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Apple to pay up to $500M to settle U.S. lawsuit over slow iPhones

121 points by 34679 7y ago

notRobot 7y ago
> It calls for Apple to pay consumers $25 per iPhone I wonder if I owned one of these iPhone models but then re-sold it to a friend before it was slowed down, who gets the compensation? Presumably it'll be me, because Apple wouldn't have records of the second sale? Unless my friend logged in with an iCloud account in which case they might be able to tell?
- bryanlarsen 7y ago
  If you sold it after the big slowdown, the slowdown presumably reduced the value of the phone and the price you got, so you deserve the money. If you sold it before, than it was your friend who experienced the drop in value.
conqrr 7y ago
I wonder if from a cost perspective, they actually benefited from doing this. $500 million to make people buy newer iPhones. Wouldn't be surprised if they did the math here to justify the cost of a lawsuit.
- fatbird 7y ago
  They were slowing the phones to preserve battery life, giving the appearance of longer useful battery lifespan. Without that, people would have been upgrading phones (or replacing batteries) sooner anyway, which seems, financially, like a wash.
  - mthoms 7y ago
    > which seems, financially, like a wash. How can that be? Replacement batteries are somewhere in the neighbourhood of 1/10 the cost of a new phone.
  - macintux 7y ago
    > They were slowing the phones to preserve battery life, giving the appearance of longer useful battery lifespan. Not quite accurate. They were preventing the phones from spontaneously shutting down by limiting CPU. Processor spikes can drain older, feebler batteries.
    - zaroth 7y ago
      Now they just let the phone crash if the battery can’t keep up, and then notify the user when it reboots what happened. Arguably a “worse is better” experience because although a crash is theoretically to be avoided at all cost because it could result in data loss, this way at least the issue is completely transparent.
    - cptskippy 7y ago
      That is also not quite accurate. The "unexpected shutdown", as Apple called it, was a result of a voltage drop in the battery. Voltage drop occurs when the max current capacity of a battery is exceeded, it has nothing to do with battery age. Also, when you experience a voltage drop you have generally exceeded the c-rate of the battery and caused some damage which increases it's internal resistance and further reduces the max current capacity of the battery. The iPhones experiencing "unexpected shutdown" weren't very old, generally a battery is spec'd with a c-rate that takes into account degradation over time. The fact that Apple shipped software to limit the max current draw of the device demonstrates that this wasn't expected behavior AND they were attempting to hide it rather than own up to a defect that might result in a recall.
  - ogre_codes 7y ago
    Not exactly, the big reason for the slowdown was to avoid crashes from a low voltage condition. They were essentially covering up a design flaw with software.
    - cptskippy 7y ago
      > They were essentially covering up a design flaw with software. My understanding is that the flaw was in the batteries. The c-rating was out of spec so every time the device drew max power it would damage the battery causing it's internal resistance to increase. Once the internal resistance of the battery was high enough, the max power current draw would result in a voltage drop and "unexpected shutdown". Did a supplier deliver under spec batteries? Did Apple underspec them? Did they know they were underspec and anticipate power management or something would limit exceeding the c-rating? No one knows because Apple refused to acknowledge that it was a defect or take accountability. All we can do is speculate.
      - ogre_codes 7y ago
        In a way, Apple got away with a bit of sleight of hand here. They got in trouble for a fix which slowed down phones, but avoided taking heat for hardware issues which might have been much more expensive to remediate. If instead of slowing down their phones, they'd just started crashing repeatedly after a year - 18 months would it have been significantly more expensive?
        cptskippy 7y ago
        Absolutely. It was classic misdirection. They even managed to get people to pay for replacement batteries by offering them at a "discount".
  - cptskippy 7y ago
    > They were slowing the phones to preserve battery life, giving the appearance of longer useful battery lifespan. I don't like this explanation because the term "life" is loaded and could mean a few different things. The issue wasn't with the battery's capacity, ability to hold a charge, and not really how long the phone could run before needing to be charged. The issue was that the battery's C-rate was too low for the load. The C-rate is the rate at which a battery can safely be charged or discharged without damaging it. When you exceed the C-rate you damage the battery and increase it's internal resistance. As a battery's internal resistance increases, the amount of current it can supply decreases. When the amount of current a battery can supply drops below what the load draws, the voltage drops. This voltage drop would cause what Apple described as "unexpected shutdown". Apple throttled the devices to reduce their maximum current draw, not because the batteries were discharging too quickly but because they were drawing too much current which was further damaging the battery AND causing low voltage drops AND unexpected shutdowns. It's not clear if the batteries were out underspec, of spec from the supplier, or had an issue which caused them to prematurely degrade. In any cause, they were defective and Apple manipulated the defective devices to hide the issue and when called out offered people discounts rather than issue a recall.
- baby 7y ago
  I’m going to use the money to replace the battery of my iPhone 6s personally. Still an excellent phone.
throwGuardian 7y ago
Too little! The cost of replacing an iPhone dwarfs $25. The reason they settled was likely due to guilt, because proving innocence is cheaper than $500M. They should not be allowed to get away with a slap on the wrist
- oarsinsync 7y ago
  The cost of proving innocence may be less than $500M. The risk of the ruling going against you even if innocent resulting in a higher penalty still exists. The calculus needs to also include that. $500M settlement is probably cheaper than the risk of court not ruling your way and being left with a larger penalty. Agreed that the penalty is too little. $25 doesn't even cover the cost of replacing a battery one time.
- powowowow 7y ago
  They made a decision to try to keep battery life closer to constant at the expense of performance, believing it was a better UX (slow phone > no phone). I think this was totally defensible, and I also think that the people who claim it's some sort of malicious activity are unhinged. That said, it makes sense to avoid a lawsuit where you'll spend a fortune in legal fees, then roll the dice on the verdict possibly losing _billions_ instead, and definitely earning a lot of ongoing PR along the way. Better to just pay it once, get one more round of dumb "Apple slowed their phones because they're evil hurr durr" commentary out, and then get back to business.
  - JoshTko 7y ago
    This. Apple invests in build quality more than any other smartphone manufacturers. A much easier way for Apple to push obsolescence would be to not support older iPhones with software updates but Apple supports phone longer than anyone else.
  - avalys 7y ago
    As I recall, it wasn’t even about maintaining constant battery life, it was about preventing the phone from unexpectedly shutting down due to insufficient battery current.
babycake 7y ago
It says 25-46$ can be paid to customers. How do I claim this money? I was affected.
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  You'll likely receive a notice in the mail in the next few months.
syspec 7y ago
> The lawyers plan to seek up to $93 million, equal to 30% of $310 million, in legal fees, plus up to $1.5 million for expenses. Ah of course...
- ping_pong 7y ago
  There needs to be a cap on lawyers fees. This is what is causing a lot of unnecessary litigation.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - elicash 7y ago
    I'm pro-cap. (For different reasons.) But (1) this case is a bad example of unnecessary litigation, and (2) there might be better ways than a cap to stop the litigation that you're calling "unnecessary." Maybe what you want are no caps, but greater penalties for losing (either to the winning side or to taxpayers who are paying costs associated with large companies suing each other) -- just for one example. So higher risk, higher reward. Or maybe the courts reform to make it easier to dismiss cases. You could think of a million ways to do it without caps. What you don't want are for good cases to not be brought on behalf of consumers because it's not worth the investment of time and money.
- dangus 7y ago
  Well, yeah. The lawyers did all the work, didn’t they? Without lawyers, you get zero.
  - elicash 7y ago
    This is a fair point, but an alternative venue from the one used in this instance can be fines by governments. Also, I think it's reasonable to debate capping fees by attorneys in these types of cases. You want the payout to be big enough that there's incentive for attorneys to go after abuses, but not so big that consumers aren't fairly compensated for losses.
gdulli 7y ago
> quietly slowing down older iPhones as it launched new models, to induce owners to buy replacement phones or batteries This happened to me a long time ago and it made me a permanent Android user, not that I don't have issues with that ecosystem but I use an isolated google account that isn't tied to my real email and desktop activity. But after 3 Android phones, each was still completely usable after 3 years and each was able to be replaced on my schedule instead of being required after an OS update "surprise" which is what happened with my only iPhone.
hurricanetc 7y ago
This entire mess could have been avoided if Apple was just upfront about what they were doing. There is nothing wrong with throttling the SoC so that the phone doesn't shut down when a degraded battery can't provide sustained peak voltage. Apple has been, and still is, the industry leader in providing software updates for older devices. You can install the latest version of iOS on an iPhone 6S, a phone that was released in 2015. The fact that they chose to make this throttling change and keep it a secret was a major whiff on their part and destroyed a fair bit of goodwill they built up from their long support cycle.
- larrik 7y ago
  Yet it's entirely consistent with their "we know best" attitude.
- pwenzel 7y ago
  6S? I'm still rocking my iPhone SE!
  - zoonosis 7y ago
    The iPhone SE was released a year after the 6S.
  - bobbylarrybobby 7y ago
    Internally, the 6s and the SE are practically the same phone. IIRC, the only significant differences are the Touch ID sensor and the front facing camera.
avalys 7y ago
I’ve always thought the coverage of this issue got things completely backwards. Apple had an issue with old phones unexpectedly shutting down. They determined this happened because aged batteries were not capable of delivering peak current anymore and the CPU was “browning out” under heavy load. They added a software feature in an iOS update that throttled the CPU in this condition to prevent a crash, at the expense of lower peak CPU performance. From my perspective, this demonstrated real dedication to customer care and old device support from Apple. A phone that is moderately slower is still more valuable than one that randomly crashes. Intuitively, I’d expect that this would decrease sales of replacement iPhones, not increase them. People latched onto the fact that Apple did this “secretly” - but Apple has never exposed this sort of implementation detail, and they’ve never wanted battery replacement to be part of the normal user experience for their devices. If Apple had shipped an iOS update that started telling people “Your battery is degraded, pay us to replace it to stop the crashes!” they obviously would’ve been raked over the coals also. There is no magic solution here. So I never saw any indication that this was malicious on Apple’s part.
- kylec 7y ago
  The problem is that there was a narrative for years that Apple was intentionally slowing down older phones with software updates, but there wasn't any proof. The fact that they were caught doing it in this case was considered validation of the broader theory, which is why it's been blown out of proportion.
  - dntrkv 7y ago
    > The problem is that there was a narrative for years that Apple was intentionally slowing down older phones with software updates, but there wasn't any proof. Except that is not what they were doing. There is a huge difference between pushing out updates around the time of a new phone release to push users onto the new phones (what people proposed Apple was doing) compared to slowing down your phone so it stays usable after its battery becomes unable to support the factory level of performance. I would say Apple was doing the opposite of what people suggested since slowing the phones down made them usable for a longer period of time.
gentle 7y ago
This whole fiasco is part of what motivated me to move out of the Apple ecosystem. The other part was the abandonment of the headphone jack.
- somehnguy 7y ago
  So you moved away from Apple because they implemented a software fix to prevent your phone from crashing when the hardware eventually degrades? Sounds like a kneejerk reaction based on misleading headlines.
  - mthoms 7y ago
    It was Apple's secrecy/denial that resulted in a degradation of trust, not the throttling.
  - gentle 7y ago
    They claimed for years that they didn't slow down older (1-2 year) iPhones. Then it turned out they did. If the phone was only going to last a year without becoming unusable unless it was throttled, then that's terrible design. If they slowed down old iPhones to drive sales then that's fraudulent. Either way I'd rather not be in an ecosystem that only has one manufacturer that conducts business that way.
  - meh2frdf 7y ago
    Hmm but my phone wasn’t crashing ... it definitely was slower!
klingonopera 7y ago
Question to those affected: When Apple had throttled the CPU due to old batteries, did they suspend throttling if the phone was connected to a charger?
- MockObject 7y ago
  Vital question.
- zoonosis 7y ago
  When the phone is connected to a charger, is it drawing power from the wall? Or is it still drawing power from the battery?
  - strbean 7y ago
    Not an expert, but I'm pretty sure it is drawing power from the wall. My understanding is it is not great for the battery to act as a pass-through for power. Many cheaper devices warn you not to use the device while charging, because they don't invest in the circuitry to bypass the battery while plugged in.
  - rzimmerman 7y ago
    My guess would be both - it draws wall power up to a point and once it hits the limit of the charger (usually 5W for the small iPhone cubes) the rest comes out of the battery. So light use might still trickle the battery, but turning on the camera probably drains the battery slightly.
- plorkyeran 7y ago
  It did not appear to for me. Back when this was first unfolding I tried running geekbench both plugged in and not and got about the same score (and started getting a much higher score once I replaced the battery).
- rzimmerman 7y ago
  They probably wouldn't - you wouldn't want the phone to die if someone unplugged the charger during high usage.
driverdan 7y ago
> Friday's settlement covers U.S. owners of the iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6s, 6s Plus, 7, 7Plus or SE that ran the iOS 10.2.1 or later operating system. The settlement should cover all iPhones and iPads, not just the ones affected by CPU throttling. iOS 4 made anything older than iPhone 3GS nearly unusable. iOS 9 did the same for my iPad 2. I completely gave up on Apple mobile devices because of this.
- captn3m0 7y ago
  I downgraded to 8 because of this (iPad 2). Works great as a reading device still.
herf 7y ago
The battery was too a bit too small, and this was a design flaw. But overall, I think third-party developers are more at fault. The biggest reason that old phones get slow is because third-party developers get new phones and don't worry as much about optimization for older models.
- jhloa2 7y ago
  While the app optimization may have played a small part, I know for a fact that when I updated my iPhone 6 to IOS 11 it basically became unusable until a whole year later when they released IOS 12. I upgraded to the 8 during this time and really regretted it once the 6 was updated to fix all the issues. If I had been able to downgrade my software it wouldn't have been an issue, but Apple forced my hand to buy a new phone by breaking my old one with zero recourse available to me. I'm now very, very careful to not update software on my phone until I've vetted it carefully. Apple lost a lot of goodwill from me with that whole shitshow.
- captn3m0 7y ago
  I face App shutdowns with even 2Apple apps if I upgrade to iOS 9 on my iPad 2. It was launched with iOS 4, and upgraded to 5 soon after launch. The slowdowns are OS wide, because of all the fancy new stuff that the newer OS version does.
deeblering4 7y ago
Is there any precedent for a company to pay damages in a combination of money and goods. For example paying N dollars in legal fees, and issuing new phones to those affected within some filter criteria? I ask because the only people who tend to benefit from from issues like this are the lawyers involved. Besides the damages being potentially punitive to the company responsible and maybe preventing recurrence of the same issue, nothing really improves for the people personally affected by the problem being sued over.
- 1123581321 7y ago
  There is, but the cost of the replacement would still have legal fees factored into it. A free phone would be an absolutely enormous settlement, which would raise the legal fees commensurately.
paxys 7y ago
I don't know why half of HN shows up to vehemently defend Apple whenever an article like this is posted. There was a time when mobile phone batteries were easily removable and replaceable. Apple got us to a place where it is now expected that instead of a $25 annual battery swap you should spend $700+ on a full replacement (and send the old one for "recycling" where it will likely end up in a landfill). It is also the company that aggressively sues repair shops and is fighting against right to repair bills.
- zippergz 7y ago
  Because half of us realize that engineering is a tradeoff (in this case with things like device size/thickness, battery capacity, durability, water resistance, appearance, etc.), and a company making an engineering decision you don't agree with doesn't make them evil. While it might be hard to believe based on discussions on HN, it actually IS possible to debate the merits of a design without dividing into "attacking" vs. "defending" factions.
  - hu3 7y ago
    There's a difference between tradeoff and design flaw. Here's an Apple apology that has since been removed: https://web.archive.org/web/20171229000007/https://www.apple.com/iphone-battery-and-performance/ https://web.archive.org/web/20171229000007/https://www.apple...
- thrwaway69 7y ago
  Probably the American half (Apple anything isn't as popular outside). I just find it funny how an average HNer finds evil in anything google does whilst giving a blind eye to apple pushing for anti consumer crap. Amp is an engineering trade off /s

121 points by 34679 7y ago

> It calls for Apple to pay consumers $25 per iPhone I wonder if I owned one of these iPhone models but then re-sold it to a friend before it was slowed down, who gets the compensation? Presumably it'll be me, because Apple wouldn't have records of the second sale? Unless my friend logged in with an iCloud account in which case they might be able to tell?

bryanlarsen 7y ago
If you sold it after the big slowdown, the slowdown presumably reduced the value of the phone and the price you got, so you deserve the money. If you sold it before, than it was your friend who experienced the drop in value.

conqrr 7y ago

I wonder if from a cost perspective, they actually benefited from doing this. $500 million to make people buy newer iPhones. Wouldn't be surprised if they did the math here to justify the cost of a lawsuit.

fatbird 7y ago
They were slowing the phones to preserve battery life, giving the appearance of longer useful battery lifespan. Without that, people would have been upgrading phones (or replacing batteries) sooner anyway, which seems, financially, like a wash.
- mthoms 7y ago
  > which seems, financially, like a wash. How can that be? Replacement batteries are somewhere in the neighbourhood of 1/10 the cost of a new phone.
- macintux 7y ago
  > They were slowing the phones to preserve battery life, giving the appearance of longer useful battery lifespan. Not quite accurate. They were preventing the phones from spontaneously shutting down by limiting CPU. Processor spikes can drain older, feebler batteries.
  - zaroth 7y ago
    Now they just let the phone crash if the battery can’t keep up, and then notify the user when it reboots what happened. Arguably a “worse is better” experience because although a crash is theoretically to be avoided at all cost because it could result in data loss, this way at least the issue is completely transparent.
  - cptskippy 7y ago
    That is also not quite accurate. The "unexpected shutdown", as Apple called it, was a result of a voltage drop in the battery. Voltage drop occurs when the max current capacity of a battery is exceeded, it has nothing to do with battery age. Also, when you experience a voltage drop you have generally exceeded the c-rate of the battery and caused some damage which increases it's internal resistance and further reduces the max current capacity of the battery. The iPhones experiencing "unexpected shutdown" weren't very old, generally a battery is spec'd with a c-rate that takes into account degradation over time. The fact that Apple shipped software to limit the max current draw of the device demonstrates that this wasn't expected behavior AND they were attempting to hide it rather than own up to a defect that might result in a recall.
- ogre_codes 7y ago
  Not exactly, the big reason for the slowdown was to avoid crashes from a low voltage condition. They were essentially covering up a design flaw with software.
  - cptskippy 7y ago
    > They were essentially covering up a design flaw with software. My understanding is that the flaw was in the batteries. The c-rating was out of spec so every time the device drew max power it would damage the battery causing it's internal resistance to increase. Once the internal resistance of the battery was high enough, the max power current draw would result in a voltage drop and "unexpected shutdown". Did a supplier deliver under spec batteries? Did Apple underspec them? Did they know they were underspec and anticipate power management or something would limit exceeding the c-rating? No one knows because Apple refused to acknowledge that it was a defect or take accountability. All we can do is speculate.
    - ogre_codes 7y ago
      In a way, Apple got away with a bit of sleight of hand here. They got in trouble for a fix which slowed down phones, but avoided taking heat for hardware issues which might have been much more expensive to remediate. If instead of slowing down their phones, they'd just started crashing repeatedly after a year - 18 months would it have been significantly more expensive?
      - cptskippy 7y ago
        Absolutely. It was classic misdirection. They even managed to get people to pay for replacement batteries by offering them at a "discount".
- cptskippy 7y ago
  > They were slowing the phones to preserve battery life, giving the appearance of longer useful battery lifespan. I don't like this explanation because the term "life" is loaded and could mean a few different things. The issue wasn't with the battery's capacity, ability to hold a charge, and not really how long the phone could run before needing to be charged. The issue was that the battery's C-rate was too low for the load. The C-rate is the rate at which a battery can safely be charged or discharged without damaging it. When you exceed the C-rate you damage the battery and increase it's internal resistance. As a battery's internal resistance increases, the amount of current it can supply decreases. When the amount of current a battery can supply drops below what the load draws, the voltage drops. This voltage drop would cause what Apple described as "unexpected shutdown". Apple throttled the devices to reduce their maximum current draw, not because the batteries were discharging too quickly but because they were drawing too much current which was further damaging the battery AND causing low voltage drops AND unexpected shutdowns. It's not clear if the batteries were out underspec, of spec from the supplier, or had an issue which caused them to prematurely degrade. In any cause, they were defective and Apple manipulated the defective devices to hide the issue and when called out offered people discounts rather than issue a recall.
baby 7y ago
I’m going to use the money to replace the battery of my iPhone 6s personally. Still an excellent phone.

throwGuardian 7y ago

Too little! The cost of replacing an iPhone dwarfs $25. The reason they settled was likely due to guilt, because proving innocence is cheaper than $500M. They should not be allowed to get away with a slap on the wrist

oarsinsync 7y ago
The cost of proving innocence may be less than $500M. The risk of the ruling going against you even if innocent resulting in a higher penalty still exists. The calculus needs to also include that. $500M settlement is probably cheaper than the risk of court not ruling your way and being left with a larger penalty. Agreed that the penalty is too little. $25 doesn't even cover the cost of replacing a battery one time.
powowowow 7y ago
They made a decision to try to keep battery life closer to constant at the expense of performance, believing it was a better UX (slow phone > no phone). I think this was totally defensible, and I also think that the people who claim it's some sort of malicious activity are unhinged. That said, it makes sense to avoid a lawsuit where you'll spend a fortune in legal fees, then roll the dice on the verdict possibly losing _billions_ instead, and definitely earning a lot of ongoing PR along the way. Better to just pay it once, get one more round of dumb "Apple slowed their phones because they're evil hurr durr" commentary out, and then get back to business.
- JoshTko 7y ago
  This. Apple invests in build quality more than any other smartphone manufacturers. A much easier way for Apple to push obsolescence would be to not support older iPhones with software updates but Apple supports phone longer than anyone else.
- avalys 7y ago
  As I recall, it wasn’t even about maintaining constant battery life, it was about preventing the phone from unexpectedly shutting down due to insufficient battery current.

babycake 7y ago

It says 25-46$ can be paid to customers. How do I claim this money? I was affected.

ceejayoz 7y ago
You'll likely receive a notice in the mail in the next few months.

syspec 7y ago

> The lawyers plan to seek up to $93 million, equal to 30% of $310 million, in legal fees, plus up to $1.5 million for expenses. Ah of course...

ping_pong 7y ago
There needs to be a cap on lawyers fees. This is what is causing a lot of unnecessary litigation.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- elicash 7y ago
  I'm pro-cap. (For different reasons.) But (1) this case is a bad example of unnecessary litigation, and (2) there might be better ways than a cap to stop the litigation that you're calling "unnecessary." Maybe what you want are no caps, but greater penalties for losing (either to the winning side or to taxpayers who are paying costs associated with large companies suing each other) -- just for one example. So higher risk, higher reward. Or maybe the courts reform to make it easier to dismiss cases. You could think of a million ways to do it without caps. What you don't want are for good cases to not be brought on behalf of consumers because it's not worth the investment of time and money.
dangus 7y ago
Well, yeah. The lawyers did all the work, didn’t they? Without lawyers, you get zero.
- elicash 7y ago
  This is a fair point, but an alternative venue from the one used in this instance can be fines by governments. Also, I think it's reasonable to debate capping fees by attorneys in these types of cases. You want the payout to be big enough that there's incentive for attorneys to go after abuses, but not so big that consumers aren't fairly compensated for losses.

gdulli 7y ago

> quietly slowing down older iPhones as it launched new models, to induce owners to buy replacement phones or batteries This happened to me a long time ago and it made me a permanent Android user, not that I don't have issues with that ecosystem but I use an isolated google account that isn't tied to my real email and desktop activity. But after 3 Android phones, each was still completely usable after 3 years and each was able to be replaced on my schedule instead of being required after an OS update "surprise" which is what happened with my only iPhone.

hurricanetc 7y ago

This entire mess could have been avoided if Apple was just upfront about what they were doing. There is nothing wrong with throttling the SoC so that the phone doesn't shut down when a degraded battery can't provide sustained peak voltage. Apple has been, and still is, the industry leader in providing software updates for older devices. You can install the latest version of iOS on an iPhone 6S, a phone that was released in 2015. The fact that they chose to make this throttling change and keep it a secret was a major whiff on their part and destroyed a fair bit of goodwill they built up from their long support cycle.

larrik 7y ago
Yet it's entirely consistent with their "we know best" attitude.
pwenzel 7y ago
6S? I'm still rocking my iPhone SE!
- zoonosis 7y ago
  The iPhone SE was released a year after the 6S.
- bobbylarrybobby 7y ago
  Internally, the 6s and the SE are practically the same phone. IIRC, the only significant differences are the Touch ID sensor and the front facing camera.

avalys 7y ago

I’ve always thought the coverage of this issue got things completely backwards. Apple had an issue with old phones unexpectedly shutting down. They determined this happened because aged batteries were not capable of delivering peak current anymore and the CPU was “browning out” under heavy load. They added a software feature in an iOS update that throttled the CPU in this condition to prevent a crash, at the expense of lower peak CPU performance. From my perspective, this demonstrated real dedication to customer care and old device support from Apple. A phone that is moderately slower is still more valuable than one that randomly crashes. Intuitively, I’d expect that this would decrease sales of replacement iPhones, not increase them. People latched onto the fact that Apple did this “secretly” - but Apple has never exposed this sort of implementation detail, and they’ve never wanted battery replacement to be part of the normal user experience for their devices. If Apple had shipped an iOS update that started telling people “Your battery is degraded, pay us to replace it to stop the crashes!” they obviously would’ve been raked over the coals also. There is no magic solution here. So I never saw any indication that this was malicious on Apple’s part.

kylec 7y ago
The problem is that there was a narrative for years that Apple was intentionally slowing down older phones with software updates, but there wasn't any proof. The fact that they were caught doing it in this case was considered validation of the broader theory, which is why it's been blown out of proportion.
- dntrkv 7y ago
  > The problem is that there was a narrative for years that Apple was intentionally slowing down older phones with software updates, but there wasn't any proof. Except that is not what they were doing. There is a huge difference between pushing out updates around the time of a new phone release to push users onto the new phones (what people proposed Apple was doing) compared to slowing down your phone so it stays usable after its battery becomes unable to support the factory level of performance. I would say Apple was doing the opposite of what people suggested since slowing the phones down made them usable for a longer period of time.

gentle 7y ago

This whole fiasco is part of what motivated me to move out of the Apple ecosystem. The other part was the abandonment of the headphone jack.

somehnguy 7y ago
So you moved away from Apple because they implemented a software fix to prevent your phone from crashing when the hardware eventually degrades? Sounds like a kneejerk reaction based on misleading headlines.
- mthoms 7y ago
  It was Apple's secrecy/denial that resulted in a degradation of trust, not the throttling.
- gentle 7y ago
  They claimed for years that they didn't slow down older (1-2 year) iPhones. Then it turned out they did. If the phone was only going to last a year without becoming unusable unless it was throttled, then that's terrible design. If they slowed down old iPhones to drive sales then that's fraudulent. Either way I'd rather not be in an ecosystem that only has one manufacturer that conducts business that way.
- meh2frdf 7y ago
  Hmm but my phone wasn’t crashing ... it definitely was slower!

klingonopera 7y ago

Question to those affected: When Apple had throttled the CPU due to old batteries, did they suspend throttling if the phone was connected to a charger?

MockObject 7y ago
Vital question.
zoonosis 7y ago
When the phone is connected to a charger, is it drawing power from the wall? Or is it still drawing power from the battery?
- strbean 7y ago
  Not an expert, but I'm pretty sure it is drawing power from the wall. My understanding is it is not great for the battery to act as a pass-through for power. Many cheaper devices warn you not to use the device while charging, because they don't invest in the circuitry to bypass the battery while plugged in.
- rzimmerman 7y ago
  My guess would be both - it draws wall power up to a point and once it hits the limit of the charger (usually 5W for the small iPhone cubes) the rest comes out of the battery. So light use might still trickle the battery, but turning on the camera probably drains the battery slightly.
plorkyeran 7y ago
It did not appear to for me. Back when this was first unfolding I tried running geekbench both plugged in and not and got about the same score (and started getting a much higher score once I replaced the battery).
rzimmerman 7y ago
They probably wouldn't - you wouldn't want the phone to die if someone unplugged the charger during high usage.

driverdan 7y ago

> Friday's settlement covers U.S. owners of the iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6s, 6s Plus, 7, 7Plus or SE that ran the iOS 10.2.1 or later operating system. The settlement should cover all iPhones and iPads, not just the ones affected by CPU throttling. iOS 4 made anything older than iPhone 3GS nearly unusable. iOS 9 did the same for my iPad 2. I completely gave up on Apple mobile devices because of this.

captn3m0 7y ago
I downgraded to 8 because of this (iPad 2). Works great as a reading device still.

herf 7y ago

The battery was too a bit too small, and this was a design flaw. But overall, I think third-party developers are more at fault. The biggest reason that old phones get slow is because third-party developers get new phones and don't worry as much about optimization for older models.

jhloa2 7y ago
While the app optimization may have played a small part, I know for a fact that when I updated my iPhone 6 to IOS 11 it basically became unusable until a whole year later when they released IOS 12. I upgraded to the 8 during this time and really regretted it once the 6 was updated to fix all the issues. If I had been able to downgrade my software it wouldn't have been an issue, but Apple forced my hand to buy a new phone by breaking my old one with zero recourse available to me. I'm now very, very careful to not update software on my phone until I've vetted it carefully. Apple lost a lot of goodwill from me with that whole shitshow.
captn3m0 7y ago
I face App shutdowns with even 2Apple apps if I upgrade to iOS 9 on my iPad 2. It was launched with iOS 4, and upgraded to 5 soon after launch. The slowdowns are OS wide, because of all the fancy new stuff that the newer OS version does.

deeblering4 7y ago

Is there any precedent for a company to pay damages in a combination of money and goods. For example paying N dollars in legal fees, and issuing new phones to those affected within some filter criteria? I ask because the only people who tend to benefit from from issues like this are the lawyers involved. Besides the damages being potentially punitive to the company responsible and maybe preventing recurrence of the same issue, nothing really improves for the people personally affected by the problem being sued over.

1123581321 7y ago
There is, but the cost of the replacement would still have legal fees factored into it. A free phone would be an absolutely enormous settlement, which would raise the legal fees commensurately.

paxys 7y ago

I don't know why half of HN shows up to vehemently defend Apple whenever an article like this is posted. There was a time when mobile phone batteries were easily removable and replaceable. Apple got us to a place where it is now expected that instead of a $25 annual battery swap you should spend $700+ on a full replacement (and send the old one for "recycling" where it will likely end up in a landfill). It is also the company that aggressively sues repair shops and is fighting against right to repair bills.

zippergz 7y ago
Because half of us realize that engineering is a tradeoff (in this case with things like device size/thickness, battery capacity, durability, water resistance, appearance, etc.), and a company making an engineering decision you don't agree with doesn't make them evil. While it might be hard to believe based on discussions on HN, it actually IS possible to debate the merits of a design without dividing into "attacking" vs. "defending" factions.
- hu3 7y ago
  There's a difference between tradeoff and design flaw. Here's an Apple apology that has since been removed: https://web.archive.org/web/20171229000007/https://www.apple.com/iphone-battery-and-performance/ https://web.archive.org/web/20171229000007/https://www.apple...
thrwaway69 7y ago
Probably the American half (Apple anything isn't as popular outside). I just find it funny how an average HNer finds evil in anything google does whilst giving a blind eye to apple pushing for anti consumer crap. Amp is an engineering trade off /s