Apple fights $2 billion UK lawsuit for ‘throttling’ millions of iPhones

Apple on Tuesday urged a London tribunal to block a $2 billion class action lawsuit accusing the company of “throttling” millions of iPhones with software updates to conceal their “defective” batteries.
Apple’s iPhone 6 Plus
Sam Tobin for Reuters:

The tech giant is facing a lawsuit worth up to 1.6 billion pounds plus interest, brought by consumer champion Justin Gutmann on behalf of iPhone users in the United Kingdom.
Gutmann’s lawyers argued in court filings that Apple concealed issues with batteries in certain phone models and “surreptitiously” installed a power management tool which limited performance.
Apple said in written arguments that the lawsuit is “baseless” and strongly denies its iPhones’ batteries were defective, apart from in a small number of iPhone 6s models for which it offered free battery replacements.
The company also says its power management update – introduced in 2017 to manage demands on older batteries or with a low level of charge – only reduced an iPhone 6’s performance by an average of 10%.

MacDailyNews Take: If this comes to trial, Apple will rightfully lose this case (as they already have in multiple countries). However, $2 billion might be a tad excessive. If this class action proceeds, the only question is the final settlement amount that Apple will be required to pay.
Expect more repetitive lessons to occur around the world as Apple’s very and increasingly expensive lesson in customer communication continues – a lesson that could have been completely avoided with the publication of a simple support document that explained the “iPhone throttling” feature. — MacDailyNews, April 8, 2021

Apple handled this poorly and deserves to learn a lesson so that the company properly communicates with customers in the future. – MacDailyNews, August 1, 2019

There’s no excusing this one. Apple deserves the ongoing headache. Hopefully, when all is said and done and paid, the company will have learned an important lesson about transparency and communication with their customers. — MacDailyNews, February 27, 2018

You can see why some think that Apple wanted to keep what they were doing a secret. If people knew that a $79 battery replacement would give them an iPhone that performed like it did on day one, a meaningful percentage would take that option versus buying a new iPhone. Now that it’s just $29 this year, that percentage will naturally increase.
Then again, as Hanlon’s razor states: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
Apple’s made up of people. People are imperfect. We’ll take Apple’s word for it that they “always wanted… customers to be able to use their iPhones as long as possible” and that they “have never — and would never — do anything to intentionally shorten the life of any Apple product, or degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades.” — MacDailyNews, January 3, 2018

Again, it’s Apple’s lack of communication that is the problem here. If Apple had clearly explained what was going on in the software, we’d know to recommend a battery replacement when users complained their older iPhones were getting “slow.” As it was, we were pretty much left to assume that the processor/RAM wasn’t up to par with demands of newer iOS releases and we’d naturally recommend getting a new iPhone.
Just yesterday, we had a friend complain that his iPhone 6 was acting “slow” and we knew to recommend a battery replacement (even though he instead opted to get himself an iPhone X on our strong recommendation). — MacDailyNews, December 29, 2017

As has almost always been the case with Apple, unfortunately, transparency comes later, not sooner, and usually as a reaction to negative publicity. A simple Knowledge Base article would have preempted all of this Reddit sleuthing and the attendant handwringing and erroneous presumptions. — MacDailyNews, December 20, 2017
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[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
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