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09-01-2024
CUPERTINO, CALIFORNIA: Apple has begun making payments in a long-running class action lawsuit over claims it deliberately slowed down certain iPhones in the US.
Complainants will receive a cut of a $500m (£394m) settlement which works out to around $92 per claim.
Apple agreed to settle the lawsuit in 2020, stating at the time it denied any wrongdoing but was concerned with the cost of continuing litigation.
A similar case underway in the UK is seeking £1.6bn in compensation.
The US case dates back to December 2017, when Apple confirmed a long-held suspicion among phone owners by admitting it had deliberately slowed down some iPhones as they got older.
It said that as batteries aged, their performance decreased, and so the “slowdown” lengthened the phones’ lifespan but it was accused of throttling the performance of certain iPhones without telling its customers, and the uproar resulted in Apple offering a cut-price battery replacement to fix the problem.
It led to the US legal action. At the time of the settlement, it was estimated that each person might receive as little as $25 each but the actual pay-out appears to be almost four times that sum.
In the UK, Apple lost a bid to block a similar mass action lawsuit last November.
The case, first brought by Justin Gutmann in June 2022, represents an estimated 24 million iPhone users.
Apple has previously called the lawsuit “baseless” and said “we 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” but unlike the US settlement, which only applied to devices in the iPhone 6 and 7 ranges, the UK lawsuit also seeks damages for those who had iPhone 8, 8 Plus and X devices.
Apple has confirmed the suspicions of many iPhone owners by revealing it does deliberately slow down some models of the iPhone as they age.
Many customers have long suspected that Apple slows down older iPhones to encourage people to upgrade.
The company has now said it does slow down some models as they age, but only because the phones’ battery performance diminishes over time.
Apple said it wanted to “prolong the life” of customers’ devices.
The practice was confirmed after a customer shared performance tests on Reddit, suggesting their iPhone 6S had slowed down considerably as it had aged but had suddenly sped up again after the battery had been replaced.
“I used my brother’s iPhone 6 Plus, and his was faster than mine? This is when I knew something was wrong,” wrote TeckFire.
Technology website Geekbench then analysed several iPhones running different versions of the iOS operating system and found some of them did indeed appear to have been deliberately slowed down. (Int’l News Desk)
