a 17-year old from Tennessee exposed apples technique of intentionally
slowing down older iPhones to force users to upgrade something that could
end up costing the company billions of dollars in class-action lawsuits
Tyler Barney a high school student in Mount Juliet said he discovered
decreased performance has to do with phones lithium-ion batteries when his
iPhone 6's became buggy according to The Tennessean it was a big
mess all the time even typing was painful seconds passed between
keystrokes he said in a press release sent to outlets Friday Barney said that
while he waited on the new updated operating system to be released by Apple
he tried his brother's older model iPhone 6 though the phone was an older
model it was about a year younger and he said it was noticeably faster he decided
to look into why that might be and found a suggestion that he replaced his
battery when he did his phone sped up instantly
Barney then took to the message board website reddit where he posts under the
username tech fire to share his findings that Apple intentionally slows iPhones
to extend their lives and stop them from shutting down his battery's age and
become less effective his post went viral and led to Apple's admission
throttling phones to extend their life and stop them shutting down as batteries
age and become less effective the discovery has triggered class-action
lawsuits from angry customers around the world and will likely cause the company
billions of dollars in legal fees on Thursday Apple issued an unprecedented
apology and published a letter saying we know that some of you feel Apple has let
you down and revealed it is slashing the price of a replacement battery and
planning to show users exactly how much their battery has degraded we apologize
there's been a lot of misunderstanding about this issue so we would like to
clarify and let you know about some changes we're making first and foremost
we have never and would never do anything to intentionally shorten the
life of any Apple product or degrade the user experience to drive customer
upgrades Apple said our goal has always been to create products that our
customers love and making iPhones last as long as possible is an important part
of that Apple said it is reducing the price of
an out of warranty iPhone battery replacement by $50 from $79 to $29 for
anyone with an iPhone 6 or later whose battery needs to be replaced starting in
late January and available worldwide through December 2018 the firm will also
cut prices around the world but has not yet revealed the pricing outside the US
in the UK a replacement battery costs 79 pounds early in 2018 it will issue an
iOS software update with new features that give users more visibility into the
health of their iPhones battery so they can see for themselves if its condition
is affecting performance the firm said last week it slows down phones to extend
their life and stop them from shutting down as batteries age and become less
effective triggering lawsuits across the world in addition to South Korea's
Communications Commission has reportedly asked for an explanation of the issue
from Apple while in France a consumer group has filed filed preliminary legal
complaints in court we are hoping to get some answers on whether Apple
intentionally restricted the performance of old iPhones and tried to hide this
from customers the Korean Commission said French consumer Association called
hop standing for stop planned obsolescence has filed preliminary legal
complaints in court against Apple and Epson Hopf said it filed its complaint
against Apple in Paris on Wednesday a prosecutor opened an investigation into
Epson last month a judicial source said on Thursday following a complaint filed
in September by hop in a court in the Paris suburb of non ter ladies Yasir
co-founder of hop told Reuters the aim of both complaints was to apply the
French consumer law which was modified in 2015 to include the notion of planned
obsolescence Apple is already facing lawsuits in the United States over
accusations of having defrauded iPhone users by slowing down devices without
warning to compensate for poor battery performance under French law companies
risk fines of up to 5% of their annual sales for deliberately shortening the
life of their products to spur demand to replace them all the u.s. lawsuits filed
in US district courts in California New York and Illinois seek class-action to
represent potentially millions of iPhone owners nationwide a similar case was
lodged in Israeli Court on Monday the newspaper
Haaretz reported one of the lawsuits filed Thursday in San Francisco said
that the battery's inability to handle the demand created by processor speeds
without the software patch was a defect rather than curing the battery defect by
providing a free battery replacement for all affected iPhones Apple sought to
mask the battery defect according to the complaint the plaintiff in that case is
represented by attorney Jeffrey Fazio who represented plaintiffs in a 53
million dollar settlement with Apple in 2013 over its handling of iPhone
warranty claims the problem now seen is that users over the last year could have
blamed an ageing computer processor for app crashes and sluggish performance and
chose to buy a new phone when the true cause may have been a weak battery that
could have been replaced for a fraction of the cost some of the lawsuits state
if it turns out that consumers would have replaced their battery instead of
buying new iPhones had they known the true nature of Apple's upgrades you
might start to have a better case for some sort of misrepresentation or fraud
said rory van Lew a Boston University professor specializing in consumer
technology law but Chris Hoofnagle faculty director for the Berkeley Center
for Law and Technology said in an email that Apple may not have done wrong we
still haven't come to consumer protection norms around aging products
Hoofnagle said pointing to a device with a security flaw as an example he said
the ethical approach could include degrading or even disabling
functionality the lawsuits Econ specified damages in addition to in some
cases reimbursement a couple of the complaints seek court orders barring
apple from throttling iphone computer speeds were requiring notification in
future instances stephan Bogdanovich and dakotas piece from los angeles have
filed a lawsuit with the US District Court for the Central District of
California they are accusing Apple of interfering with their devices without
consent the pair are trying to get the case certified to cover all people in
the United States who owned an Apple phone older than the iPhone 8 their
application for the lawsuit states plaintiffs and class members never
consented to allow defendants to slow their iPhones as a result of defendants
wrongful actions plaintiffs and class members had their phone slowed down and
thereby it interfered with plaintiffs and class
members use or possession of their iPhones a second lawsuit filed by five
plaintiffs in the Northern District of the state of Illinois accuses Apple of
deliberately keeping its power management features under wraps to
persuade people to upgrade to newer devices Apple's iOS updates purposefully
neglected to explain that it's purposeful throttling down of older
model devices and resulting lost or diminished operating performance could
be remedied by replacing the batteries of these devices the lawsuit states
instead Apple's decision to purposefully slow down or throttle down these devices
was undertaken to fraudulently induced consumers to purchase the latest iPhone
versions of the iPhone 7 as well as new phones such as the iPhone 8 and iPhone
10 in a statement sent to MailOnline a spokesman for Apple said our goal is
to deliver the best experience for customers which includes overall
performance and prolonging the life of their devices lithium-ion batteries
become less capable of supplying peak current demands when in cold conditions
have a low battery charge or as they age over time which can result in the device
unexpectedly shutting down to protect its electronic components last year we
released a feature for iPhone 6 iPhone 6s and iPhone se to smooth out the
instantaneous peaks only one needed to prevent the device from unexpectedly
shutting down during these conditions we've now extended that feature to
iPhone 7 with iOS 11.2 and plan to add support for other products in the future
a consumer watchdog that evaluates electronic gadgets performance sparked
the outcry after it found that processing power of older models is
limited once battery life begins to suffer Apple has come under fire for not
being clear with users about the software update or explaining when
throttling happens the update reduces this drain on resources allowing the
phones to continue operating the drop in performance came to light in benchmark
tests from Toronto based firm Geekbench it found that on certain versions the
Apple operating system phones with older batteries achieved much lower
performance scores battery capacity is expected to decrease as they age but
processor performance should stay the same however users with older iPhones
with lower than expected Geekbench scores have reported that replacing the
battery increases their score as well as the performance of the
geek bench developer John Poole decided to analyze the results of a number of
iPhone six and seven models running various versions of iOS he found that an
update issued to fix the sudden shutdown issue when users found their iPhone 6
was turning off when it's battery reached half charge was to blame this
resulted in the poor performance results observed writing in a blog post mr.
Poole said it appears the problem is widespread and will only get worse as
phones and their batteries continue to age I believe as do others that Apple
introduced a change to limit performance when battery condition decreases past a
certain point if the performance drop is due to the sudden shutdown fix users
will experience reduced performance without notification users expect either
full performance or reduced performance with the notification that their phone
is in low-power mode this fix creates a third unexpected state without this
warning mr. Poole believes that the fix will cause users to believe their phone
is slow so they should replace it rather than the battery which is actually at
fault this will likely feed into the planned obsolescence narrative he added
every time Apple launches a new handset people seemingly flocked to Google to
ask why their current iPhone or iOS is slow this trend has been seen every year
since Apple released the iPhone 3G in 2008 explanations for the slowness range
from Apple's iOS causing problems on older devices to the firm deliberately
slowing down old phones to make people buy the new handsets this latter
explanation is known as planned or built in obsolescence this is the idea that
manufacturers deliberately make their products in such a way that they become
out-of-date sooner by doing this the companies can encourage customers to buy
the latest model of a certain product this also stimulate
you
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