Posted on 12/27/2017 6:25:21 AM PST by grundle
SAN FRANCISCO, Dec 26 (Reuters) - Apple Inc defrauded iPhone users by slowing devices without warning to compensate for poor battery performance, according to eight lawsuits filed in various federal courts in the week since the company opened up about the year-old software change.
The tweak may have led iPhone owners to misguided attempts to resolve issues over the last year, the lawsuits contend.
All the lawsuits - filed in U.S. District Courts in California, New York and Illinois - seek class-action to represent potentially millions of iPhone owners nationwide.
A similar case was lodged in an Israeli court on Monday, the newspaper Haaretz reported.
Apple did not respond to an email seeking comment on the filings.
The company acknowledged last week for the first time in detail that operating system updates released since "last year" for the iPhone 6, iPhone 6s, iPhone SE and iPhone 7 included a feature "to smooth out" power supply from batteries that are cold, old or low on charge.
Phones without the adjustment would shut down abruptly because of a precaution designed to prevent components from getting fried, Apple said.
The disclosure followed a Dec. 18 analysis by Primate Labs, which develops an iPhone performance measuring app, that identified blips in processing speed and concluded that a software change had to be behind them.
One of the lawsuits, filed Thursday in San Francisco, said that "the batteries' inability to handle the demand created by processor speeds" without the software patch was a defect.
"Rather than curing the battery defect by providing a free battery replacement for all affected iPhones, Apple sought to mask the battery defect," according to the complaint.
The plaintiff in that case is represented by attorney Jeffrey Fazio, who represented plaintiffs in a $53-million settlement with Apple in 2013 over its handling of iPhone warranty claims.
The problem now seen is that users over the last year could have blamed an aging computer processor for app crashes and sluggish performance - and chose to buy a new phone - when the true cause may have been a weak battery that could have been replaced for a fraction of the cost, some of the lawsuits state.
"If it turns out that consumers would have replaced their battery instead of buying new iPhones had they known the true nature of Apple's upgrades, you might start to have a better case for some sort of misrepresentation or fraud," said Rory Van Loo, a Boston University professor specializing in consumer technology law.
But Chris Hoofnagle, faculty director for the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, said in an email that Apple may not have done wrong.
"We still haven't come to consumer protection norms" around aging products, Hoofnagle said. Pointing to a device with a security flaw as an example, he said, "the ethical approach could include degrading or even disabling functionality."
The lawsuits seek unspecified damages in addition to, in some cases, reimbursement. A couple of the complaints seek court orders barring Apple from throttling iPhone computer speeds or requiring notification in future instances.
#5 & 13 The lawyers will win big time.
Apple admits they throttled #iPhones – one graph tells the whole story of why they are slow
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/12/21/apple-admits-they-throttled-iphones-one-graph-tells-the-whole-story-of-why-they-are-slow/
I hate this tactic. My Corolla took a software update and now I get 15% less fuel economy, some features no longer work and the coils started burning out. I ran the numbers and the total cost of ownership of my Corolla is now much less than that of a new Corolla which also has a warranty. So I’m going down Friday to buy a new Corolla so I can have a more reliable vehicle with more features and save money too!
/S
Oh yes, they were very altruistic, after being forced by the courts.
Apple created and perfected the first commercially viable GUI and the rest of the industry eventually copied it, just as they’ve continued to copy everything Apple releases, from the iMac to the iPhone to the iPad to the Apple Watch. There’s no mystery why everything Windows, Google, Android, Samsung et al. do looks and functions as close to Apple as they can make it without obviously breaking the law. If Microsoft didn’t have Apple to copy, and the PC as well as phone manufacturers weren’t following suit, they’d have gone the way of the Dodo Bird, so stop whining. Be grateful. Somebody creates beautiful, functional devices that so thoroughly define and dominate their respective market segments that it’s clear to the idiots in Redmond what their direction should be. You know this is true, their efforts to “innovate” without copying Apple have been downright comical and a total flop.
Huh? I’m talking about when Apple was going bankrupt and Microsoft invested like $50M to keep them in business. No courts were involved.
If it slows down your phone it should.
Yes they were, it was a court-ordered settlement and it was $150mm.
Toaster companies do it too. I have a networked toaster so that my toast is ready for me in the morning. I recently updated it to patch it for security issues and now it takes twice as long to cook my toast. Oh and by chance they just released a new model that cooks toast twice as fast. I should buy the new toaster.
Oops it was $150M. Thanks for correcting me on how much Microsoft spent to save Apple.
Stop the BS, it was a court-ordered settlement:
http://www.zdnet.com/article/stop-the-lies-the-day-that-microsoft-saved-apple/
No it wasn’t.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/29/steve-jobs-and-bill-gates-what-happened-when-microsoft-saved-apple.html
Dropping the lawsuit. It was a settlement.
Duh.
The point is, if Apple didn’t exist all of these other products would have emerged anyway. There were many that had been working on these types of interfaces for decades. To think that everyone has just copied Apple is just not accurate. The Amiga was a far superior machine to the original Mac or Lisa, it was only released a year later but had been under development since before the first Mac.
I worked on a wireless web tablet in 2001, it was inevitable that such technology would emerge. Yet people attribute Apple for the tablet, even though it was released in 2010. ...to not ship the tablet I worked on (it was a finished product that had been manufactured and boxed) was a dumb move by Intel. I still have mine.
I give Apple credit for quality experiences, as they tightly control both HW and SW. Their products are only released when polished. Microsoft has to accommodate for any available HW, no matter how crappy - so you’ll have a spectrum of quality as a result. Beyond that people give them way too much credit. I’ve never owned an Apple product because there’s never been something I couldn’t do with something else and I don’t want to pay a premium for their products.
I have a 2014 HTC with none of these problems.
It has extreme battery saving mode, which lets you keep open your phone, messages and email open and will last a couple of days if you don’t use them much.
The problem with apple and Galaxy is that they don’t have this feature, which turns off ALL the background apps that you’re not using.
Liberals are always recharging their phones, just because the background apps always turn on automatically. Then they complain about global warming. And fossil fuel usage etc.
Like, duh!
Hahaha yer funny. We'd have some clunky Rube Goldberg contraption with a stylus and a pullout hardware keyboard and you know it. Nobody has ever had a lick of design sense or user experience sense except Apple. Well, there's Microsoft Bob which sort of anticipated SpongeBob Squarepants, so I guess there's that in the MS win column, lol.
You talk about inevitability as if execution and user experience don't have a thing to do with it, when in fact it's everything as the market has repeatedly demonstrated. Feature-creeping geekware that doesn't work half the time and requires twiddling around with it just to make it work never has cut it and never will.
Hah now you say a settlement. Before you said court ordered.
Microsoft did it to try and avoid being ruled a monopoly. They needed Apple to stay in business.
But the light bulb manufacturer doesn’t change my wattage and give me dimmer light in hopes to sell me a new light bulb.
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