Apple to begin payments to iPhone users in $500 million ‘Batterygate’ iPhone throttling settlement

Apple will soon begin paying $65 to owners of older iPhone models after a judge cleared way for payments in class-action lawsuit over iPhone throttling, otherwise know as “Batterygate.” The company agreed in 2020 to pay up to $500 million to settle lawsuit alleging it secretly slowed down phones to address issues with older batteries.

The iPhones models applicable in this case were iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6s, 6s Plus, and SE devices running operating systems iOS 10.2.1 or later prior to December 21, 2017, and iPhone 7 and 7 Plus phones running iOS 11.2 or later prior to that same date.
Ethan Baron for The Mercury News:

This week, two iPhone owners who objected to the settlement lost their appeal in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals over its terms, removing the final obstacle to the deal.
Under the agreement, Apple was to provide the claims administrator with names and contact information for everyone owning or leasing an eligible iPhone. The claims deadline was Oct. 6, 2020.
About 3 million claims were received, and the latest estimate puts compensation at about $65 per claim, said Tyson Redenbarger, a lawyer who represented iPhone customers in the case.
Apple, while denying wrongdoing, agreed to pay $310 million to $500 million. How much the company pays, and exactly how much each claimant receives, will depend on the number of claim approvals, and some are still under assessment, Redenbarger said.

MacDailyNews Take: There won’t be another iPhone Batterygate because Apple wants, and needs, previously-owned iPhones to known for reliability as the secondary market is key for Apple to grow their iPhone users base, which in turn feeds Apple’s Services business and provides a halo for other products such as iPads, Apple Watches, Macs, Apple TVs, HomePods, etc.
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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.
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Then again, as Hanlon’s razor states: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
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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
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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.
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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
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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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