Judge clears way for $500M iPhone throttling settlements::Owners of iPhone models who were part of throttling lawsuits that ended up with a $500 settlement from Apple may soon receive their payments, after a judge denied objections against the offer.
It always blows my mind some people actually found Apple’s defense convincing.
The iPhones didn’t inform users when they were throttling because they had an old battery. Apple kept the throttling a secret and coincidentally it helped them upsell new phones to people with old phones. This type of functionality was also unique to Apple, it’s not like this is the only choice they had and an industry practice.
Did you have one of these phones? Because I did. I was one of those that experienced this controversy first-hand.
Most people complaining I’m guessing have very little direct experience with Apple products. Although maybe you do and just have different expectations that 5 year old tech should work the same as a new phone. We still have an iPhone 6 and the original SE in the family. My high school kid uses a 2011 MacBook Air with no problems and I have a 2014 MacBook Pro as a backup laptop for work. These devices last a long time.
Where they did fuck up is not explaining what they were doing, and the slowdowns were probably more impactful than they expected.
I had an iPhone 5 and it was slowed down after a year and a half or so. Formatted it, then disabled animations, etc, but by the end it was really slow to use. The nearest official store suggested a new phone since the model was almost 3 years ago, even though I had used it for less than 2 years.
I had no idea what the problem was. No way to disable it or a cheap way to replace the battery. All that only came after they were sued.
They fucked up by not telling anyone they were doing it and not providing a way to reverse the slow downs. Having their employees suggesting getting a new phone instead of fixing the damn problem was also what I consider to be scummy behaviour.
A few years after getting a new phone (an Android one though, I don’t like to reward bad behaviour), I went back to the iPhone and it was still lagging. There was a new major update available though… which made it a bit faster. I don’t know what happened behind the scenes, but only enforced my view that I was being pushed to buy a new phone.
The iPhone 5 was released 2012 with iOS 6. The throttling for old devices was introduced in 2017 with iOS 10.2.1. That’s a big gap.
Let’s be fair here. Your phone was 5 years old and trying to run the latest OS. If it’s too slow for you, sticking with an older OS version or upgrading to a new phone is probably good advice.
