Apple Hit With Another European Class Action Over Throttled iPhones (techcrunch.com) 59
A third class action lawsuit has been filed in Europe against Apple seeking compensation -- for what Italy's Altroconsumo consumer protection agency dubs "planned obsolescence" of a number of iPhone 6 models. From a report: The action relates to performance throttling Apple applied several years ago to affected iPhones when the health of the device's battery had deteriorated -- doing so without clearly informing users. It later apologized. The class action suit in Italy is seeking $72.8 million in compensation -- based on at least $72.8 in average compensation per iPhone owner. Affected devices named in the suit are the iPhone 6, 6S, 6 Plus and 6S Plus, per a press release put out by the umbrella consumer organization, Euroconsumers, which counts Altroconsumo a a member. The suit is the third to be filed in the region over the issue -- following suits filed in Belgium and Spain last month. A fourth -- in Portugal -- is slated to be filed shortly.
Wilful ignorance (Score:5, Insightful)
Particular when applied to a manufacturer that issues updates and software supports their phones amongst the longest in the industry.
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There was one. My 6S was basically unusable outdoors in the winter before the throttling. If the phone got cold, battery output got reduced and the phone would constantly shut down. I'd bring it indoors and plug it in, and within a few minutes I'd have plenty of charge and it would boot right up.
There was a big fuss over the initial 6S phones because a lot of the early ones had defective batteries. They recalled them, but a lot of people having problems were told their batteries were fine. That ended up lea
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No, all phone batteries (and laptop batteries, etc.) drop in capacity as they age - that's the physics of how those batteries work. Most phones just fail when the voltage drops below what the phone requires. Most laptops, and iPhones, throttle CPU load in order to stay within the battery capacity. The only problem with what Apple did is that they didn't communicate it to users. But, really, would you rather have a phone that crashes randomly, or a phone that, like your laptop, slows down when the battery ch
Re:Wilful ignorance (Score:5, Insightful)
The issues was that Apple had designed and built a phone in which the battery deteriorated at an accelerated rate - well inside the reasonable lifespan of the product - yet Apple said and did nothing. Instead, they issued software updates to try and mask the problem by altering the performance of the product.
There were numerous remedies that Apple could have attempted. They could have come clean. They could have design a phone which made battery replacement an easy and cost-effective piece of maintenance.
Apple chose to not do those things. Indeed, it was only when overwhelming, incontrovertible evidence was produced via testing, that they finally admitted something they have previously denied doing.
Personally, I do not agree with the proposed remedy in this instance. I think a better solution would be to compel Apple to replace batteries in any iPhone [or iPad or iPod or similar device] for a nominal fee - and perhaps to ensure that the "nominal fee" is set fairly, limit what Apple could charge to a maximum of something in the range of 5-15% of the original purchase cost of the product. [Wild guess on those percentages, just trying to illustrate the point].
It isn't all that easy to come up with meaningful non-technology analogies to think about Apple's conduct here. One example might be: imagine a car manufacturer selling a car with a claimed top speed or acceleration from standstill to say 60mph. The company discover that the vehicle's engine degrades with time so that after 3-4 years of daily use, it can only reach 70, 80% of the original top speed. Imagine if the company solved this "problem" by downloading a software fix to the dashboard of every vehicle from that model range which re-calibrated the speedometer to mask the problem. Can you imagine how owners would react?
I really don't want to see Apple unduly harmed by the sanction that they will attract from what they did. But I'd love to see the EU issue rulings to require Apple to maintain the performance of the devices they sell, to make those devices easier to repair and maintain. You have to remember that part of the reason that Apple don't want to make it easy to repair devices is to force you to buy a new handset/laptop/tablet/etc. on a regular basis.
So there's absolutely direct consumer harm from their practices. People were buying all-new handsets when a simple battery swap could have solved the problem.
We just need to find a way of keeping corporations honest. And remember - maintaining a recycling an existing handset is far better for the environment. Fitting a new battery to a phone or tablet should have a much lower impact on the environment compared with buying an all-new device.
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The issues was that Apple had designed and built a phone in which the battery deteriorated at an accelerated rate - well inside the reasonable lifespan of the product - yet Apple said and did nothing.
Please show me where this was ever established. I suspect you have exactly zero basis for this claim outside of your imagination or similarly unsubstantiated claims from someone else. You're essentially accusing them of taking deliberate steps to produce an inferior product. I'm sure you're familiar with the saying about extraordinary claims.
Re:Wilful ignorance (Score:5, Interesting)
Speaking as someone that had an iPhone 6S, you're flat out wrong here.
I got mine in late November the year they launched. I was having random shutdowns the following months. The pattern was clear - use he phone outdoors in temperatures near freezing and the battery won't be able to keep up. I had many occasions where I'd walk outside in the winter, using my phone for directions, and you'd see the remaining battery rapidly drop, and the phone would shut off. You'd go from 70% to 0% in minutes. Once I got the phone inside the house, it would start working again within minutes, with a charge right about what it said before the rapid decilne.
All batteries output less power when they get cold. The phone couldn't compensate for that, and it was very easy to draw more power than the battery could provide. If you tried hard enough, or had some battery wear, you could have similar issues in warm weather too, but the issue was at its worst in cold weather.
I had this problem constantly. It went away once they introduced the throttling. That throttling was such a welcome change. I never even noticed the slowdown. I just noticed my phone didn't shut itself off when I needed it.
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It wasn't to do with the longevity of the battery, it was a flaw in the design that didn't account for it aging. When batteries age they are unable to provide as much current, or rather the voltage collapses more with a given load.
Because the voltage dropped so much the phone would either crash or the battery percentage would jump from 50% to 2% instantly.
Proper planning for battery aging would have prevented this. It's well known by engineers, entirely expected of lithium batteries as they wear out.
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The practice was to help the phones keep going and not die on high load.
And yet it was a non-configurable performance slowdown forced on users who may not have had any problem beforehand. Don't be so quick to play the wilful ignorance card, the lawsuit is about your right to choose rather than be told to take a performance cut.
Apple could have solved this all but for a checkbox. They didn't.
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If your phone's battery is unable to sustain the brief load required to boot up, your battery is already shot. If that condition has already been reached by a significant number of iPhone6, then the claims of an inadequate design margin are true.
Re: Wilful ignorance (Score:1)
Yep that was me, my 6 worked perfectly until it started to degrade and reboot. March 2015 - March 2018. There was no other reason to replace the phone. Dying in 3 years seems pretty accelerated.
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I got my iPhone 6S in November the year it launched. That first winter I had it, I had problems with it. If I tried to use it outside with temperatures near freezing, it would shut off and not turn back on. Only happend in cold weather. Happened every year until they released the throttle fix.
Finally replaced the battery after 3 years and it was still > 80% original capacity. It was still strong enough that they wouldn't normally have replaced it, but this was when they were offering the discounted repla
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Had they marketed the phone with specs corresponding to the throttled state, it would have been acceptable since the designed in throttle would have provided the needed margin. Had they put in a bigger battery and kept the shiny marketing specs, also fine since the bigger battery would provide the needed margin.
Marketing at one spec and then throttling to a spec that it could actually sustain after the fact, not so fine.
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I had one of these older iPhones until recently and I made sure to intentionally turn on any of the power saving or throttling features that I could to extend the life of the device. I only wish they would have given me additional ability to configure it in that way or even more aggressive
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No, most other phones just start randomly crashing due to power shortages, and you replace the battery (or the whole phone).
Most laptops do what iPhones do, which is to throttle CPU and other power drains to try to keep power drain within what the battery can provide. And by default they don't ask the user for permission, they do what they can to keep working as long as possible as the battery power drops - you have to dig around in obscure settings if you know about the options. And, when people complained
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Lawyers see stupid public opinion, and figure there is money to be made. Of the $72.8 million, two thirds is going to the lawyers if they find ignorant jurors and/or a judge. Of course Apple is not without blame, they sell their hardware with specs valid on the day you receive the phone - similar to Tesla, when you buy one, the range and acceleration is only guaranteed to be true on the day you pick it up - as you car ages, they throttle you (sometimes not to prevent a shutdown, but to prevent the cat catch
Re: Wilful ignorance (Score:2)
overkill (Score:2, Insightful)
Apple was throttling the devices because aging batteries were unable to keep up with the power draw and the phones were shutting down unexpectedly. Apple was genuinely trying to improve the usability of the device. This is kind of like an auto manufacturer that discovered one of their models has an engine computer setting that causes the cars to stop working unexpectedly
Re:overkill (Score:5, Informative)
According to wikipedia, Apple confirmed in December 2016 that some iPhone 6S models manufactured in September and October 2015 had suffered from a battery manufacturing defect. The company stated that this defect was not a safety concern, but that it could diminish capacity, and cause shutdowns to "protect [the device's] electronic components".. So in at least a proportion of cases, the battery degradation was due to a defect. So the question is did Apple deploy the throttling fix to avoid having to replace defective batteries? If so, that's pretty shady.
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Please explain how it is separate. That's just wishful thinking.
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Those specific phones got their batteries replaced for free. And Apple contacted all the owners of those phones to let them know to get a replacement battery. That's pretty much the opposite of Apple trying to force people to buy new phones.
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No, they replaced those batteries immediately.
I argued with them over it at the time. My battery was made during the window of the defective ones, but they said it wasn't from the defective batch so they wouldn't replace it. But from the beginning, my phone would shut itself off if I used it outdoors on cold winter days. The shutdowns went away after they started the throttling.
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About five years ago, I paid a guy at a small cell phone shop $40 to install a new battery (which I supplied) in my iPhone 6. I could have done it myself easily enough, but I didn't have the right tools to open the case. Rather than chance doing damage with "close but no cigar" tools, I thought that was acceptable. So there was the battery cost (about twenty bucks, if I recall correctly), the guy's fee plus the personal time and expense of driving to the shop twice. Let's say my reasonable costs to fix t
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There's no evidence that Apple intentionally sold customers "lousy batteries". There was a manufacturing run with defective batteries, which Apple replaced for free in a recall. But the CPU throttling isn't due to any defect in the batteries - all cell phone batteries lose capacity as they age, due to the physics of how those batteries work. Most phones respond to this by crashing randomly due to power shortages and have to be replaced. What Apple did was extend the usable life of the phone by implementing
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Obvious? No it isn't. At about the same apple had a battery recall. How do you know for sure any battery issues that cause unexpected shutdown was due to battery age or manufacturing error. According to Apple, the problem is only associated with a “very small” number of devices, detailing “a limited serial number range that were manufactured between September and October 2015.”
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Rather, it is an attempt to cover up premature obsolescence due to inadequate design margins.
The correct fix would be a replacement battery, but Apple made that obviously necessary step somewhere between outrageously difficult and impossible.
In the design phase, they COULD have specified a battery with sufficient capacity that the problem wouldn't show up within the reasonably anticipated service life of the product, but that might have reduced profit margins or resulted in a phone that couldn't be used to
Sleeping giants. (Score:1)
I foresaw this coming. It was inevitable but I'm disgusted with how long it has taken.
Cell Reception (Score:1)
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you still are facing a restocking fee
Take it back to Nordstrom's.
Planned Obsolesce = Apple (Score:1)
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PCs reached a plateau of maturity many years ago; smartphones, not so much. I think 4 years of OS support is reasonable for a smartphone, given the rate of improvement in hardware. The OS has to grow along with the hardware, and iOS 14 can't be expected to run on every old iPhone. Apple is mostly better in this respect than Android. iOS 14 runs on 2015's iPhone 6S.
Could they make iOS compatible with more older phones by making it more modular, and leave out features on older phones? I'm sure they already do
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But you odn't need a new OS to run an older phone, they just need to supply necessary security patches for the older phones. If they whine that they'd have to hire someone extra for this, then it just proves that they don't actuallly care about supporting their customers. Everywhere I've worked we've had to support software and firmware for older devices; treat your customers well and you retain customers, and treat them like an ATM then the customers will look elsewhere for future business.
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The irony of this complaint is that Apple supports older phones much _better_ than other phone companies. Carriers really suck at providing Android updates, and the non-smartphones never supported updates for customers. There's a reason that Apple has extremely high customer loyalty - they treat their customers much better than the competition does.
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...they just need to supply necessary security patches for the older phones.
They do, though probably not long enough to please everybody. iOS 12, which supports phones all the way back to 2013's 5S, was most recently patched just a couple of weeks ago.
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Which is good. I have a 6S, and I plan on keeping it as long as possible. It's only a few years old Newer phones are just stupidly large and ridiculously expensive, or have a tendency to bend. It does what I need: phone calls, two-factor authentication for work, and the rare need to use the internet when away from home or work.
I do miss the replaceable batteries as that's always the part that wears out first. And the lightning connector sucks (one cable works on my iphone but not my ipad, and the other c
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Yeah, well, my iPad 1 has 256 MB of RAM. Pretty sure iPad OS 14 would not be a pleasant experience. Or even just successfully boot.
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Well if you can run Windows 10 on hardware from the early 90s then you need to video that and publish cause that is a miracle.
But if what you really mean is you can run Windows versions from that timeframe on the hardware then, then sure, that's true of Apple too. Just myself I have a MacBook and iMac from 2009 and both still work like a champ, they just can't be upgraded to the very latest macOS.
But they both are running versions that did come out years after they were manufactured. El Capitain on the Ma
I used to dream that my Android phone throttled (Score:5, Interesting)
but instead when the battery got weak,
it rebooted randomly when it needed peak performance, and the battery couldn't deliver,
and then it rebooted, and lit up the screen with the company logo in black and white background
causing it reboot again... and again...
until battery run out or that I branched it to a charger
I used to dream of throttling my phone, would have saved many situations.
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So you installed an app and everything was fine?
Which is what apple should have done. Put in in the system and told people about it and let them disable it if they wanted. (or better still changed the batter for one that was up to spec).
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Why would you ever want to disable it? The throttling kicks in when the battery can't provide enough power to keep the phone running. Your options are slow it down, or let it shut down with no warning.
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It happened with my Galaxy Note 4, which I still have.
Bought a 15 euro battery on Amazon, opened the cover, swapped in the new battery, done. Took a minute, no tool required.
In fact, I already had the battery, which I used as a backup instead of a power bank.
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>I used to dream of throttling my phone, would have saved many situations.
Gosh, I've dreamed of throttling the *engineers* at GM any number of times while working on my car and losing flesh, but I never thought of throttling the *car* as a solution!
hawk, making the obligatory car analogy