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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!
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.
No, they were deceptive. Obviously the feature is great when it stops your phone from rebooting... but paired with hiding it (instead of say, giving a battery condition alert) and making the battery non-replaceable, what they've really done is put an artificial expiry date into their phones.
Even if they didn't mean to be deceptive (and I'd bet the engineers didn't, but don't ask me to extend the same credit to sales & marketing), that just makes it unintentionally deceptive.
They still need a good hard smack to help them never do anything like this again.
This kind of thing merits a prompt on every reboot.
"The OS has detected that the battery has deteriorated to the point that it may affect device stability. Should battery saving mode be enabled to attempt to work around this issue? (Battery saving mode will slow down all phone operations.)"
If you click no, they can either prompt you where to get a battery replaced, if that is at all feasible, or rather give you a small coupon on the discount of a new phone. If the phone crashes after that point, well you were warned.
That would be the ethical way to handle it... I'd rather know the true state then wonder if the phone is infested with malware.
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).
I would prefer to be notified so I can make an informed choice. Not have my iGadget mysteriously degrade performance in a time period when it would encourage me to buy a new unit. Perhaps it should prompt for three choices:
1. Accept performance degradation.
2. Accept reduced battery life.
3. Come in to replace battery.
Class action lawsuit settled. Lawyers to get $30 million. Phone customers to get a coupon for $5 off a new iPhone.
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.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
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.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.