Apple to pay up to $500M to iPhone users
mercurynews.com
mercurynews.com
This should be a case study at PR school on how not to communicate with your customers though. Had they been open about what they were doing, why, and allowing customers to turn it off they wouldn’t be in this situation. The probably would have made a lot more cash on battery replacements too.
But because they hid it they deserve this 100%.
It was gaslighting at corporate scale.
It is very common for the CPU frequency to be reduced below 50% battery, or the flashlight to be disabled under 15% battery, or the LTE modem to switch to single antenna mode (saving power) whenever the camera was on.
All of those things are because as the battery ages, it's internal resistance increases, which means the terminal voltage drops a lot whenever it is under heavy load. When the battery voltage is low (ie. nearly empty), and then the terminal voltage drops more due to high load on an old battery, you can dip below the minimum voltage necessary for the voltage regulators and the phone will power off suddenly - even if there might be 20% charge left!.
Users don't like their phone randomly turning off before the battery hits nil, so these little tricks are the lesser of two evils.
Android even has a special file for the manufacturer to configure all these hacks in!
Even some of my technical friends don’t understand the issue and solution which is worrying. I like to explain it like this:
Imagine you a driving down the highway and step on the accelerator to give the car more gas, but there is an issue with the engine. The worst thing for the engine control unit to do is to cut off the engine while you’re driving at 60mph, this can be dangerous and cause a safety issue.
Same with phones, you could be in a situation and need to make an emergency phone call, or need the last bit of juice from your device to check maps/GPS to get you out of the woods before dark. The worst thing here is for the phone to shut itself off when you need it.
Car manufacturers will turn on a big red engine warning light, put your vehicle into failsafe/protection mode (but still let your drive it with reduced power) and tell you to get it serviced ASAP.
This is what Apple failed to do correctly.
Source: my wife never bothered getting her battery replaced, didn’t care about the speed but 100% would have upgraded if the phone rebooted under load.
Batteries for the affected models if I recall were $50.
2) Is this a fine that compensates users for the damage caused?
3) Will this fine make apple do better next time?
2) No, it is a settlement with no admission of wrongdoing[1]
3) Very likely no.
[1] this is something I never understood of the Law about these kind of settlements, if someone pays something to the other party, something wrong must have been done
Admitting wrongdoing would give anyone who declines the settlement a slam dunk case in court.
With a civil suit, that's not necessarily the case, because there is a very different burden of proof compared to a criminal case. For civil trials the burden of proof is preponderance of the evidence, which means that the plaintiff merely needs to show that the fact in dispute is more likely than not. In comparison, criminal trials require a much higher burden of proof known as beyond a reasonable doubt.
> https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/preponderance_of_the_evidenc...
A settlement is a way to end a dispute by agreeing to a solution, in other countries it is "normal" that a party admits (partial) responsibility and pays to the other party a (monetary) compensation and the other party accepts the compensation and promises to refrain from further actions in court.
In such cases the admission is the actual reason why the compensation can be given to the other party.
The way these class action settlements are closed seems like one party did nothing wrong still it gives money to the other party (why? because they are generous?).
These settlements are usually significantly less costly than if a civil case actually went to trial. Civil courts tend not to be very friendly to those with deep pockets. The burden of proof is very low, and the prevailing attitude is that they can afford it, so why not award compensation to the plaintiff.
I wonder what the fine will be when current gen iPhones are slowed down with iOS updates.
I don't even think Apple does it intentionally. Software just gets more complex and slower every year on average.
I know this is TikTok gospel, but our kids use iPhone 8s and run iOS 16 just fine. My take is that most of these posts are by people who truly do need a battery replacement, or are by the kind of person who has to have the latest phone and gets peeved when it no longer is.
And if I wasn't clear, I blame software development in general, not Apple. Some other brands are worst in terms of device longevity (looking at you Samsung).