Apple Faces Lawsuits Following Reports They're Slowing Down iPhones With Older Batteries
Apple is now facing a couple of lawsuits for allegedly deliberately slowing down the performance of iPhone units with older batteries.
In the state of Illinois, five Apple customers filed a formal complaint against the company. The complainants were composed of two residents of the said state along with others from Ohio, Indiana, and North Carolina.
According to reports, the lawsuit alleged that Apple released iOS updates designed "to purposefully slow down or 'throttle down' the performance speeds" of certain units based on their experiences with the iPhone 5, iPhone 6, and iPhone 7.
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"Corporations have to realize that people are sophisticated and that when people spend their hard-earned dollars on a product they expect it to perform as expected," their lawyer said. "Instead, Apple appears to have obscured and concealed why older phones were slowing down."
Meanwhile, in California, a class action lawsuit was filed against Apple last week for almost the same grounds. The plaintiffs, Stefan Bogdanovich and Dakota Speas, also cited Apple's statement on its slowing down of iPhones with older batteries to avoid them from randomly shutting down.
According to the Los Angeles-based plaintiffs, Apple violated the "implied contracts" entered when consumers buy and pay for their iPhones "by purposefully slowing down older iPhone models when new models come out and by failing to properly disclose that at the time of that the parties entered into an agreement."
Apple has yet to respond to the lawsuits.
Recently, hundreds of iPhone users with older models and batteries went to online forums to discuss their experiences. They noticed a slowing down of their iPhones' processing performance, and a common denominator for many was having an older phone battery.
These prompted researchers to do benchmark tests to see if there was indeed a correlation between the battery age of an iPhone and its CPU performance.
Later, Apple addressed the issue where they somewhat confirmed the affected users' hunches.
The company told The Verge that lithium ion batteries "become less capable of supplying peak current demands" when they get older. They added: "Last year we released a feature for iPhone 6, iPhone 6s and iPhone SE to smooth out the instantaneous peaks only when needed to prevent the device from unexpectedly shutting down during these conditions."
