slow down a piece you own without asking your consent.
Will this be limited to batteries? I don't know.
Will Apple be the only one doing this? Probably not.
When money is involved, enough is never enough.
I don't care about $3.14, but I do care about making a statement to corporations that transparency is driving my buying loyalty.

 

[hawkeye_a]

I've been an Apple fanboy for the better part of my life. Antenna-gate, map-gate, etc...were just noise. This, however, is one of the few times, I cannot support/defend Apple. I think they treated their customers unfairly, and what makes it worse is that they stood to gain financially by doing so IMHO.

I was under the impression that as a battery ages, it would provide power to a device for a shorter time; the device's performance stayed the same.

I'm still running iOS 10 on my iP6S because of these shenanigans.

 

[bollman]

They did. Additionally no one reads the bug notes for the iOS release. Literally everyone knows an old battery in old hardware is not as powerful as a brand new battery and brand new hardware. What Apple did was standard practice across multiple industries to prevent shutdowns and explosions...and other unfortunate battery behavior.
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Ummm.... *facepalm* You just negated your original argument.

If a computer slowdown is a function of battery health then there is no point to this lawsuit because that is the nature of computers to begin with. The power surges will degrade device faster if Apple didn't slow them down to the level of speed they could handle for the particular task at hand. That's the reason they implemented this fix.

Read the original post. The poster stated that laptops do NOT suffer from degraded performance when the battery is dead, they would work at full speed with the charger connected, my argument was that it is not true, even according to Apple documentation.
If the battery is dead, the computer runs at reduced speed and that is not a force of nature. It is a decision made by designers of the system software, to reduce the available performance when the battery cannot handle surges in power and thus prevent sudden shutdowns, exactly how Apple handled iPhones with depleted batteries.
Difference is that when it came to laptops, Apple even had a TS about it, but not for iPhones, until it became a "thing" on the interweb.

 

[jweinraub]

Give me a break. Stop being so glib. As if Australia would handle this so much better?

It's not like this is an open and shut case anyway. You actually have to PROVE wrongdoing in America. You don't just get to speculate and pitchfork and see someone burned at the stake, even if it's probably true. We have this thing called burden of proof.

And by the way, it's one of the many reasons why America is the best country in the world.

The burden of proof for civil cases is completely different than criminal cases. In criminal cases, sure, you have without a shadow of a doubt. Civil cases don't require such high levels of proof.

 

[Krio]

So many puns in one short post! You, sir, or madam, or sir-madam, or whatever your noun of choice may be, have won the day!

I prefer Galactic President Superstar McAwesomeville, but will respond to 'hey you' as well.

 

[78Bandit]

I've got a 6 Plus with the original battery. When 11.3 was released and the throttling was turned off it ran like a brand new phone for a while. Battery health was at 80% which is right at the borderline. Two days later I was using it to browse the internet while the battery percentage was at 27% and it suddenly shut down. Afterward the throttling was reenabled and it was almost depressing how much slower the phone was.

I'll be taking advantage of Apple's battery replacement, but for those that were caught by the throttling while Apple cloaked their fix in misleading statements like "power management improvements" and "Apple doesn't deliberately slow down older devices" and were told "your battery is fine" when they took it to the genius bar, I can see why they would be extremely upset.

Hopefully the design flaw that let the devices draw more power than the battery was capable of delivering as it aged normally has been fixed and this won't be an issue with phones using the A11 and later chips. Shorter run time is acceptable, random shutdowns and constant throttling is not.

 

[Constable Odo]

How many consumers were affected by this slowdown where it actually cost them money to replace their older smartphones with newer ones? Hundreds? Thousands? The news media made such a big deal out of this and Apple gets sued dozens of times. Facebook has a data breach involving 80M users' personal data and I'll bet Facebook isn't being sued as much as Apple was. That's just crazy. No one will be able to prove that Apple deliberately slowed down iPhones to force consumers to upgrade to new iPhones if that's what these lawsuits are all about. The intermittent iPhone shutdowns were real as iPhone batteries certainly do degrade. I would think a slowdown would be better than a total shutdown.

Any wise judge should just throw the cases out of court as a waste of court time or only fine Apple for not informing consumers of the possibility of an iPhone slowdown. Apple has already offered consumers enough with less expensive battery replacements. Facebook is being given a free pass by consumers but Apple isn't. It definitely seems a bit unfair. That's why I believe consumers' concerns about protecting their privacy isn't as great as some people think it is if users aren't going to initiate lawsuits against Facebook. That pretty much proves the #DeleteFacebook movement isn't going to work. Consumers are going to continue to let data harvesting companies like Facebook and Google have their way.

 

[Baymowe335]

By what possible measure could you come to that conclusion? Setting aside military, name one worldwide ranking of countries that supports your position.

Best countries list.

1. USA
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Yes, where one would sue over a hot coffee, incompetently spilled by oneself. Take some responsibility as the world doesn’t owe you.

Don’t take the best parts of our system and throw out exceptions that undermine the best legal system in the world.

 

[Konceptz804]

I dont understand how Apple can be liable for this. ALL lithium-ion batteries degrade over time, no matter the make, or model, they degrade. Anyone with half a clue about how technology works would know this......

 

[Baymowe335]

Be honest though. Have you ever used the word ‘glib’ before zuckerberg this week?

Yes, I went to college.
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The burden of proof for civil cases is completely different than criminal cases. In criminal cases, sure, you have without a shadow of a doubt. Civil cases don't require such high levels of proof.

This is true, but we hold these standards even when they are not of criminal nature. You have to prove wrongdoing, not just make accusations and extort. Does it happen? Sure, but there is no better system.

 

[Nicksd84]

Unusable? I think that’ll require some legal definition.

I’m pretty sure my phone was throttled because the battery was bad. It was far from unusable, however and at no time did I think of upgrading for that reason.

My apologies for being hyperbolic ::sarcasm:: App lag in start ups and response time. Animation stuttering and freezing. Springboard restarts. These have gone away with a new battery. I'm not complaining that Apple did it. Their solution was smart. However, not diclosing that a battery swap would return performance to normal was wrong and should be fined.

 

[kdarling]

I dont understand how Apple can be liable for this. ALL lithium-ion batteries degrade over time, no matter the make, or model, they degrade. Anyone with half a clue about how technology works would know this......

The class actions are not about normal battery loss. Nor are most even about Apple using too small a battery, thus causing a problem to begin with.

Most of the lawsuits are over Apple not telling their customers that they were slowing down their phones, nor letting them know that a new battery would fix things. Thus they claim that Apple was in effect secretly inducing them to upgrade to a new model.

Apple's stores repeatedly told customers that their batteries were okay, while in reality the phones were throttling because the internal software thought otherwise. The store test did not match the OS parameters.

 

[bodonnell202]

You get better and more informative battery software and cheap battery replacements. You already won from this. Enjoy it.

Hey, the bad publicity has had a couple great outcomes already and I'm happy that:
1. iOS 11.3 has turned off throttling on my 6s and gives me info about my battery health
2. I can get my battery replaced for much cheaper this year when and if it makes sense to do so

I guess what I meant to say is that I hope Apple learned something from this and will be more transparent with their customers before attempting something similar.

 

[eoblaed]

lying to customers..... Where you been?

In this case it’s Apple that was in the wrong. All they had to do was tell people.

Lets not kid ourselves here. Had this not been discovered Apple I bet would have kept silent.

The choice was: phone crash, or phone CPU keep its demands in a range the battery could satisfy peak surges at.

Apple put some logic in to keep the phone from crashing. Sure, they could've not, and just let the phones with old batteries keep crashing (not even Apple has figured out how to defy the laws of physics when it comes to aging Li-ion), but it seems to me if I had a choice between a crashed phone, or a slower phone, I'd go with the slower phone. After all, one still works.

No company explains every performance impactful decision they make in a public forum: it would be exhausting and, ultimately, very very few people would care. "We had to make a change to the core asynchronous networking logic; a piece of state was in a critical path and could potentially be double freed by different threads so we had to introduce a mutex to prevent the double free. This could introduce resource contention and impact performance." There would literally be thousands of declarations every release.

I had an iPhone 6 (nice thing) become a paperweight, because Apple decided it should run in degraded mode.

This is why we can’t nice things.

My son had a 5S that kept shutting down on him (crashing) when the battery was at 25% - 30%. Once iOS 11 was installed, it stopped doing that and his phone became significantly more stable.

 

[kemal]

So everyone who can claim they bought a new iPhone because of the iOS slowdown update should get the amount of one year of depreciation of their old iPhone, or $3.84. A random amount determined by lawyers earning $90 million on your behalf.

 

[cmaier]

I dont understand how Apple can be liable for this. ALL lithium-ion batteries degrade over time, no matter the make, or model, they degrade. Anyone with half a clue about how technology works would know this......

It wasn't the degradation that was the problem. It was the "reduce the performance of the device to compensate for the degradation, without telling purchasers, and potentially reducing it such that the actual device performance is less than the performance that was promised to potential customers prior to sale, thus (arguably) fraudulently inducing customers to purchase the device expecting one level of performance while actually receiving a lower level of performance" that is the alleged problem.

 

[SoGood]

Best countries list.

1. USA
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Don’t take the best parts of our system and throw out exceptions that undermine the best legal system in the world.

Sorry to say it but many inside and outside the US think the US legal system has gone way overboard with the legal profession being the only beneficiary. Frivolous law suits that clog the system and citizens blame others for one’s own fault.