According to the Reuters article: “Apple denied wrongdoing and settled the nationwide case to avoid the burdens and costs of litigation, court papers show.” [1]
It’s entirely possible the lack of clarity of what was happening violated consumer protection laws (I’m guessing, I don’t know what specifically the lawsuit was based on) without malice intended. The Apple way is to try and have design be silent and in the background. In this case it was a way to solve degrading batteries that would cause a phone to reboot, so slowing down to compensate is a slick way of preventing random reboots without involving the user. Since it doesn’t seem to be the case that this happened without battery degradation, I don’t think you can point to evidence that this was done to cause new phone sales. Am I mistaken?
> “Apple denied wrongdoing and settled the nationwide case to avoid the burdens and costs of litigation, court papers show.”
That's literally the text used by everyone that settles. Apple employs enough lawyers to populate a small country. Nobody with that kind of legal firepower gives up a lawsuit by settling for a million of $300 million and up to $500 million for no good reason.
They settled for the same reasons everyone settles:
1. Because they can afford to pay.
2. Because they know they're going to lose (and they would probably have to pay more and may even be punished in some other ways, on top of that).
It's obvious I can't prove this myself, but they didn't disclose it and only did so when their hand was forced by third parties investigating and after this settlement.
I mean, what would they have to do to be assumed malicious, in this case? If basically losing a class action lawsuit is not enough, what is? Tim Cook coming up on stage and admitting it?
It's not even their first example of thinly veiled for-profit malicious moves, such as the removal of the headphone jack (presented at the time as due to space reasons, reason immediately debunked by many people disassembling phones).
