Mass Lawsuit Against Apple Over iPhone Batteries Can Go Ahead, London Tribunal Rules (reuters.com) 20
Apple on Wednesday lost a bid to block a mass London lawsuit worth up to $2 billion which accuses the tech giant of hiding defective batteries in millions of iPhones. From a report: The lawsuit was brought by British consumer champion Justin Gutmann on behalf of around 24 million iPhone users in the United Kingdom. Gutmann is seeking damages from Apple on their behalf of up to 1.6 billion pounds ($1.9 billion) plus interest, with the claim's midpoint range being 853 million pounds. His lawyers argued Apple concealed issues with batteries in certain phone models by "throttling" them with software updates and installed a power management tool which limited performance.
Apple, however, said the lawsuit was "baseless" and strongly denied batteries in iPhones were defective, apart from in a small number of iPhone 6s models for which it offered free battery replacements. The company sought to get the case thrown out of court, but the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) said Gutmann's case can proceed in a written ruling on Wednesday.
Apple, however, said the lawsuit was "baseless" and strongly denied batteries in iPhones were defective, apart from in a small number of iPhone 6s models for which it offered free battery replacements. The company sought to get the case thrown out of court, but the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) said Gutmann's case can proceed in a written ruling on Wednesday.
Government of the lawyers, by the lawyers, and ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow! Millions will get a coupon for a free battery replacement or $30 off your next iPhone, and some lawyers will get $30 million!
What a great damned system!
Re:Government of the lawyers, by the lawyers, and (Score:4, Informative)
some lawyers will get $30 million!
Not in the UK my friend, sorry.
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> [lawyers will get $30 million!] Not in the UK
Only $20 mil?! Damn socialists! How can they afford a copter pad on their yacht now?
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Moreover, Apple did the throttling to prevent the iPhone with an old (not defective) battery from shutting down. They made an informed decision (like all they do while designing phones) but Apple being Apple, they didn't communicate on it and that was a crappy decision.
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Totally agreed. They could/should have been more transparent. I’m fine with giving powerful companies a hard head-slap when they deserve it, but this is basically a victimless situation.
Would not have mattered if they explained their reasoning beforehand.
Apple would still have been accused of exactly the same bullshit.
And you know it!
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It was a design flaw. They failed to account for the changing characteristics of an aged battery.
Other manufacturers mitigate the issue by providing more capacitance to lessen the peak load on the battery, and by having their BMS system understand aging and not send the battery from 50% to 2% in one second.
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It was a design flaw. They failed to account for the changing characteristics of an aged battery.
Other manufacturers mitigate the issue by providing more capacitance to lessen the peak load on the battery, and by having their BMS system understand aging and not send the battery from 50% to 2% in one second.
Or just having their phones reboot in the cold; or just throttle the CPU/GPU without telling anybody.
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Yeah? My iPhone 7 was working fine until a month ago. I'd deliberately avoided any updates for more than 2 years, but one of my apps wouldn't work without the latest version of iOS, so I reluctantly updated.
Sure enough, the UI constantly stuttered as it struggled to navigate around the home screen. Video calls had worked flawlessly before, now after 10 minutes they slow down to 1FPS. Can I roll back the update? Can I bollocks. It's basically useless now, so I've been forced to purchase a new (non-Apple) pho
If it was so bad why are people still buying? (Score:1)
And I am not defending Apple (I don't buy their products) but grumbling about entitlement (and lawyers).
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> Let the market decide
Some places have "consistency laws", whereby a given model number has to be "reasonably consistent" unless a disclaimer included. If Apple knew some were sub-optimal and did dodgy things to hide it, they could fall into the consistency rule.
Consumers making smart decisions does require a degree of consistency, otherwise they'll be comparing Apples to oranges. We want companies making better mouse-traps, not traps that trick consumers. (Trick the mouse, not the buyer.)
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Haha if that were true most of today's advertising would be illegal.
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Ads usually use vague fluff words to avoid saying anything specific enough to be measured. I bought a "sturdy shelf" that cracked in a week. "Sturdy" has no real meaning in court, but "can hold 1000 lbs" does.
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Oh FFS (Score:4, Informative)
Apple did this to extend the life of the devices. What's going to make you shell out for a new iPhone sooner: be slower than it used to be, or randomly turning itself off when the battery could no longer supply enough power for peak performance? Better to wait another second or two for Netflix to launch, or your phone to die when you're about to start a child custody hearing over Zoom? Aging Android phones have the exact same issues, because batteries.
Apple's screwup was in not informing users and making this setting something they could turn off. But it was not to herd users into buying new phones or batteries, quite the opposite.
Maybe (Score:4, Interesting)
You could have a user-replaceable battery
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Instead of one glued in to the box