
Apple to pay up to $500M to settle U.S. lawsuit over slow iPhones - 34679
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-pay-500-million-settle-154848278.html
======
avalys
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.

~~~
bgentry
It's shocking to me that even in a technical audience like HN, so many people
don't understand the fairly simple story that you've outlined here. Look
around this thread and see how many people spread the narrative like "Apple
intentionally slowed phones down" or even "Apple tried to extend battery life
at the cost of performance". Reiterating the summary:

\- Some iPhones in this generation began randomly shutting down as their
batteries aged.

\- While looking into this, Apple determined it happened because certain aged
batteries could no longer deliver enough current to sustain peak workloads
(computers use more current when performing more intensive tasks). This is
probably due to Apple underprovisioning the battery capacity in this
generation, but that's not something they could fix in existing devices.

\- Apple added a mechanism to detect when these random shutdowns occurred _on
a specific device_ due to insufficient power from the battery.

\- Once the random shutdown had been detected _on a specific device_ , that
specific phone would instead throttle its CPU when the system was under heavy
load to prevent the random shutdown from occurring.

In short, your phone was not affected unless your battery had already degraded
and was experiencing power-related random shutdowns. The changes Apple made to
deal with this were an unequivocally user-friendly change to work around a
hardware shortcoming and keep peoples' phones working well for longer than
they otherwise would have.

The mistakes Apple made were:

\- Designing the phone hardware with barely enough battery capacity, such that
some moderately old phones might not be able to keep working properly when the
batteries decayed.

\- Not being transparent with the hardware design flaw above, such as
proactively replacing any customer whose device was being affected by this
flaw while still under warranty.

\- Not going far enough with the software changes to initially add something
like the battery health info they later added in response to this PR fiasco.

That's about it, I think?

~~~
chooseaname
> The mistakes Apple made were:

> \- Designing the phone hardware with barely enough battery capacity, such
> that some moderately old phones might not be able to keep working properly
> when the batteries decayed.

Indeed! This was (and still is) very much a design flaw. People like to say,
all phones have this issue, but where are the examples? Also, look at the
iPads which are just scaled up iPhones. They don't have this issue because
they don't suffer the same design flaw.

Apple put a bandage on the issue and people throw praise at them.

~~~
manfredo
This is like saying my car's gas tank is a design flaw because I want to drive
farther than my tank will allow. Increasing battery capacity means increasing
the volume of the battery, which results in a phone that isn't as sleek. This
isn't a design flaw, this is a tradeoff between form factor and battery
capacity - just like how car designers have to make a tradeoff when selecting
a fuel tank capacity.

The examples are, literally, every device that uses a lithium ion battery.
Take any phone or tablet, repeatedly charge and discharge the battery fully
(better yet, do so in a hot climate) and eventually it will not put out
sufficient voltage. This will either trigger CPU throttling, or your device
will start crashing. The iPhone was the most widely publicized example, but
this is a fundamental issue with battery chemistry that all battery powered
devices are subject to.

~~~
chooseaname
Other phones don't have the issue because they didn't match a tiny battery
with an over sized CPU. To use your analogy (which still isn't adequate at
explaining the issue), this is like paring a top fuel dragster with a tiny
fuel tank.

~~~
edmundsauto
There is no correct answer here (no arguing matters of taste), but consumers
seem to have voted for the sleek design.

~~~
gentleman11
We did not. I can’t buy an iPhone 5 anymore that can still run iOS properly,
so I had to get one of these huge but thin things

~~~
colejohnson66
Apples newer phones are actually thicker. They stopped the “make it thinner
each year” thing.

------
hurricanetc
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.

~~~
pwenzel
6S? I'm still rocking my iPhone SE!

~~~
zoonosis
The iPhone SE was released a year after the 6S.

------
syspec
> 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
There needs to be a cap on lawyers fees. This is what is causing a lot of
unnecessary litigation.

~~~
elicash
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.

------
paxys
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
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
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...](https://web.archive.org/web/20171229000007/https://www.apple.com/iphone-
battery-and-performance/)

------
klingonopera
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?

~~~
zoonosis
When the phone is connected to a charger, is it drawing power from the wall?
Or is it still drawing power from the battery?

~~~
rzimmerman
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.

------
notRobot
> 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
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.

------
deeblering4
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
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.

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

~~~
ceejayoz
You'll likely receive a notice in the mail in the next few months.

------
conqrr
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
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.

~~~
macintux
> 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.

~~~
cptskippy
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.

------
gentle
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
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.

~~~
gentle
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.

------
driverdan
> 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
I downgraded to 8 because of this (iPad 2).

Works great as a reading device still.

------
herf
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
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.

------
gdulli
> 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.

------
throwGuardian
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

~~~
powowowow
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.

~~~
mthoms
The issue is that they kept this all a big secret. A decision which
indisputably goes against their customers best interest and (perhaps
coincidentally) enhances their bottom line.

I'm otherwise a _huge_ Apple fan, but people defending this completely baffles
me. Especially since _Apple themselves_ have admitted it was a mistake to not
inform the customer (a key fact that you conveniently left out of your rant).

It's amazing that defenders changed their response from "Apple would never
slow their phones, you're unhinged!" to "Apple did it in your best interest!
You don't understand technology!" without skipping a beat. Just. Stop.

Batteries degrade over time. It's an inherit limit of the technology. That's
fine. Let _me_ decide what to do about it.

~~~
powowowow
I understand that you claim that it enhanced their bottom line, but that makes
no sense.

I (and many others) will _immediately replace_ a phone that routinely turns
itself off under load. I will limp along, for quite a while, with a phone that
is a bit slow. Every piece of evidence supports the notion that it was a well-
intentioned decision that turned out to be not ideal.

And yet all you unhinged haters are _STILL COMPLAINING_ two years after Apple
apologized for the decision, explained it, built features to expose the
battery health, cut battery replacement costs down to zero-margin levels, and
have now agreed to pay a settlement on top of that. To quote you: "Just.
Stop."

~~~
mthoms
I see you deleted your first _highly abusive_ comment and re-wrote it to be
(only slightly) less so. I hope you see the irony in doing that while at the
same time calling out other people for being "unhinged".

Remember to breathe.

