Slashdot Mirror
Apple Faces $5 Million Lawsuit Over Allegedly Slowing the iPhone 4S With iOS 9 (mashable.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A $5 million lawsuit filed in New York federal court alleges that Apple's iOS 9 mobile operating software significantly slows down the iPhone 4S. According to the complaint: "The update significantly slowed down their iPhones and interfered with the normal usage of the device, leaving Plaintiff with a difficult choice: use a slow and buggy device that disrupts everyday life or spend hundreds of dollars to buy a new phone. Apple explicitly represented to the public that iOS 9 is compatible with and supports the iPhone 4S. And Apple failed to warn iPhone 4S owners that the update may or will interfere with the device's performance."
Is there any reason other than vendor lockin for them to refuse to allow you to install an older version of ios?
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
My wife and I just ordered new iPhone 6s' yesterday because of this exact issue. The issue is about expectations, but not in the way you think it is... we have been able to run apps in the past, that after the update no longer perform well. I've had to remove all of my music and much of my pictures just to provide enough free memory to operate. Previously the phone could switch between web browsing and other apps without issue, even with multiple tabs (pages) loaded at one time. Now if I switch from words with friends to the browser with just a single page loaded, then back to words, I find the latter app has been shut down and needs to completely re-initialize before I can use it. My expectation was SET by the way the phone performed before the update, and now it performs terribly.
If you didn't experience this issue, perhaps it is because you were not using the phone to it's full potential.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
Thing was pretty much crippled. Even if you could get safari to not crash for 5 minutes it was still unusable slow. Should never have been certified to run on that hardware, unless as a blatant attempt to force upgrades to Galaxy tablets..
If you didn't experience this issue, perhaps it is because you were not using the phone to it's full potential.
Yep :)
Then again, what if Apple decided people would be unhappy with the speed on iOS 9 so they decided to limit it to iPhone 5? I bet the same people grumbling about this issue would be grumbling about Apple's forced upgrades. They are stuck both ways via expectation. I'm defending the choices made but, considering how quickly the smartphone market is still developing, is it purely reasonable to expect a device multiple years old can run everyone up to snuff, that plus developers getting lazy with memory on new devices (same old same old).
I have personally been on the receiving end of the abuse Apple doles out to its business "partners" on a regular basis so I hate them with the burning passion of a thousand suns, but this is nothing more than a frivolous lawsuit that should be thrown out with prejudice.
As a very part-time developer, I understand that entropy rules all. For all the lamenting about how bloated programs or operating systems have become, people continue to request more and more features. If someone ever devises a way to infinitely expand a program while keeping hardware requirements static, I'm sure they will have people beating down their door to give them big bags of money to learn that secret. Until then, new features means more CPU cycles and RAM is required. All the wishful thinking and/or harsh language in the world isn't going to magically turn the CPU from the 4S into the CPU in the 6. So all those new features we collectively demand means that sooner or later the older models will have to be left behind because they can't keep up and we really have no one to blame but ourselves because who here would buy an iPhone 7 if it was EXACTLY the same as the iPhone 6, but it just cost more?
This lawsuit should be thrown out with prejudice. If I were the judge whose docket it landed on (assuming I was a judge) I'd ask the state bar to look into the actions of this lawyer. Any first year law student would likely be able to tell within 30 seconds that the plaintiffs would have zero chance of success, yet they had no apparent problems taking money from someone to file this worthless lawsuit. IMO, this sort of lawyer is even lower than the ambulance chaser type.
Apple is not able to speed up your CPU with a software upgrade. I don't remember reading my warranty and Apple guaranteeing speed for the next 5 years. Maybe I missed that clause.
Jokes aside, even after all these years, i don't think people think of Android phones and iPhones as computers that happen to make phone calls. You have a hybrid microkernel/UNIX machine perpetually exposed to everyone on the Internet. You need to update. You need to keep it secure. Maybe users would like iOS 7 and receive security updates forever, but what about when their apps get rooted because they haven't been updated?
There really isn't a way to have Apple win here.
Remember this is the company that got sued because they gave everybody (an admittedly bad) free album. Having deep pockets sucks some times.
Samsung Galaxy S3 here, still going strong. They said the USB port would fail, they said the plastic back was cheap or that the replaceable battery would make it break but they are all fine. I don't believe in replacing things that work, it's bad for the environment. Nor do I believe in artificially making things 'not work' through software.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Some people are more in tune with what their CPU is capable of. Some people may be more willing to settle for slowness; after all it is an old device *pout*. These are the types of people Apple love. On the other hand, other people will look at the OS and what it is capable of and what it does and realize that there is really no valid justification for the slowness issues.
In other words, I think is is a 'willingness to settle' issue rather than an expectation issue.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
WTF? I don't mean to insult you, but really a company intentionally screws you over in order to get more money out of you and you reward them by swallowing what they dish up to you? People like yourself are the reason Apple does this and gets away with it.
Then again, what if Apple decided people would be unhappy with the speed on iOS 9 so they decided to limit it to iPhone 5? I bet the same people grumbling about this issue would be grumbling about Apple's forced upgrades.
If they would let people downgrade OSes (or even if they didn't go out of their way to prevent people from downgrading the OS), then it wouldn't be a problem at all.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."