Same for me. Nothing works. Has anyone successfully submitted a claim? Pretty sure Apple has to pay $0 for this “settlement” because the site is broken and work accept legitimate serials numbers OR find serial numbers for the ones you don’t still have.
Apple will pay a minimum of $310M and maximum of $500M, depending on number of claims. Once the stratospheric lawyer fees are removed, if the number of claims submitted times $25 is between $310M and $500M, that's how much Apple will pay. If it's
less, then each person will get whatever the non-lawyer-portion of $310M divided by the number of claims. If it's more, each gets their share of $500M minus fees. That's why the settlement is for "about" $25.
So while suppressing the number of claims could save Apple up to $190M, they're still out three hundred mil, and if only ten people were able to submit claims they each just won the lottery.
That said, I successfully submitted a claim for a 6 using the lookup tool. No issues at all with that one.
I
wasn't able to submit a claim for a 7, though, using either the lookup or actual serial number. I know people are having trouble with 6 and 6s as well, but if you look at when iOS 11.2 was released (Dec 2, 2017, 11.2.1 update on Dec 13) and when you need to have installed it by for the claim to be valid (Dec 21, 2017), that's less than a 3 week window. It's certainly possible that some/many 7 owners did
not update right away so their device isn't technically eligible.
Whether that's the reason the claims are being denied is a completely different question, and I really wish the form specified the reason when it rejected a serial number. I'd like to know if Apple has proof from signing cert logs or whatnot when I installed the OS on that device and it's really a no-go, or if there's something else that's not working.
I’m sure Apple tracks many things related to your device. I’m not concerned any of it will wind up where it shouldn’t be.
I'm not particularly concerned about a database of when free OS updates were installed on what particular hardware ID, either, and I suspect it's tracked in a similar way to anything you download from the App Store (although unlike the App Store, it's possible to download an OS and not install it for some period of time; I don't know if iOS can be updated completely offline, I've never tried).
That said, it would still be nice to know that Apple is logging and storing every iOS update performed, mapped to serial number and associated AppleID owner at the time.