Apple on Wednesday lost a bid to block a mass London lawsuit worth up to $1.9 billion which accuses the company of using ‘defective’ batteries in millions of iPhones.
Reuters:
The lawsuit was brought by British consumer champion Justin Gutmann on behalf of around 24 million iPhone users in the United Kingdom.
Gutmann is seeking damages from Apple on their behalf of up to 1.6 billion pounds ($1.9 billion) plus interest, with the claim’s midpoint range being 853 million pounds.
His lawyers argued Apple concealed issues with batteries in certain phone models by “throttling” them with software updates and installed a power management tool which limited performance.
Apple, however, said the lawsuit was “baseless” and strongly denied batteries in iPhones were defective…
The company sought to get the case thrown out of court, but the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) said Gutmann’s case can proceed in a written ruling on Wednesday. The CAT did, however, say there was “a lack of clarity and specificity” in Gutmann’s case which needed to be resolved before any trial.
MacDailyNews Take: The batteries were not defective. Apple’s secrecy – intentional or not – about what they were doing at the time was defective.
If this comes to trial, and some clarity is added by Gutmann’s legal team, 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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As usual, MDN take is logical and sound: “MacDailyNews Take: The batteries were not defective. Apple’s secrecy – intentional or not – about what they were doing at the time was defective.”
The whole kerfuffle was caused by Apple’s “nanny oversight” lack of info rather than bad intent.
On the other hand flash light rechargeable battery throttling would be welcomed by cave explorers who are running out of battery.
If it makes the light last long enough to escape, versus otherwise going dead faster and zero light then, Hell yeah !!!!
Probably better to just carry a Faraday flashlight for emergencies. 🙂 Self-contained, floats and never needs external charging.
At this point, Apple should just give everyone 1 free battery replacement and call it a day, they might even come out ahead considering the legal costs..