
France fines Apple €25M for iOS software that slowed down older iPhones - kilotaras
https://www.dw.com/en/france-fines-apple-25-million-for-slowing-iphone-software/a-52290154?maca=en-rss-en-eu-2092-rdf
======
wmeredith
This is so dumb. Apple has a lot of flaws but old hardware support certainly
isn’t one of them. Firstly, they only slowed down older phones to prevent them
from crashing as they had less and less reliable battery draw. Secondly,
Apple’s support for legacy phone hardware is _the best_ in the market. It’s
absurd that they’re being punished for this.

~~~
jonplackett
The problem is they didn't tell anyone they were doing it.

So people thought their phone was just old and slow and bought a new one, when
they could have just replaced the battery and made it fast again.

~~~
Bud
This is total bullshit. I would bet real money that a grand total of ZERO
users "thought their phone was just old and slow and bought a new one" as a
result of this issue.

Zero.

~~~
sequoia
I would very gladly take you up on this bet. You name the stakes.

What do you think the average user thinks when their older phone performs
worse after an OS update? "Aha, I bet the vendor is throttling the performance
to preserve battery life, which I can fix by replacing with a new battery, a
repair process which the vendor makes clear and easy!"

This has not been my experience. I'm a technical iPhone user and I don't even
research it this much, I just think "%#&* they updated the OS _again_ and now
my phone is slow _again_ "

------
Someone1234
Apple was actually fined for failure to INFORM consumers that the update would
slow down their phone.

To quote the regulator:

> were not informed that installing iOS updates (10.2.1 and 11.2) could slow
> down their devices [...] committed the crime of deceptive commercial
> practice by omission" and had agreed to pay the fine.

This is kinda clickbait reporting from the BBC. Which depressingly has become
more the norm in the last few years.

~~~
asimovfan
Yes :) apple did not swindle people, they just did not INFORM them how they
were swindling them.

~~~
iDemonix
I'm not sure swindling involves negating a battery peak performance issue for
users on old hardware. I still use an iPhone 6 and had noticed less crashes
with upgrades (loading big apps would often crash it), less now with iOS
upgrades. I can disable it if I want, but I prefer not to.

On the flip side, I have friends with Android phones that are 4 years old, and
barely usable.

~~~
takeda
Why don't they do what every other industry is doing? Have you wondered why in
your phone battery degrades significantly after a year, in the mean time the
battery in a hybrid such as Prius lasts about 10 years?

They are overvolting them and don't implement mechanisms to keep battery
change using optimal levels.

Apple also pioneered the move to make batteries non-removeable (and other
companies followed) most people are then forced to get new phone when battery
gets bad.

~~~
jmull
Just to correct an incorrect fact: Apple’s phone batteries are replaceable.

Just not by the average user.

But in the same way you don’t have to trade your car in when it needs an oil
change or new breaks, you don’t have to buy a new phone when the battery
degrades. You can take it in for a non-prohibitive fee, or do it yourself for
a little less if you’re a little more technical or adventurous.

~~~
takeda
iPhone batteries are replaceable as much as any other android non-removable
batteries are. You know what I meant.

------
privateSFacct
Apple implemented this to help users extend life of older devices.

Apple should just have phones in France run full clock at all times to comply
with this regulation. These types of things don't recognize that phone design
is a CONSTANT power management / speed tradeoff. If you demand things run 100%
speed at all times - poof - your batter life is gone.

~~~
ogre_codes
Apple throttling phones to preserve battery life was the right thing to do.

Doing it without telling users their batteries were expired and causing their
phone to slow down was the wrong thing to do.

Whether that merits a $27m fine is debatable.

~~~
bgorman
I absolutely disagree.

These phones were unusable with the throttling. I switched to Android because
my iPhone 6 was unusable less than 3 years after getting it.

This is like saying that an appropriate fix for a car manufacture is to limit
the maximum speed of a car to 25 miles per hour. It breaks so many use cases
that the car becomes worthless.

~~~
ninkendo
> This is like saying that an appropriate fix for a car manufacture is to
> limit the maximum speed of a car to 25 miles per hour. It breaks so many use
> cases that the car becomes worthless.

Would you prefer the car simply turn off entirely while driving at highway
speeds? Because phones with this issue would turn off entirely below certain
charge levels, when the batteries had this issue.

A more appropriate analogy would be that your car's fuel pump could randomly
fail at highway speeds when below 1/2 tank, so the manufacturer just started
arbitrarily limiting the car to drive 25mph to avoid the pump shutting off,
_when it detected this issue._

Point being, the real problem is not the mitigation they employed, but the
fact that they didn't _tell_ users in any way, users just saw a slower phone
(equivalent to a slower car.) If my car detected a fuel pump issue for me and
said "Fuel pump needs replacing, car is limited to 25mph when below half-tank
to avoid catastrophic failure, please take to service center", it would be
acceptable. Arbitrarily limiting to 25mph without any indication why, not so
much.

~~~
jerkstate
as a matter of fact, modern cars (including French manufacturers like Renault)
implement a "limp home" mode that limits the speed when problems are detected
in the engine or transmission. It's hard to believe that Apple's action could
be so poorly understood.

~~~
achamayou
A substantial difference as others pointed out is that Apple did this quietly,
whereas limp mode is typically notified to the driver about loudly as anything
can be.

------
martin-adams
If my recollection of the events is correct, I do think this fine is fair as
the slowing down of people's iPhones when a new iOS was released, combined
with newer iPhone models being launched made people think that it was due them
perceiving the phone was old tech and unable to power the latest iOS features,
not the software doing it for the lifespan of the battery.

Apple were silent about this for many years and were pressured to put the
option to disable this in. This is what is important. They were happy to be
silent and let users feel like the only option was to upgrade to have a fast
phone. And since it's not feasible to replace batteries on older phone,
everything was stacked in Apple's favour.

~~~
rgovostes
> I do think this fine is fair as ... made people think that it was due them
> perceiving the phone ...

> users feel like the only option ...

A fine is fair because people jumped to conclusions because of the proximity
in time of an OS release and a new product release? No, that's called a
conspiracy theory.

If people had convinced themselves this was a ploy to sell more phones, then
why on earth would they go back to Apple for another round?

I think it's in everyone's best interest for Apple to have been more
transparent, but there was not a shred of proof of intention of harming users,
and they ran a battery replacement program likely at a loss for a year.

~~~
martin-adams
>> If people had convinced themselves this was a ploy to sell more phones,
then why on earth would they go back to Apple for another round

They believed their phones were obsolete, which it turns out they weren’t as
it was in fact Apple who had slowed down the CPU to save power and made a
decision not to inform users this was happening.

I believe the consequence of this was those users feeling they needed to
upgrade sooner that what would have been. That is my subjective take on it.

Google Trends has shown that there is a spike in people searching for ‘iphone
slow’ at the same time there is an iOS release.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/agkgha/oc_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/agkgha/oc_google_trends_data_for_iphone_slow_vs_new_ios/)

While not causation, it is certainly correlated that people are perceiving a
slow iphone when Apple release new software. Turns out the cause may have been
Apple slowing down the phone in those updates.

------
awinter-py
> As part of the agreement, Apple must display a notice on its French-language
> website for a month. It says Apple "committed the crime of deceptive
> commercial practice by omission" and had agreed to pay the fine.

I'm not seeing the crime notice on
[https://www.apple.com/fr/](https://www.apple.com/fr/). Where do I go to see
this thing?

~~~
131hn
See screenshot here [https://imgur.com/1kH0t67](https://imgur.com/1kH0t67)

The disclaimer states :

Au cours du mois de décembre 2017, le procureur de la République du tribunal
de grande instance de Paris a été destinataire d’une plainte émanant d’une
association de consommateurs. Cette plainte vise le groupe Apple, pour des
faits qui auraient notamment consisté en la diffusion de mises à jour du
système d’exploitation iOS entraînant un ralentissement de certains iPhones,
sans en avoir préalablement averti les clients et utilisateurs. Au terme de
son enquête, le Service National des Enquêtes de la DGCCRF estime que le
groupe Apple a commis le délit de pratique commerciale trompeuse par omission
(article L. 121-3 du code de la consommation) en ne révélant pas aux
consommateurs et utilisateurs, la présence d’un système de gestion dynamique
de l’alimentation inclus dans les mises à jour d’iOS à partir de la version
10.2.1 et pouvant, sous certaines conditions, ralentir le fonctionnement des
iPhones des catégories 6, 7 et SE, en particulier ceux équipés de batteries
âgées. Un procès-verbal de délit a été adressé au procureur de la République.
Avec l’accord du procureur de la République, une amende transactionnelle
significative a été proposée à la société Apple Inc. qui l’a acceptée.

------
stuart78
This feels like a reasonable outcome. I think Apple could have done a much
better job of communicating what was happening, and I imagine having to agree
to having committed a "deceptive commercial practice" probably stings much
more than the fine itself.

Apple has already made the settings for all of this much more apparent, which
seems like the outcome that actually helps customers here.

------
djmobley
I was glad when Apple “slowed down” my old iPhone.

It fixed the sudden shut down issue for me that was driving me insane. The
shut downs were unpredictable and rendered my phone unusable until it was
plugged in to charge.

It would have been better if Apple acknowledged the sudden shut down issue in
the first place, rather than rolling out this secret fix.

They denied all knowledge when I took my iPhone 6 in for service, and refused
to replace the battery as it was still showing more than 80% of its original
capacity.

~~~
jonplackett
They didn't want to acknowledge the shut down issue because people might then
have asked - Hey! why is my 2 year old phone randomly shutting itself down?
That doesn't seem like it should be happening to a 2 year old phone - maybe
you guys should fix that, by, say, replacing the battery.

------
aerovistae
Such a small fine as to not be worth reporting.

"Man in California fined 15cents over parking dispute"

~~~
speedgoose
It's not about the amount, it's about sending a message. It's in the news,
it's a lot more expensive for Apple.

~~~
rasz
and the message was "pay 15 cents"

------
alibert
It has been lost in translation but France fined for the lack of
communication, not for slowing down the phone.

------
hannibalhorn
They implemented a software feature to make an older, degraded battery last
longer - while it should be optional and obvious, a government fine seems a
bit over the top.

We've all now got houses full of IoT devices (Smart TVs, Webcams, etc.) that
have serious security problems and don't get proper updates because the
vendors lack incentive. This is a disincentive, and totally the wrong way to
go.

~~~
caconym_
Yeah.

A choice between telling customers you'll slow down their phones because
<technical explanation nobody gives a shit about> and silently making their
phones work better in a way that's likely to generate clickbait outrage if it
gets out is one between a rock and a hard place. Companies do so much shit
behind consumers' backs, and so many hardware vendors drop software support on
ridiculously short timelines, that this feels wrong. Very legal and very cool,
sure, but just barking up the wrong tree in terms of focus on good outcomes
for consumers.

~~~
AlisdairO
The solution seems straightfoward to me. Slow down the phone, and output a
message saying 'this iPhone is being slowed down due to an old battery.
Replace the battery to restore performance'. Then have a warning sign on the
battery screen with a similar explanation.

My wife's iPhone got throttled, and it felt really bad to use. This wasn't
some small hit to performance that you can just do without informing the
customer.

~~~
colejohnson66
They literally do just that. When it first happens, they’ll notify you with a
notification. Go to the battery screen in the settings and tap “Battery
Health.”

~~~
AlisdairO
Yes, they do now. They didn't then.

------
zenexer
According to the BBC[1]:

> _As part of the agreement, Apple must display a notice on its French-
> language website for a month._

> _It says Apple "committed the crime of deceptive commercial practice by
> omission" and had agreed to pay the fine._

I am unable to find this notice on Apple's French-language website.[2]

[1]:
[https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51413724](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51413724)

[2]: [https://www.apple.com/fr/](https://www.apple.com/fr/),
[https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.apple.com%2Ffr%2F)

Edit/Disclaimer: I'm not saying such a demand is reasonable or agreeing with
the decision; however, I'm curious as to whether Apple will comply.

------
overgard
Here's a thing to consider: your current phone, in your pocket, would it not
be perfectly sufficient for the next 10 years if software wasn't making it
obsolete? Is there any new app that really needs twice the processing power.
Is the bajillion DPI screen hard on your eyes? Like, other than wear and tear,
do you really have any reason to buy a new phone? I have an iphone 7, but to
be honest I'd still be using my 5c if the battery hadn't kicked the bucket.
This is no doubt a real problem for apple/samsung/etc.

~~~
geuis
I’m still happily using my 6s.

What I’m unhappy about is that iOS 13 broke a few things in Safari that have
affected its stability. Double-tap to zoom is incredibly unreliable now and it
worked perfectly for years. There’s some weird caching going on and some
rendering issues, so sometimes a site will get stuck in a weird broken state
that re-navigating or refreshing won’t fix. Have to exit Safari and reload it
to fix.

The email client now has a huge amount of white space at the bottom with all
of the features like Mark as Read bundled under the reply arrow.

And text selection is complete crap now. Selecting text in the url bar just
defaults to highlighting the entire url and it takes 5-10 taps just to get a
cursor. And in regular text, it’s impossible to see where the cursor is
BECAUSE ITS UNDER MY THUMB. The old magnifying glass was a way better UI.

~~~
overgard
Right so, basically the software updates just made things worse. As an
industry we're funneling people into these forced updates because most people
dont want to update. And their reason for not updating is totally rational, it
will almost always make things worse! I get the security aspect, but otherwise
this is horrible.

------
blakesterz
> The French watchdog said iPhone owners "were not informed that installing
> iOS updates (10.2.1 and 11.2) could slow down their devices".

I think that's reasonable. I doubt many people would've cared if Apple had
TOLD us that's what they were doing, and also made it an switch. "Hey you can
slow down your phone so the battery lasts longer now that you've upgraded" or
something like that. It still feels like they made a deliberate choice to not
let us know what they were doing so we'd buy new phones.

~~~
hrktb
> I doubt many people would've cared if Apple had TOLD us that's what they
> were doing, and also made it an switch.

It’s just a few dozen of bucks to change a battery, and people did it in
droves when Apple told what they were doing.

------
ColonelSanders
These electronics are marketed to perform better than the one before. They
shows big numbers flaunting how the thing zips, has more cores, whatever.

Therefore, it makes sense that patches curving or throttle performance are
made transparent to the consumer. If anything, these patches should ask for
permission from the user and toggle-able via settings. Performance was
promised.

If the "wear and tear" argument of batteries aging is true, they should be
made replaceable. If an item is subject to wear and tear - it should be
serviceable, not soldered.

It would be pretty ridiculous to have a firmware update for a car that makes
it use more gas, in hopes they'll buy a new one. Especially if it was snuck
in.

Maybe we need a regulatory bureaucracy to audit software patches and wire
refunds when performance advertised degrades.

Perhaps the cost of the electronic should be held in escrow by the regulatory
authority, made into a security for the model of the unit, and only vest to
Apple/Lenovo/etc based on a timespan. That escrow can subsidize the cost of a
$1000 soldered logic board replacement on their own balance/tab.

Or they could just make the units serviceable from the outset. The path of
least resistance.

That way, it incentivizes honesty and success for businesses like Apple by
tying their products to sustainability. Them being all about the environment:
[https://www.apple.com/environment/](https://www.apple.com/environment/).

~~~
thedance
The battery is replaceable. It takes fifteen minutes at any Apple store.

~~~
fsh
They have to remove the glued-in screen to get at the battery. Much more
difficult than it should be and with the risk of compromising the
waterproofing. I don't buy the argument that this is somehow required for
engineering reasons. Wristwatches have easily replaceable batteries while
being a lot smaller than an iPhone and having much better ingress protection.

------
hurricanetc
They’ll need a forensic accountant to find this fine in their balance sheet.
What is even the point of a fine of this amount?

I’m not arguing for or against Apple being fined. It’s just such a pointlessly
trivial amount for Apple as to be totally meaningless.

------
zakember
Everyone keeps talking about how Apple is only being sued for €25M which is a
small amount for them, but no one is talking about the fact that France cannot
have different fine amounts for different companies based on the company's
profitability.

They are expected to fine a standard amount based on a certain case and this
amount should be big enough for all companies to avoid the thing in future,
but at the same time not bankrupt the company either.

------
mindfulhack
The important issue is to let customers know. I just turned off the throttling
setting on my iPhone SE, and I couldn't believe how immediately faster and
more snappy my entire iPhone was.

I'll see if it starts shutting down while on battery power, _I_ want that
power and control over something so basic about my device. This HN thread has
done what Apple should have in the first place: disclose.

------
ebg13
What about every other phone that also does this? My Moto G5+ from 2017 still
gets the same battery life that it did when I bought it, which is basically
impossible, but the performance is a fraction of what it was. If you're going
to focus on this issue, make it a law and go after everyone.

~~~
txdv
i bought a cheap nokia 6.1 and the performance improved once upgraded to
android 10

~~~
ebg13
The G5+ is stuck on 8.1.

------
gdulli
I've only ever had one iPhone and the reason I decided I'd never get another
is that it slowed down unacceptably when a new OS version came out.

Every phone I've had since then I've switched from on my own schedule, never
forced to by slowness like my one iPhone.

------
blazespin
This is a real issue. My wife uses her Mac for netflix and maybe light photo
cataloging/editing, and yet after 10 years it's now slower than molasses. Why
should we upgrade? We're not doing anything that requires a new computer.

~~~
mceachen
If you can downgrade back to El Capitan (just take care that there haven't
been security updates for 4 years now), you'll probably find it completely
useable. Sierra and later made my MBP from 2010 go from my primary workstation
to being a pretty aluminum doorstop.

------
wolfpwner
I thought they did this before because of the degraded battery over time.

~~~
dhimes
I have an iphone 6 (not even 6s), with the original battery. The battery
health says capacity is 96%. Maybe that's a poor estimate? There are some
things that run down the battery at a fascinating pace, but that's a very
recent event. For instance, I can lose 20% charge in airplane mode. I now have
to turn the phone completely off when I want to store it somewhere like in a
locker when I work out (yeah, I'm a boomer I know- I'm one of the few people
in the gym who don't have headphones on).

~~~
1123581321
Definitely a bad estimate if that is an original battery. 500 charges should
bring the health down to about 80%. Presumably yours has been charged
1000-1500 times since it was purchased new from Apple.

My 11 Pro is at 96% and it is only a few months old.

Lithium battery degradation is a chemical fact; it happens as reliably as,
say, car brakes do with use.

------
blinotz
There’s absolutely no valid reason why my iPad should have been a perfectly
usable - even fast - web browsing device 5 years ago and is now so slow as to
be basically useless.

~~~
xwowsersx
I suppose that's true if you never update the OS. If you do, I don't think
it's fair to say there's no reason.

------
agumonkey
Apple used to be a rare exception of making old hardware run with the latest
OS. Old iMac would still operate fine with the newest OS X years later.

~~~
choward
Rare exception? Linux is the most installed OS in the world and they support
way more than just some old proprietary hardware.

~~~
agumonkey
In commercial OSes I meant. Otherwise yes, linux has always been more oxygen
for your old machine.

------
mister_hn
I don't know, but 25M€ for Apple are nothing. They should have charged even
more, since it affected millions of devices

------
sys_64738
That's less that Tim Cook's yearly stock bonus. How about fining them 25
billion euros?

------
davidw
Apple probably made that much money in the time it took to read the article.

------
maitredusoi
25 M ? is it this just 1 second in Apple's time ?

------
tboyd47
Explains why my iPhone 5 still runs quick as a whip.

------
jonplackett
Fined $27 million.

Made $64 billion in the last 3 months.

So that's about 1 hour of profit.

I'm sure they've been taught a lesson they'll never forget.

EDIT: as pointed out below, that was revenue not profit. But apple make so
much damn profit it's not as crazy different as it would be for most
companies. So it's more like 2.5 hours.

~~~
ShinTakuya
Classic mistake of conflating revenue with profit. They made closer to $25
billion.

Ignoring that, it's a mistake to think that these "small" amounts don't matter
to companies. They just lost the yearly salaries of 150 or more engineers.
It's worth it for them to assign 5 guys to add and maintain a feature that
notifies customers of the performance drop.

~~~
jonplackett
Yeah you're right. Just did a quick google for profit and can see it's
actually revenue I got back.

OK, so it's 2 and a half hours.

~~~
ShinTakuya
Yeah, I know, but as I mentioned it's a deceptive way of looking at things.
Every 0.1% matters to companies at this scale.

~~~
jonplackett
How much money do you think they made from doing it though?

Or at least how much would they have made if no one had noticed and they
didn’t have to do the $25 battery replacement program. I would guess A LOT
more than this fine.

------
solarkraft
This is a "Good job, please continue".

I'm a bit disappointed by France"s regulators here.

------
osrec
I don't think Apple would even notice a fine of such a small amount. If you
want to reprimand a corporate, you must make it hurt a little, otherwise it
has little impact on their future behaviour.

~~~
lowercased
perhaps it's just relative to their operations/sales in France? they might
have 1 billion euros in revenue, but if profits are, say, 300 million euros
for France, a 25 million euro fine isn't... trivial. But... this is just
supposition.

------
jey
Background context: This is because Apple throttled down the maximum CPU speed
of phones whose batteries were old/weak. The (claimed) intent was to prevent
old phones from suddenly shutting off while running CPU-intensive apps like
games.

~~~
fox8091
Having used older Android phones with dying batteries, that's something that
will happen. If I was under 30% battery, opening the camera immediately shut
off the phone. Same for playing a video or running an intensive app.

------
behnamoh
I think the more important issue is when Apple doesn't provide some features
of newer iOS versions to older iPhones, even though they can perfectly run the
features. A classic example is the Airdrop which wasn't available for iPhone
4s, but people got it running on their gadgets anyway.

I know that new iOS features are supposed to drive the customers to switch to
newer iPhones, but to exclude other users from such features is not right IMO.

~~~
zepto
Why is it not right?

~~~
Qahlel
Because Apple sets the borders of the "garden". Once you buy something it is
yours. If I buy an apple from grocery store, the store shouldn't dictate how I
should use that apple.

~~~
zepto
This has nothing to do with the question.

