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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."
Would have got the frosty, but my iphooooone is toooo sloooooowelevetyone.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"Oh crap, not again, we're so screw.... wait! That's *million*...? Search the couch cushion in the lawyers-lounge and pay the ticket..."
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..
On behalf of us shareholders, thank you for upgrading!
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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).
Is this just an apple user thing or something?
Can't tell you how many OS upgrades I've done on the PC when I'm at the bare minimum of 'compatibility' and can't do everything I used to do simultaneously, didn't even think I should sue somebody because of it.
Compatibility with the baseband processor might be an issue since its firmware is usually upgraded at the same time and downgrades can be risky. The baseband is pretty scary really, a huge black box that runs underneath the regular phone OS and has total control over it. Also, it would be re-introducing security problems that were fixed in later iOS versions, which might come with its own liability problems. Plus, it would re-enable old jailbreaks that were fixed in the later versions.
That said, as a 4s user I think this complaint is overblown and is some lawyer looking for a big class action payday. I do turn off the superfluous animations however, so maybe it's partially my fault that I'm not being tremendously inconvenienced. I guess I'm mostly hoping that Apple doesn't stop supporting older versions of the iPhone. I have an original model iPhone as well and most apps on the app store no longer work, even if they aren't big 3D extravaganzas. They're simply compiled against a version of iOS that is too new for that old phone. Pretty annoying when a simple to-do list app won't even work because your phone is too old.
I read the internet for the articles.
I bought a used iPhone 4S on ebay a couple of months ago to try out an iOS device.
The device was in a factory default state when I got it (as expected).
After setting up iTunes, creating an AppleID (which required a CC!) and running through all the updates I found that the phone was basically unusable because it was so slow.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
It's possible to create an AppleID without a credit card.
https://support.apple.com/en-u...
I had the same issue with iOS 4 (I think) and my iPhone 3GS. Apple makes new OSes "compatible" with barely-compatible devices they no longer want to support, and prevents downgrading after, so that you'll buy a new phone when your performance tanks. It's despicable and I'm glad to see they're finally being taken to task for it.
Rooting/Hacking and other security issues. They don't want you to be able to downgrade to a "rootable" version, and pushing security updates to prevent this would be a nightmare if they had to support multiple previous versions.
Well, they could just use the exact same updating system that they have on OS X which supports branched updates. There's absolutely nothing unusual or particularly hard about supporting multiple versions of an operating system.
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.
This very article would seem to disagree with your statement.
But, you may be right.
I am simply sharing my experience with an iPhone 4. It seemed relevant.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
I recommend you avoid RCA and PROSCAN tablets (although nabis are probably a waste of time too). Otherwise the rest of them are all decent that i've seen.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
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.
It's not so much carrier but carrier tech. CDMA doesn't allow calls and data at the same time. GSM does.
It's the flip side of the Android OS fragmentation issue. Yeah if you force all your users to upgrade to the latest OS, there's less fragmentation. But it creates these types of usability problems. (Which the press mostly chooses to ignore because they're in love with Apple. "Upgrade to a newer Android phone" is not viewed as a solution to the Android fragmentation problem. But "Upgrade to a newer iPhone" is viewed as an acceptable solution to these OS-induced performance issues.)
Enough already with the "fragmentation" bullshit. It is a LOT easier to create an app that works well on the Android tablet my grandma bought in 2011 and on my fancy new Moto X than an app that works on an iPod Touch bought in 2011 and an iPhone 6 with retina.
Apple software and hardware is disposable and has a life expectancy of 4 years, if that. Meanwhile at the office we have a legacy piece of shit 20 years old VB5 application and it works on Windows 10.
lucm, indeed.
You always have the choice to go back if you don't like it. Apple users can't. Big difference.
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.
Not really: From their documentation: (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203905)
"If you're using the store for the first time with an existing Apple ID, you must provide a payment method. After you create the account, you can change your payment information to None."
So the first time you have to input credit card, which you can then remove again. How that is user friendly is anyone's guess.
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."
(This is still swillden. Posting as AC because /. appears to be broken and won't let me log in.)
I'm a Google Android engineer, so I obviously don't think Apple's approach is right for everyone. I work on Android low-level security components, and I (and the others on my team -- I'm not claiming this is my special mission, though I wholeheartedly support it) do a lot of extra work to make sure that what we build always includes a way for users to unlock and take complete control of their devices (though many OEMs block the routes we provide -- please buy Nexus or other unlockable devices and convince them users care about openness). I'm hardly an Apple fanboy or apologist. But I do understand the issues that drive them to make the choices they do.
The issues I mentioned are real, and serious. Android has chosen a different direction than Apple, and I think it's a better one. But it comes at great cost, and it's a cost that Apple doesn't want to pay because they don't have the same philosophical commitment to openness and end-user control. They're all about providing the smoothest, most polished experience they can for users and app developers, and that would be dramatically harder than it is if they had to deal with dozens of different versions of iOS. I know how that is, because it's my day job.
For example, I can't design a new feature without thinking hard about how it's going to affect users whose devices won't get upgraded, and how app developers are going to deal with the fact that some devices have it and others don't. As a member of the security team, all of our work has to focus on layered, defense in depth strategies, because we know that vulnerabilities will be discovered and we will not be able to fix them (rather, we can and will fix them, but the fixes won't get to many devices), but instead need to have other layers we can use to mitigate the damage. This applies even to Nexus devices, because while we must cut off support for older devices at some point in their lifespan because otherwise we'd lose all ability to make forward progress, we know that many of those out-of-support devices will still be in use.
From the perspective of a mobile device OS engineer, the notion that I could focus just on a single version is extraordinarily attractive. I completely understand why Apple makes the choice they do given their focus on polish and their target market. If that's not the experience you want, I suggest you switch to Android and buy an unlockable device.