Apple starts sending 'batterygate' settlement payments | Hacker News Reader

Apple starts sending 'batterygate' settlement payments

macrumors.com

45 pointstosh63 comments

Does anyone have a cite that Apple knowingly created the issue they were dealing with here?

   1. iPhones have the ability to burst-use a lot of energy
   2. Older batteries aren't able to produce the same voltage as fresh batteries
   3. Apple throttles performance on older iPhones to prevent them shutting down completely by demanding more power than the battery is able to deliver.
   4. Apple doesn't explain to anyone what they're doing.

   2 is just physics/chemistry
   3 and 4 are a mild misstep.

So my question is: did Apple know ahead of time that they were designing phones that would age out of functionality and require this workaround? Or did they design phones that operated at peak functionality when new, and then a few years later realize the consequences of that design decision as the phones got older, and then take a perfectly reasonable course to handle the situation as well as possible, and only screw up in not telling people what they were doing?

> Does anyone have a cite that Apple knowingly created the issue they were dealing with here?

No, because if someone did the case likely would have gone to trial and Apple would have lost more than they settled for. The general assumption in situations like this is that they settled because they knew evidence would show up in discovery that would lose the case.

I mean, I agree in principle: this is just an engineering decision to deal with pretty routine hardware failures. As a matter of software, this is an eminently reasonable workaround. But as a matter of business ethics, you gotta tell people what you're doing with their devices.

Basically, if this was an open source project that did exactly the same thing nothing would have happened. Apple got burned because they tried to hide it.

> Basically, if this was an open source project that did exactly the same thing nothing would have happened.

Because users would have been able to control their software's behavior in the first place? Or because Open Source projects don't hide their behavior, and would have informed their users of the change?

> But as a matter of business ethics, you gotta tell people what you're doing with their devices.

I'm curious about this from a legal perspective.

Apple has and (probably is still) extending unpublished entitlements to developers that allow for behavior that is not publicly documented.

> Apple has and (probably is still) extending unpublished entitlements to developers that allow for behavior that is not publicly documented.

Sure, but that's fine. You bought a product that the manufacturer claims does "X", but someone else with the same device has access to feature "Y" because they paid more or whatever. Totally legal market segmentation, no different for a phone than a dishwasher or car or whatever.

Apple got in trouble here because they secretly modified phones (that it turned out couldn't do "X" without crashing) to do "Z" instead, which was slightly inferior, and didn't tell the owners (presumably to avoid having to compensate them). Can't do that with a dishwasher or car either.

IMO it was all perfectly reasonable, but yes, the settlement was mostly because the performance dropped without informing the user whatsoever, which lead to a non-zero amount of sales of new iPhones, even if Apple's motivation wasn't to push users to buy a new phone.

But I think it's fair to say that laypeople shouldn't need to read every article about a potential Apple "gate" to know if/when their phone is performing normally, just old, or is defective and thus they need a new one.

If they had told users (which they should have done) it might have lead to even more sales of new iPhones. Yes, some users would have replaced just the battery. But many others would have replaced the phone entirely, among them people who would never have noticed any slowdown from throttling.

My wife didn’t upgrade despite knowing her phone was throttled. She definitely would have if it was rebooting due to brownouts. So there was a sale “saved” by apple. No idea if the numbers cancelled out.

Coincidentally, we found out today her iPhone 8 has a degraded battery. Once again she has no plans to change the battery.

4 is not a mild misstep. There was enough confusion/noise that phones are getting slow after updates, which could have been cleared by communication. Apple was benefitting from this as people instead of getting battery replaced were getting new phone.

> then a few years later realize the consequences of that design decision

Making it extra difficult to replace batteries in older phones is a very deliberate design decision.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/22/vin-locking/#thought-diff...

> Making it extra difficult to replace batteries

This seems counter to reality.

> Apple has completely redesigned the internals of the iPhone 14 to make it easier to repair. It is not at all visible from the outside, but this is a big deal. It’s the most significant design change to the iPhone in a long time.

https://www.ifixit.com/News/64865/iphone-14-teardown

I think this was done with good intent but could have been handled better. But you can't satisfy anyone these days. All that happens is a YT celebrity does a hit job on Apple and everyone dogpiles on.

Just yesterday I was speaking to someone who was getting fed up of her iPhone 14. She said she'd had it less than a year and it'd been terrible, charged really slowly andw ent slow and she was "going to buy a fucking samsung next time". She let me have a look at it. It was in low power mode and she was using a poundland 5W charger on a chewed up piece of shit cable. Charged it up of my PD powerbank and got her to order an Anker PD charger and a good cable on Amazon and explained what power save mode is.

That's the average user. And when they go looking for solutions they find idiots on YouTube with whole channels devoted to shitting on particular vendors because it's divisive, they get clicks and make money.

On top of this, the woman spends a fortune servicing her Mercedes but will only spend £1 each on a replacement charger and cable. What do you think will happen when her battery craps out?

If Apple tell people that their battery needs replacing some fucker will fire up a video with APPLE GOUGING PEOPLE FOR NEW BATTERIES. Fuck, it's disposable, it's maintenance no different to your car. Take it to the garage and get it swapped out.

But you can't satisfy anyone these days.

You can satisfy me very easily. Tell me what's going on with my phone and its battery, and (ideally) ask me what I want to do about it.

That’s literally what they have done. My iPhone 15 tells me the battery install date, the cycle count, the remaining life estimate and what performance profile it is using which can be overridden.

Well, yeah, now.

Would they have done this if they hadn't been sued?

3, assuming properly implemented, is good engineering and not a mis-step at all, IMO.

> 2. Older batteries aren't able to produce the same voltage as fresh batteries

Nit-pick: older batteries aren't able to produce the same maximum power as fresh batteries.

Thanks -- so, watts?

They created the problem by hiding it from their users and disempowering them, leaving them no way to control or monitor the compromise between performance and battery life.

All they needed to do was engage with the user. But nooooo, because Apple.

Ask the user what?

“Do you want your phone to crash because your battery is old - yes or no?”

The issue here was not that the battery life was shorter. It was that the batteries could not deliver enough current to run the processor at full speed. There’s no choice to “empower” the users with.

No, that was not the issue, and "crashing" was never on the table. The issue was that they artificially (and for obvious reasons) made the phone look like it needed to be replaced, when all it needed was a new battery. Key point: this effect kicked in long before the battery became simply unable to run the phone at full speed at all.

Asking the user, "Your phone's battery is no longer meeting its specifications. Do you want to reduce your phone's power usage to provide additional operating time?" would not have been an unreasonable thing to do. Basically the same question the phone already asks when the charge drops below 10%!

This would empower the user to make the same decision with their phone that they would make with any other battery-operated device that is showing its age, from dimming their flashlight to turning down their radio to driving slower.

But noooooo, because Apple.

Eh? The feature only kicks in after the first brownout.

So? What difference does that make? The battery ages to a certain point, eventually the phone shuts down prematurely. The phone then slows itself down to try to hide the battery loss from the user.

The user is aware of NONE of this. The user thinks, "Darn, time for a new phone already."

Except it's not time for a new phone, it's time for a new battery.

The real question is, why is this OK with you? Why do you, as a user, want less insight and control over your devices? Why carry water for a trillion-dollar company without being paid to?

> No, that was not the issue, and "crashing" was never on the table.

That’s the difference it makes. They were preventing “crashes”. Apple want to you have a working phone so that they can sell you services. They extended the lives of out-of-warranty phones with degraded batteries. They are known for having industry leading support periods for their phones and this is no different.

People like my wife didn’t care that her phone was slower. She cared that it worked. She never bothered to change the battery. She just upgraded when she would have anyway.

I noticed today that her iPhone 8 is in a throttled state. She doesn’t care.

Should they have told the user? Sure. Should they have to pay enormous amounts of money for extending the lives of old hardware? No. Especially when the other manufacturers let their phones rot. Literally doing nothing would have made apple better off and driven more sales due to rebooting handsets.

Maybe they'll tell me what's going on next time. That'd be nice.

It's also nice that your wife doesn't mind. That doesn't scale, though.

Do you have a citation for any of these claims?

Yes, owning one of the phones in question.

Disagree? It's too late to file an amicus brief on Apple's behalf, so arguing about it here is the next best thing, I guess.

I remember several iphones suddenly start performing poorly after updating coincidentally when Apple released new iphone models. It happened so much that people refused to update iOS because "that's how they get you."

Apple knew about the complaints, it was very loud. They did this for several update cycles and hit pay-dirt on their sales.

Meanwhile, Google didn’t utilize a similar workaround with their Nexus 6P models (which was their flagship around the similar timeframe as the iOS “batterygate” scandal), as their phones were hitting the same issue.

You know what happened? While my friends who had iPhones were sometimes complaining about slowdowns, pretty much everyone I knew who owned a Nexus 6P (including myself) ended up having to deal with the RMA process. Why? Because the phone would just shutdown instantly while at double-digit percentage charge.

For me personally, it started with shutting down instantly at 8%. Then it creeped into the 12-15% territory. By the time I felt like I had it enough to deal with it, the phone would just shutdown entirely at 27-29%. The problem initially started around a year after the purchase, and progressed to this awful state in less than half a year. For a lot of people, it would straight up just start hitting a bootloop too, so your phone was entirely toast no matter what.

Nexus 6P was an extremely popular “clean android flagship from google” phone at the time (Samsung was not the clear “apple of android” player at yet, but was visibly getting there at a breakneck pace, as they were gearing up for the release of their Galaxy S8 series). Every single person I knew who owned that phone hit that problem within the first 18 months at latest.

To Google’s defense, their remediation was (at one specific narrow point in time) to just give people their newer Pixel 1 in exchange for RMA. The problem was that Google butched even that, as they didn’t expect such volume of requests, and they started denying RMA for people who didn’t have their “protection plan.” Oh, and that option was only available in certain locales in the first place, and you had to get a bit lucky even then.

The situation was so disastrous for the owners, I have no idea how Google managed to not get dragged through the mud in press for this even remotely as much as Apple continues getting dragged for their approach to almost the exact same problem that occurred around the exact same time period. My only bet is that, overall, Nexus phone market share wasn’t nearly as massive as that of iPhones.

Every single person I knew who owned a Nexus 6P hit this issue, and that included myself too.

For context, look at the number of comments on the “official RMA thread” in r/Nexus6P related to this[0]. Just reading the replies on it today almost gave me a headache, with how vividly I remember having to deal with this at the time.

0. https://www.reddit.com/r/Nexus6P/s/XPfDqktozm

This was mostly apocryphal, with one basis in reality. Spotlight reindexing could use a lot of CPU if you had a large photo library, but that was also a background task so it meant lower battery life for the day or two.

What happens in almost all cases is that people attribute things to the biggest visible change they know about, which is usually a major OS release. Facebook used to use like 30% of an iPhone’s battery life but because it was in the background people would say the iOS release did it because they remembered installing that and it changed the UI palpably, whereas the Facebook update automatically installed in the background.

I used to see this with people saying an OS release killed their hard drive: when pressed, they’d remember that they’d had things get slow or files corrupted before but hadn’t recognized that as a sign of imminent failure, whereas that OS upgrade was a really visible change which caused a ton of I/O activity.

Interestingly, the 2015 Nexus 6P had the exact same issue (among others).

> If you're among those affected, your phone will randomly shut down and completely die, even though your battery indicator might have said you had plenty of juice left. It's not a simple system crash, because your phone will stay dead until you connect it to a charger.

https://android.gadgethacks.com/news/nexus-6p-battery-random...

Google refused to do anything to remedy the situation and lost a lawsuit over that.

> Nexus 6P owners eligible for up to $400 from Huawei and Google in class action settlement

https://www.androidcentral.com/nexus-6p-owners-eligible-400-...

Doing nothing seems to have ended up costing more per device, with Apple paying out about $100 and Google paying out up to $400.

This the highest settlement of actual cash I’ve seen in my life. Normally the settlements end up being less than $10 with the lawyers taking the lions share and not worth replying to to avoid disclosing my SSN to a possible fraudster. I guess I should have sent in my claim for this!

I got $148.25 in two payments for the Vergara v. Uber TCPA settlement. They sent me an unsolicited SMS.

Class action notices are incredibly difficult to distinguish from scams. Unsolicited emails/texts with a random domain name promising money if you just fill in a form with some personal information!

I really wish the courts would set up a `classactions.gov` site; if a court approves a settlement, you get `foo.classactions.gov` for it.

Dumb question: has the word “gate” just become synonymous any scandal because it’s a play on the word “Watergate” (which references the office building of the Nixon scandal)?

Yes. That's been the case since Watergate.

This is good news. The keyboard lawsuit should start seeing payments in 2024 hopefully!

https://www.keyboardsettlement.com/

I’m curious why apple didn’t just let folks turn this off if they were so upset. Their phones would have died and apple would get another sale. Make the turn off permanent- once opted out no going back. Off all the “gates” this one seemed a bit underwhelming

Because by throttling the phone, they could blame all the new “powerful apps” instead of their defective batteries.

The batteries weren’t defective. They were just aging normally.

If that was the case Apple wouldn't have deployed the stealthy 'fix' and instead just said 'your battery is old and hence sometimes turns your phone off unexpectedly. But it's normal'. It clearly shows that the battery aging wasn't considered normal

Sorry, I don’t see the logic here. Any battery will be able to supply less peak current as it ages. Throttling the SoC is clearly a better solution than just having the device randomly brown out. Fundamentally, that’s why it’s the solution that Apple adopted. We can speculate about Apple’s motives. My point was just that the batteries were not defective.

Yes, an apple is humble and that’s why they didn’t tell anyone they were doing it. And that’s why they’re also paying a fine for it.

I didn’t make any claim about Apple’s motives. I just said that the batteries weren’t defective.

Also, this isn’t a fine, it’s a settlement.

Why do you keep saying they weren’t defective, because they said so?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/willskipworth/2023/11/01/apple-...

“ Apple Must Face Lawsuit Alleging It 'Throttled' IPhones To Cover Up Defective Batteries, U.K. Tribunal Rules”

Fine settlement potato potatoe

There are no magical batteries that can supply the same peak current after two years' worth of charge cycles as on day one. There was no manufacturing defect in the batteries. The batteries were only 'defective' in the sense that their performance had reduced as the result of a completely normal aging process. The same thing happens to the batteries in all other phones. The only differences lie in how phones deal with this in software. As the raw physical performance of the battery degrades, this always involves some kind of compromise. Some people didn't like the compromise Apple chose and how they chose (not) to communicate it. But that's not a debate I'm trying to get into here.

>Fine settlement potato potatoe

It's quite different. A fine is something you'd get for violating some kind of regulation. This is a lawsuit that Apple settled.

It’s funny, you seem to be a stickler for the word “fine” and not for the word “defective”.

To me the word 'defective' in this context implies a manufacturing defect, or some kind of degradation in performance beyond that which would typically be expected through normal use. My point is just that the batteries were not defective in that sense.

Yeah, it’s weird. If you understand batteries you understand why they did this. iPhones last longer already and are better supported than many android phones so apple has a history with longevity in their phones

One is however solved more easily, replacing the battery for 80 bucks. The other necessitates a new device for 800 bucks. Apple benefits from hiding the cheaper fix in order to make $$$.

The mechanism might be technically reasonable, but intentionally misleading customers is not.

Because they would have had a class action suit for selling phones that only last a year or so.

It is far easier to notice a phone that dies in you than something as vague as it progressively becoming slower.

It looks to me they simply hoped nobody would notice it was intentional.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com