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Apple Hit With Class Action Lawsuit After Admitting To Slowing Down Old iPhones (appleinsider.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Apple Insider: A day after Apple acknowledged slowing down iPhones with degraded batteries, a Los Angeles man is pursuing a class action lawsuit in the matter. Owners didn't agree to the prospect, and it hurts the devices' value, according to a filing by plaintiff Stefan Bodganovich, cited by TMZ. The case is said to be particularly concerned with the impact on iPhone 7 users. The suit asks that Apple stop throttling older devices, and pay compensation to affected people. Over the course of December, a number of people on Reddit and elsewhere have speculated that iPhones perform faster after battery replacements, mostly citing anecdotal evidence. Apple effectively confirmed that situation on Wednesday, but with the provision that it only throttles phones to prevent sudden, potentially damaging shutdowns. UPDATE: A second lawsuit has been filed against the company. Chicago Sun-Times reports "five customers have filed a federal lawsuit in Chicago against the tech giant for what they're calling 'deceptive, immoral and unethical' practices that violate consumer protection laws."
Slow down old phones, customers see how much faster the new ones are....profit!
If you bought a new phone because the old one got slow, when all you needed was a new batter costing 1/10th as much even at Apple's official service charges, you were tricked into wasting a lot of money.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
From Steve Job's Corpse... It ought to be rolling over and over and over in his grave. Watching what these boobs did with his company.
Does the slow-down also happen when the phone is plugged into the wall?
If yes, then this lawsuit has a huge case here! Still, it should be noted in the manual at the minimum of this 'feature'.
This is retarded. There's clear reasons why someone would potentially want this feature. The suit shouldn't request they stop doing it, but rather make it optional and put it in control of the user.
Full disclosure: Typing this on a laptop which gives me the choice of performance or battery life in the power settings.
It is feature people, as per design...
My iPad Nano 2 is slow as hell, even for things as trivial as web browsing.
The "feature" is iOS related, not device related.
Tim Cook rails against the privacy-invading business model of other tech companies, then we learn they accept billions in secret payments from Google to enable said business model on their phones.
Apple release a software fix they claims resolves a shutdown issue they previously denied even exists, then we learn the "fix" was a hack that throttles the phone performance to unusable levels, which serves to both save them hundreds of millions in additional recall costs while also surreptitiously motivating users to upgrade to a newer model to get a usable phone again.
These are not the actions of an ethical company.
This exact points was covered in the discussion thread to an earlier slashdot article which covered this story.
Someone posted the results of some speed tests they had performed and it indicated that the performance degradation is driven by a software check on the handset version, not the condition of the battery.
Apple have a tremendous opportunity to dig themselves out of this with some excellent PR - by issuing a new version of iOS which doesn't only remove this feature, but which includes an App that gives a detailed, accurate summary of battery performance, with a recommendation regarding replacement.
If they were to do this, they might be able to turn this PR disaster into a positive story. It's just shocking [criminally shocking] that they are doing this in the first place.
... if this nasty little trick was unique to Apple, or if any of the other big handset manufacturers have been doing this. Has anyone seen any discussion of that?
The best case scenario is this strengthens the argument for the right to repair a device.
Apple will put its horde of lawyers on these cases, and they will be forgotten under a mountain of expense and paperwork.
Courage!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
For my wife who went out to buy a new "old" model even bigger economic impact. A total fleece if her purse indeed. Perhaps this is what I need to wean her off the Apple Express
The quote at the footer seems apt..."Any excuse will serve a tyrant." -- Aesop
N/T
Class action lawsuit settled. Lawyers to get $30 million. Phone customers to get a coupon for $5 off a new iPhone.
A class action suit has been filed against Dewy Chetham and Howe by members of the class ripped-off-twice. The ripped-off-twice were consumers who lost $10000 to $50,000 to misdeeds and dereliction of fiduciary responsibility by Fly-By-Night Financial Consultants. A class action suite was filed by Dewy Chetham and Howe and they obtained class action status and extracted 2.8 million dollars in damages. But they inflated their bill, 10$ to photocopy a page, 500$ an hour for para legal, 100,000$ for two lap tops etc. Further the puny offering of $3.84 for each member was so low no one bothered to collect it. Now the class memebers are suing Dewy Chetham and Howe for malpractice, and dereliction of duty to their clients, for botched negotiations and settling for unreasonably low damages. They are seeking punitive damages and restitution equal to their original loss.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Honestly, if 'my cut' of owning iPhone's in all of this doesn't cover the cost of replacing the family household of iPhone 5S and 6S's I have, then Apple and the lawyers can keep it.
I have yet to see any class actions actually benefit the Big Consumer in any way. It looks good from a legal piece of paper and PR perspective but by the time the shit-storm settles, what does Apple care if they have to pay even hundreds of millions of dollars out to even more hundreds of millions of consumers, multiplied by their investment in the devices that have degraded batteries? They sit on BILLIONS of CASH. It looks bad, but I can cite a metric ton of examples that looked bad like Netflix trying to split their streaming/DVD lines out, Microsoft with Windows Vista, Ticketmaster with ticket markups, hell, even Apple still getting flack for horrid labor for building iterations of this thing over and over.
The problem is when you're that big, you don't don't even stumble over shit like this.
From what I understand, the most computationally power efficient way (as in flops per watt-hour) to control ECU throttling is to stay at the lowest speed when idle, and immediately throttle up to the highest speed when there's any meaningful demand on the CPU. This is not only the most efficient method, but very nearly the fastest, having a vanishingly slim performance disadvantage vs. locking the CPU to the maximum speed at all times. All the desktop OSes control frequencies this way by default.
So is Apple actually extending battery life by avoiding the maximum CPU speed? It will reduce heat production and peak power draw, but if you had two phones with equally worn batteries running a video transcode task, and one had normal throttling control and one had worn-battery throttling control. the one with normal throttling control should get more seconds of video transcoded before the battery runs out, even if its battery might run out first.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Is anyone really surprised there's all this funny business going on at Apple? After all, it's an American company, and as it is well known by know, Americans are crooks.
the slowdown should go away as soon as the phone is plugged into the wall (And yes , using a 2.4A charger (5V) gives enough power to an iPhone to 1) work normally 2) charge).
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
If it's a feature, and an important one, talk about it in the manual!
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
perhaps they should have a button that allows you to make a binary choice between:
would you prefer:
maintain balanced quality of service as your battery degrades or accelerate the battery and possibly court a battery-swell fire?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
How else are they going to get you poor suckers to buy new phones? Slow it down after 18 months of use, thats how!!! !HAHAHAHAHA SUCKERS!!!
We need to start taxing devices into which batteries have been glued. If an end-user can't replace the battery themselves, the lifespan of electronic devices is cut significantly. This results in more waste, and should be taxed accordingly.
This practice needs to stop.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
I can all but guarantee that the resulting settlement for these suits will be Apple offering up a free battery replacement for any affected model.
Frankly, people getting upset about this are the ones who do not have enough understanding of electronics to know that this is ultimately a good thing. If Apple hadnâ(TM)t done this, people would be bitching about their phones/tablets randomly shutting down. Of course Apple being Apple, and insisting on maintaining total secrecy about everything caused what should have been a non-issue to blow up into a PR disaster complete with lawsuits.
People are just holding it wrong...
...I believe Apple - because the "problem" goes away when you replace the battery (which is how people even knew about it in the first place). If they were simply slowing down old models to get people to upgrade, you'd expect the problem to be present on every phone, irrespective of its battery state.
Where they went astray was not telling people what they were doing, and not making it a user option. THAT doesn't surprise me either, mind.
Since I've upgraded by 6S to 11, I've noticed a marked slowdown in everything. Apps take up to 1 second to close or switch. That's an eternity for the 6S processor. Web pages generally take less time than that to load. Same goes for basic OS springboard functionality, swipe left and right, open folder, etc. It will hang for about 1/10 second before updating. It happens plugged in or not. It's 100% completely Fing unacceptable, this phone works perfectly fine and has been perfectly fine for 2 years. I did not backup so I cannot easily downgrade, they had better Fing fix it NOW.
Apple let me handle my own battery, thank you. I generally leave the phone plugged in 30% of the day in any case.
They are also pulling something similar to this with older compute systems. We at work spend tons of $ on Apple systems; we've not only noticed the iPhone issue (spanning more than 2 years as is claimed), but also with computers such as Mac Pro, et al. This is not due to simple resource demands of the new OS release. So Apple is going to get themselves into some serious trouble.
The Snapdragon 808/810 has a habit of frying cores on the Google Nexus 5x and 6p. There are class actions on this problem as well.
There is a fix for the problem - disable the 4 large/fast cores, and run the phones only on the other 4 small/slow(er) cores.
As far as I know, Google has not pushed this fix out as an OTA. If the bootloader is unlocked, then an owner can apply an independent set of fixes (replace both the recovery and the boot.img, at the very least).
Apple at least detects and compensates for a basic hardware problem, but both companies should strive to also clearly report what is happening to the user.
An owner of a failed 5x or 6p likely admires Apple's approach.
And that ladies and gentlemen is why the standard practice is companies never admit anything.
...this is Slashdot, after all. You buy a new Chevy, with OnStar included.. That's the "feature" that allows cops (or a competent hacker) to shut down your car at will https://hardware.slashdot.org/...
Let's say that just after the warranty expires, GM sends commands to your car's engine to make it run more sluggishly, and start burning more oil. So you go and buy a new car again.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
The price of Apple's battery replacement may be reasonable (in the US only).
BUT Apple will also force-upgrade your phone to the latest firmware as part of that. You'll also get a slowdown, numerous new software defects, unwanted 'features', and exploits with your new battery.
Would you like fries with that?
All Apple has to do is make it a setting people can turn on and off.
Just let people know that if they turn it off, the system may overheat and their phone may shut down.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Apple is just flat-out wrong to do this without telling people. Period.
What has happened is this: Apple's batteries don't last as long as they should. They've always used undersized batteries to keep the phones size down, thinking they can make up for it with better hardware/software management. And for the most part, they're right. Until the battery's capacity starts running low (prematurely in many cases, I would say, due to the batteries being so small to begin with), at which point they can't accurately measure the amount of charge it has left in it. If the phone can't run up to specification with the battery it has, it needs to be replaced, and that's that.
This means that big warnings should pop up on the screen to let the user know the battery is going to shit (which they don't want, because then people would scream bloody murder when their batteries start to fail after a year, and people with Apple Care start demanding battery replacements all the time).
This was an underhanded measure to both keep warranty repairs down, keep bad press about their batteries out of the media, and get people to buy new phones because theirs is slow and they don't know why. I exclusively have used iPhones and the entire Apple ecosystem in the past, and even I think this is a low point for them. So underhanded while acting like they're doing people a favor. Fucking ridiculous.
At the very least, when the huge warnings pop up when the phone is rebooted, give the user the OPTION to enter low-performance mode to conserve the battery. If the user accepts, the battery meter icon should flash non-stop until it's replaced to let the user know it's faulty. If the user declines, the battery meter icon should disappear, because there is really no good way to measure the capacity and this would definitely force people to get a repair or new phone.
But again, anything that actually brings to light the battery being faulty is bad for Apple, because they don't want people to know how shitty they really are, and they also don't want to have to replace ones that are covered by Apple Care. Positively underhanded.
I won't be joining either of these class-action lawsuits, even though I've been affected. You know why? Because the overly litigious nature of our society is just getting far too stupid for words -- and I don't care in the least if my opinion on this is unpopular, either; I'm going to say it anyway.
Consider: my iPhone 6 performed well enough to play one particular game fairly seamlessly. I'm one of the crazies who likes to install beta software on his primary device, so I was one of the first people to get a taste of the disputed throttling. It was pretty significant, at first... not just something that you'd notice only in benchmarks, but something that actually made that one game entirely unplayable. I was actually quite annoyed at the inconvenience... but I was also fully aware that the issue was directly related to the beta I had just installed, so I simply submitted a bug report, and played that particular game less frequently. Over the course of improved releases of the beta, the game performed slightly better. It never quite reached pre-update performance levels, but it was largely playable again. I also did take personal note that the stability of that phone had indeed increased... there were no more spontaneous shutdowns. So even with the performance degradation, I still saw the updates as an overall improvement.
Fast forward to the present, and I now have a spiffy new iPhone X -- which plays almost all of my games flawlessly -- and my iPhone 6 has been passed down to one of my kids. So here's where I get to explain that asterisk above, and in-so-doing, explain why I'll be abstaining from the lawsuits: I wouldn't have been able to pass that phone down, if it were still randomly shutting down. It would simply be an out-of-warranty worthless brick, and I'd probably have no clue as to why! Apple gave that old iPhone a new lease on life, by fixing a serious bug. This change to iOS is not at all worthy of a lawsuit response... it's actually a good thing.
Further, consider what is most affected... it's basically just games. Nothing at all critical was ever affected by this reduction in performance, even during the earliest beta stages. The phone still makes calls just as well as it ever did. It still receives emergency dispatches from the local services, just as it always did. This is entirely a convenience issue. And if there is someone out there who has a non-game based use case for needing the absolute best performance out of their smart phone, which might conceivably affect them financially in some way? Well, I would submit to you that such a person had already updated their device to the newest, fastest device that they could get their hands on... and would therefore, be extremely unlikely to be affected by this issue.
People just need to stop suing over every little inconvenience that pops up in life.
I agree with those people, it should have been a choice and not hardcoded. Let the people have the choice to use it at normal speed but with shorter operating time or reduced speed but with 'normal' operating time.. People know batteries become crap after a few years.
Why hasn't this (shutdowns) been an issue with any other company's phones ever?
App neutrality...what's that? we slow down your phone for everybody.
We all get a new Apple device
What other company has the courage to fuck their customers in the ass as much as Apple?
Microsoft? Please. They're amateurs.
So. much. courage.
Yesterday I got a message stating that my battery level requires that the phone will run on low power. Ode as it was near 20%. It seeems perfectly smart and sensible to do this and nice to be notified. I am all for it..it is like driving on empty...one does not accelerate rapidly and lets the vehicle roll on neutral as much as possible to scavenge enough energy to the next fuel depot. This is all Apple is doing..protecting you from a crash and loss of data.
... I literally saw iOS say 93% to 92% and then back to 93%. I was like huh? Haha.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).