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."

Comments

Unsurprising

[AmiMoJo]

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.

Re: Unsurprising

[MachineShedFred]

You are assuming those are the choices. Batteries that age put out less voltage throughout the discharge. If the voltage supplied to the CPU isn't sufficient to run it at full power, you get random reboots, corrupt data, etc.

Lower the CPU power, increase tolerance of lower voltage, increase stability of the whole device. So, how about this choice:

1. Accept performance degradation.
2. Have a phone that is unstable, rebooting when power draw is highest (phone calls) and possibly fucking over your data
3. Have a battery service.

I agree that Apple should have done some notification to the user when this "limp mode" was engaged, but a lot of people are preening about it being some kind of nefarious marketing scheme to get people to buy new phones, when it could just be an honest attempt to maintain stability on an aging device to keep existing customers happy. The proper move probably would have been to throw a notification that your iPhone is in need of a battery service, click here to schedule one, etc.

Re: Unsurprising

[torkus]

I'd hope folks on /. would know the CPU is absolutely not running at battery voltage, much less directly off the battery.

Lowering the CPU power prevents spikes in battery drain. Since batteries are less efficient at higher current draws, this still makes sense but not how you explain it.

Also, engaging 'limp mode' and notifying the user is likely a very bad idea. Limp mode is very likely a momentary (though frequent) throttling of the CPU - or more exactly, it DOESN'T throttle the CPU up and engage more cores when a higher load is presented. Modern CPUs bounce frequency and multiplier and cores around constantly...so you'd get as much as a few pop-ups a second. So much for improving battery life.

SERIOUS QUESTION...

[Anonymous Coward]

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'.

Yes

[ytene]

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.

Re:Yes

[The MAZZTer]

I've read comments saying people have had their batteries replaced with new ones and the slowdown goes away. So which one is it? Both of these can't be true. It either happens based on battery age (which is fine, maybe even a desired feature, but it should have been disclosed and maybe had controls) or OS version (which is not fine and can easily be interpreted as predatory).

Re:Buy a newerer fasterer one

[torkus]

I also have to wonder if this was partly in response to the battery issues they had with the 6-series (or 6s, i forget) where they'd get unexpected shutdowns and battery capacity under ~40% was a complete crapshoot. I had one and regularly saw the phone power off at 20% battery...or go from 30 to 5 and then power off and back to 40% when powered back on.

My guess is iffy battery performance messed up their capacity algorithms when it couldn't handle minor spikes in power due to CPU...so they basically just cut out the spikes in CPU to avoid further need of replacing batteries. And from there...it becomes a logical step to apply this to any device which might have anything similar happen. A slower phone is easier to accept than one which powers off somewhat randomly after all.

I'd put my money on them being linked. It was a business decision to help limit battery replacement...and a "good idea" spread it to all devices.