Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Businesses Iphone Apple

Apple To Pay $113 Million Settlement Over Its iPhone 'Batterygate' Slowdowns (cnet.com) 60

Posted by msmash from the time-to-pay dept.
Apple is paying $113 million to settle an investigation by 34 states and the District of Columbia over the company's practice of slowing down the performance of older iPhones when their batteries degrade. From a report: Apple's moves weren't announced by the company, but rather proven by internet sleuths. That led regulators and customers alike to criticize the company for not being forthcoming, particularly when asked about it in the past. "Big Tech must stop manipulating consumers and tell them the whole truth about their practices and products," Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, who helped lead the investigation, said in a statement. "I'm committed to holding these goliath technology companies to account if they conceal the truth from their users." Apple will pay Arizona in particular $5 million, with the rest split among other states.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Apple To Pay $113 Million Settlement Over Its iPhone 'Batterygate' Slowdowns More

Apple To Pay $113 Million Settlement Over Its iPhone 'Batterygate' Slowdowns

Comments Filter:

  • 113 million out of 192 billion (Score:5, Insightful)

    by EmagGeek ( 574360 ) on Wednesday November 18, 2020 @02:01PM (#60739638) Journal

    So Apple is giving up 0.06% of its cash hoard to pay the lawyers representing the victims of one of their global scams.

    I'll wait for my postcard check for 17 cents.

    • So small, it's just business as usual. It works out to be less then a dollar a unit. On a phone that started at $649 each.

      When will these settlements be at a real reasonable rate to actively discourage bad behavior? Should have been closer to a value of 25%+ of the sales of those iPhones.

      That would be a wake up call, to all companies, Apple and otherwise.

      • > It works out to be less then a dollar a unit. On a phone that started at $649 each.

        Not just that - it caused many people to buy new phones, even those who were happy with the pre- and post-slowdown performance.

        I strongly suspect $113M is much less than the profit created by the malware.

    • If those affected by this get anything at all, it'll probably be a discount voucher for an Apple product or service (replacement iPhone battery?). At least that's my experience with these types of class-action lawsuits.

      • I got an e-mail from Apple before the settlement informing that I was eligible to join the plaintiffs. They can keep their twenty bucks. My battery still works fine. It might be because I do not use my phone as much as most people or maybe I got lucky. I guess some lawyers are going to get stinking rich, though.

    • Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)

      by hdyoung ( 5182939 )
      Consumers: "Apple, I'm angry that you're adjusting my iPhone so that it doesn't crash frequently when the battery wears out. It's my god-given right as an American to have my iPhone crash repeatedly. I DEMAND you allow my iPhone to crash repeatedly. I'm suing"

      Apple: (shrugs shoulders) "no problem. Here's 100 million dollars and you're phone can be as unstable as you want it".

      Consumer: "Yay a win for freedom!"
      • You missed the entire point or you work for Apple ... or both.
      • Imagine being on a tech site and thinking that decreased battery capacity leads to crashes.

        Imagine thinking it should be illegal for them to make the batteries non-replaceable and then conceal that they're throttling old phones' CPUs.

        • Re:113 million out of 192 billion (Score:4, Insightful)

          by hdyoung ( 5182939 ) on Wednesday November 18, 2020 @06:27PM (#60740682)
          1. I'm confused. The degrading batteries did, in fact, lead to crashes because they couldn't source peaks in current demand from the phones, right? Tell me if I'm wrong but I think that was the core issue. So, Apple slowed down the phones to compensate, under the reasoning that a slower phone is better than one that unexpectedly crashes. Its true that they denied it for a while. Bad on them.

          2. Apple batteries: replaceable by third party vendors or a normal shmoe if you're willing to put some effort into it. People are mad that it's not as easy as replacing the battery in a kids toy. If you feel that strongly about the design of the phone, there are plenty of Androids that fit the bill. Variety of choice is a good thing, right? Why mandate that Apple be the same as Android

          3. Fair enough. Apple should have been up front about what they were doing. What they actually did was done for good engineering reasons, but they weren't transparent about it. The fine is probably deserved. But the transgression doesn't make them the incarnation of Lucifer made flesh. I see a lot of people shouting about Apple's evil, which pales in comparison to the abuses that the rest of the tech titans are doing.

      • All they had to do was ask.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by DRJlaw ( 946416 )

      So Apple is giving up 0.06% of its cash hoard to pay the lawyers representing the victims of one of their global scams.

      I'll wait for my postcard check for 17 cents.

      First, no, this is a lawsuit by governments against Apple, so that money is going to their respective treasuries, not to you.

      Second, the class action suit concerning this was settled and the claims had to be submitted by October 6, 2020. You would have gotten $25 per affected device, if you had paid attention to this, which you apparently didn't

    • Re:113 million out of 192 billion (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Wednesday November 18, 2020 @04:03PM (#60740122)
      I'm normally against Apple's over-controlling shenanigans, but this wasn't a scam. Apple did the right thing here. It's well known within the industry that the amount of charge you can draw from a Li-ion battery decreases with wear. Unmanaged, this can cause the device to suddenly shut off when it tries to draw more power than the worn battery can supply (e.g. your laptop suddenly turns off when "it was still showing 40% battery remaining").

      When a Li-ion battery gets to this state, you have two choices. Replace the battery, or limit the amount of power the device tries to draw at any given moment. While most would prefer the former, either is preferable to the device suddenly shutting off seemingly at random. So Apple was right to try to address this. Their only mistake was not telling people what they were doing and why. That created the false impression that Apple was crippling devices to try to get you to upgrade (which the lawyers then played up for a multi-million dollar payday). When in fact the devices were already crippled due to a worn battery, and Apple's fix in fact allowed you to continue using the device for longer. And thus you could put off replacing the battery or upgrading to a new device.

      It's actually fortunate that the settlement was so small. If it had been large, it would've discouraged companies from trying to address problems by turning major flaws (like devices suddenly shutting off on their own) into minor annoyances (the device merely slows down instead). And resulted in an expensive all-or-nothing approach to problem solving, rather than mitigation strategies which require no additional money out of the pocket of the end user. Crack in your windshield? You're no longer allowed to repair it with clear adhesive, you have to replace the entire windshield (and no it's not free because your insurance covers it - you end up paying for it via higher premiums).

      If you're gonna rail against Apple, do it for something they're doing wrong. Like locking out third party repair centers from fixing their products. Not stuff like this which actually helped customers, it was just portrayed as harming them by lawyers misrepresenting what was actually going on.

      • When a Li-ion battery gets to this state

        You missed the part of where Apple knew about this being a physical problem with the battery and they didn't want to fess up to the issue. It wasn't Apple chose what it felt was best for the user, its what they felt would be the cheapest solution to their own mistake.(in the end, it wasn't the cheapest, but that was the gamble Apple was willing to make at the time).

      • No, I didn't "have two choices." I didn't have any at all, because Apple didn't ask me what I preferred the phone to do.

  • such malarky (Score:4, Insightful)

    by goombah99 ( 560566 ) on Wednesday November 18, 2020 @02:10PM (#60739678)

    You don't have to be an apple fanboy to honestly say that haveing a phone fail gracefully over time maintaining its usability as it's battery life degrades is a feature not a bug. The only arguable issue is if this feature is something a manufactuer is free to decide or if every possible tweak is left to the user. For example, why can't I overclock my iphone? Since apple's niche is to spare the user the need to tweak everyting and make good choices that simplify their lives-- something people gladly pay extra to have--- I think it's obvious they need not have exposed that as a choice for the user but just making a sensible choise for them.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Scoth ( 879800 )

      My problem with this was the lack of transparency and even denial by Apple. I had a couple year old Android phone I had to replace at an inconvenient time because it'd shut off/restart under high load because of an old battery and having a way to underclock it to reduce power usage would have been handy. It'd definitely have been a useful option to have.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Ecuador ( 740021 )

      We've been through this quite a few times. It was a design fault - all other manufacturers manage it so that their batteries can be used without randomly shutting the phone down even when their batteries are not new. Apple decided to "fix" a hardware issue with a software solution that throttles down phones - even phones with what we'd call relatively new (e.g. 1yr old) batteries, and does not tell anyone about it. Reminiscent of Boeing with MCAS, at least Apple is not in charge of transporting people throu

      • huh? they were not shutting phones off they were extending their daily battery life so your phone was... ahem... a phone, all day rather than running out when it's weka battery charge was gobbled to early in the day. How is that a bad idea? You might disagree with the choice, but it's a reasonable choice.

  • Not a scandal! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by BishopBerkeley ( 734647 ) on Wednesday November 18, 2020 @02:39PM (#60739796) Journal

    A little over 3 years ago when I was traveling a lot and my 4-year-old iPhone 5S's battery was not keeping charge very well, I really appreciated the fact that my battery was lasting an extra hour or two. That made the difference between boarding a plane or not because all my boarding passes were electronic.

    Eventually, I found the time to have the battery replaced, and I got back both battery life and performance.

    Then I bought an iPhone X, and sold my newly refreshed iPhone 5S for $400 on ebay. Cha-ching!

    I don't see this as a scandal. Apple made a choice between battery life and performance, and this really benefited a lot people who were in my situation. It clearly did not benefit others, but their reasons for doing so were legitimate.

    And, Apple certainly had nothing to gain from it. Replacing my iPhone 5S battery cost me $30. I don't think anyone else bought a new iphone because their battery was worn out.

    • I see this as a "minor" scandal, which is close to your view. There is a lot of nuance here that people just ignore. Consider that iPhones at least last long enough to have battery issues! The iPhone 5S you mention just recieved an OS point release, that's 7 years of support. Which is just incredible and incomparable to the Android wasteland. Pun fully intended. How is the Nexus 5 doing these days? This so called scandal was first an issue, if I recall, on the 6S which after 5 years is still fully up to dat

    • I just replaced my wife's iphone 7 battery. It was previously reporting 63% capacity in the battery settings app.

      The front screen is pretty much held on by glue, but it was pretty easy to replace the battery. 5 screws, one adhesive gasket, two adhesive tapes under the battery. Didn't have to remove any other parts except a covering plate over the battery connector.

      It was also much cheaper than buying her a new iphone.

    • > It clearly did not benefit others, but their reasons for doing so were legitimate.

      No, they could have checked with the battery controller and not slowed down phones with healthy batteries. They chose not to do this. Ineptitude was their excuse and ill-begotten gains was their reward.

      $113M means this was a profitable choice and the shareholders and lawyers are happy.

    • At that time, I just turned on my Battery Saver mode on my S5. I know some people who leave it on the whole time, because they don't mind the performance hit. Thank God Apl 'invented' the silent slowdown that tricked users into thinking their phone was permanently slow!

    • I don't see this as a scandal. Apple made a choice between battery life and performance, and this really benefited a lot people who were in my situation. It clearly did not benefit others, but their reasons for doing so were legitimate.

      I don't agree at all and neither did the courts in two separate cases. The situation appears to be borne out of a design flaw in which the processors from the iPhone 6 and onward would draw more power during standard operation than the battery could handle after its capacit

  • "Big Tech must stop manipulating consumers and tell them the whole truth about their practices and products," Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, who helped lead the investigation, said in a statement. "I'm committed to holding these goliath technology companies to account if they conceal the truth from their users."

    Perhaps he got something right -- we all know that the "truth" is only in the source.

  • To all those who say that the slowdown is the correct thing to do, I can only say that that would be true if the phone would work at max speed when plugged in. As things were done, Apple reduced the phone's speed also when plugged in, leading to an impression of low performance and time to upgrade. Combined with lack of transparency, I fail to see the incompetence instead of the bad intent.

    Go ahead Apple zealots, mod me down.

    • While I can see how it may see to make sense to you, so you might find it quite surprising that the iPhone will not run on "being plugged in" alone. Why? Because the 2.5W or even 5W charger you plug it into will not satisfy the 10W+ power peaks the system requires. Think about, why did the iPhones in question start running faster when the batter was replaced? They probably would have ran full speed if you connected it to a powerful enough power supply instead of a battery (I've done that in a lab setting wi

      • You make a lot of assumptions, but essentially if a battery can't manage by itself, and a power brick can't manage by itself, then they can still manage it together better than alone. So just saying that a power brick can't deliver enough to reach full power - which I have trouble believing - so still throttling when plugged in is necessary doesn't make sense. At the least the system could throttle less. The way Apple does it is shitty and leads their customers to believe they should get a new phone. As the
  • Wow.. What do affected Apple iPhone owners get ? $.25 ? $113M isn't going to go far, especially after the lawyers get their cut. You have to fight back with your wallet. Don't buy an iPhone.

Slashdot Top Deals

To the landlord belongs the doorknobs.

Close