

Lawsuit: Apple turned iPhone 3Gs into "iBricks" to boost iPhone 4 - recoiledsnake
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/11/lawsuit-apple-turned-iphone-3gs-into-ibricks-to-boost-iphone-4.ars

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Poiesis
Yup, 4.0 sucked for the 3G. Kind of appalling QA for a company like Apple to
let that slip out. The 3G at that point was two generations behind, seemingly
giving Apple no large incentive to fix the performance problems.

But you know what? _They did anyway._. The 4.1 release made these phones
(including mine) usable again. I still think they screwed up badly, but I give
them props for fixing the problem reasonably quickly when there were clear
incentives for not doing so.

~~~
harryh
4.1 made it better but definitely does not completely fix the problem. My 3G
iPhone is still significantly slower than it was pre iOS4.

~~~
Xuzz
Can someone sue Microsoft for slowing my computer with Windows 7? They don't
provide any easy tools to downgrade and preserve my data... It's almost like
they want me to but a new computer with Windows 7 -- another duplicated
license to what I already own.

~~~
bryanh
I don't think that is a fair comparison. Going out of your way to buy a new
version of Windows (which has clear hardware requirements) and slapping it on
old hardware is much different than syncing your phone and following
directions for a standard upgrade.

~~~
wtallis
Windows performance can suck on hardware well above the "minimum system
requirements", and this has taught most computer users to know that new
features come at a price.

Mac OS X's trend of new releases being faster on the same hardware is a
shockingly rare exception to the norm, and due to Apple's habit of releasing
features before they're optimized. (The whole Quartz system took several
releases to get up to acceptable performance, and Spotlight also made very
significant gains after the initial release.)

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Xuzz
Obviously they weren't taught well enough to know that iOS 4 would slow things
down, too :/.

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Tyrannosaurs
Good luck to her proving malice. Claiming that the product isn't fit for
purpose would seem to be pretty straight forward but I'm not sure how she's
going to prove that they did it intentionally to increase iPhone 4 sales.

~~~
hartror
Considering they have to prove it was unsuitable for purpose and intent I
would expect just proving unsuitably for purpose is their fall back position.

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Tyrannosaurs
I'm not sure fall backs work that well in law. In some cases the fact you
failed to make one argument undermines your overall position. I think
generally you're better off focusing on what you can prove.

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karzeem
Apple had two choices: release iOS4 for 3G and let it run slowly, or require
3GS+ to run iOS4. They went with the first option. My bet is that if they'd
gone with the second, she would have sued them for obsoleting her 3G too
quickly.

~~~
glhaynes
Those weren't their only two choices, since iOS 4.1 fixed the performance
problems with the 3G. (Not that this suit has any merit, especially in light
of that.)

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pornel
If they needed time to fix those problems, then this would delay release of
iOS4 and iPhone 4.

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geuis
Does Apple come across as a company that needs to resort to such tactics to
force people to buy new phones? They build better devices (faster, more
memory, better battery) that in themselves are enough to entice users to
upgrade if they desire. The accusations of this lawsuit are honestly more
likely of cell carriers (here's looking at you, Verizon).

~~~
boredguy8
Yes. I mean, the term "resort" is pretty pejorative, but having worked with
Apple products in both the design (video/audio composition and editing) and
education (5,000+ UG), Apple's 'planned obsolescence' is pretty devastating.
The two ready-to-hand examples:

LogicPro - the migration from a dongle-based system to a non-dongle system was
an utter nightmare where some people were able to maintain their old license
and pay the upgrade price while others couldn't.

PPC -> Intel - the migration in driver architecture was a nightmare across the
entire Apple ecosystem. "Better/faster/just works" did not apply here at all.
As a classic example: the version of Final Cut released shortly after the
architecture switch was unable to run natively on Intel. Shortly after the
Universal Binary version was released, Apple broke compatibility with After
Effects plugins and instead replaced it with FxPlugin and once again caused a
huge disruption.

So yes, it does in fact seem like the sort of thing Apple would do.

~~~
Zev
For an overwhelming majority of applications out there, it really was just
"recompile and it works" or even using Rosetta for the interim, until the
developer got around to it. Apple even created a script that automatically
converted scalar types into an architecture-safe equivalent (int -> NSInteger,
for example).

Final Cut, Adobe CS and a few other major products are the exception to the
migration, not the rule. I've spoken to people who used to work on Final Cut.
It has one of the largest codebases that I've ever heard of. Plus, Final Cut
wasn't done in Objective-C and Cocoa. It is a C++ application with a
completely custom UI, done by Macromedia over a decade ago. Its not even a
full 64-bit application yet.

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glhaynes
The performance problems affected the older models of iPod touch, too, didn't
they? And the updated iPod touch (with retina display/camera/etc) wasn't out
then, so it's clear Apple wasn't pushing people to upgrade to the brand new
model in that case. Besides, the performance problems were cleared up with iOS
4.1.

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cschep
People would have been so miffed if they would have told them iOS 4 wasn't
available for the 3G.

"OMG, they are forcing us to upgrade!"

What would they have them do? Send out free (better) hardware everytime they
update iOS in a major way? That just doesn't seem right.

~~~
alanstorm
People would have been miffed, and left with a iPhone that still worked (just
like owners of the first generation iPhone).

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gaiusparx
Just curious what kind of damages is Ms Wofford is able to get from such
lawsuit if she wins? an iPhone 4 or millions? The lawyer costs more than an
iPhone 4 right?

~~~
tedunangst
Based on the outcome of the scratched nano lawsuit, it should go something
like this:

All iPhone 3 owners will get a $10 Apple store credit.

The lawyers will get about $10 million in cash.

Ms. Wofford, as the lead plaintiff, will get a bonus of about $10k in cash.

~~~
raganwald
This plus the Buzz case really underlines how broken the class action tort
system is. "Hey, we're the lawyers, we work for you, that's why we get ten
million and you get ten thousand, and if you don't like it we'll go work for
someone else."

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jsz0
I was using my 3G until 2 weeks ago running iOS 4. Not the best experience
early on with 4.0 but it got quite a bit better with subsequent releases.

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bryanh
I'll admit, I upgraded my 3G to the 4 because of how uselessly slow it was. I
wonder if I can get a piece of the class action?

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Stevenup7002
I don't think this really has any ground. It's not like you were forced to
upgrade to iOS 4.

~~~
zumbojo
The upgrade is practically automatic. iTunes nags you every time you plug in
an out-of-date iPhone and only requires a single click. That and the jump from
3.3.1 to 4.x is an absolute night-and-day _excruciating_ difference in speed
and usability.

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msbarnett
Only the jump to 4.0 is excruciating; 4.1's performance is on-par with 3.1.3

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bryanh
It merely helped in my situation. If 3.1.3 ran at 100%, 4.0 ran at 40-50% and
4.1 bumped it back up to 60-70% at best (in my experience).

