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Judge clears way for $500M iPhone throttling settlements
(appleinsider.com)
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this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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It always blows my mind some people actually found Apple's defense convincing.
The iPhones didn't inform users when they were throttling because they had an old battery. Apple kept the throttling a secret and coincidentally it helped them upsell new phones to people with old phones. This type of functionality was also unique to Apple, it's not like this is the only choice they had and an industry practice.
Did you have one of these phones? Because I did. I was one of those that experienced this controversy first-hand.
Most people complaining I’m guessing have very little direct experience with Apple products. Although maybe you do and just have different expectations that 5 year old tech should work the same as a new phone. We still have an iPhone 6 and the original SE in the family. My high school kid uses a 2011 MacBook Air with no problems and I have a 2014 MacBook Pro as a backup laptop for work. These devices last a long time.
Where they did fuck up is not explaining what they were doing, and the slowdowns were probably more impactful than they expected.
I had an iPhone 5 and it was slowed down after a year and a half or so. Formatted it, then disabled animations, etc, but by the end it was really slow to use. The nearest official store suggested a new phone since the model was almost 3 years ago, even though I had used it for less than 2 years.
I had no idea what the problem was. No way to disable it or a cheap way to replace the battery. All that only came after they were sued.
They fucked up by not telling anyone they were doing it and not providing a way to reverse the slow downs. Having their employees suggesting getting a new phone instead of fixing the damn problem was also what I consider to be scummy behaviour.
A few years after getting a new phone (an Android one though, I don't like to reward bad behaviour), I went back to the iPhone and it was still lagging. There was a new major update available though... which made it a bit faster. I don't know what happened behind the scenes, but only enforced my view that I was being pushed to buy a new phone.
The iPhone 5 was released 2012 with iOS 6. The throttling for old devices was introduced in 2017 with iOS 10.2.1. That’s a big gap.
Let’s be fair here. Your phone was 5 years old and trying to run the latest OS. If it’s too slow for you, sticking with an older OS version or upgrading to a new phone is probably good advice.
I bought a replacement in 2015 (months after the problem started), so no, I wasn't trying to use the latest iOS on a 5 years old phone. Even if I was, it's up to them to make sure it runs at least well enough and/or to provide a way to downgrade (something that Apple didn't [still doesn't?] allow you to do) as customers have no idea if the update has a problem before they install it and use it for a while.
Only Apple can prove this as all we have is rumours, but I believe they started playing with the idea of slowing down devices way before that wider release years later. I remember finding similar reports when I tried to find out what was happening to my phone. There were complaints even on Apple's own community forums: some owners had laggy iPhones while other owners, with the same device/model, were fine. Unfortunately, other than the usual user blaming from people that didn't have the problem and the "buy a new phone" comments, no one suggested an actual fix.
The slow down in 2017 was huge for some people. Here's a 3 year old iPhone 6 that had its frequencies go from 1400 MHz to 600 MHz: https://twitter.com/Sam_RMSI/status/943400254451335168
I'm far from being an Apple hater - I'm typing this on a M1 MBP after all - but it's not okay to slow down phones like that without any warning, information or a way to disable the "feature". The person above had their clock speeds drop to less than half of the original speeds! Like, what the heck?
I'm sure they had good intentions, but in practice they slowed down some devices too much without any warning or a way to reverse the change. Their only fixes for the problem they created all involved giving them money: you either had to buy a new phone or pay for a battery replacement which was not that cheap. They had to be sued first and only then they added a setting to disable the throttling and started offering affordable battery replacements...
This type of behaviour from companies shouldn't be defended or praised.
If Apples objective was to force people to upgrade, it would have been much easier to just discontinue support for old handsets on the newest iOS. Instead users got the latest iOS, it was just throttled because of the battery limitations.