Apple has agreed to pay up to $500 million to settle a long-running class action lawsuit in the United States that accused the company of "secretly throttling" older iPhone models, as reported by Reuters.
Each affected iPhone user in the class would receive $25, according to the preliminary settlement, reviewed by MacRumors. The amount could increase or decrease slightly depending on legal fees and the aggregate value of approved claims, with Apple's total payout to fall between $310 million and $500 million.
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The class includes all former or current U.S. owners of the iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6s, 6s Plus, 7, 7 Plus, and SE running iOS 10.2.1 or later (for the iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6s, 6s Plus, and SE) or iOS 11.2 or later (for the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus), and who ran these iOS versions before December 21, 2017.
Apple has maintained no legal wrongdoing despite agreeing to the settlement. U.S. federal judge Edward J. Davila is expected to preliminarily approve the proposed settlement on April 3, 2020.
The class action lawsuit was filed in December 2017, after Apple revealed that it throttles the maximum performance of some older iPhone models with chemically aged batteries when necessary in order to prevent the devices from unexpectedly shutting down. The complaint called it "one of the largest consumer frauds in history."
Apple introduced a performance management system in iOS 10.2.1, but it did not initially mention the change in the update's release notes. Likewise, in a statement issued a month later, Apple still only mentioned vague "improvements" resulting in a significant reduction in unexpected iPhone shutdowns.
Apple only revealed exactly what the so-called "improvements" were after Primate Labs founder John Poole visualized that some iPhone 6s and iPhone 7 devices suddenly had lower benchmark scores starting with iOS 10.2.1 and iOS 11.2 respectively, despite operating at maximum performance on previous versions.
Apple apologized for its lack of communication in December 2017, and reduced the price of battery replacements to $29 for iPhone 6 and newer through the end of 2018. Apple then released iOS 11.3 with a new feature that enables users to track their iPhone battery's health and performance status.
The performance management system has also been disabled by default since iOS 11.3, and it is only enabled if an iPhone suffers an unexpected shutdown. The performance management can be manually disabled by users as well.
Top Rated Comments
Tell people what you're up to, and why, and maybe even have some arcane way of opting out of this throttling, and not only would most people not care, but they'd be appreciative of the effort.
Be sneaky and take a "my way or the highway" approach and this is what you get.
I do not think anyone has a problem with that but you have to tell the customer you are doing it. That is where Apple went wrong. They tried to hide it instead of being open about it.This is sad. When a phone has an older battery and tries to pull more amps than the battery can provide, the phone has three choices. The first is, turn the phone off. The second is, slow the phone down a bit so it pulls less amperage. The third is, let the battery explode like a thermite grenade. Of the three, option two is the least disruptive.